This volume aims to build on the approach to cultural psychology originally developed by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky and his colleagues Luria and Leontiev by providing qualitative methods such as interview techniques and content analysis as empirical tools for exploring the cultural aspects of psychology, and specific guidelines for formulating, conducting, and analyzing interviews on cultural aspects of psychology.

Qualitative methodologies in cultural psychology often lack the objective and verifiable character of quantitative analysis. Author Carl Ratner corrects this shortcoming by rigorously systematizing qualitative methods. The book discusses, for example, means of systematizing such subjective reports as interviews, letters, and diaries, which often yield valuable data that is not easily quantified. Ratner argues that "complex psychological phenomena are expressed through extended responses" and hence are best studied by new, more regularized qualitative methods that go beyond measuring simple, overt responses.

The social character of psychological phenomena has never been easy to comprehend. Despite the fact that an intricate set of social relations forms our most intimate thoughts, feelings, and actions, we believe that psychology originates inside our body, in genes, hormones, the brain, and free will. Perhaps this asocial view stems from the alienated nature of most societies which makes individual activity appear to be estranged from social relations. One might have thought that the emergence of scientific psychology would have disclosed the social character of activity had overlooked. Unfortunately, a century and a which naive experience half of psychological science has failed to comprehend the elusive social character of psychological phenomena. Psychological science has evi dently been subjugated by the mystifying ideology of society. This book aims to comprehend the social character of psychological functioning. I argue that psychological functions are quintessentially so cial in nature and that this social character must be comprehended if psychological knowledge and practice are to advance. The social nature of psychological phenomena consists in the fact that they are constructed by individuals in the process of social interaction, they depend upon properties of social interaction, one of their primary purposes is facili tating social interaction, and they embody the specific character of his torically bound social relations. This viewpoint is known as sociohistorical psychology. It was artic ulated most profoundly and comprehensively by the Russian psycholo gists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria during, the 1920s and 1930s."

This book utilizes cultural psychology as a cultural theory and psychological theory capable of explaining and improving social issues. In particular Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology, and Ratner's macro-cultural psychology are invoked to explain racism and mitigate it. This explanation of, and solution to, racism are utilized as a framework for analyzing and refining contemporary movements for racial justice. Among the topics discussed: Macro cultural psychology and Vygotsky's Marxist cultural-historical psychology Differentiating psychological racism from economic racism Historical examples of racism during American slavery which reveal their cultural and psychological features Cultural-psychological analysis and refinement of Black Lives Matter, racial capitalism, intersectionism, and Ta-Nehishi Coates' work Cultural Psychology, Racism, and Social Justice will be of interest to the fields of social policy, social transformation, psychological theory, cultural theory, and history.

This provocative monograph defines the elusive concept of neoliberal psychology, focusing on its form, content, and cultural contexts and establishing it as a core feature of modern society. Its cross-cultural analysis examines the reality of neoliberal psychology in the globalized world, asserting that neoliberalism influences individuals' sense of self, identity, and-regardless of country of origin-concept of nationality. Macro cultural psychological theory opens out neoliberal psychology in its most visible aspects, such as work life, sexuality, consumer behavior, and the shared vision of the good life. At the same time, the author identifies profound social inequities and other negative aspects of neoliberal society and discusses how they may be corrected. Included in the coverage: Snapshots of neoliberal society and psychology. A psychological theory for comprehending neoliberal psychology. Neoliberalism as a cultural, political, economic, ideological system. The neoliberal class structure of phenomena. Psychological and cultural emancipation, and macro cultural psychological theory. Since neoliberalism is the dominant social system in today's world, and because it commands both strong support and strong criticism from diverse interest groups, Neoliberal Psychology will be of general interest to a wide readership. The book's psychological focus is a new window into neoliberalism that is more accessible than more technical accounts of its economics and politics, and it should appeal especially to social science students and professors.

