Book contents
- Co-Operative Action
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
- Co-Operative Action
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What Is Co-Operative Action, and Why Is It Important?
- Part I Co-Operative Accumulative Action
- Part II Intertwined Semiosis
- Part III Embodied Interaction
- Part IV Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- 16 Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- 17 The Accumulation of Diversity through Co-Operative Action
- 18 Seeing in Depth
- 19 Co-Operative Action as the Source of, and Solution to, the Task Faced by Every Community of Creating New, Culturally Competent Members with Specific Forms of Knowledge and Skill
- Part V Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants
- References Cited
- Index
- Series page
17 - The Accumulation of Diversity through Co-Operative Action
from Part IV - Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2017
- Co-Operative Action
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
- Co-Operative Action
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What Is Co-Operative Action, and Why Is It Important?
- Part I Co-Operative Accumulative Action
- Part II Intertwined Semiosis
- Part III Embodied Interaction
- Part IV Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- 16 Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- 17 The Accumulation of Diversity through Co-Operative Action
- 18 Seeing in Depth
- 19 Co-Operative Action as the Source of, and Solution to, the Task Faced by Every Community of Creating New, Culturally Competent Members with Specific Forms of Knowledge and Skill
- Part V Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants
- References Cited
- Index
- Series page
Summary
The ability to accumulate solutions and materials found by our predecessors is central to human cognition and social life. The practices that accomplish this not only are built into the intrinsic organization of co-operative action itself, but lead systematically to the progressive unfolding of diversity. Crucially, each reuse of inherited materials occurs within a local activity where it is transformed and adapted to current tasks. As it enters into new relationships of mutual elaboration with the different tools and resources found in each setting it helps constitute the infrastructure that makes tasks possible. Path-dependent transformations lead to the ongoing proliferation of diversity, across centuries, and simultaneously within closely linked settings, including the airport examined in Chapter 16. Lack of copresence might seem to create a crucial analytic divide, and indeed predecessors lack the ability to police their successors’ use of what they created. However, states of copresence, including participants’ access to each other and their task-relevant perception of the environment, are themselves varied and complex. Inherited resources can fall into ruin and disappear if not sustained through ongoing webs of co-operative action.
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- Co-Operative Action , pp. 263 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017