Abstract
As part of a theoretical and friendly dialogue that we have developed over the years (Marková et al., 2020, 2022; Zittoun, 2017), we both realised that our newly published books appeared almost simultaneously at the same publisher (Marková, 2023; Zittoun, 2024). To pursue this dialogue, we proposed to review each other’s book, and we then had a dialogue on these two reviews. The present “dialogical review” has thus three parts: the first part presents some of the points emerging from our dialogue; the second part is the review of Ivana Marková’s The making of a dialogical theory. Social representations and communication (2023) by Tania Zittoun; and the third is the review of Tania Zittoun’s Pleasure of thinking (2024) by of Ivana Marková.
Introduction to a dialogical reviewing process
As part of a theoretical and friendly dialogue that we have developed over the years (Marková et al., 2020, 2022; Zittoun, 2017), we both realised that our newly published books appeared almost simultaneously at the same publisher (Marková, 2023; Zittoun, 2024). To pursue this dialogue, we proposed to review each other’s book, a proposition welcome by the editor of this journal, whom we thank here. We read the other’s book, and wrote our reviews independently; when we exchanged these, we were struck by a few facts.
First, although we work on very different phenomena and with different scopes, both our books have adopted a dialogical epistemology (Marková, 2016), which means that both books consider thinking and knowing as processes that are cocreated by selves and others (rather than being products of individual minds). Also, both embrace a transdisciplinary stance (Stenner, 2014), bringing in dialogue diverse orientations within psychology, diverse social sciences, as well as other cultural domains – philosophy, science, and the arts – as only way to build a complex and integrative understanding of humans in society.
Second, we both identified a series of interrelated points that currently demand special attention in the development of a social theory or a sociocultural theory in psychology. These include: • the problem of apprehending and modelling human sociocultural phenomena, and ethical problems they raise; • the importance of time and temporalities in constructing sociocultural theories; • the question of building theories that aim to capture, in a holistic manner, complex and developmental phenomena, without viewing them in a hierarchical order; instead of hierarchies, such theories would view developing phenomena as interactions of components that safeguard a degree of their freedom and encourage thinking through centres of variation; • the question of the diversity of modes of thinking and knowing; • and finally, the role of the unconscious in social and individual thinking.
We thus hope that our dialogue touching on these interrelated points in our books will be generative and will invite other colleagues to join.
