Overview

Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology presents a new look at the relationship between people and society, produces a semiotic theory of cultural psychology and provides a dynamic treatment of culture in human lives. This book makes a decisive break from the post-modernist theoretical framework that considers knowledge as local and situation-specific. It restores the goal of construction of general knowledge to the social sciences. While recognizing the uniqueness of all human personal experience from birth to death, it emphasizes the universality of cultural organization of human minds and societies.

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9783032116345

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Jaan Valsiner, born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1951, is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995-2025) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology and Editor-In-Chief, Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science (Springer, 2007-2026). After working for over three decades in USA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Clark University, he accepted in 2013 the position of Niels Bohr  Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark.  Valsiner is the Head of the Competence Center on Cultural Psychology at University of Tallinn, Estonia. He focuses on theoretical innovation, with monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998, Ornamented Lives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2018) and Sensuality in Human Living (Springer, 2020). He has also published a major theoretical treatise General Human Psychology (t2021 by Springer) that would synthesize William Stern’s personology with his Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics.  Jaan Valsiner has been awarded major research prizes in Europe-- the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017. As part of his credo for building psychology on an international and trans-cultural basis, he has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.  Since 2017 he is a Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.

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