ABSTRACT
The study of social cognition often follows as an attempt to represent the structure and content of social knowledge assumed to be located within individual social actors. This chapter aims to elaborate a coactive systems framework for understanding how social meanings develop as mediators of social action in adolescence. A coactive systems conception maintains that action and experience is the coactive product of relations among evolving elements of the system. As such, human action is the emergent product of coactive relations among elements of the system rather than the outcome of particular elements considered separately. Dynamic skill theory provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools for charting transformations in the skills that mediate social action over the course of adolescence. In the way, social meanings that mediate action are themselves shaped within particular affective-charged interactions, relationships and sociocultural contexts.
