Affirming the “S” in HBSE Through the Socio-Cultural Discourses of Lev Vygotsky, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Bruner, and Ken Gergen

Abstract

Owing largely to the pioneering spirit of Sigmund Freud, social work's understanding of human behavior and development has supported individualist discourses that essentialize the self. Socio-cultural discourses present alternatives that strengthen the intentions of many social workers when they invoke the concept of human behavior in the social environment. In particular, Lev Vygotsky, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Bruner, and Ken Gergen offer compelling and salient accounts for genuinely regarding human behavior as embedded, even constituted by, social environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavior
• development
• Bruner
• Myerhoff
• HBSE
• identity
• social construction
• culture
• Vygotsky
• Gergen

Notes

1. Here I am reminded of the oft-sighted bumper sticker found on European-American-owned and -driven cars in Oregon that says “Native Oregonian.”

2. I include those perspectives that might be considered social constructionist, postmodern, and/or post-structural in this “wave.”

3. “Mental processes” are feeling, thinking, and willing.

4. For example, Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards uses the idea of being a voice for the poor in his campaign (John Edwards for President, 2007).

5. What might our world be like if biology, chemistry, and physics operated from a cultural orientation rather than a positivist orientation? Would we still have the internet? Pharmaceutical drugs? Abundant food? Cheap cars? Nuclear power? Genetically modified organisms? Expedited extinction of plants, animals, and civilizations?

6. “Meaning” is later described as “a culturally mediated phenomenon that depends upon the prior existence of a shared symbol system” (Bruner, 1990, p. 69).

7. It dawns on me that the dominant metaphor used to represent humanness has shifted in Western culture as the cutting edge technology has shifted—from the clock in the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, the engine until the mid-twentieth century, the computer until quite recently, and now the “network.” What came before the clock and what will come after the network?

8. The more contemporary anthropological/communications term artifact is interchangeable with Vygotskys “tool.”

9. In contemporary terms, these may be referred to as intrapersonal and interpersonal development.