Contexts And Conventions
Jul. 1st, 2009 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotDidn't seem appropriate to bring this up on the comment thread to Mark's Steven Wells tribute, but one advantage my hallway-classroom formulation has over formulations that divide by type of person (Blots versus Swots) or by type of attitude (playfulness versus seriousness) is that hallway versus classroom describes two different behavioral contexts with two different behavioral conventions, albeit contexts/conventions that people internalize and then carry within them as expectations in regard to what's appropriate behavior in various circumstances. What's important to remember is that someone who has internalized the hallway-classroom split has internalized both sets of conventions.
This doesn't mean that someone will perform equally well in both environments, just that "hallway" and "classroom" don't describe different types of people or different temperaments. And of course there can be good reasons to analyze by type or class of person or by role or by temperament etc. But anyhow, I wonder what an analysis of the Sinker-Wells relationship that mentions the hallway-classroom split would reveal. I barely know anything about Wells, by the way.
This doesn't mean that someone will perform equally well in both environments, just that "hallway" and "classroom" don't describe different types of people or different temperaments. And of course there can be good reasons to analyze by type or class of person or by role or by temperament etc. But anyhow, I wonder what an analysis of the Sinker-Wells relationship that mentions the hallway-classroom split would reveal. I barely know anything about Wells, by the way.
