Readings :: Organizing Networks

Organizing Networks: An Actor-Network Theory of Organizations
By Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger

I've continued my interest in actor-network theory (ANT), organizations, and sociological approaches, which first came together in my book Network. So when I saw this book in the library, I went ahead and picked it up.

This book was published in 2016, and it's definitely a product of its time, focusing on examples such as networked social movements, open educational resources, and open-source software. The authors' goal is to understand such networked organizations by using the concepts and terms of ANT. 

In contrast to networked organizations, "the networks we are talking about are the basic from of social and organizational order and not a particular way in which some traditional organizations might decide to work together. Based on ANT, the concept of network we propose is neither market, nor bureaucracy, nor a mixture of the two. Our aim is to offer a different theoretical foundation for talking about organizations as networks" (p.12). ANT, they say, is "fundamentally different from relational sociology. ANT has its basis in ethnography and science and technology studies and proposes a methodological symmetry between humans and non-humans. This clearly distinguishes ANT from relational sociology" (pp. 12-13). They add, "For actor-network theory, social space is flat and the whole is always less than the sum of the parts. Networks are scalable actors, and actors are always made up of many heterogeneous associations. In other words, the actor is the network. ... Following actor-network theory, we will portray organizations as processes of organizing in which heterogeneous actors, both human and non-human, are constantly negotiating and re-negotiating programs of action" (p.14).

Since "organizing is indistinguishable from activities of networking," they acknowledge that "it would probably be more appropriate not to speak of networks at all, but only of networking. ... when we use the word 'network,' we always understand this term to imply the activity of networking as it is defined by ANT." (p.15)

The authors, then, want to focus on processes rather than things or products. They nominate ANT as "the basis for a foundational theory of organizations that is not dependent on modern sociology" (p.17). In their approach, they argue, "ANT proposes a non-linguistic concept of communication. Not words, but things make the difference" (p.18). And in this approach, "Networking, [Weick's] sensemaking, [Goffman's] staging, and narrative all refer to the same process by which organizations are constructed, maintained, deconstructed, and transformed" (p.20). And "Making sense via enacted narrative is the kind of communication that constitutes organizations" (p.22).

With this introduction, they embark on five chapters.

Chapter 1 draws on Gibson to discuss technical mediation in terms of affordances. Here, tool and hand translate and enroll each other (p.34), and "The result of these links and interfaces, that is, the result of technical mediation, can be called an 'actor-network'" (p.35). In places, the authors sound almost Vygotskian: 

The episodic and very limited representational connection that determines how apes perceive and handle objects is broken and things remain with us even when we are no longer holding them in our hands. Big brains that can process links, that is, as cognitive science argues, outsource information into the environment, have an evolutionary advantage over those that cannot. Technical mediation is a motor of evolution. Technical mediation “translates” and “enrolls” animals and things into actor-networks, that is, associations in which different actors have different functions. These functions then become concerns, goals, or what ANT (Latour 1994: 33) calls “programs of action.” Goals, interests, concerns, or what traditional sociology has called “intentionality,” arise when both human and non-human actors are mutually translated and enrolled into programs of action. (p.37)

And "Only when things quite literally 'get out of hand' do they become part of a social world together with humans, take on an 'agency' of their own, and come to play their roles in those hybrid and heterogeneous networks of humans and non-humans that Latour calls 'actor-networks'" (p.39). They understand storytelling as "that form of language in which the assigning of roles and functions to actors in a meaningful series of events takes place" (p.42), and thus "the task of creating social order becomes a matter of information control or information design" (p.44). The authors conclude:

Organizing is not what happens, when people do things together, this is what monkeys also do, but when things quite literally “get out of hand” and yet still play roles and influence social relations. What makes organizations more than mere interaction, which monkeys also do, are the many non-humans that have been linked up to human activities in actor-networks. (p.50) 

In Chapter 2, the authors review Weick on sensemaking, covering these elements: retrospective accounts; perceptions of what counts as relevant; persuading others, resulting in a shared problem; developing plausibility and coherence of a story; interpretation rather than mirroring facts; sense making as ongoing activity. Weick's sensemaking became the cornerstone of "communicative constitution of organizations" (CCO). (p.55). They then review various models in CCO: McPhee and Zaug's four flows model (p.61), Taylor's imbrication (pp.67- 72), and Cooren's ventriloquism (pp.72- 76).