This book articulates how psychologists can use their theory, research, and intervention to generate insights into emancipatory social change that is necessary to solve social and psychological problems. These include racism, sexism, civil rights, poverty, militarism, education, and politics. Psychology was not developed to directly address social issues. It must therefore be reconceptualised to fulfil this aim. In this book Carl Ratner makes use of Vygotsky's psychological approach known as 'cultural-historical psychology', supplemented by Martin-Baro's Liberation Psychology and the work of Bourdieu and Foucault to develop an emancipatory psychological theory. This approach is then utilized to lay out a specific program of social and psychological emancipation. This reconstructed psychological theory is also used to evaluate populist movements that aim at social and psychological emancipation. Ratner posits that populism is inadequate to solve social and psychological problems because it misunderstands the nature of society and what it takes to improve society and psychology. This is demonstrated through wide-ranging examples including populist feminism, populist socialism, and populist distortions of liberation psychology and cultural-historical psychology. This lively critique opens a pathway for academic across the social sciences concerned with how their disciplines can be oriented toward understanding and solving social-psychological problems, and will appeal to wide readership including policy makers, and social activists.

This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters seeks to advance the field of cultural psychology by reviving its historical legacies and arguing for its social responsibility in future historical developments. It considers European legacies for cultural psychology as developed by leading figures such as Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Ernst Cassirer in order to provide insights into a long tradition of thinking from a cultural psychology perspective. The book discusses historical pathways in the rise and repression of cultural psychology and its different historical forms, arguing for the necessity of decolonizing psychology, securing a place for culture in it, and developing an epistemology suited to humankind's meaning-making processes in mutual shaping of psyche and culture. It provides an integrative and historical understanding of the subject and uses the diversity and heterogeneity within the field to offer critical reflections on its achievements. The thoroughly international group of contributors brings diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture, and society and considers the future of cultural psychology. The volume is a stimulating read for scholars and students of cultural and theoretical psychology and related areas including philosophy, anthropology, and history.

Carl Ratner's new book deepens our understanding of psychology by emphasizing the role that cultural factors, such as social institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts play in psychological functioning. The author demonstrates the impact of culture on stimulating and structuring emotion, personality, perception, cognition, memory, sexuality, and mental illness. Examples from interdisciplinary social science research illuminate a sophisticated dialectical relationship between cultural factors and psychological phenomena.
Written in an engaging style, the book articulates a new theory, "macro cultural psychology," and a qualitative methodology for investigating the cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. Ratner explains how this cultural perspective can be used to enhance psychological growth, illuminate directions for social reform, and how social reform can enhance psychological functioning, and vice versa.
"
Cultural Psychology" critically examines several prominent psychological approaches including social constructionism, feminism, hermeneutics, psychobiology, evolutionary, cross-cultural, ecological, and mainstream psychology. The book articulates a theory of macro culture that emphasizes the political dimension of culture and psychology.
Intended for students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, education, psychotherapy, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and policy makers and practitioners in public health and social service who are interested in understanding cultural aspects of psychology. The book is an appropriate text for courses in cross-cultural or community psychology, social work, social theory, and critical thinking.

This book articulates a bold, new, systematic theory of psychology, culture, and their interrelation. It explains how macro cultural factors -- social institutions, cultural artifacts, and cultural concepts -- are the cornerstones of society and how they form the origins and characteristics of psychological phenomena. This theory is used to explain the diversity of psychological phenomena such as emotions, self, intelligence, sexuality, memory, reasoning, perception, developmental processes, and mental illness. Ratner draws upon Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural psychology, Bronfenbrenner's ecological psychology, as well as work in sociology, anthropology, history, and geography, to explore the political implications and assumptions of psychological theories regarding social policy and reform.
The theory outlined here addresses current theoretical and political issues such as agency, realism, objectivity, subjectivism, structuralism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism. In this sense, the book articulates a systematic political philosophy of mind to examine numerous approaches to psychology, including indigenous psychology, cross-cultural psychology, activity theory, discourse analysis, mainstream psychology, and evolutionary psychology.

