Reading :: Concepts

 Concepts: A Critical Approach

By Andy Blunden

“Concept” is a broadly used and often polysemous term, like “solidarity” or “context.” Sometimes people try to pin these words down with operationalized definitions that make them useful for a specific domain or application. This is what Lev Vygotsky did in Thought and Language, where he explored how children acquire word meaning as unorganized heaps, then complexes, then pseudo-concepts, then eventually concepts, which are developmentally higher and more abstract. In this dialectical account, Vygotsky envisions concepts as the developmental endpoint of word acquisition. 

Blunden is a Vygotskian, and in this book, he understands concepts as unifying divergent realizations across disciplines — something that is needed if we are to conduct interdisciplinary research (p.2). The first part of the book examines concepts as they are treated in a range of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, and the narrative turn in the humanities; the second part turns to philosophy, focused on Hegel, and then how Hegel’s science of logic was taken up experimentally and materially by Vygotsky (p.2). 

To begin this discussion, Blunden defines “concept”: “A concept is generally understood to be a thought form which constitutes a unit of our knowledge of the world” (p.3). Concepts matter, he says, because contemporary life is in crisis due to “the fragmentation of communities and the dissolution of social bonds” (p.8), leading to the abandonment of “the very idea of concept”: interactionism has been conceived without mediation (p.8). This postmodern crisis leads to accepting incommensurability, or as Blunden puts it, “reinforcing the disintegrating social tendencies which led to the error in the first place” (p.8). He adds: “Concepts are the pre-eminent social bond, in fact. Concepts are not just thought-forms but forms of social life. Efforts to reduce concepts to products of face-to-face interactions both reflect and promote a view of social life which is to say the very least poisonous” (p.8). 

Interactionism is one of the challenges to concepts that Blunden mentions. Others include the individual/society split, brain-world dualism, and formalism (pp.8-9). To heal these, he offers concepts as units of both consciousness and social formation (p.9).

In Chapter 1, he explores the psychology of concepts. He criticizes psychologists for trying to isolate subjects from normal life and for focusing primarily on concepts of things, especially artificial objects (pp.14-15). “According to Cognitive Psychology,” he charges, “when all the attributes of something are taken away, there is nothing left. This accords with many contemporary philosophies, such as post-structuralism, but not with science and not with Aristotle” (p.20). A theory of concepts, he argues, needs a distinction between essence and appearance (p.28). 

He also goes after cognitive psychologists for not thoroughly considering the interplay between organism and environment. For instance, someone’s memory might be improved by systems of memory aids, “but it never seems to occur to them that these systems are an integral part of every person’s normal cultural environment and that the psychological functions which people exhibit in real life reflect the cues embedded in their cultural environment rather than the underlying natural functions” (p.29). The word “never” is awfully strong here, since this seems like classic distributed cognition a la Hutchins and Norman, or situated cognition a la Lave & Wegner, and it’s also been treated in neuropsychology (I’m weaker in my understanding of this area). Blunden does acknowledge Hutchins later in the chapter, conceding that it “did open a window on the need to understand tools and symbols indigenous to a culture as having an important place in cognition, and many other things besides” (p.32). However, he dismisses Hutchins and Latour by claiming that both see concepts as a shorthand for nested subroutines (or “shorthand for long chains of atomistic percepts and set-theoretical relations,” p.32). He does not provide justification for this characterization; I’m unconvinced by it.

He sums up this chapter by claiming that psychologists have not given any thought to a suitable unit of analysis for understanding concepts. “In fact, a simple concept is a unit, and the problem is not to break a simple concept into parts (which always destroys the concept) but rather to determine which concept is analytically primary” (p.33). He charges that “Psychologists study individual actions, while sociologists study group behavior; linguists, on the other hand, study language” (p.33); but “Actually, concepts exist only through the correlation of all these domains, and can be understood through at least a study of psychology, social theory and linguistics, informed by a knowledge of philosophy” (p.33).

A very short Chapter 2 gets into narratives and metaphors. He argues that metaphor theory sees a concept’s meaning as deriving from its place in a larger system, and quotes Lakoff as arguing that concepts are acquired in and through practical activity (p.41). 

Chapter 3 turns to conceptual change and linguistics, starting with Piaget’s idea of equilibration: “how an organism (child) develops in the process of adaptation to its environment” (p.47). But Piaget tried to “transpose his conception from ontogenetic (child) development to phylogenetic (historical) development,” This move “does not work” (p.48). Blunden then turns to Kuhn, and at the end of this section, argues that “A concept is … a living, active form of life” (p.57). With this, he turns briefly to Wittgenstein, then to Brandom’s theory of concepts (p.62). According to Brandom, understanding involves being able to use a concept “as both a conclusion and a premise in reasoning” (p.63). That is, “a concept is not a representation of what actually exists, but rather it represents a hypothetical condition, a possible predicate of some object, or the conclusion of some reasoning process. … It is not a reflection of an existing state or perceptual field, but a product of reasoning” (p.63; it’s interesting to set this interpretation in contradistinction to Lenin’s reflection theory, which was credited in Leontiev’s and Luria’s work roughly from the Great Terror to de-Stalinization). 