Chapter 3 brings them to Goffman's sociology of interaction. They declare that 

Our aim is not to be faithful to Goffman, but to explore the possibility that Goffman’s work can be faithful to ANT. ... Our goal in bringing Goffman into the story is to try to get a better grasp on how so-called face-to-face communication is dependent upon many actors both human and non-human who are not physically present at the moment of interaction, indeed, how meaning and sensemaking are enacted, embodied, extended, and embedded in networks. (pp.79-80)

Along the way, they identify several types of info control in staging: 1. identification 2. front 3. standardization 4. idealization 5. simplification 6. exclusion 7. selection and segregation of the audience 8. solidarity 9. mystification (p.93). And they summarize: 

Our claim is that insights gained from ANT and from Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of interaction provide a basis for understanding Weick’s “sensemaking” as constitutive of organizations in a way that extends and enriches the work done by the CCO school of thought. (p.102)

They want to make narrative "a foundational concept for a network theory of organizations," but not a version of narrative that buys into the subject-object split (pp.115-116). And "Networking, sensemaking, staging, and enacted narrative are different words for one thing, organizing" (p.136). So "Our claim is that the problem of the communicative constitution of organizations can be posed as the problem of localizing and globalizing narratives, that is, when narrative is theorized as networking, staging, and sensemaking." (p.144).

Chapter 4 turns to "the impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) on society" (p.148), following ANT's lead by "defining human social order in terms of 'technical mediation' ... and 'interobjectivity' (p.147). In opposition of seeing ICTs as technical infrastructure a la Castells (p.150) or flow of new media content a la Manovich (p.151), they focus on usage a la Benkler, Shirky, and Tapscott (p.151). The latter is the most ANT-relevant in their view, and they classify it under the social construction of technology (SCOT) (p.159). And they conclude, "Not persuasion, not manipulation of opinion, not hype, but authentic and transparent communication is what characterizes networks" (p.170). I'm not sure how this view squares with ANT, which seems pretty persuasion-focused, nor how persuasion is opposed to authenticity. 

In the final chapter, the authors "take a closer look at some of the more important trends and challenges that characterize organizing in the global network society." (p.173).  

So what did I think? To be honest, I had a hard time figuring out what this book was about. That is, I understood that the authors were interested in using ANT to understand organizations and organizing, and I understood that they wanted to compare/contrast with other frameworks sociologists use to examine organizations. I also saw their efforts to signpost the argument from one chapter to the next. But perhaps because I'm not a sociologist, I had difficulty understanding the stakes. Yes, we could understand organizations in terms of ANT. Yes, doing so would entail parting with established frameworks -- while still sticking close to a lot of what those frameworks already do well. 

But I was missing a compelling argument for contributions that (a) ANT uniquely brings to the discourse and that (b) entail a significant payoff. Even as an ANT enthusiast, I just didn't see the case being made effectively.

On the other hand, I learned a lot about other major frameworks in the sociology of organizations. I've made a lot of notes, which I think will lead to more reading into organizational sociology. So the broad review was helpful. 

Should you read this book? If you're interested in the sociology of organizations, this book overviews several frameworks and makes a case for ANT, and I think it's probably worth the price of admission. 

(Attend my online talk for ECIS DATIS)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'll be addressing the Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies (DATIS) workshop for the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). The details are below. 

Those in North and South America may find this to be a difficult start time (5am CST!), and I'll certainly be drinking my share of coffee before the talk starts. But this time is convenient for ECIS's members, and I'm thrilled to have a global conversation with them about activity theory and IS. I hope you'll join us. 

==

We are delighted to share this invite with you for our Pre-ECIS 2024 “Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies” (DATIS) Online Talk, presented by Professor Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin, US.

