Sociocultural critique of Piaget and Vygotsky

Abstract

Piaget has su!ered a great deal of criticism that his theory of psychological development neglects the social nature of human development. Much of this criticism has come from researchers following a Vygotskian approach and comparing Piaget's approach unfavorably with that of Vygotsky. Smith (1995) refers us to Piaget's collected articles on sociology (Piaget, 1995) to argue convincingly that it is oversimplication and misunderstanding to assume Piaget's neglect of the social nature of human development. We want to o!er our own critique of both Piaget and Vygotsky from a new, sociocultural perspective, recently emerging in several disciplines of social sciences (Heath, 1983; Latour, 1987; Lave & Wenger, 1991; McDermott, 1993; Rogo!, 1990). We do not consider ourselves followers of Vygotsky's theory but of a sociocultural approach, despite the fact that the sociocultural approach is itself heavily built on and in#uenced by Vygotsky's work. For a while, a sociocultural approach was an invisible by-product of e!orts by mainly US psychologists like Cole (1978), Wertsch (1985), Scribner (1984), Rogo! and Wertsch (1984) and others to reconstruct and continue Vygotsky's paradigm. Just as the medieval endeavor to bring a renaissance of ancient Greek art and culture gave birth to a new art and a new culture, we argue that the renaissance of Vygotsky has gradually produced a new theoretical approach* namely the sociocultural. Initial critiques of Piaget from a Vygotskyian perspective came when the sociocultural approach was into the earlier phases of development, when `psychologistsa2 were `increasingly interested in the e!ects of the social context of individuals' cognitive developmenta (Tudge & Rogo!, 1989, p. 17). In contrast, from a current sociocultural perspective, cognitive development is embedded in social contexts and their separation is considered impossible and, thus, cannot have `e!ectsa. Like Smith, we claim that there is an overlooked similarity between Piaget and Vygotsky. However, from a recent sociocultural perspective, we associate these similarities with a shared failure to recognize the unity of cognition and social context. Our paper is primarily