Taking Brandom’s understanding seriously, Blunden says, means that “the use of concepts commits any person who uses a concept to the work of integrating concepts into a single whole, which is the person’s world view; a person must answer for what flows from the concepts they use. When a rational person is presented with a new concept, its ramifications and its interaction with all the other concepts must be worked through. Incompatible concepts cannot be carried side by side with each other. … The unified whole is only the outcome of the integrative role of a rational person” (p.67). Notice that this notion is congruent with Vygotsky’s dialectical understanding of concepts, and is just as monologic. As my dissertation director David R. Russell once pointed out to me, evolutionary biologists still go to church — and as Blunden says on p.78, “it doesn’t matter how weird or contradictory a concept may be, whether it belongs to religious fanaticism, superstitition or a computer game, those thought-forms which are a part of how people organise their own activity within some collective form of life, count as ‘concepts’” (p.78).

Back to Brandom. Where do concepts come from? Nominees include (1) empiricism — originating in experience; (2) pragmatism — originating in their significance for action, and (3) rationalism — originating in capacity for “production of good inferences in reasoning” (p.67). Brandom suggests “an eclectic approach” recognizing all of these as possible origins, and he critiques psychology for restricting concepts to representation (p.68).

Blunden’s problem with Brandom is that Blunden wants a unifying principle to make this theory a whole theory, and Brandom does not offer one (p.72). Yes, “concepts are products and vehicles for reasoning,” but “concepts can only exist as formations of human psyches. … concepts are essentially both psychological and societal theories” (p.72). He concludes the chapter by arguing that pragmatism entails the use of artifacts, which are existing products of society, “the real bearers of culture” (p.76). “Omit these mediating elements and you are left with the atomism which is so characteristic of liberalism and analytic philosophy” (p.76). 

He concludes Part I by arguing that “we urgently need an approach which grasps concepts as processes, not things” (p.86).

This brings us to Part II, “Hegel.” Blunden argues that the point of Luria’s Romantic science was to grasp a process as a whole rather than building it up in parts (cf. gestalt psychology), and that the ur-phenomenon is the simplest single example of a phenomenon (which sounds like the Vygotskian idea of the unit of analysis) (p.98). “In any formation of consciousness … there is a simple concept which functions as its Absolute,” or in other words, “when a concept is taken as the Absolute, it constitutes a social formation, in which a way of thinking, a constellation of artefacts and a system of activity mutually constitute each other, with the Absolute at its heart” (p.112). In Hegel’s logic, the Being is the concept-in-itself (pp.121-124). After going through the basics of Hegel’s dialectic, Blunden concludes that “the scientific study of the situation itself means to grasp it as a concept (which a study of its historical origins contributes to but is not equal to) and then to determine what follows from, or unfolds from the concept. The concept is a nodal point in development. To grasp the concept of something, presupposes an historical investigation of it” (p.131). 

Side note: Here and elsewhere, Blunden tends to appeal to “science” as both authoritative and monologic, and expects any science to have central monologic concepts to which everyone in the discipline signs on. Science shuts down debate. But (a) that understanding seems to contradict science as a method that focuses on disproving rather than proving, along with the scientific ethos that nothing is sacred (which is why replication studies are lauded, even though they are often not conducted); (b) the understanding also seems to contradict what we see in social studies of science, in which scientists in practice (one might say in a social formation — a way of thinking, a constellation of artifacts, and a system of activity) deal with heterogenous propositions and representations; and (c) different scientific disciplines interact productively even when they are dealing with very different concepts and propositions. That is, I think Blunden is not describing science so much as he is describing his idealized understanding of science.

He ends the chapter by claiming that “the dialectical logic offers the only alternative to categorisation by attributes” (p.133), and says that “only a theory which takes concepts to be a process is going to be able to capture the nature of concepts” (p.133). 

Let’s skip a bit. In Ch.11, Blunden argues that 

a concept has three distinct developmental processes:

• the microgenetic process through which it is manifested in the course of interactions;

• the ontogenetic or learning process by which an existing concept is acquired by an individual and subsequently enters into their life activity; and

• the cultural-historical process through which a concept is first formulated, developed within some project and then concretised and ultimately merges into the entire way of life. (p.187)

Often these developmental processes are dissonant, yielding contradictions in the concept (p.188). 

