Sociocultural Ecology of Nested Dynamic Systems Social Analysis of Urban Everyday Life Meeting 2 (January 30, 2014) Nikita Kharlamov, AAU

The Ostensive (Visible) Ostensive = presents itself to or is open to view. Question: What latent phenomena can it serve as an index of (indicate)? {Compare: latent variable in statistics; latent function in functionalism} What do you see? What does it mean? How did it get there? Who placed it there? What larger social / psychological / economic / political / cultural phenomenon does it reflect?

Hallmarks of an Ecological Science (Remember our discussion of ‘levels of organization’ last week!) Dynamic, interdependent processes constituting natural systems (ecosystems) Living things are active participants in a network of reciprocal influences Ecosystem constituents are functionally interconnected as a result of their (partial) co-evolution Systems are organized into nested hierarchies (nested = each system is like an egg in a nest of a larger-scale system; and it ‘contains’ other smaller-scale systems inside itself) Example: a cyclist in an urban environment. A cyclist is nested in a traffic system; and is a system of a ‘bicycle’ and a ‘human body’ [After H. Heft, The tension between the psychological and ecological sciences, 2014]

Why ‘Ecological’? Why ‘Systems’? Key issue - structure: what are the specific relationships / patterns / mechanisms / agents / systems / processes that connect the different parts of the system? Key issue – development: how do these relationships and systems change over time and what triggers these changes?

Person-Environment-Behavior: Transactions “How humans relate to and use, influence and are influenced by, nature and the built environment” (Werner & Altman, 2000) Focus on systematic description of the forms and patterns of phenomena and processes, while recognizing their dynamic, co-evolutionary character Preference for naturalistic (field), direct observational studies of complex real-world settings, rather than lab- based experiments, modeling using simplified artificial setups, or indirect surveys ‘Transaction’: not an isolated cause-effect relationship, but an event/process in a complex system; its analysis requires understanding the ecosystem as a whole

Roger Barker ( ): Behavior Settings “We can predict behavior better from places than from people” (Sabar, The Outsider, 2014) A) Specific time, place, and objects B) Standing behavior patterns (rules & roles) -> A combination of physical and social Typically easily identifiable by members of a culture Unit of human habitation Case: Our own classroom!

Urie Bronfenbrenner ( )

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model (from Eisenmann et al., 2008) Typically used in research on child development to account for the nested ecological character of any developmental process/influence Note that this model is organized on a range of scales / levels, and occurrences at any level are embedded in a larger level, and themselves embed smaller levels The key advantage of this kind of models: they allow tracing specific relationships / paths of influence / ways of mutual determination and co-evolution Example: classroom education. Economic crisis might provoke a decision of the school board to increase classroom size, which in turn leads to reduced amount of attention that teachers can grant each individual child. A researcher shall have to unpack this pathway in as much detail as possible (documenting, for example, meeting minutes of the school board), so that ‘miracles’ are eliminated.

Tying Strands Together Accounting for persons, their behaviors, their settings, and the mutual connections therein Ecological focus on dynamic systems where any change is nested and thus pulls other changes into effect Humans move across various behavior settings over the course of their life (and over one day) What is our focus? What level of organization can we easily access in the city? Exercise: Analyze the cyclist-in-the-city example from a nested ecological standpoint.