The social character of psychological phenomena has never been easy to comprehend. Despite the fact that an intricate set of social relations forms our most intimate thoughts, feelings, and actions, we believe that psychology originates inside our body, in genes, hormones, the brain, and free will. Perhaps this asocial view stems from the alienated nature of most societies which makes individual activity appear to be estranged from social relations. One might have thought that the emergence of scientific psychology would have disclosed the social character of activity had overlooked. Unfortunately, a century and a which naive experience half of psychological science has failed to comprehend the elusive social character of psychological phenomena. Psychological science has evi dently been subjugated by the mystifying ideology of society. This book aims to comprehend the social character of psychological functioning. I argue that psychological functions are quintessentially so cial in nature and that this social character must be comprehended if psychological knowledge and practice are to advance. The social nature of psychological phenomena consists in the fact that they are constructed by individuals in the process of social interaction, they depend upon properties of social interaction, one of their primary purposes is facili tating social interaction, and they embody the specific character of his torically bound social relations. This viewpoint is known as sociohistorical psychology. It was artic ulated most profoundly and comprehensively by the Russian psycholo gists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria during ,the 1920s and 1930s.

This volume aims to build on the approach to cultural psychology originally developed by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky and his colleagues Luria and Leontiev by providing qualitative methods such as interview techniques and content analysis as empirical tools for exploring the cultural aspects of psychology, and specific guidelines for formulating, conducting, and analyzing interviews on cultural aspects of psychology.

Qualitative methodologies in cultural psychology often lack the objective and verifiable character of quantitative analysis. Author Carl Ratner corrects this shortcoming by rigorously systematizing qualitative methods. The book discusses, for example, means of systematizing such subjective reports as interviews, letters, and diaries, which often yield valuable data that is not easily quantified. Ratner argues that "complex psychological phenomena are expressed through extended responses" and hence are best studied by new, more regularized qualitative methods that go beyond measuring simple, overt responses.

This important book fills two interrelated gaps in the field of psychology, first by developing a Marxist orientation to psychology and second by explaining how psychological pioneer Lev Vygotsky contributed greatly to this trend. Through outlining core principles in Marxist psychology, the book offers a framework for continuing Vygotsky's Marxist legacy in new areas of the field. This book first documents the neglect in Vygotskyian studies of his deep use of Marxist concepts, and then subsequent chapters overcome this neglect. They explain the use of many Marxist concepts in his theoretical and methodological writings, demonstrating how Vygotsky utilized specific Marxist meanings in his work on consciousness, signs, development, imagination, creativity, secondary language acquisition, and unit of analysis. Chapters also address how Vygotsky dealt with incompatible theories and methodologies, illustrating how Marxist and Vygotskyian psychology can grow from anti-Marxist, anti-Vygotskyian approaches to psychology, such as psychoanalysis. This book marks an original contribution to the field of psychology, offering a new understanding of both Vygotsky's work and cultural and Marxist psychology. Furthermore, it expands the field of Marxism to include psychology. It will be of interest to all students and researchers of cultural, educational, and developmental psychology as well as the history of psychology. It will also appeal to social theorists and Marxist scholars.

This important book fills two interrelated gaps in the field of psychology, first by developing a Marxist orientation to psychology and second by explaining how psychological pioneer Lev Vygotsky contributed greatly to this trend. Through outlining core principles in Marxist psychology, the book offers a framework for continuing Vygotsky's Marxist legacy in new areas of the field. This book first documents the neglect in Vygotskyian studies of his deep use of Marxist concepts, and then subsequent chapters overcome this neglect. They explain the use of many Marxist concepts in his theoretical and methodological writings, demonstrating how Vygotsky utilized specific Marxist meanings in his work on consciousness, signs, development, imagination, creativity, secondary language acquisition, and unit of analysis. Chapters also address how Vygotsky dealt with incompatible theories and methodologies, illustrating how Marxist and Vygotskyian psychology can grow from anti-Marxist, anti-Vygotskyian approaches to psychology, such as psychoanalysis. This book marks an original contribution to the field of psychology, offering a new understanding of both Vygotsky's work and cultural and Marxist psychology. Furthermore, it expands the field of Marxism to include psychology. It will be of interest to all students and researchers of cultural, educational, and developmental psychology as well as the history of psychology. It will also appeal to social theorists and Marxist scholars.