In Ch.13, we finally get to Vygotsky on concepts. Blunden says “Vygotsky does tell us what a concept is, but he hardly puts it in bold type.” To get there, he invites us to follow Vygotsky’s thinking . Vygotsky distinguishes between concepts in general and true concepts, which only enter consciousness during and after adolescence (p.230). Blunden summarizes: “a ‘true’ concept is a socially fixed and transmitted solution to some problem which has arisen in social practice in the past, not a bundle of attributes or features associated with some object. Such a bundle of attributes Vygotsky calls a ‘pseudoconcept’ and it is the kind of generalisation children acquire until they begin to go out into the world and become involved in the problems of social life and a profession” (p.231). A couple of pages later: “a concept is a mediated relationship of a person to their environment in which a word, acting as a sign for a problem or solution encountered by the community in the past, is used to organise the individual’s actions, but which necessarily also includes immediate sensorimotor interactions with the environment. It is this relationship to one’s activity which is both culturally mediated and immediate, which is essential to concepts” (p.236). Blunden adds that Vygotsky regards scientific concepts as “the purest type of nonspontaneous concept” because 

the scientific concept has developed over history so as to distance itself more and more from all traces of appearance and immediate perception, and integrated all its concepts more and more into a single system. Science has increasingly purged itself from cultural prejudice and sectional interests, imperfectly perhaps, but in its essence, in its tendency, science is universal. (p.250)

Blunden attributes this view to Vygotsky, but does not distance himself from it, and it seems consonant with the other statements Blunden makes about science. As mentioned earlier, this view seems highly problematic in light of social studies of science.

A few pages later, Blunden affirms that “the scientific concept offers the purest example of a true concept. But all other concepts which are consciously acquired through deliberate instruction in some institution where the concept is part of a whole system of concepts, reflecting the social practices of the institution in question, must be regarded as true concepts” (p.253). 

From here, Blunden takes up Vygotsky’s concern with word meaning: “a word is a sign for a concept” (p.255). He then moves to conscious awareness, which includes this striking claim: “In general, conscious awareness of a psychological function is attained only with a high level of development of the function. It stands to reason, that you must first be able to ride a bicycle before you can be aware of your pedalling, and the same is true of attention, memory, and perception. Conscious awareness of a function is a precondition to voluntary control and thus mastery of the function” (p.264). But the pedaling example is the opposite of what was claimed by the Vygotsky Circle. For instance, Leontiev argues that we first encounter elementary movements as conscious actions, which we eventually turn into unconscious operations so that we can build more complex actions on top of them (one of his examples is learning how to shift gears in a car). Luria similarly draws on Vygotsky’s work to discuss how “higher” functions are built by networking “lower” ones, and he reteaches a brain-injured soldier to write by coaching him to be less conscious of writing individual words. Perhaps “conscious awareness of a function is a precondition to voluntary control,” but this conscious awareness happens earlier in the developmental process, is integrated in a larger system of functions, and can be revisited and reconstructed (e.g., an intermediate golfer might focus on rebuilding their golf swing) only once other functions are operationalized. 

Later in the book, Blunden says that “activity theory” usually refers to the works of Leontiev and Engestrom, but not Vygotsky. But, he says, although Vygotsky didn’t use the term to characterize his work, he “was really the originator of Activity Theory” (p.278). Blunden rationalizes this by arguing that word meaning is understood as an action, and “actions find their ultimate rationale … in activity” (p.278). “[C]oncepts are activities which transcend the immediate context in which words are used, just as the actions by means of which any project is realised are meaningful only in the light of the project being realised” (p.279). He adds that “Vygotsky’s Activity Theory” is based on the idea that “concepts arise from predicaments” (p.280).

Frankly, this is a reach. “Activity theory” is a label commonly used to describe a framework emerging from the works of several theorists. Vygotsky is certainly considered one of them, but the category of activity was imported from philosophy to psychology by Rubinshtein and then picked up by Leontiev, who was searching for a way to distinguish his work from Vygotsky’s at a time when Vygotsky’s work was radioactive. For Rubinshtein and Leontiev, “activity” refers to labor activity, from which meaning and consciousness supposedly emerged. Saying that Vygotsky originated AT is a bit like saying that Hegel originated Marxism: there’s a lineage, yes, but the claim omits a fundamental shift.

Blunden goes on to characterize those who are generally associated with activity theory with focusing only on social motive, which Vygotsky did not happen to address, and he points to Meshcherayakov, who he says responded in practice to these criticisms (p.285). He argues that true concepts are only developed by collaboration through an artifact (which includes words), and studying dyads is a good way to study this collaboration, since it’s well-bounded and since Vygotsky demonstrated that he could “unfold the whole of social life, from analysis of the collaborative use of an artefact to complete some task” (p.286; consider that this unfolding was demonstrably unsuccessful in Vygotsky and Luria’s cross-cultural research). Blunden adds, in one of his characteristic absolute statements, that “In fact, nothing can come of interaction between two subjects lacking any means of mediating their interaction, other than a fight to the death or mutual retreat” (p.288). 

