6-8 pages Child and Youth care

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Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development Edited by U. Bronfenbrenner Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 2004. Pp. 336. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 0761927123. Hardback, $74.95. ISBN 0761927115

Long before I ever met Urie Bronfenbrenner, I was an avid reader of his work. As someone

interested in Soviet society, I had read his 1970 volume Two Worlds of Childhood: US and USSR,

and encountered several of his other publications in graduate school and postdoctoral study in

Moscow. It was during a subsequent trip to Moscow in 1977 that I finally met Urie at an

international conference, and the first impression he left was indelible.

Given that one of the topics I study is memory, I realize that the details of my recollection are

probably inaccurate, but the fact is that Urie had such an impression on me that I have a vivid,

almost ‘flashbulb’ memory of the occasion. It was at a meeting organized by the Soviet Academy of

Sciences in a building on Leningrad Prospekt in the seventh floor conference room.

Urie and other major figures from American psychology such as Bill Kessen from Yale, along

with my Russian mentor and friend Volodya Zinchenko, were there at a meeting on

developmental and educational psychology. During one of the breaks I was introduced to Urie by

Volodya, and then I was able to watch the Soviet–American group as they continued their

discussions. The group was having a hard time getting down to business, largely because several

of the Soviet participants were arguing among themselves about some procedural matter. At that

point, Urie, who was chairing the session, spoke up in that clear, inimitable voice of his, saying

‘Deti! Deti’ [Children! Children!], to bring the group to order. The group immediately came to

order.

I was a little taken aback by this move on his part, but because Urie was who he was, and

because he had the universal respect of the people around the table, this stern father managed to

get away with it and start up a productive afternoon session. I will never forget the warm, yet

forceful way that Urie pulled that session into order. The reminder to all was that this was a voice

both of authority and of care, and that they all had more important things to do other than arguing

amongst themselves.

During that same semester in Moscow another event brought me into further contact with

Urie and allowed me to see yet another side of him. This was the death of one of the great figures

of Soviet psychology and one of Urie’s dear friends, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Zaporozhets.

Zaporozhets had been a major figure in his generation of Soviet psychologists, a generation that

included such individuals as A. R. Luria, A. N. Leont’ev, and D. B. El’konin, and he was one of Urie’s

close friends in Moscow.

The writing of this article was assisted by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. The statements made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

The British Psychological Society

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British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2005), 23, 143–151

q 2005 The British Psychological Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

DOI:10.1348/026151004X21134

I went to the memorial service held for Zaporozhets at the institute he had headed for many

years, and upon returning to the USA I spoke with Urie about this experience. I remember that in

this conversation I was deeply moved by the compassion and sorrow he displayed for this old

friend and colleague. Having been born in Moscow himself, Urie understood much better than

most of us the kinds of troubles and tragedies that Aleksandr Vladimirovich had witnessed during

his life, and yet, as Urie noted, he had managed to remain a wonderful, warm human being,

something that could not be said of too many others.

These early encounters with Urie Bronfenbrenner left me with two overriding impressions,

and these impressions come through again and again in Making Human Beings Human. The first

of these impressions is that he has been the kind of visionary who can grasp the essence of major

theoretical as well as policy issues well before most of us had come to understand them. In some

cases, I do not think we have caught up with him yet! The various strands of his complex and

nuanced theoretical framework come together in this book and help clarify why he has had such a

powerful impact on how we think of human development and education.

Before turning to this intellectual vision, however, I wish to note the second powerful

impression that Urie has left on so many of us, an impression that has to do with another aspect of

what it takes to make human beings human. When addressing issues of development, Urie has

always been concerned with more than just the intellectual and cognitive dimensions of human

nature. He has insisted that we go beyond these and include the ethical and emotional aspects of

what it takes to make those we study, as well as ourselves, human, and this shows through not only

in his writings but in the way Urie lived his own life.

Starting with the assumption that ‘to a greater extent than for any other species, human beings

create the environments that shape the course of human development’ (p. xxvii), Urie has argued

that it is incumbent on all of us to create decent, nurturing environments for human development.

In his view, this is an ethical agenda that outweighs just about any other call on societal resources,

a view that is unfortunately out of step with what is going on in all too many countries in the world

today.

For Urie, this ethical commitment translated into being an indefatigable proponent of

stronger families and other institutions that can improve children’s chances for a better future.