 

Please use the Zoom Meeting Link below to join us. We would also really appreciate it if you can send quick email to Paul Kelly (p.kelly@essex.ac.uk) to confirm you will be joining us for the event. 

 

Date: Friday 7 June, 2024

 

Start Time: 11 am UK / 5 am Austin US / 8 pm Brisbane Australia

 

Duration: 1 hour

 

Title of Talk: "‘Fourth-generation activity theory is about WHAT?’ Thinking through our mission(s) for 4GAT"

 

Abstract: In "The future of activity theory: A rough draft" (2009), Yrjö Engeström suggested that a fourth generation of activity theory (4GAT) might be needed to address social production and peer production, in which "the boundaries and structures of activity systems seem to fade away." Some of us interpreted Engeström as addressing post-bureaucratic society, specifically changes in work organization. But his later work demonstrates that he is instead addressing post-market society, specifically alternatives to capitalism. Can a single 4GAT address both? And what does IS as a field need from a 4GAT?

 

Meeting URL:  https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/99552841813?from=addon

 

Meeting ID:   995 5284 1813

 

This online talk is a special pre-cursor to the DATIS Workshop scheduled for 16 June at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) in Paphos, Cyprus. For more information about the ECIS DATIS Workshop, see the ECIS Workshops page here:   https://ecis2024.eu/workshops/

For any questions, please get in touch with Dr Paul R Kelly (p.kelly@essex.ac.uk), who is arranging this event with the DATIS Organising Committee and Professor Clay Spinuzzi. With kind regards to all and look forward to seeing you for the talk!

Reading :: Engaging Ambience

 Engaging Ambience: Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory

by Brian McNely

When I saw that this book was coming out, I emailed Brian my congratulations and let him know I had preordered it. He replied by thanking me, but saying he wasn’t sure how relevant it would be to me. 

Having read it, I sort of see what he meant — the book is written more or less in conversation with Heidegger, as a new materialist approach involving visual and sensory research. Moreover, it is written in the evocative style of ethnographers such as Annemarie Mol, a style that I find … florid, perhaps? Still, I found the book valuable and thought-provoking. 

McNely’s opening question, interpolating Barad, is “How and why … does matter come to matter in rhetoric?” (p.1). That is, how do “things, moods, sensations, feelings, and their combined effects” ground “suasive events”? (p.1). And if they do ground those events, “how do we go about studying [a materialist rhetoric] systematically — with something more rigorous than thought experiments?” (p.9). To do this, he draws on Heidegger and Husserl for theory and Gries, Barnett, and others in rhetoric for methodologies. “Methodologies are not appended to theories,” he adds: “They enact theories, values, and philosophies; enliven theoretical understanding; and reciprocally extend the development of theory. In short, methodologies are ways of doing theory, such that theory and practice are inseparable and mutually constitutive” (p.17). 

With that background, McNely goes on to explore several cases: a student-led software development studio; three media researchers interpreting focus group sessions; a Roman Catholic eucharistic procession; and, finally, his own autoethnographic study of his walks to and from campus. In each, he explores the sets of experiences, affects, signifiers, and (of course) writing technologies at play, writing evocatively about the experiences of his participants and himself, and putting his photographs front and center. These cases are amplified by McNely’s clear writing and storytelling throughout. Although each case is small in scale, McNely goes deeply into each, drawing ably on new materialist theory to help us understand their complexities. 

Should you pick up this book? If you’re thinking through methodology or ambient rhetorics or new materialism — and certainly if you’re doing all three — definitely give it a read.

A tribute to Bill Hart-Davidson

Yesterday I got a call from a mutual friend, telling me that Bill Hart-Davidson had passed away. I was shocked. 

Bill and I had known each other since at least 1999, when both of us received our PhDs and went on the job market. In the very early 2000s, we were put on the same SIGDOC panel along with Mark Zachry, and the three of us got to talking afterwards. (I already knew Mark well, since he had been my office mate at Iowa State). Soon the three of us began collaborating, writing a streak of conference papers from 2006-2012 and conducting research about our shared interest in how people communicate and mediate their work via texts. 