Finally, Blunden takes a shot at rival approaches to concepts: “Dialogic and interactionist approaches cannot account for the creation and development of concepts, which are essentially societal products, and generally such dialogical theories do not attempt to account for such concepts” (p.289). 

He poignantly ends the book by arguing that “a concept is the nearest thing human beings have to eternal life”: it “means a change in social practice” (p.298). This ending brings home to me how much Blunden has staked his notion of concepts on a dialectical process in which Science provides an authoritative word. Without a lasting contribution such as a concept, how can an atheist or agnostic be assured that they have contributed to the world? And without an authority such as Science to settle disputes (and to lend heft to Blunden’s absolute statements), how can such a contribution be concretized and guarded? Ultimately Blunden’s project is modernist, just as the Soviet project was modernist. 

Despite my criticisms, I found a lot to like about Blunden’s book. He has ably connected Vygotsky’s book (which is sometimes difficult to read) with Hegel’s works (which I am frankly unwilling to read). He has thought about how concepts arise from developmental processes and stretch across artifacts and practices. And he has surveyed (some) literature on concepts in different fields. I’m not willing to follow him to his modernist conclusions, but I respect the journey. 

If you’re interested in concepts, Hegel, or Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, definitely pick this book up.

Reading :: Activity Theory: An Introduction

 Activity Theory: An Introduction

Edited by Alex Levant, Kyoko Murakami, and Miriam McSweeny

I have been reading a lot of books lately that attempt to introduce activity theory. This collection isn’t the last (I still need to write a review of Andy Blunden’s Activity Theory as well). Nor, in my opinion, is this collection really an introduction — the chapters are largely pretty advanced. With authors such as Seth Chaiklin, Yrjo Engestrom, Bonnie Nardi, David Bakhurst, Annalisa Sannino, Mike Cole, Andy Blunden, and Anna Stetsenko, the collection has an impressive bench with decades of experience. That experience is really on display here, with two chapters (Bakhurst’s and Cole’s) being interviews that allow the authors to reminisce about their formative experiences in the 1980s and 1960s-1970s, respectively. 

Rather than going through each chapter, I’ll pick and choose a bit, based on my current interests.

Seth Chaiklin’s “The theory of activity — in a psychological perspective” examines the concept of activity as it developed in the Soviet Union and beyond. Chaiklin describes four periods:

1. Sechenov, early 20th century

2. Vygotsky Circle, 1925-1940

3. Personality, 1960s-1970s

4. Collective activity, 1980s (p.77). 

After reviewing this theory, Chaiklin raises the concern that “activity theory” is being used broadly and thus may not always be applied to the same research object. He adds, “research traditions that have developed or adopted Soviet ideas about activity should be understood on their own terms, where their relation to the original tradition about the theory of activity must be evaluated critically, rather than assuming that contemporary traditions are necessarily a continuation or elaboration of the original tradition” (p.85) — not to disallow certain applications, but to better signal research focus and tradition. 

In “The politics of expansive learning: A study of two social movements,” Yrjo Engestrom, Mikael Brunila, and Juhana Rantavuori consider two social movements in terms of activity theory and the cycle of expansive learning: PAH, a Spanish movement that has stopped evictions due to a mortgage crisis, and Herttoniemi Food Cooperative, a Helsinki cooperative aiming at sustainable forms of food production and consumption. Both explore the inner workings of these movements using CHAT.

In “Encountering cultural historical psychology and activity theory: An interview with Michael Cole,” based on an email exchange between Levant and Cole, we get insights into Cole’s early involvement with cultural historical psychology and activity theory. The story starts in 1959, when Cole entered Indiana University as a graduate student and became aware of a generous stipend for students who studied Russian and participated in an academic exchange program (p.330). Cole completed his basics, but didn’t have time to study Soviet psychology, so he arrived in Moscow in 1962 with a background in Skinnerian behaviorism. Looking for a connection to his schooling, he identified Luria as a possibility due to Luria’s publications on conditioned reflex methods for studying word acquisition. After reading Luria’s twin study, Cole contacted Luria, who agreed to take him on for the exchange program. He went home in 1963, having conducted some research with Luria but not intending to follow up on it (p.331). 

