Change and Development

Issues of Theory, Method, and Application

Eric Amsel, K. Ann Renninger, Ann Renninger, Eric Amsel, K. Ann Renninger, Ann Renninger

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134792054
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book and the symposium on which it was based were designed to cross the boundaries of subdiscipline and theoretical orientation to address four critical issues in understanding development: explanation of change and development; the nature and process of change; forms of variability in performance; and the promotion of change through application.

The chapters suggest that change and development in target systems from cells to selves, may not be explainable, assessable, or promotable without careful reference to the context (social and otherwise) of the system, and that the process of change and development may involve variability of the system in addition to periods of stability. Together the chapters harken back to the spirit of the grand theory.

Instead of proposing a grand theory, they provide an excellent foundation for considering the importance of an individual's (or particular group's) context and variability, and discussions to facilitate thinking about what still needs to be worked out.

I

Foundations of Change Development

1

Stumping for Progress in a Post-Modern World

Michael Chandler

The University of British Columbia

Braced against mounting odds, this chapter sets itself in opposition to a contemporary current of so-called post-modern thought that, if left unchecked, would not only work to collapse the usual common language distinction that ordinarily divides the notions of change and development (notions that form the centerpiece of this volume) but would also serve, in the bargain, to carry away the essential foundations upon which the scientific study of human development necessarily rests. Although surprisingly little-spoken about in most psychological circles, such fin de siecle attempts to give the boot to what developmental theorists have cared most about must be seen, I argue, as a serious challenge, deserving our most careful attention. On that premise, the pages that follow are structured as a kind of cautionary brief, filed in favor of the importance of retaining critical parts of modernism’s so-called Enlightenment Project and are intended not only to help explain why it is that advocates of various post-modern views are eager to wish developmental theory away but to provide a sort of starter kit of objections, potentially useful to those who, like myself, are moved to take up arms against this sea of troubles.

I plan to follow this agenda in two steps. First, I begin by delivering a kind of wake-up call meant to alert anyone who may have managed to sleep through the earlier announcement of what Kessen (1984,1990), and others (e.g., Gergen, 1991; Kvale, 1990; Lather, 1990; Morss, 1992), have taken to calling “The End of the Age of Development.” To accomplish this purpose it is necessary to say at least enough about what has come to be billed as eliminative, or deconstructive, or skeptical post-modernism to alert you to the bad, stomping-boot fate that practitioners of these deconstructive arts have in mind for the likes of you and me. Beyond this brief scare tactic, I use the balance of this chapter to line out what I take to be good reasons for concluding that such apocalyptic rumors concerning the purported death of our collective enterprise are, at best, exaggerated. Here the arguments to be unfolded are pleated roughly as follows. To begin with, I mean to bracket and set aside as fair commentary the whole barrage of intended post-modern slanders to the effect that the developmental sciences in general, and structural developmental theory in particular, are quintessentially “modern.” That is, I mean to start by simply stipulating to the allegation that more or less the same broad bill of particulars spelled out on modernity’s banner of authority—structure and hierarchy and directionality—are also the customary hallmarks of classical developmental theory. Next, I hope at least to make intelligible why it is that, in the eyes of our harshest post-modern critics, anyone found still clinging to such remnants of high modernism is, at the very least, guilty of having hitched their wagon to a falling star, and is taken to be a fool for having done so. Finally, I spell out why, despite such disparaging views, it is happily still the case that the most ground-leveling of such criticisms, if not frankly mistaken, at least end up having little real force when aimed away from their usual sociopolitical targets and toward our own altogether more focused enterprise as developmental scientists.

Given all of the above, a proper starting point for this account would seem to be with an attempt to first get clear about what is ordinarily meant by post-modern thought, and why its practitioners keep on certifying as dead what I, at least, differently experience as the very live business of doing developmental science.

Who are these Post-Modernists and why do they Keep Spreading these Rumors about Us?

A variety of personal and procedural limitations all militate against the prospects of my coming up with even an acceptable caricature, let alone a coherent definition, of all that has come to be gathered together under the loose rubric of post-modern thought. This is so not only because of the sheer volume of things currently being written on the topic of post-modernism (Books in Print now lists some 1,500 relevant titles in English alone) but even more so because the very act of supposing that such summarial definitions are possible is itself an instance of the kind of supposedly misguided essentialism that post-modernists are always on about. Even at its mercurial best, the term post-modernity is self-consciously intended, even by those who wear it by choice, to be one of those loose, baggy, portmanteau sort of words that is imagined to look its best only when fully stretched to cover whatever unconventional ideas one happens to already own. Such prêt-á-porter impossibility arguments tend not to wash particularly well, however, with post-modernism’s critics, who commonly see all such excuse-making as slippery, vague and ambiguous (Bernstein, 1991), and as amounting to no more than “yet another of those period descriptions that help you take a view of the past suitable to whatever it is you want to do” (Kermode, 1988, p. 62). Reconciled, then, to the evident necessity of building some definition of post-modernism from the ground up, what seems best is to begin by first working to get a better handle on the antecedent notion of “modernity.”