He has been a tireless advocate for children in the public sphere, as well as in his academic

pursuits. Among other things, this is what led him to make time to sit down with the real target

population in all this – children. The photo of him with two children at the end of his

introduction is a wonderful reminder of this. For Urie, the study of human development is a

generative, moral enterprise that has to do with real people, especially young people. Anyone

who has ever listened to him or read his works cannot but be struck by this part of what he has

stood for.

In Urie’s hands the call to ethical action amounts to much more than lofty platitudes. Indeed, it

has often weighed heavily upon him as he has reflected on the current state of society and its

trajectory of change, going so far as to warn that:

Social changes taking place recently in modern industrialized societies, especially the

United States, may have altered environmental conditions conducive to human

development to such a degree that the process of making human beings human is being

placed in jeopardy (p. xxvii).

While recognizing the magnitude of this problem, Urie has remained an optimist

throughout his long career. His warnings amount to a call to action rather than a retreat into

despair. For him this has meant social and political action, such as the work he carried out as a

public spokesperson and advocate of Head Start, and it also meant conducting the kind of

research that could guide public policy as it sought to improve the conditions for human

development.

The scholarly counterpart to Urie’s call to ethical action was a programme of research that

could address complex issues in the real world. Without this, research fails to meet the crucial

test of ecological validity and is all too often incapable of informing the sort of social action that he

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has so valued. As Richard Lerner points out in the Introduction to this volume, Urie has sought to

avoid ‘artificial “experimental” conditions’ (p. x) when pursuing research issues. His inclination

in this regard sprang from his critique that ‘[m]uch of contemporary developmental psychology is

the science of the strange behaviour of children in strange situations with strange adults for the

briefest possible periods of time’ (from Lerner’s introduction, p. x).

One of the biggest impediments that Bronfenbrenner sees when trying to bring the complexity

of human development into view is the tendency for scholars to operate within the confines of

isolated academic disciplines. In order to have any chance of bringing together the scientific

advances that ‘have been occurring simultaneously in disparate disciplines and in unconnected

branches of the same discipline’ (p. xxvii), a new brand of inquiry into human development was

required, and Bronfenbrenner spent much of his career working to create it. Perhaps even more

importantly, he spent much of his career encouraging others to engage in this task. He did so

through his own example and through his endless enthusiasm and support for other scholars,

especially his junior colleagues.

As Making Human Beings Human illustrates, Bronfenbrenner has touched on so many issues

and disciplines over his career that it is difficult to categorize him in the terms we usually employ

in the West in the social sciences. At the risk of providing a one-sided account of what is to be

found in this volume, I shall outline a view of his thinking based on its parallels with Russian

psychology. I do this not only because of how and where I initially encountered Bronfenbrenner,

but because I think it provides a perspective on his thought that neither he nor others have

explored in depth.

What I have to say does not amount to saying that because Bronfenbrenner was born in

Moscow his thought and writings are somehow permeated by a Russian dusha, or soul. But I am

saying that his broad approach to human development reflects the unique background he brought

to his work – especially the cultural and intellectual forces that surfaced in Russia and the rest of

Europe in the early 20th century. Bronfenbrenner does not present himself as a linguistic or

intellectual translator of writings from Russia or the Soviet Union and indeed mentions figures

such as Lev Semënovich Vygotsky and Aleksei Nikolaevich Leont’ev only a few times in this

volume. Hence my claim is not so much one of the direct influence of these thinkers as one of a

shared style of theorizing that sets Bronfenbrenner apart from many Western scholars.

When exploring this claim, the first point I would make concerns the breadth of

Bronfenbrenner’s research programme. For many American readers, he is considered to be a

developmental or social psychologist, but he clearly addressed issues that extend well beyond

these sub-disciplines and beyond the discipline of psychology more generally. In several respects

this reflects a broader European, rather than just a Russian perspective, and it also reflects the

impact of discussions with a brilliant set of colleagues at Cornell University over several decades.

So without trying to claim uniqueness of influence, I would like to consider some of the striking

similarities between Bronfenbrenner’s approach and those that characterized Russian psychology

of the early 20th century.

The first of these similarities has to do with how the needs of practical, policy-oriented

intervention can guide a research programme. Important parallels can be found in Soviet and

Russian psychology, at least in its best incarnations. For example, consider L. S. Vygotsky’s attempts

in the 1920s and 1930s to create what turned out to be an ill-fated field, namely that of pedology

(pedalogiya). This effort was intended to bring together specialists from a broad range of disciplines

to address the critical problems of human development facing the Soviet Union at the time.