Shortly afterwards, his academic mentors asked him to consult with a mathematics teacher in Liberia about his students’ difficulty in learning mathematics. Cole, as he was naive about cultural variations in learning, spent much time traveling Liberia and speaking to many different people about this difficulty. Westerners mainly thought in terms of learning deficits, but Cole and colleagues decided that their starting point had to be to learn about indigenous mathematics (p.332). As they wrapped up the first project and began preparing a second one, in 1966, Luria invited him to an international psychology conference (p.333). Cole spent that summer in Moscow, meeting regularly with Luria and finding out about Luria’s Uzbek study (p.334). “Unlike us, Luria approached cross-cultural research with a strong theory of history based on Marxist Historical Materialism that distinguishes high and low cultures with corresponding high and low levels of economic activity and mental development” (p.334). Cole made the connection to his research in Liberia, but “we conceived of schooling as but one of the everyday activities that children engage in” (p.336). And “what Luria interpreted as the acquisition of new, pervasive, higher modes of thought we were more inclined to interpret as changes in the application of previously available modes of thought to the new and thus unfamiliar problems presented in an alien form of discourse common to the test circumstances and schooling practices” (p.336).

After completing more studies and a monograph on the Liberian studies, Cole read Leontiev on activity theory, recognizing in it the same concept they had tried to get at with their own use of the term “activity” (p.337).

Cole also traces the term “CHAT” to 1985, to a Utrect conference where he first met Yrjo Engestrom (p.338). 

Cole concludes by saying that “superseding the dualism between Vygotsky’s ‘sign-o-centrism’ and Leontiev’s ‘activity-o-centric theory’ remains a just-out-of-reach goal” (p.342).

Anna Stetsenko’s “Reclaiming the tools of the past for today’s struggles: Radicalizing Vygotsky, via Marx, in dialogue with Audre Lord” is the last chapter in the volume. Longtime blog readers may know that although I respect Stetsenko’s tireless efforts to rethink CHAT in liberatory terms, she and I frequently see things differently. And that happens in a big way in this chapter. 

Stetsenko wants to revitalize the heritage of Marx and Vygotsky for taking on the inequities we see around us: Marxism tried to solve these issues, issues that are still relevant (p.373). After going over her own biography as a researcher starting her career in 1991, just as the USSR began to collapse (p.375), then moving to the US in 1999 (p.376), she reviews Marxism’s development “as a revolutionary and uncompromising critique of the capitalist status quo, coupled with passionate activism for social change and a staunch commitment to its realization” (p.386). 

That point above is not where my big disagreement comes in. Rather, the alarm bells started ringing around p.391, where she tries to appropriate Vygotsky’s focus on the New Human, which she links to “many 20th-century prophets from the Global South and scholars of color” who envision a revolutionary new form of human rising from the debris of the failed existing social orders (p.391). She sees the New Human as being raised to a higher level.

I’ve talked about the New Human extensively on this blog — see my review of Rosenthal’s New Myth, New World for starters — and explored how Vygotsky describes this figure, lifted from Trotsky and rethought in terms of assimilating and using cultural mediators. As we review the Vygotsky Circle’s works from their instrumentalist period, such as “The Socialist Alteration of Man,” Studies in the History of Behavior, and Cognitive Development, it’s clear that Vygotsky was not racist: He believed that everyone had the opportunity to assimilate cultural tools and achieve cultural development. But he was most definitely ethnocentric: these various peoples could only rise to new heights and become the New Human by accepting and assimilating these culturally advanced tools and the new social structure offered by communism. This was the whole point of the Uzbek expedition, nakedly laid out by Luria in the introduction to Cognitive Development! (See Proctor’s Psychologies in Revolution for an extended critique — or, for a much more compact one, see Cole’s interview earlier in this collection.) 

So, for me, lauding the stifling figure of the New Human seems like doing the exact opposite of the work Stetsenko is trying to do: to acknowledge and honor indigenous knowledge and agency. Truly honoring indigenous agency would require being at peace with many directions for development and many understandings of the world, not just the single line of development implied by the New Human (and demanded by dialectics). It would require questioning the implied eschatology that seems to underlie so much Marxist developmental theory, an eschatology in which the rest of the world finally wakes up and agrees with the author! (See Matusov’s discussion of dialogical pedagogy and especially his criticism of Freire.) 

Let’s get back to the collection as a whole. Although I don’t think it is truly an introduction to activity theory, this collection has some very valuable pieces in it. For my money, the interviews with Cole and Bakhurst were the most useful, but each piece contributed to my ongoing understanding of CHAT. If you’re interested in CHAT — and you know a bit about it — definitely pick this collection up. 

Reading :: Transforming and Understanding

 Transforming and Understanding: An Introduction to Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

By Yannick Lemonie

I’ve been waiting for this book to be translated into English, and as soon as the English version was released, I ordered it. Lemonie teaches ergonomics and conducts developmental research in Paris, where he uses the change laboratory methodology, and he has developed his understanding of CHAT in close contact with Yrjo Engestrom and Annalisa Sannino (who wrote the Foreord and Postface, respectively). 

