The polysemic notion of `unit of analysis' has been developed by Gestalt psychologists and fruitfully used by Vygotsky in the struggle against reductionism in psychology. Currently, it has been appropriated by a sociocultural approach for criticizing cognitive approaches for using the `individual as unit of analysis'. In this article, I argue that a sociocultural approach is experiencing a crisis as it is being affected by holism—a tendency to include the universal whole in the studied phenomenon. I propose and discuss alternatives to reductionism and holism for a sociocultural approach.
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