In a cruel, but all too common twist of Soviet fate, the entire enterprise of pedology, including

many individuals associated with it, was denounced over disputes about the role of mental testing.

Despite the fact that Vygotsky had formulated notions such as the ‘zone of proximal development’

(Vygotsky, 1978, 1987) as part of a critique of mental testing, his use of the term pedology meant

that his entire body of writings was condemned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party

of the USSR in 1936.

This is part of a larger, more complex story, but my goal is not to outline the fate of the

pedology movement. Instead, it is to examine factors that motivated an interest in it in the first

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place. Along with some of his colleagues, Vygotsky was impatient with the disciplinary

fragmentation and isolation that all too often prevented him from pursuing critical practical issues

in human development. His proposal on how to circumvent these limitations is reflected in the

opening section of his volume Lectures on Pedology, a volume that grew out of a course he gave in

1931 in Leningrad. There he defined this field in the following terms:

In its literal translation pedology means ‘the science of the child’. But as is often the case

with a literal rendering of a term, this does not express what pedology studies. It is possible

to study children’s diseases or pathological development in children, and this would be a

science of the child in an important sense. One could study the child’s socialization in

pedagogy, and this too will, to a significant degree, be a science of the child. One could

study child psychology, and this too will be a science of the child. From the very outset,

therefore, one must establish what it is precisely in the child that is the object of pedological

research. For this reason it would be more accurate to say that pedology is the science of

development of the child (Vygotsky, 1996, pp. 11–12).

In expounding his account of pedology Vygotsky outlined a general agenda for studying all aspects

of human development, especially during childhood. This focus on the general principles of

development led him to write about topics such as the distinction between evolutionary change

and revolutionary transformation, and the importance of recognizing different challenges and

accomplishments in different phases of stage periodization. He pursued many of these ideas in a

broad array of his writings (e.g. Vygotsky, 1981).

My point in bringing all this up is not so much motivated by Vygotsky’s particular claims about

development, but by his strategy of taking a broad range of phenomena into account when

formulating his agenda. By coining the term pedology, Vygotsky was implying that existing

academic disciplines, which have the strong tendency to operate in isolation, were not up to the

task of accounting for the broad range of issues at stake in the challenging sociocultural context in

which he found himself. The challenges involved in understanding, let alone intervening in human

development were simply too overwhelming to be addressed by any single academic discipline.

After all, this was a context in which Vygotsky and others were committed to helping a largely

non-literate and poor society transform itself into a modern technocratic power in very short

order.

The problems that Bronfenbrenner has chosen to pursue over the past several decades are

not as dire as those that confronted Vygotsky, but there is a parallel in how the two

approached their task. This is reflected in the fact that Bronfenbrenner has taken as his

overriding task the need to confront major social problems that affect the life experiences of

humans as they develop. And as was the case for Vygotsky, he has always started with the

assumption that these problems can be tackled only by bringing a broad ranging research

programme to bear.

What is most striking in all this is not Bronfenbrenner’s call for multidisciplinary research. All

scholars worth their salt know enough to spout this line in today’s world. Instead, what is striking

is the naturalness and ease with which he moves across what would otherwise be seemingly

insurmountable disciplinary boundaries for most of us, at least for most of us raised in the US social

science tradition. What makes this even more impressive is that Bronfenbrenner’s analysis goes

well beyond most of today’s standard multidisciplinary efforts. One of the keys to understanding

how it does so is to understand how his analytic framework reflects a crucial assumption about the

individual as the object of research.

In this regard, other interesting parallels with Vygotsky’s writings come into view. One of the

major themes in these writings was that individual mental functioning has its origins in social life.

Vygotsky asserted that ‘the social dimension of consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The

individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary’ (1979, p. 30). Vygotsky’s

student Aleksandr Romanovich Luria made a similar point when laying the foundations of

neuropsychology. Noting the seemingly paradoxical nature of the position he was outlining, Luria

asserted:

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In order to explain the highly complex forms of human consciousness one must go beyond

the human organism. One must seek the origins of conscious activity and “categorical”

behavior not in the recesses of the human brain or in the depths of the spirit, but in the

external conditions of life. Above all, this means that one must seek these origins in the

external processes of social life, in the social and historical forms of human existence (1981,

p. 25, emphasis in the original).

