Yes, Charles.
Thank you for your reply.
If you give me permission to go ahead on this issue,
I"d like to say a few more words:
I think my difficulty is not in not being able to apply a label to an activity, but how the motives of individuals fit into Leontev's tripartite division of activity/motive, action/goal, and operation/automaticity. As Paul P. said, "Technically then, individuals have no motives." But it seems to me that any analysis that leaves out individual motives is an incomplete picture.
Personally, I do not understand it as a "tripartite division", but rather as a superimposition of three levels. Me too, as you do, also believe that any analysis that leaves out the subject's motive is a photo taken from a very specific perspective.
I like what Phillip had to say about motive: "In an AS the collective motive is a motive of greater worth than the sum of the individual motives of the members of the system."
The "colletive" motive, seems to me, interact with subjects' ones engaged in the activity.
(...) thoughts I'd like others' thoughts on:
With respect to Leontev's tripartite division of activity, action, and operation, instead of placing activity on the top tier alone, and individuals (or groups) only on the bottom two tiers, activity and individual(s) engage at all three levels of motive, goal, and automaticity.
Personally, I prefer to use the word subject instead of individual.
Motives, goals, and operations (of activity systems and individuals) emerge out of interactions among individuals, activity systems, artifacts, sociohistorical processes, and environment.
Contradictions exist not only among the various nodes of Engestrom's model and between interacting activity systems, but also among the motives, goals, and operations of activity systems and subjects (both collective and individual), including contradictions within/among a single individual's motives, goals, and operations.
I agree with you.
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