In this 2023 collection published by Brill, the contributors consider the question of what cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) demands from empirical research methodology. How do we study human practice in a way that is consistent with CHAT, which implies “a non-dualist ontology and epistemology” (p.vii)? In the preface, the editors argue that CHAT presumes investigating praxis “in terms of the way singular persons, the members of practice, are internally connected to collective society, that is, to practice itself,” and they add that “this premise poses a major departure from all other classical frameworks and methods, where connections between persons and their societal ‘contexts’ tend to be treated as two different, self-contained factors or elements that need to be externally connected” (p.vii). Thus the impetus for this volume, in which CHAT scholars such as Patricia Dionne, Alfredo Jornet, Anna Stetsenko, Beth Fernholt, and Ritva Engeström discuss how they handle the challenges of field research in their own work.
Those who aren’t in CHAT, but who read the above description, may wonder to what extent CHAT really “poses a major departure from all other classical frameworks and methods.” I think the words CHAT and classical are doing a lot of work here, frankly: We see similar themes in other strands of practice theory, in non-CHAT distributed cognition and situated cognition approaches, and arguably in actor-network theory and others in the new materialist vein. Depending on how we interpret “internally connected,” we may see resonance more broadly with some strands of ethnography and ethnomethodology. But perhaps these are not considered classical? I had a hard time finding the specific boundaries the editors were trying to draw here, and it’s possible that they kept these a bit vague so that the contributors, with their variances, could fit comfortably into the collection. Of course, it’s also possible that I’m just not steeped enough in the literature to pick up what the authors are laying down.
Let’s forge ahead into a few of the chapters.
Chapter 1. “From-the-field challenges of a non-dualist methodology” by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet (pp.1-14).
In this introduction, Dionne and Jornet note that CHAT is “today one of the most often cited sources in research concerne with the social and cultural dimensions of human thinking and praxis”; although its “ontological and epistemological premises are still highly debated,” “the framework’s aim to achieve a non-dualist, developmental methodology is hardly contested.” Yet how do we concretely implement such research? “What are the concrete challenges faced in the pursuit of a non-dualist approach in actual inquiry?” (p.1).
The authors briefly review CHAT in research, noting that “the use of the CHAT term is contested,” sometimes (as in this book) referring broadly to approaches rooted in the Vygotsky Circle, sometimes more narrowly referring to approaches based on Yrjö Engeström’s work (p.2). Still, “All CHAT inquiries … investigate human matters of praxis in terms of the way singular persons, the members of practice, are internally connected to society; that is, to activity itself” (p.2). In contrast, they say, all other classical frameworks and methods treat “connections between persons and their societal ‘contexts’ … as two different self-contained factors or elements that need to be externally connected” (p.2). (This critique reminds me strongly of Latour’s critique of classical sociology in Aramis, but the authors don’t cite that critique here.) The authors say that this difference has been discussed broadly in the literature, but “the concrete, lived world of methodological practice however remains largely unaddressed in the literature” (p.3). To address this gap, the authors included researchers using specifically CHAT methodologies such as Change Labs, Transformative Activist Stance practice, the Clinic of Activity, and social design experiments (p.4). The authors overview these contributions.
Chapter 2. “Knowledge production as a process of making mis/takes, at the edge of uncertainty: Research as an activist, risky, and personal quest” by Anna Stetsenko (pp.15-45)
In this chapter, Anna Stetsenko outlines “the transformative activist stance,” in which “knowledge production is a part of human becoming understood to be about people contributing to shared community practices, from a position of non-neutral struggles to transcend these practices and overcome their constraints” (p.15). She opposes “the ideology of adaptation and control so prevalent in science and research” and instead champions “a novel transformative onto-epistemology, coupled with the socio-political ethos of equality and social justice” (p.15). Her methodology includes
“A duly historicized account of processes in question”
“An ethical-political stance achieved within a critical inquiry into socially constructed forms of knowledge and their history”
“A practical intervention in the course of social life” (p.15)
She characterizes this work as “a strong rebuttal of science normativity,” particularly an assumption of objectivity. And she aligns this approach with “works that emphasize the need to decolonize knowledge and overcome its hegemonic and racist roots and entailments” (p.14). Stetsenko goes on to argue that “classical forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity … are actually deeply flawed and ultimately not efficacious — in addition to them being hegemonic and racist,” and science’s “success has been achieved in spite of, not due to, a rigid imposition of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity” (p.19). She sees this critique as “admittedly quite radical.” (To me, these critiques don’t sound new or radical or uniquely CHAT-oriented — they sound like 1980s-1990s Donna Haraway, along with many others in the rhetoric of science and in ethnography more broadly.)