Closing the Brackets on Modernity

Even if its end should prove to be already in sight, taking the full measure of the modern era also naturally requires some clear vision about when, give or take a century or two, it actually began. As it is, nothing like such a handy consensus is available here either. Instead, one could swing several figurative cats between modernity’s various putative starting dates. By some popular accounts, “The modern world as a coherent period of social history began seminally in the sixteenth century, matured after the eighteenth century, and now in the late twentieth century is coming to an end” (Holland, 1989, p. 10). Others, in seemingly equal numbers, have viewed the full horizon of modernity as being effectively contained within our own century, and is imagined to be best understood as fronted by some pivotal cultural achievement such as the 1913 New York Armory Show (that brought North America, for the first time, the works of Duchamp, Kandinsky, Matisse, Picasso, and others), the first performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” or the publication of Mann’s Death in Venice or Proust’s Swann’s Way, all of which capped off what some regard as the inaugural year of the so-called “New Enlightenment.” If some Solomon-like flourish could be aimed effectively to cut the differences dividing such outrider alternatives exactly in half, then it would likely yield a composite view that would read modernity as a byproduct of the so-called European Enlightenment, and so locate its beginnings somewhere between the 17th and 18th centuries.

Viewed perhaps more analytically, the modern era is often seen (e.g., Harvey, 1990) to have begun with a kind of building intellectual sea-change, distinguished by a sharp turning away from earlier pre-modern sensibilities that equated getting things right with successfully staying in touch with this or that extrapersonal authority or external source of guidance (God, say, or the “idea of the Good”), and toward a new kind of inwardness in which persons came to restory themselves as beings with inner depth (Taylor, 1991). This new sensibility, it is said, helped to set the tone for what Habermas (e.g., 1987) characterizes as the project of modernity, a broad-based effort to develop objective descriptions of human kind, universal morality and autonomous art, each according to its own inner logic. Because these sought after universal truths were thought to be located at various depths beneath the clutter of concrete sense experiences, modernism, on this standard reading, came to be conceived by the scientific imagination as predicated on what Smith (1992) detailed as three essential assumptions, the first of which being that phenomenal reality is decidedly less interesting than the orderly and well structured truths that presumably lie behind it. The second is that human reason is capable of comprehending reality’s deep structure through a grasping of the orderly and universal laws of nature. And finally, in this emerging scheme of things, progress in the direction of human fulfillment and happiness is seen to be predicated on somehow coming to know these laws and facilitating their operation in our lives.

Although a commitment to the possibility of warranting these notions of universality, hierarchy, structure, reason, and progress quickly came to be quite widely spread, it is important for our own purposes to note that the fundamental tenets of this emerging project of modernity were to become more or less identical with the collective ambitions of a whole army of 20th century developmental theorists, the majority of whom shared with Dewey (1910) the view that mere behavioral flux and lapse is at best an insult to our intelligence. In fact, it would not put too fine a point on these matters to argue, as did Blasi (1976), that, for much of this century the essential raison d’être for most developmental scientists, and the justification for the existence of developmental psychology as an autonomous discipline, has been a commitment to the proposition that certain classes of change are interesting precisely because they seem to occur at a certain depth, and because they appear somehow designed or guided, rather than merely happenstantial. Dewey (1910) similarly captured (although did not always share) this critical distinction between change and development by asking us to consider how it is that “men” come to be “impressed by the facts of life” (p. 5). On his own account, it happened like this:

Their eyes fell upon certain things … [which] … were inert and passive. Suddenly, under certain circumstances, these things—henceforth known as seeds or eggs or germs—began to change, to change rapidly in size, form and qualities. Rapid and extensive changes occur, however, in many things—as when wood is touched by fire. But the changes in the living things are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in one direction, they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume, or pass fruitless into wandering flux; they realize their predecessor, preserve their net effect and also prepare the way for a fuller activity on the part of their successor. In living beings, changes do not happen as they seem to happen elsewhere, any which way; the earlier changes are regulated in view of their results. (Dewey, 1910, p. 5)

Now, as then, the key planks forming the broad scaffold for modern thought, both within and without the developmental sciences, remain remarkably unchanged, and need to be seen as including the themes of unity or continuity, hierarchy, directional change and rationality. That is, modernity, as it has come down to us from the past, regularly privileges guided development over merely random or aimless change; it features sameness and structure over the simply different and contingent, and it consistently champions being or identity in preference to mere becoming or aimless polysemy. By these historical lights, the pursuit, by legions of developmental theorists, of various deep structures or reoccurring patterns in human ontogenesis deserve to be seen in context as only the local issue of a still more widely distributed common stock of shared modernist offerings.

