Introduction

In an earlier paper, I discussed the uses of cross-cultural research by the originators of the Soviet cultural-historical school. My focus was on the ways in which their ideas intersect with certain streams of American cross-cultural research (Cole, 1988). In that paper I argued that continued progress in developing the ideas of the cultural-historical school would be well served by combining their emphasis on the mediated structure of higher psychological functions and historically evolving modes of activity with the American approach emphasizing the importance of cultural context and empirical methods that begins with an analysis of concrete activity systems.

In this chapter, I begin where my previous discussion left off by presenting various contributions to the elaboration of a cultural theory of human nature that have come to prominence in the past decade under the rubric of cultural psychology. After suggesting some ways in which these efforts complement the basic program of cultural-historical psychologists and their successors who work within the framework of activity theory, I present an example of research designed to apply the overall framework to a concrete problem of development in modern industrial societies.

Recent proposals for cultural psychology

Approximately a decade ago, Douglas Price-Williams (1979, 1980), a well-known cross-cultural developmental psychologist, published two papers suggesting that psychologists recognize the existence of cultural psychology, which he denned as “that branch of inquiry that delves into the contextual behavior of psychological processes” (1979, p. 14).