To further her argument, Stetsenko takes a side trip into “works that purport to break with established positivist and empiricist models of science … in what is known under the broad label of ‘qualitative methodology’” (p.20). Stektsenko spends a couple of pages reviewing qualitative research textbooks and picking out cites that support her argument that qualitative research actually nudges us toward scientistic understandings. She concedes that the textbook genre might push these descriptions to be “non-flexible, authoritative, nearly universalistic, and as if set in stone” (p.21). Nevertheless, she argues, these textbooks push researchers to fit in by building on the status quo rather than her preferred approach of “breaking the rules, daring to innovate, creating novelty, and generally moving beyond what is ‘given.’” She charges that “the common tacit strategy of following with the status quo and normativity in science and research in fact belies a deeply seated philosophy that prioritizes the social over the individual, tradition over innovation, compliance over daring, and the past over the present and future. … Ultimately, this strategy reflects a hegemonic, patriarchal, and coercive view of science where rank-and-file members of community practice have no authority and, essentially, make no difference and do not matter” (p.22). Stetsenko ultimately blames this state of affairs on “the workings of capitalism, and the structures of power and control that accompany and reinforce it, with its instrumentalist drive for profit at any cost” (p.22).
Where to start?
Let’s start with A.N. Leontiev, with whom Stetsenko studied and collaborated at Moscow University in the mid-1970s. What would Leontiev think? We actually know, because Levitin interviewed him about the question of methodological pluralism. From my review of Levitin’s 1982 book:
Leontiev begins the interview by taking a swipe at American psychology, which (he says) accumulates facts but has not developed the theoretical and methodological foundations to interpret them (p.111). "Soviet psychology has rejected the path of methodological pluralism of which Western psychology is so proud. I think this is false pride, because the old adage, 'many approaches mean no approach' has a lot of truth to it" (p.112).
With this point in mind — that Leontiev argued for a single theoretical and methodological approach and attributed it to the superior Soviet (and, obviously, non-capitalist) approach, and contrasted it favorably with the Western (capitalist) approach of methodological pluralism — I have a hard time crediting Stetsenko’s claim that capitalism is at the root of this “hegemonic, patriarchal, and coercive view of science.” Capitalism’s “instrumentalist drive for profit at any cost” seems better suited for multiplying methodological approaches and destabilizing received knowledge. It’s not for nothing that postmodernism has been characterized as the logic of late capitalism.
More broadly, this discussion of “what is known under the broad label of ‘qualitative methodology’” seems almost like shadowboxing — as if Stetsenko has some adversary making claims about qualitative methodology, and she wants to rebut these arguments without citing them. Without this broader conversation, her critique is hard to follow: We don’t know the terms or stakes of the discussion. And the term “qualitative methodology” is far, far too open to anchor that discussion. As Stetsenko concedes, qualitative research textbooks explicitly acknowledge that different paradigms use qualitative research (p.19). One’s paradigm might affect how you conduct an interview, analyze the results, and generalize your findings, but positivists, constructivists, and poststructuralists alike might conduct interviews, i.e., collect qualitative data. (In fact, most CHAT research I’ve seen would qualify as qualitative research.)
Ultimately, I’m just not sure where Stetsenko is going here or how her proposal significantly diverges from so much work I’ve seen from the 1980s and even earlier. When she argues that research findings can’t be seen as final truths, and instead that we must see science as being made up of “mis/takes — up-takes, re-takes, and problems rather than solutions or final answers” (p.28), to me, that sounds like the essence of the scientific method. Certainly it’s been part of the discussion of social studies of science (SSS) from at least Latour & Woolgar on.
