Situationality
Situation is that part of the reality with which a particular individual forms
relationships. Situationality, then, is the totality of the relationships of this
individual to her personal situation. It is exactly this personal relatedness
that makes situationality an individually accentuated concept: every
individual’s situation and situationality is unique, because it is only the
person in question who lives exactly within this particular personal situation,
and consequently has a totality of relationships exactly with this
situation.
The situation of an individual consists of a multitude of structural components,
which may be concrete or ideal. The former includes all kinds
of physical factors, and the latter such ‘soft’ things as values, norms,
human relationships as experienced contents, etc. Thus, situationality
is the totality of the relationships of a person to all concrete and ideal
components of her situation. According to the HCM, situationality is
not simply the totality of the relations to the external factors which
have a causal influence on an individual, but is more basic in nature:
a human actor comprises not only consciousness and corporeality, but
also situationality.
This view stresses the great relevance that the particular objects and
ideas in a person’s situation have in shaping her behaviour. For example,
all the phases and features in a task implementation provide components
of the situations of individuals working for the project in question.
In sum, situationality connects an individual actor to her ‘environment’
and even assimilates these two. In other words, situationality is
linked with and dependent on the other two dimensions of an actor
(consciousness and corporeality): an occurrence in one of these three
has an immediate impact on the other two. This makes an individual an
extremely complex phenomenon – a three-dimensional totality