Klaus Riegel's contribution to dialectical developmental theorizing has been described by his associate Meacham (1999). Riegel (1925-77) was born in Berlin but later worked as an academic psychologist in the USA.
In the years leading up to his early death in the 1970s he developed a form of dialecticism, disseminated through his university lectures, publications and conferences. Precursors of his theory included the work of Spranger (who proposed that individuals could only be understood in relation to their historical times), and it was Rubinstein, rather than Vygotsky, who influenced his thinking (Thought and Language but not Mind in Society appeared in English translation in Riegel's lifetime). Riegel's psychological theory was in stark contrast to traditional psychology's concern with stabil- ity and the maintenance of equilibrium. Rather, his theory was specifically developmental in nature. Drawing upon Rubinstein's transactional theory, he proposed that aspects of the individual (biological, psychological and sociocultural/historical) are in transactional relationships - each being defined in relation to all the others. A change in one aspect produces a crisis, the resolution of which results in development (which may be posi- tive or negative). His theory was reflexive, in that he recognized that the theory should be applied to theorizing itself, which is therefore influenced by its historical times. Riegel's own times encompassed the Holocaust, the birth of the civil rights movement in America, and the publication of Jensen's controversial work on genetics and intelligence; in fact, Riegel pre- sented what was probably the first university course in black psychology.
Riegel's concern was therefore not with individuals' stability, but with their development in relation to sociocultural change.
We will take up and expand on the sociocultural theme in Chapter 9, and also mention the place of Riegel's theory in relation to integrative the- ories of development, in Chapter 11. It is of interest that his work is now much less well known than that of Vygotsky. This might be because his emphasis on relativism is more explicit than that of Vygotsky, and thus presents a greater challenge to traditional positivist developmental psych- ology. Indeed, Broughton (1987) suggested that the critical perspective on developmental psychology offered by Riegel's dialecticism has been lost in its application to lifespan psychology. He maintained that this field has 'trivialized history ... reducing it positivistically to a variable confounded with psychological change' (1987: 11).
Conclusions
A dialectical approach to children's development was proposed by Vygotsky in the early twentieth century, but not taken up beyond the Soviet Union until much later. The contributions of Rubinstein and Riegel
also deserve mention, although it is Vygotsky's theory that has become the best known. Van DerVeer (1986) argued that Vygotsky made three original contributions to our understanding of human development: in his descrip- tion of the crisis-like character of development, the importance he placed on the role of speech, and his emphasis on the social nature of the young child. Vygotsky's work has inspired research on the crucial role of adults and older peers in cognitive development, with a focus on process rather than structure, and has become influential in education.
Dialectical theory, in providing a link between individual development and the social world, paves the way for a greater consideration of the role of culture and history in individual development, and represents a move in the direction of more holistic and systemic views of development. In this respect, Rubinstein's and Riegel's notion of constitutive relationalism is worthy of fresh consideration. These issues will be taken up in Chapters 9 and 11.
contextualism
Introduction
In Chapter 1 we gave consideration to influences that shape child develop- ment theory, including history and culture. In this chapter we examine the basic tenets of contextualism, adopting the argument advanced by Kalbaugh (1989: 4) that 'contextualism is based on assumptions funda- mentally distinct from those of the dialectical (organismic) paradigm'. We can address this issue by considering the work of Pepper, which we intro- duced in Chapter 1 and further elaborate in the final chapter. Pepper's work embraced the idea that different theoretical positions adopted by sci- entists are related to different philosophical positions that they hold, which can be represented in terms of root metaphors (Pepper, 1942), including organicism and contextualism. There is some commonality between these two metaphors, in particular, the idea that 'reality is in constant flux' (Kramer and Bopp, 1989: 4). They also share an emphasis on placing activity in a given time and place. The difference is that for organicism the emphasis is on the developmental process of the organism, whereas con- textualism includes the subjective context of the observer and the observed in a certain social context.
We have taken Pepper's idea that the root metaphor for contextualism is 'The real historic event' (Pepper, 1942: 232). Pepper (1942) maintained that contextualism (pragmatism) is generally associated with the writings of William James, John Dewey and Margaret Mead.
These theorists are covered in this chapter, as is Urie Bronfenbrenner, and we will also give consideration to lifespan developmental psychology.
Using a contextualist approach, it will be argued that developmental change involves reciprocal or bi-directional influence (Bell, 1978), whereby an active organism is relating to a responsive context. The bi- directional nature of influence emphasizes that just as the individual is changed by the context, so the context is changed by the individual. Thus individuals are both products and producers of their contexts (Lerner, 1986).
Essentially, contextualism is based on the idea of the unique historical event. Rosnow and Georgoudi (1986) have identified four themes that
are especially important in considering contextualism.
1. The historic event is the basic unit of analysis with a consequent focus on change and development.
2. The context consists of all the conditions surrounding the event. The sociocultural context in which the event takes place provides meaning to the event.
3. Variability and chance are an integral part of contextualism because contexts themselves are ultimately developing and impermanent real- ities. This point alone differentiates contextualism from mechanism and organicism, which are based on the assumption that the true order and unity of events can be determined probabilistically (Thayer, 1968).
4. Action and knowledge. The purposive and intentional nature of human action is emphasized in contextualism. Development, then, is an active participation in the construction of contexts that in turn impact on any future action.