Hi Andy,
Don't think of this posting as a rushing in to defend Helena -- rather, your comments are very important to address and I have been thinking of these things anyway, so there is a sort of resonance. There are important issues to be resolved and I'll risk attempting some headway in this public space. First we should work to express our ideas as precisely as possible, and I'll attempt some of that this morning. With the pace of conversation on xmca, we often write in shorthand notation, and most of the time I have found that we do not really mean what we write so literally. Rather we express our ideas metaphorically, i.e. as 'bumping'. We are often making an offer in the search for the patterns of words that will provide a better description than our extant language. I have been focusing on how people and things are the material means for activity, and what this means when they move from one system to another.
'Activity systems' themselves can be thought of as 'sociocognitive structures' that span people and things and are conceptual in nature. That is to say, activity theoretic researchers organize their work around these 'ideas' both when interacting with other activity theoreticians and with people who do not share an understanding of activity systems. When thought of this way, it is clumsy to describe activity systems as "bumping", "intersecting", and so on, because 'activity systems' is how we are thinking of interaction among humans and things, and there is no simple "corresponding element of reality" (as Einstein would have wished of complementary variables in quantum mechanics). Two activity systems, being different in many ways than, say, two basketballs, cannot 'bump' into each other in the same way, and being different than two lines on a paper also cannot 'intersect' in the same way. The work to be done in part is to develop the language with which to describe how people who are involved mostly in one form of activity (such as research) come to interact with people who are involved mostly in another form of activity (such as going to school), and how people can be engaged in one form of activity ( such as k-12 teaching) and then later be engaged in another form of activity (such as attending graduate school).
When i write shorthand about 'intersecting activity systems', what I really mean is to refer to an ensemble of situations as the two above. For these two situations, it is helpful to recognize that two genetic elements of activity systems, 'people' (i.e. subjects) and 'instrumentation' (i.e. artifacts) can participate in one form of interaction at one time, and that at a later time can participate in another form of interaction. So it is shorthand to write that these people and things participate in different activity systems. Of course the lines are blurred, and because people bring 'sociocognitive structures' with them, and artifacts carry information regarding 'sociocognitive structures', activity systems are not so cleanly separated. (I just hope i have enough time this morning to write in a responsive way, and still be precise enough). Indeed, in the case of naturalistic observation (for example Bateson in Bali) , the researcher is primarily concerned with making recordings of one activity system, and minimizing some forms of interacting with the people and things of that system, wishing not to perturb what is being observed. Could one say that Bateson is not participating in village life in Bali? Bateson perhaps is more mindfully participating in university research -- he chose to be in Bali in order to do it. Bateson leaves Bali and the village life more or less goes on the way it did before his appearance. With his subsequent publications and talks in the research activity systems, he enacts change in those systems, together with other researchers. But if Bateson had never gone to Bali, the research systems would not be the same. In a manner of speaking, Bateson enacts the 'intersection' of the systems of the Bali village and university research. With this situation it is primarily a unidirectional (asymmetrical) intersection.
What we are attempting to do in our research is to describe the actions/interactions among people and things using the conceptual framework of activity systems. (I am running out of time, and wishing to think of how 5D can be thought of as intersecting systems, but this has to end). The enigma for me is the following: we can describe one situation involving a physical setting, people, things, ideas, and ways of interacting, and so on, and with a history of doing so, as an activity system. We can do so for another situation, that may for the most part be isolated from the first. Then, people and things from one system can "move" (people drive in cars, packages are sent in the mail, etc) to the other, and interact. In the process, the people and things often change, and consequently since they are the genetic elements of the activity system, so does the system. When they go back to the first system (if they do) they bring their changes with them.
bb
>Helena,
>
>I personally think that it is too glib to say that there are different
>activity systems which 'bump into each other'. I can see that the idea of
>"nesting" has some capacity to cope with the reality, but I am not convinced.
>
>It seems to me that it is one of the great illusions of our times to
>believe that people are engaged in separate activity systems and
>consequently have concepts which *in principle* are incommensurable. Of
>course to propose against this a monolithic consciousness would be an
>absurdity, and a monolithic objective truth which simply has different
>sides perceived from different standpoints is also inadequate and
>oppressive in its import.
>
>Multiplicity of culture is now widely and rightly accepted as part of the
>modern world.
>
>However, other very important things about this world include (1) the
>shattering of almost all person-to-person relations into customer-service
>provider relations, and (2) the unification of all people (and their work =
>activity systems) in a single worldwide division of labout (= activity
>system).
>
>I think it is very important to see the interaction of two activity systems
>not as the collision between two independent lumps but through finding how
>to conceive of their actual relation (there must be such a relation or you
>wouldn't have a 'bump'!), i.e. as a unity.
>
>Andy
>
>
>At 09:41 AM 31/01/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>>Hey, people -- The analysis has a perspective, too -- a motive. The
>analysis can't be "objective." So we've got nested activity systems, each
>defined by a motive. Where the motives are disjunctive, we've got the
>edges of one activity system bumping up against another one.
>>
>>This is one of the beauties of AT -- it allows us to keep in mind that
>we've got multiple systems running at all times and that what drives one
>system may not be what drives the one that forms its context or that lies
>within it.
>>
>>This is key to using AT for understanding work.
>>
>>Helena Worthen
>>
>>Judy Diamondstone wrote:
>>
>>> I know there are many xmca-ers who can help me here. Nate? Andy? someone?
>>>
>>> At 03:20 PM 1/30/01 -0500, you wrote:
>>> >>>>
>>>
>>> This, I think, gets right to the heart of debates lately. The
>"real" motive in AT is supposedly objective, right? So while individuals
>may participate in an activity for different reasons, the difference
>between their version of affairs and the "real" social motive is
>irrelevant, unless it affects their actions, in which case they become the
>subjects of analysis and the disjunctions between what they think they're
>doing/their reasons for doing it and the collective object becomes the
>'object' of analysis. Or do I have this wrong?
>>>
>>> In Yrjo's interpretation of the contradictions in Stanislavski's
>methods and of the workshops conducted as an intervention into theatre, the
>subject's version of affairs does not define the object -- on the contrary:
>the ideal of theatre is enunciated by the analyst. I buy it because it's
>illuminating, inspirational, but we don't know what participants in the
>workshop might have commented on Yrjo's analysis. So what makes the ideal
>he identifies the 'real' objective ....?
> >>
>>> At 11:41 AM 1/30/01 -0800, you wrote:
>>> >>>>
>>>
>>> Questions:
>>>
>>> Does motive always determine the activity?
>>> Or, does different people having different motives change the
>activity system for each individual even if they physically are doing the
>same thing?
>>> Because people can have more than one motive while engaging in
>work (e.g., survival, pleasure, social influence, etc.), can one person
>with multiple motives doing the same thing be engaged in more than one
>activity?
>>> Given the difficulty of determining motive(s), how do we
>identify the "real" activity?
>>>
>>> Charles Nelson
>>>
>>> <<<<
>>>
>>> <<<<
>>
>>
>+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>| - Andy Blunden - Home Page - http://home.mira.net/~andy/index.htm - |
>| "Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of |
>| a people: - the individual, which is a world. Phenomenology, Hegel |
> Spirit, Money & Modernity, Melbourne Uni Summer School 23/24 Feb '01
> Reading material at http://home.mira.net/~andy/seminars/23feb00.htm
>+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
-- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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