Vygotsky ’ s Legacy : A Foundation for Research and Practice

The two volumes in this review belong to what one may call the " third wave " of Vygotskian studies conducted outside Russia. The " first wave " that started in the 1960s included selected translations of some of Vygotsky's works and first attempts to analyze his theory and make it comprehensible for an English-speaking audience. The massive " second wave " of the 1980s and 1990s accomplished the task of translating practically all Vygotsky's and his immediate collaborators' main works and generated a wide range of interpretative and derivative studies. The " third wave " has moved from the level of translations, interpretations, and Vygotskian-based research to the level of textbooks and handbooks. To use Thomas Kuhn's term, one may say that what we currently witness is the passage of Vygotskian studies into the stage of " normal science. " The genre of Vygotsky's Legacy is easily identifiable. Although the authors claim that the book is intended " for all who are interested in Vygotsky's ideas " (p. viii), it is clearly a graduate textbook aimed at the growing audience of students who take courses in sociocultural psychology or cultural-historical activity theory. The book is well structured: It starts with an introduction, ends with implications, and has seven main chapters, each one focusing on a particular aspect of Vygotsky's theory. The didactic objective is further emphasized by the presence of summaries and a short glossary of Vygotskian terms appended at the end of the book. The first part rather boldly starts with the issue of Vygotsky's research method. The authors identify the requirement to grasp the " essence " of behavioral or cognitive phenomena in the process of their formation as the central element of Vygotsky's methodology and elaborate on his critique of a typical scientific approach that analyzes already fully formed psychological entities into their constituent parts. The principles of the experimental-genetic (from genesis formation) approach were translated by Vygotsky into a concrete research methodology of so-called double stimulation. According to this methodology, an individual has to be confronted with a task that is beyond his or her natural abilities but simultaneously supplied with