What is particularly interesting about such claims, especially in the hands of a figure like Vygotsky,

is not simply the claim that individual mental functioning emerges out of social life. Indeed, quite

similar claims were being advanced at the same time by figures such as George Herbert Mead

(1932) in the USA. But this assertion had different trajectories as it emerged and made its way

through the human sciences in Russia and the USA.

The first respect in which this is so, concerns a point that is quite subtle, but after repeatedly

witnessing its power over the past few decades, I have recognized the very real role it plays. This

has to do with how easily and widely ideas about the social origins of individual mental

functioning are accepted in a community of scholars. Like most graduate students in the social

sciences in the 1970s, especially those at the University of Chicago, I read and discussed the

writings of Mead. What was striking about these discussions was that everyone found Mead’s

claims interesting, but no one seemed to know quite how to put them into productive use. They

were deemed to be something good to know about, but just how we were to expand on them was

not clear.

Upon finishing my PhD, I went directly to Moscow on a postdoctoral fellowship, and in

discussions there I found a quite different orientation toward claims about the social origins of

individual mental functioning. In contrast to the USA, where Mead’s claims were viewed as

fascinating but deemed too vague or too difficult to operationalize in psychology, in Moscow

claims about social origins seemed to everyone to be so obvious as to not require explicit

discussion. This is a difference that took me years to articulate in my own mind, largely because it

was not so much a matter of overt claims as of implicit assumptions that guide the work of

different communities of scholars.

When I first began to recognize this, I was unfamiliar with some of the ideas of philosophers

and social theorists that could help sort it out, but my vague feeling about the gulf that separated

American and Russian psychologists stayed with me years later when I came across a set of ideas

that could help bring it into focus. I have in mind writings by figures such as Steven Lukes (1977)

on ‘methodological individualism’, the critique by Charles Taylor (1985) of ‘atomism’, and the

notions of Norbert Elias (1991) about the relative importance of society and individual.

I found Elias’s formulation to be particularly appropriate when trying to understand the broad

cultural and intellectual differences between Russian and US society and how they play out in

psychological research. In particular, it is useful to turn to his formulation of how some take

the individual to be the starting point in explanation, and others take society to fulfil this role. He

presented this opposition as resembling a ‘curious party game’ (p. 54) in which philosophers and

social theorists in the West indulge, and it also provides insight into how Russian and American

social scientists differ in what they take as a starting point.

One (side) says,‘Everything depends on the individual’, the other, ‘Everything depends on

society’. The first group says: ‘But it is always particular individuals who decide to do this

and not that’. The others reply: ‘But their decisions are socially conditioned’. The first group

says: ‘But what you call “social conditioning” only comes about because others want to do

something and do it’. The others reply: ‘But what these others want to do and do is also

socially conditioned’ (p. 54).

Elias’s formulation of this opposition is useful when trying to understand the difference between

Mead’s impact in the USA and Vygotsky’s in Russia. It is a formulation that points to fundamental

differences in the starting points employed by members of the two societies, when trying to

understand the world and when trying to change it.

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Consider again, for example, Bronfenbrenner’s basic claim that ‘to a greater extent than

for any other species, human beings create the environments that shape the course of human

development’ (p. xxvii). As much of the writing throughout his career shows, he views social

environments and their effects to be the main issue here, and in this regard he constructed

a theoretical framework that stands in opposition to methodological individualism and

atomism.

What sets Bronfenbrenner apart from so much of psychology in the USA, and American society

in general, is his basic assumption that one cannot improve the developmental trajectory of

individuals by focusing primarily on individuals. Indeed, this is not even a good starting point in his

view. Instead, as Luria noted, ‘one must go beyond the human organism’, not only to understand,

but to change the developmental trajectory of that organism. And the key to that is changing the

social environment in which individuals are nurtured.

Bronfenbrenner’s position is actually more subtle than that represented by one of the poles

caricatured in Elias’s scheme. He does not stand in opposition to mainstream psychology by

simply switching the focus from the individual to the social environment. To do this would

amount to espousing a combination of social determinism and mindless behaviourism. Instead, his

focus has always been on the complex interaction he sees between social and individual planes of

analysis, and this brings me to another parallel I see between his thought and that of his Russian

colleagues. This consists of the fact that for Bronfenbrenner as well as for his Russian counterparts

the point is not so much that it is either society or the individual that must be considered as being

analytically prior. Instead, the point is that the social and individual are not envisioned as being

separated in some neat way in the first place.

