community vs. activity system

From: Cunningham, Donald (cunningh@indiana.edu)
Date: Sat May 12 2001 - 09:47:46 PDT


I seem to be taking up a lot of bandwidth here but perhaps my naive musings
from the periphery and the patient replies are of some interest to others.
It seems I may have been making a classic mistake of substituting the part
for the whole. Perhaps what I have been calling community is actually the
activity system? For example, whereas I might ask whether the XMCA list is a
community, I would be better served asking whether it is an activity system.
Borrowing from YE's analysis of an ISCRAT meeting which he published in
"Perspectives on Activity Theory", could we represent our XMCA this way?
(You have to imagine the triangles!)

Subject: Members of XMCA list

Mediating Artifacts: Writings of CHAT theorists (e.g., LBE in the current
discussion), XMCA Discussion list

Object: Understanding of CHAT

Rules: Conventions of scholarly debate and collaboration, "netiquette"

Community: "Colleagues inspired by CHAT worldwide" (here I'm paraphrasing YE
from the ISCRAT piece)

Division of Labor: Perspectives from different specialty disciplines,
nationalities, languages, "schools of thought", background experiences.

All leading to the OUTCOME: New intellectual tools and patterns of
collaboration among XMCAites.

Contradictions abound, of course, or this would not be an activity system.
For instance, there is a contradiction between understanding CHAT and the
division of labor represented by our specialty disciplines. This
contradiction seems to drive a lot of the debate on the list.

The first thing that I notice when I do this analysis is that any of the
vertices can become any other (e.g., XMCA members can become the object of
another, related activity system). I imagine I am not the first person to
notice that! My confusion of community with the activity system is perhaps
understandable since in this example (and in others, I imagine) XMCAites are
a part of the community of those inspired by CHAT. The subject could, in
another analysis, be what is here represented as the community. What would
BE the community in that analysis, I wonder?

So (thinking aloud), it appears that the degree of resolution on our lens
when we analyze an activity system is a significant factor in the insights
we gain into the phenomenon under study.

Does any of this make sense?

djc



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