Carl Ratner's new book deepens our understanding of psychology by emphasizing the role that cultural factors, such as social institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts play in psychological functioning. The author demonstrates the impact of culture on stimulating and structuring emotion, personality, perception, cognition, memory, sexuality, and mental illness. Examples from interdisciplinary social science research illuminate a sophisticated dialectical relationship between cultural factors and psychological phenomena.
Written in an engaging style, the book articulates a new theory, "macro cultural psychology," and a qualitative methodology for investigating the cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. Ratner explains how this cultural perspective can be used to enhance psychological growth, illuminate directions for social reform, and how social reform can enhance psychological functioning, and vice versa.
"
Cultural Psychology" critically examines several prominent psychological approaches including social constructionism, feminism, hermeneutics, psychobiology, evolutionary, cross-cultural, ecological, and mainstream psychology. The book articulates a theory of macro culture that emphasizes the political dimension of culture and psychology.
Intended for students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, education, psychotherapy, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and policy makers and practitioners in public health and social service who are interested in understanding cultural aspects of psychology. The book is an appropriate text for courses in cross-cultural or community psychology, social work, social theory, and critical thinking.

The current co-op movement in the U.S. seeks to be a structural alternative to capitalism; this book seriously questions whether the current movement can accomplish that task. Carl Ratner offers a rich and unique political analysis and critique that provides helpful insights into the practice and problems of the contemporary cooperative movement. Noting that co-operators tend to view their work as apolitical because the explicit influence of national political parties is absent, the author constructs a compelling argument that co-operators nonetheless operate unwittingly with implicit political conceptions of freedom, opportunity, human rights, social participation, decision-making, power, and governance that are shaped and limited by the capitalist economic system. Ratner demonstrates how a more radical, anti-capitalist, socialist form of cooperation and co-ops are needed to realise the fulfilling potential of cooperation and co-ops. For those wishing to understand and advance the cooperative movement, this book is essential reading.

This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters seeks to advance the field of cultural psychology by reviving its historical legacies and arguing for its social responsibility in future historical developments. It considers European legacies for cultural psychology as developed by leading figures such as Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Ernst Cassirer in order to provide insights into a long tradition of thinking from a cultural psychology perspective. The book discusses historical pathways in the rise and repression of cultural psychology and its different historical forms, arguing for the necessity of decolonizing psychology, securing a place for culture in it, and developing an epistemology suited to humankind's meaning-making processes in mutual shaping of psyche and culture. It provides an integrative and historical understanding of the subject and uses the diversity and heterogeneity within the field to offer critical reflections on its achievements. The thoroughly international group of contributors brings diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture, and society and considers the future of cultural psychology. The volume is a stimulating read for scholars and students of cultural and theoretical psychology and related areas including philosophy, anthropology, and history.

This book articulates how psychologists can use their theory, research, and intervention to generate insights into emancipatory social change that is necessary to solve social and psychological problems. These include racism, sexism, civil rights, poverty, militarism, education, and politics. Psychology was not developed to directly address social issues. It must therefore be reconceptualised to fulfil this aim. In this book Carl Ratner makes use of Vygotsky's psychological approach known as 'cultural-historical psychology', supplemented by Martin-Baro's Liberation Psychology and the work of Bourdieu and Foucault to develop an emancipatory psychological theory. This approach is then utilized to lay out a specific program of social and psychological emancipation. This reconstructed psychological theory is also used to evaluate populist movements that aim at social and psychological emancipation. Ratner posits that populism is inadequate to solve social and psychological problems because it misunderstands the nature of society and what it takes to improve society and psychology. This is demonstrated through wide-ranging examples including populist feminism, populist socialism, and populist distortions of liberation psychology and cultural-historical psychology. This lively critique opens a pathway for academic across the social sciences concerned with how their disciplines can be oriented toward understanding and solving social-psychological problems, and will appeal to wide readership including policy makers, and social activists.

Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology are the major psychological approaches to studying the relationship between culture and psychology. The three approaches have developed in relative isolation from each other, and each has accumulated a substantial corpus of theoretical and empirical work. This new book compares the similarities and differences of the three approaches, and it assesses their strengths and weaknesses.