Let me return to Vygotsky’s writings to show how this works out in his case. Some of the

quotes I used earlier would seem to suggest that Vygotsky in fact did see social phenomena as

being quite distinct from individual mental life. After all, he stated that ‘the social dimension of

consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The individual dimension of consciousness is

derivative and secondary’ (1979, p. 30). But this seemingly unequivocal assertion is best

understood as part of a rhetorical encounter between Vygotsky and the psychological and

psychophysiological theorizing of his day.

In formulating specific claims about human development, Vygotsky was more likely to

proceed on the assumption that any neat distinction between social and individual functioning is

not so clear. Instead, he typically moved back and forth between the social and individual in such a

way that suggests something quite different. This can be seen in his formulation of the general

genetic law of cultural development:

Any function in children’s development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on

the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an

interpsychological category and then within the individual child as an intrapsychological

category : : : but it goes without saying that internalization transforms the process itself and changes its structure and function. Social relations or relations among people genetically

[that is, historically, in time] underlie all higher functions and their relationships (1981,

p. 163).

At first glance, Vygotsky’s formulation of this law again would seem to suggest a clear distinction

between social (interpsychological) and individual (intrapsychological) functioning. But as one

watches how he used it to generate insights into human development, it becomes clear that he

was really interested in the similarities that bind the two planes together. Rather than seeing social

processes as occurring up to a certain point and then somehow ceasing or being transferred in

one fell swoop to an individual plane of functioning, his writings repeatedly suggested a much

more complex form of interaction between the two.

In Vygotsky’s hands, changes in individual functioning are always mirrored by changes in

social functioning and vice versa. Learning to participate at new levels in social life is as much

an accomplishment on the intrapsychological plane as it is an impetus to move on to a new level of

social functioning. The two go hand in hand to such a degree that they are best viewed as

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moments, or aspects of a single developmental process rather than isolated forces, one of which is

an independent variable and the other a dependent one.

A nice summary of this point can be found in Vygotsky’s claims about how the development of

speech, an obviously social phenomenon, is tied to the development of generalization, or concept

development, something that is usually considered to be a part of individual mental functioning. In

the first chapter of Thinking and Speech Vygotsky related the two by writing, ‘Social interaction

presupposes generalization and the development of verbal meaning; generalization becomes

possible only with the development of social interaction. Therefore, it may be appropriate to view

word meaning not only as a unity of thinking and speech but as a unit of generalization and

social interaction, a unity of thinking and communication’ (1987, pp. 48–49, emphasis in the

original).

At the most general level, then, the point is that the Russian approach to social and individual

functioning does not so much assume that the social and individual are neatly separated, with the

former coming first. That is, it does not constitute an attempt simply to stand methodological

individualism on its head, thereby once again engaging in Elias’s ‘curious party game’, but this time

insisting that ‘everything depends on society’. Instead, Vygotsky and others were challenging any

simple distinction between the social and individual in the first place. They viewed development

as involving a social and an individual moment. To be sure, an analytic distinction between social

and individual functioning was still viewed as important. But the distinction to be drawn between

them is a product of the theoretical imagination rather than a reflection of isolated phenomena in

the real world.

This sort of ‘both–and’ thinking that characterized much of the intellectual style I

encountered in Moscow contrasted with the preference for ‘either–or’ categories that are part of

a more typical Western approach, and I think it holds a key to understanding important parts

of what Bronfenbrenner has had to say over his career. The best way for readers to decide whether

or not they agree with this is to read the book in its entirety, but let me end by providing a couple

of illustrations of how I see this playing out. In order to highlight how deeply ingrained I think this

form of thinking is in Bronfenbrenner’s thinking, one of these illustrations comes from the

beginning of his career and the other from his later writings.

Article 3 in Making Human Beings Human is a condensed report of Bronfenbrenner’s 1942

doctoral dissertation ‘Social status, structure, and development in the classroom group’. There, he

employed sociometric techniques to examine classroom interaction, something that was not an

unusual method to use at the time. But a guiding assumption behind his thinking was unusual, and

it continues to be a timely, but little understood topic today, some six decades after this study. This

is the idea that we need to examine how social groups develop.