Unfortunately, this side quest to characterize qualitative research obscures what I think is an important part of Stetsenko’s approach: the fact that it is interventionist. And I think this underdiscussed aspect might have been a better angle for exploring the uniqueness of her approach. It would have been interesting to see it contrasted with other interventionist approaches that don’t have a CHAT background (such as participatory action research). Interestingly, the next chapter does discuss interventionist approaches, including Stetsenko’s, in more detail.
Chapter 3. “Agency and Activity of Students from Non-Dominant Groups: Methodological and Ethical Issues” by Isabelle Rioux and Patricia Dionne (pp.46-70)
In this chapter, Rioux and Dionne conduct a literature review that overviews different interventionist approaches based in CHAT: social design experiments (Gutierrez & Jurow), transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), Change Laboratory (Engeström), the clinic of activity (Clot), and studies aimed at understanding students’ activity (various). The authors examine how each approach handles agency, which in the CHAT tradition is based on action, and power relations (pp.47-49). I found this chapter to be a useful overview and contrast, and it will join similar overviews such as Sannino’s “Activity theory as an activist and interventionist theory” in my arsenal of readings for graduate students.
Chapter 4. “The Constant or Person-as-Place, and Research Life: Sustaining Collaboration between University-Based and Field-Based Co-Researchers” by Beth Ferholt and Chris Schuck (pp.71-101)
Beth Ferholt’s work on playworlds — the consensual worlds that children and adults create through their play, analyzed in terms of perezhivaniya — came on my radar sometime last year. This chapter considers how the authors investigated a playword case and what it can tell us about the bidirectional relationship implied in the research-life process, in which the research generates questions for one to solve in one’s own life, and “one’s life becomes a means of generating questions so one can study these questions through research” (p.71).
Quick correction here: the authors state that the original unit of analysis in playworld research was indeed perezhivanie, but they found themselves working toward a new unit of analysis (p.74). This UoA is not elaborated here, but will be in a promised upcoming paper.
Chapter 5. “Dialogical Epistemology as a Resource of CHAT Methodology in the Close Interaction of Science and Society” by Ritva Engeström (pp.102-126)
Just a quick note here that Ritva Engeström’s “Voice as communicative action” was a big influence on my early work in genre + activity theory in the late 1990s. It’s great to see her in this collection, where she puts her finger on an issue that I’ve been thinking about these days: “What does a unit of analysis mean in research practice?” (p.109). She specifically asks this question in the context of developmental work research and change labs. She kindly cites my thoughts on the object as bounding the activity system (p.110), and also reviews Langemeyer’s focus on the tool for similar purposes, before discussing her own focus on the subject as problematic due to the fact that “individual subjects in a joint activity share the process of engagement but simultaneously are constructing their subjectively unique understandings of issues associated with ongoing activities” (p.110). This take is specifically useful if we are considering “a unit of analysis for semiotic mediation” (p.111).
Chapter 10. “A Reflection on CHAT’s History and Direction: Interview with Michael Cole” by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet (pp.244-261)
Let’s skip to the last chapter, where the editors interview Mike Cole. Cole discusses the term “cultural-historical activity theory” as connecting the Vygotsky and Leontiev schools (p.245). He traces the term back to a 1985 conference in Utrecht where he first met Yrjö Engeström (p.246). They compared approaches and he found Engeström’s triangle to represent a more “inclusive” approach in terms of integrating the two traditions (p.246). Over time, different “flavors” of CHAT emerged (p.247).
Cole discusses a broad number of topics here, from perezhivanie (p.248) to the tension between Vygotsky’s sign-centric approach and Leontiev’s activity-centered approach (p.249) to cross-cultural research (pp.249-51) and ecological validity (pp.251-256). All in all, it’s a solid mediation on nearly 40 years of CHAT by someone who saw the whole thing unfold and who is still thinking broadly and deeply about it.
So what did I think of this collection? Like most collections, it is not entirely even — some chapters really stand out more than others. But on balance, it brings us some real insights on CHAT’s past, present, and future practice. If you’re interested in considering advanced questions on CHAT methodology, definitely pick it up.
(2003)
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