ABSTRACT
In this chapter I wish to explore the extent to which two approaches to the social formation of mind are compatible and may be used to enrich and extend each other. These are: Activity Theory (AT), as derived from the work of the early Russian psychologists, Vygotsky and Leontiev, and the work of the sociologist Basil Bernstein. The purpose is to show how Bernstein (2000) provides a language of description which allows Vygotsky’s (1987) account of social formation of mind to be extended and enhanced through an understanding of the sociological processes which form specific modalities of pedagogic practice and their specialized scientific concepts. The two approaches engage with a common theme, namely the social shaping of consciousness, from different perspectives and yet, as Bernstein (1977, 1993) acknowledges, both develop many of their core assumptions from the work of Marx and the French school of early-twentieth-century sociology. There has been much debate over the years about the effectiveness of schooling but relatively little about the effects of different modalities of schooling. The empirical work which is used to illustrate the theoretical argument of this chapter is drawn from a study conducted in British special schools. This sector of the state school system was selected as it is the one which exhibits the greatest diversity of institutional modalities of schooling. The empirical work in this chapter seeks to investigate the effects of different forms of institutional modality and the theoretical work seeks to develop a language of description which facilitates such research. It is possible to track different approaches to the study of cultural historical formation in the early work of Vygotsky and Leontiev. The unit of analysis was word meaning in the case of Vygotsky (1987) and the activity system in which the individual was located in the case of Leontiev (1978, 1981). In both approaches, there is little by way of an explicit focus on institutional structure. In their attempt to develop an account of social formation their gaze fell first on the individual in dialogue and the object-oriented activity system. The notion of the object of activity – the problem space or raw material that was being worked on in an activity – is central to the work of Leontiev.