We stopped our regular collaborations after 2012, as each of us began pursuing other research interests. But we still made a point to see each other at conferences and to seek counsel for sticky problems. In fact, the last time I contacted Bill, it was to thank him for some feedback he gave on an article I was trying to write.

Since we were the same age, we did a lot of things in tandem. For instance, I remember talking to him at SIGDOC 2007 (El Paso) about the fact that I had begun ashtanga yoga to get back in shape. He had recently begun biking for health reasons. Around that time, we both picked up bass guitar -- although he stuck with it and I didn't. We both became involved in our departments' digital writing labs. And eventually we both picked up service obligations, with Bill becoming the Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Education at his university.

But we diverged in other ways. While I am introverted, Bill was always outgoing and deeply interested in people -- qualities that made him a great teacher, but also a great leader. He did a stint in Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) leadership and became an ATTW Fellow. While I was researching entrepreneurship from a safe distance, he became an entrepreneur, co-inventing Eli Review: peer review software that is now being used at colleges and universities. Bill was endlessly interested in how to push the field forward, and as a result, he seemed to know everyone -- and at least a little bit about everything -- in it.

So Bill touched a lot of people's lives -- as an outstanding professor, an associate dean, an entrepreneur, a bass player, and on and on. He was always gracious, always enthusiastic about people's projects, and always focused on amplifying what worked rather than tearing down what didn't. Our field has lost someone really vital -- but more importantly, all of us have lost a good friend. I just can't believe he's gone.

Reading :: Doing CHAT in the Wild

Doing Chat in the Wild: From-the-Field Challenges of a Non-Dualist Methodology
Edited by Patricia Dionne and Alfredo Jornet

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

1. “A duly historicized account of processes in question”

2. “An ethical-political stance achieved within a critical inquiry into socially constructed forms of knowledge and their history”

3. “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.

(I'll be keynoting the DATIS workshop at ECIS!)

 I'm excited to announce that I'll be keynoting the 5th Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies (DATIS) Workshop at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2024)!

Here's the description:

Featuring a keynote from Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, this edition will delve into 4th generation AT, encouraging discussions that align with the ECIS theme "People First: Constructing Digital Futures Together". We aim to highlight the technological, ethical, social, and cultural facets of IS, all central to AT.

Whether you're an Early Career Researcher, a PhD student, or a seasoned scholar, DATIS offers a unique platform to reflect, gain insights, and receive feedback on your work. This workshop is not just about presenting papers; it's about fostering a robust community, sharing dilemmas, and constructing digital futures together.

Reading :: Cognition in the Wild

 Cognition in the Wild

by Edwin Hutchins

Note: The link goes to the 1996 revised edition, but my copy is the 1995 MIT Press edition. 

This book changed my life. In the mid 1990s, I was a new PhD student with a serious lifelong addiction to science fiction. What I liked about science fiction was how authors would introduce a bizarre premise, then extrapolate how that premise would change premises, cultures, and motives. But when I started reading books like this one and Vygotsky’s Mind in Society, I realized that sociocognitive studies were stranger and more bizarre than fiction. Even the most out-there science fiction had not challenged the premise of the individual mind the way that these studies did. I gave up science fiction — and fiction reading in general — that year, and haven’t looked back.

Surprisingly, I haven’t reviewed Cognition in the Wild on this blog. I started blogging in 2003, and by that time, the arguments in the book had become part of my basic premises (for instance, the notion of genre ecologies in my 2003 book Tracing Genres through Organizations is premised on the “tool ecology” Hutchins describes here) and launched me into other readings, such as Latour’s parallel thoughts on symmetry. 

That Latour link summarizes his review of the book, and I encourage readers to read it if they want a thorough, thoughtful review of Hutchins’ essential contributions. Here, I’ll just hit a few highlights related to how the book impacted my view of the world.

