My slide deck from the workshop portion of the 2016 Dartmouth Institute. During this portion, respondents and I discussed my paper "What's Wrong with CHAT?" This deck encapsulates the argument, but also briefly introduces activity theory and discusses its development.
5. Field studies of...
Software developers
Traffic safety workers
Telecommunications workers
Office workers
Freelancers
Search engine optimization
specialists
Coworkers (in coworking spaces)
Innovators learning to be
entrepreneurs
6. Common threads
in these studies
Multiple, often quotidian texts
Composed and assembled
innovatively, sometimes
idiosyncratically
Yielding solutions that balance
stability and flexibility
(centripetal/centrifugal)
Within bounded cases (bounded by a
relatively stable, mutually defined
activity)
8. Activity theory...
… and Bakhtinian genre theory (Tracing Genres, 2003)
… and actor-network theory (Network, 2008)
… and organizational networks (All Edge, 2015)
AT is overly complicated. We can talk about it if you want...
9. Choose your own adventure!
“Your conceptual
framework”: Basics of AT?
“Your methodology and
methods”: AT and
methodology?
“The conclusions you are
drawing”: Rhetorically
pivoting AT?
“[How] your work could
speak to or be used by
scholars from a different
discipline”
13. Mediation at the social level (cyclically repeated labor)
(also handy for bounding case studies of work)
Subject (actor/s) object(ive)
(material,
projective)
Mediating artifact(s)
Community
(stakeholders)
outcome
Rules Division of labor
14. Levels of activity: To explain learning and development in collective activities
Level of activity Characteristics
Activity (Macro level)
Culture, history; objectives and outcomes; usually
unconscious
Action (Meso level) Actions and goals; conscious
Operations (Micro
level) Habits and reactions; unconscious
16. Field research in case studies
(not ethnographies)
Observations
Interviews
Artifact analysis (including textual analysis)
Others as they might be useful
Cf. Topsight (2013)
18. “I’m using a Soviet theory
to study entrepreneurship.”
— me, 2014
19. “Generations” of AT, with historical accretions of concepts*
* An ANT-based translation analysis
1GAT
2GAT
3GAT
mediation, internalization, proximal development
activity system, structure of activity
activity networks, contradictions, rules
20. 3GAT was
applied to design
research
And consequently changed in
fundamental ways
From research subjects to
participants
From individual to collective
subjects
From prediction to description (and
deliberation)
From individual activities to
networked activities
22. The next pivot?
A “rough draft”
Application: Apply AT to
sociocognitive, not just social,
research into writing
Theory: Rebuild activity theory
around dialogism
Phenomenon: Understand the
object(ive) as multiple
Development: Theorize interfering
cycles of development