As the title suggests, Lemonie intends this book to be an introduction to CHAT — more specifically, Yrjo Engestrom’s version of CHAT. The book has three parts:

• Part 1, “Four Generations of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory,” covers the history of CHAT in the “generations” that Engestrom has popularized.

• Part 2, “Four Central Concepts for Analyzing Activity,” examines the object of activity, the concept of contradiction, expansive learning, and development as qualitative reorganization. 

• Part 3, “The Interventionist Dimension of CHAT,” focuses on the change llaboratory methodology and contrasts formative interventions with other interventionist approaches.

There’s a lot of overlap between Part 1 of Lemonie’s book and my book Triangles and Tribulations, which will be published next month. But they represent two different approaches to CHAT, with Lemonie’s book more or less seeking a single history leading to a single CHAT, while my book understands CHAT’s history and concepts as much less coherent and centralized. But put those differences aside for a moment. Lemonie’s book excels in Part 1, systematically examining the “generations” through detailed research into how Vygotsky, Leontiev, Engestrom, and Sannino understood and developed CHAT. In each chapter, he provides tables describing the different periods in the development of the person whose work is being examined. 

In the chapter on Vygotsky, he covers mediation (including the collapse of physical and psychological tools), the instrumental method, and analysis by unit, discussing how these set up the second generation. In his chapter on Leontiev, he overviews Leontiev and the Kharkov school, including their split with Vygotsky, and provides background on the rift between Leontiev and Rubinshtein (whose category of activity deeply influenced Leontiev). The chapter on Engestrom’s third-generation CHAT covers the problems of mainstream cognitivism, the activity system and activity networks; he also defends the activity system from critiques by Blunden and Bakhurst. Finally, the chapter on the fourth generation centers on Sannino’s work with utopias; it covers the runaway object, utopias, and Sannino’s work with homelessness policy. Lemonie covers a lot of ground in these four chapters, but he does it well, giving us an overview of the concepts being developed in each generation.

Part II brings us to four key concepts in CHAT. 

Chapter 6 covers the object of activity, which is that to which an activity is oriented. Here, Lemonie discusses how Leontiev’s understanding of the object as both an independent thing and “a mental image” (Leontiev 1974, p.11, qtd on p.189) differs from Rubinshtein’s in that it overcomes the immediacy of the stimulus-response relationship (p.189). Since every activity is oriented to an object, the object delimits the activity (p.200). Lemonie then draws on Leontiev, Engestrom, Kaptelinin, and Stetsenko to explore controversies over what counts as an object (pp.202-204). 

Chapter 7 moves to the concept of contradiction, discussing its status as a dialectical concept and providing various examples from the literature. He discusses Entestrom and Sannino’s recent work on discursive manifestations of contradictions (p.223) and draws on Ilyenkov to understand contradictions not as problems but as systemic causes (p.227). And he covers four forms of contradictions (p.234).

In Chapter 8, Lemonie covers expansive learning. (To my surprise, he characterizes my book Topsight as an example: p.250). Throughout, he of course draws heavily on Engestrom’s work.

Chapter 9 focuses on development as qualitative reorganization, drawing on Vygotsky, Engestrom, and Stetsenko.

Finally, in Part 3, Lemonie turns to the interventionist dimension of CHAT. 

Chapter 10 focuses on the Change Laboratory methodology. Here, Lemonie draws on Engestrom and Sannino to baldly state that CHAT is an interventionist approach (pp.300-302). In fact, he quotes Yamagata-Lynch’s 2010 book as saying that CHAT has been applied in North America as descriptive rather than as a tool for changing practice (pp.299-300), a stance that he rejects. Instead, he describes the change labs methodology as one premier way to apply CHAT in the way he thinks it should be applied, as interventionist. He honestly does a great job here, providing a compact, clear, well illustrated discussion of change labs.

Chapter 11 then discusses formative interventions vs. other interventionist approaches: action research, design-based research, and participatory design. These discussions are again compact and thorough. 

Overall, this is a valuable book for those thinking through CHAT and especially for those interested in interventionist approaches. I do have a couple of disagreements with it, which I’ll discuss in a bit of detail, but I want to emphasize that these are small disagreements compared to the substantial contributions this book has made.

