Tiny Paper: The Concept of Supportance

In this part of the Tiny Paper series, we introduce the concept of Supportance, a core concept of Oliver Ding's 2021 book draft, Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century.

The original article presents an extensive argument for the new meta-concept of Supportance, which is developed within the Ecological Practice approach to social action.

Inspired by James J. Gibson’s concept of Affordance, Ding defines the concept of Supportance as the potential supportive action possibilities offered by a social environment, distinguishing it from Affordance, which is limited to the natural/material environment and perception.

Ding contrasts Supportance with related concepts like Social Affordance and Social Support, arguing that Supportance is necessary for creating a new, non-reductionist social theory that moves beyond simple perception and individual psychological analysis. The core idea is that Social Actions are dynamic processes of Actualization of Supportances, involving perception, action, and a crucial third phase called curation, which links individual and collective experiences.

This new framework aims to expand ecological psychology into a broader social theory by providing a new unit of analysis that accounts for the complexities of human social interaction and development.

At Possible Press, we are collaborating with several knowledge centers to publish a series of Tiny Papers.