This is a fascinating, but little investigated issue in the analysis of human development today, so

it was very instructive to find Bronfenbrenner writing about it in the 1940s. In most studies

of human development, the focus is on the individual. Indeed, the field could almost be called

individual human development, but it hardly needs renaming given that the individual focus is so

widely presupposed in the first place. In contrast, discussions having to do with practice in

everyday life routinely make claims about how a group develops. Basketball coaches have

no problem talking about how teams develop over a season, and teachers readily discuss ways in

which a group of students develops as a class over the course of a year. Yet efforts to study human

development remain largely devoid of theoretical and methodological tools for talking about this.

The key to understanding what Bronfenbrenner was up to in his dissertation is to take

seriously his assertion that ‘social development applies not only to the individual but also to the

social organization of which he is a part’ (p. 22). From this perspective, the investigator must take

into account ‘both the individual and the group as developing organic units’ because, ‘Piecemeal

analysis, fixed in time and space, of isolated aspects and attributes is insufficient and even

misleading, for the elements of social status and structure are interdependent, organized into

complex patterns’ (p. 26). An insistence on taking a both–and stance, something that parallels

Vygotsky’s basic assumption about the relationship between social and individual functioning,

was already a part of Bronfenbrenner’s thinking at the time of his dissertation and was destined to

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be the key to much of the contribution he went on to make during the subsequent decades of his

career.

Perhaps the best known part of this contribution can be found in Bronfenbrenner’s classic

1979 volume The Ecology of Human Development. As Richard Lerner points out in his foreword,

Bronfenbrenner’s dissertation ‘presents an initial view of his ecological theory of human

development’ (p. xxi), so much in the basic orientation of Bronfenbrenner’s thinking and writing

remained in force throughout his career. In his hands the ecological approach became a means for

conceptualizing in greater and greater depth how individual development is tied to the social

environment.

Throughout this effort, Bronfenbrenner has consistently refused to formulate issues in terms

of how the social context is some sort of independent variable that affects development of the

individual. Instead, he has consistently moved back and forth across disciplinary boundaries that

seem so limiting to others in order to create a picture of how multiple forces of development

operate in a dynamic system. This goes up to and includes issues in human behavioural genetics as

is evidenced in Article 11, co-authored with Stephen Ceci, on ‘Heredity, environment, and the

question “How”’.

In keeping with a both–and orientation, Bronfenbrenner and Ceci argue that we all too often

ask the wrong question when speaking of behavioural genetics by posing it in terms of ‘how much

of the variance (in human behaviour is) attributable to heredity and how much to environment’

(p. 175). In contrast, the authors argue that ‘The question “How?” offers a more fruitful approach

than the question “How much?”,’ and this amounts going back to the need ‘to identify the

mechanisms through which genotypes are transformed into phenotypes’ (p. 175).

The insights that these two authors are able to generate by using their bioecological model

touch on many of the themes that have run throughout Bronfenbrenner’s career. Recognizing that

several disciplines have something to contribute, but that in isolation they are powerless to

provide insight into the complex phenomena involved, he has consistently assumed a

multidisciplinary approach. Recognizing that assumptions about the individual as a self-contained

unit of analysis are limiting, he has moved back and forth between social and individual processes.

And recognizing that his findings inform political and moral decisions, he has joined Ceci in this

article in reminding us that the poorest of environments can exacerbate already negative

trajectories in human development.

In his foreword, Richard Lerner calls Urie Bronfenbrenner ‘the consummate developmental

scientist,’ arguing that ‘for more than 60 years, (he) has been both the standard of excellence and

the professional conscience of the field of human development’ (pp. ix–x). These accolades are

by no means undeserved, but because of his unique background, assumptions, and lines of

reasoning, I believe we have not yet appreciated all that Bronfenbrenner has to offer the study of

human development. It is in part because of this unique background that he has been able to bring

new perspectives to bear on the field and generate new insights. But the assumptions he brings to

his work often differ in subtle ways from those brought to bear by scholars in the West, especially

the USA, where one or another form of methodological individualism all too often reigns. For this

reason, I believe we still have some way to go to appreciate all that Bronfenbrenner has been

trying to tell us for the past six decades, and I think this means many will still be reading and

appreciating him six decades from now.

References

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Luria, A. R. (1981). In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), Language and cognition. New York: Wiley

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Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago:

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Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language: Philosophical papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge

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JAMES V. WERTSCH (Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

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