Hutchins aims to put cognition back into the social and cultural world — treating groups of people and their environment as a cognitive/computational system (p.xiv). He brilliantly does this by examining cases in which people’s cognition is unquestionably not just going on inside their heads. Most of the book examines navigation aboard a US Navy ship, tracing the different calculations that are made by the team on the bridge of the ship — not just the sailors, but also the specialized navigation tools they use, working as a whole system. He convincingly argues that the team is able to solve complex problems that, at first glance, no individual is even remotely capable of solving. (As Latour says, Hutchins’ account is in many ways parallel to John Law’s historical study of navigation in his 1986 chapter “On the methods of long distance control: Vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India.”) Hutchins examines the individuals and tools involved in navigation, but also the way that broader problems and solutions are culturally structured, the ways that identities structure dynamics in navigation, and how the implementation of computational systems is grounded in their representational aspects. He considers how knowledge and practice are “crystallized” in the physical structure of artifacts and how several representational structures can be superimposed in a single framework, organizing schemata. And he considers how each tool creates the environment for the others. 

Once we account for the system that has accumulated around the activity of navigation, what is left? Hutchins argues that what’s left is mundane cognitive abilities, “abilities that are found in a thousand other task settings” (p.133). In other words, many of the complex tasks that we attribute to special cognitive abilities (genius, aptitude, knack) are attributable to working within the systems that are handed down to us. This premise still largely rings true to me. In the mid-1990s, we in writing studies had developed an account congenial to this one, based in genre studies, and you can see me clumsily trying to link this genre account to Hutchins’ in Tracing Genres and beyond. Among other things, Hutchins’ account led me to really examine and value the expertise in each case study I’ve conducted: people develop expertise together, through local innovations as well as collective solutions, and that expertise gets built into their tools, practices, and environments. Using these resources, people become capable of things that, on paper, they shouldn’t have the cognitive ability or expertise to do. As Hutchins argues, “the collection through time of partial solutions to frequently encountered problems is what culture does for us” (pp.168-169). And a few pages later: “If we ascribe to individual minds in isolation the properties of systems that are actually composed of individuals manipulating systems of cultural artifacts, then we have attributed to individual minds a process that they do not necessarily have, and we have failed to ask about the processes they actually must have in order to manipulate the artifacts” (p.173). 

But by accepting those resources, they also accept the premises and framing that underlie each of these. 

Yet people also exercise agency, and this means that they also contribute to these systems, trouble and destabilize them, and layer in different logics and assumptions. This aspect is not explored well in Cognition in the Wild, perhaps because the major empirical work is derived from a Navy ship, an environment in which sailors don’t necessarily work long enough to develop the expertise to innovate well (and in an organization that is necessarily very hierarchical). Still, he argues later in the book that “I believe the real power of human cognition lies in our ability to flexibly construct functional systems that accomplish our goals by bringing bits of structure into coordination” (p.316).

With the above in mind, Hutchins argues that “Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system” (p.289, his emphasis). He also addresses the question of why we talk to ourselves: for self-regulation, not communication (p.313-315, cf. Vygotsky on inner speech and externalization). 

Skipping a bit: Hutchins concludes that culture is “a human cognitive process that takes place both inside and outside the minds of people, It is a process in which our everyday cultural practices are enacted. I am proposing an integrated view of human cognition in which a major component of culture is a cognitive process … and cognition is a cultural process” (p.354). And “culture is a process, and the ‘things’ that appear on list-like definitions of culture are residua of the process. Culture is an adaptive process that accumulates partial solutions to frequently encountered problems” (p.354). 

Unfortunately, Hutchins concludes, cognitive science has attempted to remake the person in the image of the computer (p.363). What he attempts to do here is to provide a new template for understanding human cognition. This is an ambitious undertaking, and one that has been taken up in broadly sociocultural and sociocognitive contexts. As the above-linked review says, in reading this account, Latour was compelled to lift his famous “ban” on cognitive explanations. 

Nearly thirty years later, this book is still insightful and still relevant. I can see why it helped to persuade me to give up fiction. And if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.