The first disagreement is in something Lemonie says about an article I published about participatory design in 2005. (I can’t believe that was 20 years ago.) The article about how PD techniques were picked up and “translated” (in the ANT sense) as they moved from Scandinavia to the US. I used the ANT term “betray” to describe how these techniques were taken up in North America and used in a way that did not accord with their use in the Scandinavian context — the techniques were meant to empower participants in Scandinavia, but were used in the US to improve usability. Lemonie says: ”While he playfully invokes the term ‘betrayal’, he immediately underscores that any form of translation is a form of ‘betrayal’, thereby attempting to weaken the term. However, the idea he defends is that the methods and techniques employed are adapted to the American context.” But “I would argue that this is a betrayal in the sense that, by adapting to this context, PD methods have lost the objective of truly transforming the status quo,” instead becoming tools for productivity “without providing workers with the power to challenge the existing order” (p.374). 

But this is the whole point of the sociology of translation! As Latour liked to say, there is no transportation without transformation, no translation without betrayal — innovations (such as PD’s use of prototyping) don’t just spread unaltered, like particles, but instead are altered as they are taken up. In my article, I show how the conditions under which PD was developed in Denmark (especially the strong unions that had a legislatively enshrined seat at the table with management) simply did not exist in the US, meaning that PD literally could not be taken up in the same way. 

Furthermore, I disagree that Scandinavian PD aimed at “truly transforming the status quo.” Quite the opposite: the status quo was being threatened by rapid computerization, and the research team partnered with union representatives to develop interfaces that could preserve parts of the status quo. Their explicit purpose was to identify tacit craft practices and build interfaces that could still leverage them so that the deep experience of workers wasn’t lost. They feared that without these interventions, that tacit knowledge would become useless and experienced typesetters would be replaced by young computer scientists — which would have been a complete shift of the status quo! To preserve the status quo, the union provided political (not functional) representatives: not average workers, but union reps authorized to stand in for the union as a hierarchical organization. They doubled down on the existing hierarchy.

 I think this point is important more broadly as well. As I argue in Triangles and Tribulations, CHAT itself has been translated many times. To take one example, in Chapter 8, Lemonie discusses how “Engestrom employs the concept of the zone of proximal development in a distinct manner from Vygotsky” (p.258), not as an individual’s growth working in a dyad, but as collective growth as the collective dialogues about potential solutions. Similarly, in Chapter 10, Vygotsky’s principle of double stimulation (which was applied to individuals) is applied to collectives. These follow more generally from the fact that in developing the concept of the activity system, Engestrom moved from Leontiev’s concept (a singular subject) to collective subjects. All of these are translations, picking up an insight and using it differently, and we might consider how Vygotsky might have viewed these translations as betrayals! But if Engestrom had not translated these concepts to make them relevant for larger social groups, CHAT might have languished rather than being the subject of Lemonie’s book. 

And this brings me to the second disagreement. Lemonie goes all in on the argument advanced in different ways by Sannino, Engestrom, and Stetsenko: that CHAT is an interventionist theory (p.300), requiring interventionist approaches (p.302). He argues that the Vygotsky Circle’s method was fundamentally interventionist (p.302) — that is, a fundamental part of the method involves acting on the object to ascertain its properties (p.301) — and methods built on it must follow a four-step process:

1. “analyze the connections between the whole and the parts in the present”

2. ”historicize the analysis by examining the preconditions for the most important present-day connections identified in the first step in the context of past contradictions”

3. “project[] the main social contradictions from the past, through the present, to their resolution and beyond in the future”

4. ”organiz[e] … the actions necessary to achieve the future” (p.304)

In this context, he criticizes Yamagata-Lynch’s “appropriation” of CHAT primarily for descriptive research (p.300). (He might as well be criticizing me as well, since I’ve often used CHAT for descriptive case studies.)

This argument, as mentioned above, has been advanced by various people. I don’t fault Lemonie for repeating and elaborating on it. However, restricting CHAT to interventionist research is a bad move. 

First, we find models for descriptive research throughout CHAT’s history. Leontiev’s forbidden colors experiment is not interventionist — at least, not in any meaningful sense. Leontiev created different conditions in which he did or did not supply colored cards to children doing the task, and did or did not provide minimal instructions. The point was to see how they took up the cards. Similarly, Luria and Vygotsky’s Uzbek expedition was not interventionist: They selected conditions (illiterate, semi-literate, literate) and tested participants to find out whether they could see optical illusions and how they conceptualized groupings of tools and objects. We could go on and on. These might have been “interventionist” in the sense that they used double stimulation, but they generally involved someone with more power (the researcher or a more culturally advanced participant) and someone with less power (a child, an illiterate peasant with the Soviet security apparatus looking over their shoulder). They did not involve guaranteeing agency to the participants. Certainly we can find work by the Vygotsky Circle that might involve collaborating with participants in ways that emphasize their own agency, but this work took part in clinical settings — Vygotsky working in defectology, Leontiev and Luria working in rehabilitation centers. 

