Reading :: Collaborative Projects

Collaborative Projects: An Interdisciplinary Study

Edited by Andy Blunden

This book has been on my shelf for maybe six months as I've been clearing out other books to be blogged (I usually do the library books first), or working on research, or sometimes simply procrastinating due to the high number of sticky notes protruding from the book's edges. I took a lot of notes. But I looked through those notes last night and I think this might end up to be a quicker review than I had anticipated. In any case, it's time.

This edited collection follows after Blunden's An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity, which proposed rethinking the activity system as a collaborative project. In this collection, Blunden presents the works of several researchers who (more or less) take this tack with activity theory. Like most collections, this one is a bit lumpy, with people taking up the core idea in different ways. Rather than reviewing each contribution, I'll just discuss Blunden's introduction.

Andy Blunden. "Introduction: 'Collaborative Project' as a Concept for Interdisciplinary Human Science Research"

Like many collections, this one is most on-point in the introduction. Blunden notes that the human sciences are fragmented in various ways but a "chasm" exists between disciplines that study individuals vs. those that study humans en masse. He asserts that these two types of disciplines lack a mutual concept, and asks, "Could Activity Theory with 'project' as a unit of activity, [sic] provide a way to overcome this gap by using a shared conceptual language across both domains?" (p.1). He adds the adjective "collaborative" to "project," which "is meant to distinguish 'project' as a social formation in contradistinction to an individualistic conception of projects, but projects are always collaborative, and collaboration is always for a project" (p.1). In this chapter, he outlines the concept of the collaborative project.

Blunden tours thought from Marx to Vygotsky to Leontiev and Luria, comparing it with somewhat similar work that traces from Husserl to Schutz and Heidegger as well as Sartre. But he asserts that activity theory (AT) originates in the social world, while in phenomenology and existentialism "the psyche projects itself on to the world" (p.7). He notes how, in being taken up in Europe and the Nordic countries, the activity system developed as an elaboration of Leontiev's "activity" (p.7). 

Blunden argues, borrowing from Hegel, that "projects can be seen as passing through four stages of development," stages that are "ideal-typical, not proscriptive":

1. a group of people are subject to some problem or constraint on their freedom
2. they will attempt and fail projects due to misunderstanding the problem
3. they will formulate an adequate concept of the situation and launch a social movement to change social practices
4. the new form of practice is "mainstreamed" or institutionalized (p.8)

In their development, projects objectify themselves in three aspects: symbolic, instrumental, and practical (p.8). 

• Symbolic: Through being communicated or represented
• Instrumental: Through the construction of instruments or artifacts to facilitate/constrain project actions and integration with the community
• Practical: Once it has been relatively permanently (?) integrated into a community, it becomes an institution (p.9)

Importantly, Blunden argues, the object of the project is immanent within the project itself; it is "not some objective need existing independently of the project, which determines the project from the outside. It might even be quite illusory. But it emerges from the activity of the project itself, as its immanent goal and self-concept" (p.10). Notice that Leontiev would probably disagree, but Leontiev was working within an objectivist (Stalinist) framework. Notice also that conceiving the object as immanent allows the project to be conceived as a dialectical unity.

Blunden further argues that as a unit of analysis, a collaborative project also functions as an ethic (p.11). 

Skipping a bit: Blunden argues that "Every science has for its foundation one concept" — a unit of analysis, system concept, or molar unit (p.13). For many social sciences, he says, the UoA is an individual. For others, it is the social group (usually an aggregate of individuals). But both of these UoAs have been unsatisfactory, leading to proliferating system concepts in the 20th century: "discourse, activity, genre, language game, frame, tradition, figured world, activity system, idioculture, social formation, network, ideology, ideological apparatus, field, habitus and so on" (p.13). And objects of study included "nation, state, market, community, economy, culture, people, social class, and so on" (p.13). Blunden advocates for the collaborative project as a concept that 

• can represent social life at the individual, meso, and cultural-historical level
• can embody movement and change (not structural equilibrium)
• can capture the dynamic between how individual psyches are determined by social situation and how individuals participate in social change
• can express both an "ethical conception of modern life" and "a unit of scientific analysis for the formation of modern life and its conduct" (p.14)

Among other things, "the project is a concept of both psychology and sociology"; it is also humanist because it "gives realistic expression to the agency of individuals in societal affairs and concrete content to social relations" (p.15). 

Blunden thus sees the project as extending and strengthening AT for disciplines dealing with humans en masse (p.16). (Put another way, AT began as a psychology but has extended into a sociology.) 

Unlike psychology, the collaborative project treats emotion and reason under the same heading because we begin with actions (p.16). 

Unlike sociology, the collaborative project does not start with the social group: "Activity Theory sees a social group as but the product of a project, as the appearance of a project at one stage in its development" (pp.17-18). An institution is also a project—one that has become mainstreamed.

Around here, Blunden equates the collaborative project with the activity system (p.20). He adds that "there are three basic modes of collaboration which constitute labor activity as projects":

• command
• exchange
• collaboration (p.21).

(These roughly correspond to hierarchy, market, and network or collaborative community.)

In sum, the project is 

• genuinely interdisciplinary
• a theorization of the connection between human actions and the societal context
• a "further development" of Leontiev's "activity" and Engestrom's "activity system" (p.23)

Blunden adds that Leontiev's concept of activity was "defined by a universal, societal concept of its object"; people might have different perceptions of the object and the activity, and they might have different motives, but due to the social division of labor and societally produced supervision of labor, the social and individual needs are harmonized (p.24). This concept originated in the Soviet planned economy, and thus did not extend well to the capitalist world, nor to "any really existing 'planned economy'" (pp.24-25). Engestrom dealt with this issue via his expanding model. But the question remains: who or what determines the object of the activity/project? The Central Committee? Or does it just emerge from past activity? Blunden argues that it is "immanent within the project itself" (p.25, his emphasis). It's not just a solution (many solutions can be formulated for the same problem). The project continues to develop according to its own logic, so to speak" (p.25). 

This introduction is a lot to digest. And, as with many collections, the other pieces do not entirely share the vision of the introduction: they draw on varying theorists in varying ways, following the concept of the collaborative project in broad strokes but not entirely in specifics. Still, they are well worth reading. 

If you're interested in how AT is developing, and especially how to reconcile the concept of activity with other types of practice theory, definitely pick this collection up.