In the concluding section Seth Chaiklin analyzes Understanding Practice as an example of a social scienti®c practice. After considering commonalities and diversity among the chapters, and in relation to the Western scienti®c tradition, Chaiklin sketches a social science yet-to-be that is concerned with the theoretical description of the practices of individuals in societally signi®cant institutions ' (p. 384). Such a social science dissolves traditional distinctions between theorizing and application, between describing what is' and creating `what ought to be' by including values, beliefs, and ideologies in the object of scienti®c study. This will be of particular interest to readers of this journal.
Variations in the authors' views of the relation of learning to sociocultural practices, the diversity of practices studied, and the foregrounding or backgrounding of learning in those practices make the book a challenging cover-to-cover read. However, the intellectual work performed by the editors in the introductory and concluding sections greatly assists the reader in this process.
In the spirit of looking forward to that yet-to-be social science of relations between changing individuals and sociocultural practices, two issues highlighted by the organization of this volume are deserving of more consideration in future. The editors clearly argue against a concept of context as a hermetic `container' of individual learning and knowledge. However, with the exception of the work by Dreier, none of the chapters address how individuals learn and develop across multiple sociocultural practices, how these practices change, and how they are ontologically related to one another. Facing these questions will bring understandings of learning-social practice relations to bear on the problem of knowledge/skill transfer in education, and of the issue of continuity and change in human development.
A second issue highlighted by the organization of this volume is the distinction between activities that embody a publicly debated agenda for learning and those that do not, though both forms of activity involve participants who learn. Future attention should be given to the analytic possibilities of this distinction for plumbing the depths of what schools are about in a society, what schools could be about, and thus broadening the conversation of what they should be about.