Even when we get to Engestrom’s work, we find early studies that are primarily descriptivist. His 1987 Learning by Expanding sets the tone by laying out the activity system and applying it to literary cases such as Huck Finn — describing the case but certainly not intervening in it. His 1990 and 1992 collections again describe cases such as judging and medical work, but generally do not lead to interventions. His 1996 collaborative article with Escalante describes the failings of a kiosk, but does not involve interventions with either the users or the manufacturer. Yes, Engestrom argues for an interventionist orientation throughout this early work, but his publishing suggests that these descriptive cases are themselves legitimate products of research. And as I discuss in Triangles and Tribulations, these early descriptive cases were the models for the CHAT work we took up in North America! 

Second and related, descriptive research is the first step toward intervention. The above four-step process begins with descriptive research — as it should! Without this precursor step, interventionist research is a hammer looking for a nail: it assumes a problem rather than exploring to determine whether one exists. This is an important limiter. Take for instance my 2012 article on coworking. When I heard about coworking in 2008, I became interested in who coworks, why they cowork, and what they thought coworking was. Four years later, I published a CHAT analysis, one that noted ongoing contradictions and speculated on how coworking would develop. If I had started by assuming a problem, I might not have investigated at all, or I might have come up with some highly stereotyped problem based on an incomplete understanding. Fieldwork involves entering the worlds of one’s participants so that one can develop insight about the activity from their view, and without that step, a researcher may not be able to adequately understand the lived problems that they face — or even whether they have problems that they find severe enough to require intervention.

This brings us to the third issue: interventionist research assumes a problem that can be localized, articulated, and solved through intervention. The problem is the nail that the hammer of interventionist research seeks. But there are real drawbacks to seeing the entire world through a problem-solution frame — particularly one that pressures researchers to identify solutions that they and the participants can implement together. That sort of solution suggests a limited scale, budget, and timeframe. (The counterpart to these limited solutions is that researchers often look for a common and familiar root to the problem. Lately for Engestrom and Sannino this root has been capitalism, and the solution has thus been alternatives to capitalism.) This state of affairs can lead researchers to project a basic problem onto the study rather than learning from participants. 

I think this issue is exacerbated by research funding, which tends to already be problem-oriented in interventionist research. Thus researchers come into the research primed to seek a specific problem, the one described in their funding proposal, and guide their participants to a solution that can be achieved by the end of the funding cycle. Consider for instance Sannino’s work with the Housing First project, which begins with the question of how to implement policy dictates, but avoids any questioning of those dictates. The researchers have assumed the institutional goals of the public policy and are focusing on ways to enact them, not question them. 

This is a bit of an irony. I find in my discussions with European colleagues that they tend to think of US research as thoroughly capitalist, serving the values of capital (this is how I interpret Lemonie’s criticism of my PD paper). But I typically don’t seek funding for my studies. When I was curious about coworking, for instance, I just started making appointments to interview people and tour spaces. I didn’t have to articulate a problem, a timeframe, a budget, or a deliverable, and consequently I allowed myself four years to explore coworking, and I published when I felt that I was done. This leisurely pace and wide-ranging exploration would not have been possible if I had accepted the yoke of funding. 

Fourth, in Engestrom’s CHAT, research assumes that problems are primarily in the corners (the mediators: instruments, rules, and division of labor). This is a big shift from Vygotsky and Leontiev, who mainly focused on the individual participants as they took up instruments. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this shift from subjects to mediators reflects the scaling up of scenes of research from dyads to organizations. With dyads, it’s easier to alter the subject (e.g., to teach a student how to use a cultural mediator). With existing groups such as workplaces — whose participants have some autonomy, including the ability to exit the workplace), it’s easier to alter the mediators. To use the example of Housing First again, Sannino reports that some staff at the housing unit were unhappy with changes to rules, so they quit, presumably to be replaced by others who could get with the program. The change lab focuses on establishing agreements — housing agreements, care agreements, etc. — little social constitutions that are established by change lab participants and then presented as an existing agreement to others who later enter the organization. 

Since this interventionist research assumes that the problems are in the corners, solutions tend to alter mediators rather than taking on more fundamental changes such as subjects (are we hiring the right people?), objects and outcomes (are we working on the right thing for the right reasons?), or communities (should we add or cut stakeholders?). That puts some powerful conditioning on the problem space. Compare this to Lemonie’s criticism that PD in the US has “lost the objective of truly transforming the status quo,” instead becoming tools for productivity “without providing workers with the power to challenge the existing order” (p.374). 

So that’s my brief for looking beyond interventionist research in CHAT — a brief that was provoked by Lemonie’s arguments, but really responds to more general CHAT arguments. Despite these minor disagreements, Lemonie has put together an excellent book, and I highly recommend it to those who are interested in CHAT, especially the change labs approach.