Although perhaps sometimes blinded by the light of their own bright quests for universal patterns and transhistorical truths, it would be a serious disservice to our elders, and perhaps ourselves, to suppose that no one ever anticipated what have more lately become the post-modern critiques of such modernist efforts, or ever really worried about the downside possibility that all this tilting after the hidden and the abstract might end up leaving too many of life’s rich details lost on the cutting room floor. That much, at least, we all knew. Here, however, is the unexpected rub, the rude awakening that post-modernists have in store for anyone who has ever set their cap upon achieving some context-independent vision of how things might look beneath the swirl of transient details. What we native born modernists never really counted on—no, here I need to take more individual responsibility—what I, personally, never counted on, would never in a million years have come to on my own—is that all such seemingly benign and once generally acceptable talk about transsituational this and universal or essentialist that could have come, in half a lifetime, to be so widely held up for ridicule or so broadly seen as little more than an embarrassing remnant left over from a shamefully modern colonialist past, a past now regularly revealed to have fallen very far short of being the innocent quest after enlightenment it was once naively imagined to be. For many, this late-breaking news that all such once comfortable talk about developmental “progress” is now widely regarded in post-modern circles as a new form of obscenity, and that the once proud search for the hidden outlines of human nature has dilapidated into an apology for new forms of totalitarianism (Griffin, 1989) is a rude awakening—a collective startle roughly akin to the shock of embarrassment that first accompanied the discovery that the much sung childhood favorite of yesteryear “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” (“the one with the wagg-ely tail”) is in actuality an old sea chanty about prostitutes (Broughton, 1981).

Having lived through this rude surprise, what now needs to be somehow reckoned with, and perhaps even sympathetically understood, is just how it could have come to pass that most of modernity’s comfortable old shoe assumptions—assumptions upon which the continued existence of the developmental sciences as a coherent enterprise would seem to rest necessarily—could have come to be so regularly judged by the average postmodern thinker as not just awkwardly mistaken, but as utterly and irreconcilably and altogether dangerously mistaken. We developmentalists badly need to understand this for the important reason that, should post-modern thinkers prove to be even half right, then our own supposedly “enlightened” efforts will not only have failed, but will need to be seen as fairly accused of complicity in everything from “the progressive marginalization of the poor,” and “the erosion of community” (Griffin, 1989, p. 4) to “destructive wars” and “the slow poisoning of the natural ecology” (Holland, 1989, p. 11). Given that they have such a poor opinion of us, learning how to recognize best a post-modernist when you meet one promises, then, to have important adaptational significance. As you will see, however, learning to know one when you see one is no easy accomplishment.

Drawing a Bead on Post-Modernity

Whatever post-modern thought might prove to be, it is in some sense parasitic upon the still unsettled definition of modernity, and confusion necessarily grows exponentially. Even by its promoters, who perhaps have been overzealous in avoiding what Jameson (1991, p. ix) called “the mischief of premature clarification,” the term is so semantically diffused and unstable, so “stretched in all directions” (Rose, 1991, p. 3), and so intractably difficult to define (Hassan, 1987), that many have begun to suspect that it may now cause more trouble than it is worth (Rorty, 1991b). So much for its “boosters.” Its “knockers,” as Taylor (1991, p. 22) called them, are as you might guess, considerably less forgiving. In their eyes, post-modernism is variously seen as the new fuzziness, a French fad, a form of parlor nihilism, the revenge of the philistines, a symptom of fin-de-millennium weariness, an obscurant form of facile relativism, and, according to Callinicos (1989, p. 126) “the candidate winning the prize for the silliest argument.” While a certain amount of this may qualify as mere sour grapes, there is still little room for doubt that this umbrella term has gradually come to be used to cover so broad a “plethora of incommensurable object tendencies” (Rose, 1991, p. 3), that serious definitional attempts probably need to be abandoned in favor of the practice of only reporting putative citings.

However hard it may prove to be to characterize post-modern thought in any positive sense, it is rather easier to say what post-modernism is not; or at least what it has set itself against. Trading on the negative momentum occasioned by the threatened collapse of belief in all more triumphalist accounts of progress, post-modern thought, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard (1979), is distinguished primarily by: (a) its absolutely skeptical and incredulous attitude toward any and all “transcendental structures,” ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Change and Development: An Introduction
• Part I Foundations of Change Development
• Part II Nature and Process of Change and Development
• Part III Variability, Change, and Development
• Part IV Foundations of Change Development
• Author Index
• Subject Index