Rewriting stress: Toward a cultural psychology of collective stress at work

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute theoretically to the development of a cultural psychological, i.e. dialogical and distributed, understanding of stress. First we challenge established cognitivist notions of stress and discuss philosophical and epistemological implications tied to this perspective. Then we introduce a dialogical, distributed and situated understanding of stress and rewrite central concepts from cognitive stress research such as appraisal and coping. This new orientation is related to a recent metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes are embedded in and possibly even extend into the environment. This philosophical position is known as externalism and holds that the mind needs to be understood not just by intrinsic mental features such as physiological or cognitive processes, but also in light of what either occurs or exists outside the organism. With reference to empirical examples, we argue that this framework can contribute to a new understanding of the situated and distributed nature of stress.