In: Brenner, The Structure of Action, 1980, pp.313-350
p.324 The present is a brief interval in which things are becoming, going on, being produced...
The acting person always is in this brief interval of reality, a reality which is partly specified, and always specifiable
further. Psychological theories, Shotter argues, must be framed around this fact; they must accommodate the perspective
of the active agent.
p.324 Social worlds are joint products of interacting persons and depend upon the construction
by the interactors of shared meanings... as a joint product, actions in a social world constitute joint action. To
understand an action requires understanding the personal and social worlds within which that action takes place and makes
sense, since an action necessarily is a component of intentional personal and social worlds.
p.325 As Argyle points out, many situations are standard, and role-rule frameworks can be said to exist
a priori once people enter upon those situations... there are many contextual constraints within which people operate,
and the creative, negotiative function of persons in the production of social worlds is itself constrained and operates
in conjunction with situational factors
p.335 Active agency seems inextricably tied to teleology... in which an action is performed 'in
order to...'.
p.336 Active agency must be taken into account in any attempt to understand human action, since
people act intentionally and both choose and create the contexts of their actions. That is, people
in part choose which situations to enter and which to avoid. Furthermore, once choosing to enter a particular situation,
or finding himself in it, the person may modulate it or even drastically transform it by his actions.
p.339 the meaning [of an action] is given partly by the action implications of the action
- that is, by the subsequent actions implied by it. This allows the performer of the actions to modify it
even as he produces it by covertly responding to it from the perspective of the recipient, a process... developed
at length... under the rubric of role taking.
p.342 The model of human action which emerges from the selective extraction of major themes from
this volume can be stated succinctly... Human action is situated, temporally and hierarchically structured, and meaningful
but modifiably so. The action of interest often is joint action, produced by the coordinated activity
of two or more people, and not explainable in terms of any one of them. The persons whose situated actions we wish
to understand are active agents whose agency is subject to biological and social constraints,
and who operate from active perspectives of a continually present interval to reality which is partly specified and partly
specifiable. To understand an action, it is necessary to understand the situation of its occurrence
p.343 In addition to identifying the relevant components, the ease with which each can be modified
should be determined. That information is necessary in order to estimate the social constraints which limit
the active agency of the actors. Finally, the consequences for the other situational components of a change
in any one of them should be assessed, since the situation is conceived as a system of interdependent components,
and situations will differ in the extent to which change is transmitted through the system.
p.343 the procedures use for identification of units [of action] also should be compatible with the implicational
conception of meaning.
p.344-345 the structure of situated action is discovered in part by examination of the unfolding of the
action in its situational and act/action context over real time. Its emergence and maintenance or modulation is observed and
analysed.
p.346 This book clearly is part of a growing perspective which is becoming increasingly
mature and sure of itself. The exact shape of the science that will be formed by the continued development of this perspective
- what I have called the structural analysis of situated action - is not clear yet
