ABSTRACTS

MCA Abstracts -Vol. 14 (1)

(1) Placeless Organizations: Collaborating for Transformation

Bonnie A. Nardi
University of California, Irvine

Abstract
This paper defines and discusses placeless organizations as sites and generators of learning on a large scale. The emphasis is on how placeless organizations structure themselves to carry out social transformation—necessarily involving intensive learning—on a national or global scale. The argument is made that place is not a necessary component of such activity and that lack of a sense of place may be beneficial to the work. The paper is intended to contribute to elaborating the cultural-historical dimensions of activity theory by examining a social framework within which significant learning activity occurs.

(2) Enriching the Theory of Expansive Learning: Lessons from Journeys toward Co-Configuration

Yrjö Engeström
University of Helsinki

Abstract
An intervention study aimed at analyzing and transforming work and learning in three organizations (a bank, a primary health care center, and a hi-tech company) allowed us to investigate forms of co-configuration work in which there is a focus on the development of products and services which adapt to the changing needs of users. The working hypothesis of our study was that the forms of expansive learning (that is, the processes by which a work organization resolves its internal contradictions in order to construct qualitatively new ways of working) required for co-configuration work have transformative, horizontal, and subterranean features. Based on our three organization case studies, this paper argues tentatively (as a stimulus to further theoretical and empirical research) that our working hypothesis has to be enriched by the notion of experiencing, which serves to bridge the design and implementation of organizational transformation. In terms of the role played by tools and technologies in work and learning, the notion of instrumentality is introduced to further enrich our working hypothesis, emphasizing that expansive learning for co-configuration work involves tools and novel mediational concepts in the form of multi-layered, integrated toolkits.

(3) Emotion at Work: A Contribution to Third-Generation Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

Wolff-Michael Roth
University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Abstract
Second-generation cultural-historical activity theory, which drew its inspiration from Leont’ev’s work, constituted an advance over Vygotsky’s first-generation theory by explicitly articulating the dialectical relation between individual and collective. As part of an effort to develop third-generation cultural-historical activity theory, I propose in this article a way in which emotion, motivation, and identity can be incorporated into the theory. I provide case materials from a five-year ethnographic research project in a salmon hatchery that underscores the important role emotion and the derivative phenomena of motivation and identity play in the workplace generally, and in mathematical knowledgeability particularly.
Their [intellect and affect] separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional psychology, since it makes the thought process appear as an autonomous flow of “thoughts thinking themselves,” segregated from the fullness of life, from the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses, of the thinker. (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 10)

(4) Characterizing the Use of Mathematical Knowledge in Boundary-Crossing Situations at Work

Phillip Kent, Richard Noss, David Guile, Celia Hoyles & Arthur Bakker
Institute of Education, University of London

Abstract
The first aim of this paper is to present a characterization of techno-mathematical literacies needed for effective practice in modern, technology-rich workplaces that are both highly automated and increasingly focused on flexible response to customer needs. The second aim is to introduce an epistemological dimension to activity theory, specifically to the notions of boundary object and boundary crossing. We draw on ethnographic research in a pensions company and focus on data derived from detailed analysis of the diverse perspectives that exist with respect to one symbolic artifactartifact, the annual pension statement. This statement is designed to facilitate boundary crossing between company and customers. Our study shows that the statement routinely failed in this communicative role, largely due to the invisible factors of the mathematical-financial models underlying the statement that are not made visible to customers or to the customer enquiry team whose task is to communicate with customers. By focusing on this artifactartifact in boundary-crossing situations, we identify and elaborate the nature of the techno-mathematical knowledge required for effective communication between different communities in one financial services workplace, and suggest the implications of our findings for workplaces more generally.

(5) Knowing In a System of Fragmented Knowledge

Attila Bruni, Silvia Gherardi, Laura Lucia Parolin1
Trento University, Italy

Abstract
Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by “technologically dense” practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work “together.” The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and re-shape them as “systems of fragmented knowledge:” that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter’s alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: Framing and postscripting, as practices that generate a “space” of signification for the subsequent action; footing, as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and delegation to the non-human, as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to non-human systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation.

Key words: knowing-in-practice, practice-based approach, system of fragmented knowledge, telemedicine, remote consultation.

(6) Interactive and Historical Processes of Distributing Statistical Concepts Through Work Organization

Rogers Hall
Ken Wright
Vanderbilt University
Kären Wieckert
Belmont University

Abstract
In this article, we analyze interactive processes through which research groups and their statistical advisors insert new (for researchers) statistical concepts into existing research practice. Through processes of talk-in-interaction (speaking, gesture, and inscription), they assemble specimens, research workers, devices, algorithms, and texts, in alternative representations of future work. Alternate assemblies are compared, edited, and projected into future activity, in clients’ projects and in publications, where they are viewed over a longer project history. As achievements of local interaction, assemblies have an interactive structure that builds from, and contrasts with, accounts of historically prior practice, involves joint imagination of new combinations of human judgment, with technology (e.g., statistical algorithms), and includes deliberate efforts to evaluate and edit future work activity. Speakers animate orders of work as laminar, narrative structures that deploy time, place, and human/technical agency in consequentially different ways. These alternative assemblies are produced during conversations in which client research projects have been disrupted or suspended in the hope of finding a better way to work in the future. In this sense, learning about new technical concepts that will be realized at a collective level of analysis is anticipated and given structure in local processes of interaction. We conclude with a discussion of how technical concepts are extended in scope and meaning as they are distributed through work organization.

The statistical consultant becomes an informal coordinator of research, drawing to the attention of workers in one branch of the organization related research completed, in progress, or contemplated in another branch—research which, as Warren Weaver once put it, “involves the same verbs but different nouns.” (Eisenhart, 1948, p. 7)

(7) Learning about Cancer

Harry Daniels, Department of Education, University of Bath
Nicholas James, Institute for Cancer Studies, University of Birmingham
Rubina Rahman, School of Education, University of Birmingham
Annie Young, Three Counties Cancer Network
Jan Derry, Institute of Education, University of London
Christopher McConkey, Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit, University of Birmingham

Abstract
In this article we will discuss the findings of a study about how patients who have been diagnosed with cancer learn about their disease. This is a form of learning that is not often thought of as learning within the practices in which it takes place. It involves learners who neither possess specific forms of knowledge nor are they sure about what knowledge there is to possess. In medical practice, this form of learning is often referred to in terms such as “information seeking,” and the implemented practices of providing information do not always seem to take account of current understandings of teaching and learning amongst educational and psychological researchers. Here we report the findings of a UK Department of Health project concerned with the acceptability and usefulness of the Internet as a cancer information source. Post-Vygotskian theory is deployed in the interpretation of the data and the development of a model of the learning.