The Conclusion provides an overview of our theoretical approach and details how each of the four novel sociocultural lenses presented in this book offers observational and analytical tools for better understanding how behavioral regulation is a competency that is socially embedded and functions as a system of self-, other-, co-, and socially shared regulatory processes. Reconceptualizing competence as involving all forms of behavioral regulation moves away from the dualisms characteristic of traditional psychological approaches that divide the self from culture and the individual from society. Our analytical lenses do not reject the importance of an individual’s development of psychological and practical actions over time, but rather reframe them as part of a relational process of agency in which the regulated actions and interactions used to enact and develop intellectual and social emotional competences are always part of the sociocultural world.

In Chapter 2, we offer a theoretical frame referred to as the relational habitus (RH), which can be used to conceptualize, observe, and document how meaning-making processes are co-constructed over interactional and historical time. The RH is an ecological ensemble of relations including self, tools, tasks, and others that is intersubjectively constructed and sustained over time in formal and informal learning communities. The RH helps explain how variances in the social organization of regulatory processes are related to the structure of activities in learning arenas, the interactional processes in activities, and movement in the social and psychological spaces of these arenas. The RH encompasses three interrelated aspects of intersubjectivity: (1) an orientation to others in cultural contexts, (2) mutual perspective-taking accomplished through communication, and (3) perspective-making during learning. These aspects explain how regulatory processes emerge from and change through meaning-making by the agential actions of individuals and the situational structuring of these actions.