Why Operativity-in-Context Is Not Quite a Sociocultural Model

Understanding cognitive development requires building up an approach that can effectively integrate constructivist and sociocultural perspectives, and this paper [Psaltis, Duveen, & Perret-Clermont, this issue] offers a useful contribution to that effort from a neo-Piagetian direction. Its key contribution lies in its overview and assessment of a line of empirical work situating children’s cognitive development in social-relational context that has been carried out over the last several decades by a group of ‘social Genevans’ (e.g., Doise, Mugny, Perret-Clermont, and others) and their Anglo-Cypriot associates (including Duveen and Psaltis). This program of research followed up theoretical initiatives that Piaget himself had introduced, particularly in such early works as The Moral Judgment of the Child [1932/1965], but then failed to pursue in the great bulk of his substantive research after 1932. In the process, as the authors argue convincingly, this research program has not only vindicated the basic thrust of the social-relational approach proposed by Piaget, but also refined, deepened and extended it. In addition to specifying more precisely certain features of children’s peer interaction most likely to promote cognitive advances, this research has addressed the institutional and cultural dimensions of social context in ways that go beyond Piaget’s own model. The authors’ analytical reconstruction of three phases or ‘generations’ (pp. 299– 308) of this neo-Piagetian research program is thus the solid core of their paper. (Another cogent account of this social Genevan research program, which usefully complements the one presented in the paper by Psaltis et al. [this issue], is in Duveen & Psaltis, 2008.) We agree that this ongoing body of work has significant and promising implications, theoretical as well as empirical. On the other hand, we find it necessary