Dear David Ackermann,

These comments of mine travel on a strange loop, from the north of
Germany via California to you in Switzerland. Since we both met at Walter
Volpert's "Institute for Human Sciences in Work and Education" at the
Technical University of Berlin (in 1985 ?) this is the first chance to
exchange our views on action theory.

Like my Berlin colleagues five years ago, you did not recognize the
necessity of a distinction between action and activity (Handlung und
Taetigkeit), instead you made valuable and well-taken comments on a
taxonomy of *actions* (not activities), and stressed empirically useful
criteria in this respect. This means that you opened another field of
discussion: Differences between the many variants of action theory and
Leontyev's General Psychology that builds upon the tripartite scheme of
distinguishing...

- "motivated" (beware of special meaning|) activities,
- goal directed actions, and
- operations adaptive to physical conditions.

No doubt, you have heard this distinction so very often that it sounds like
a litany to you, recited by "disciples of Alexei Nikolaievitch" but never
adequately explained.

The discussion in XACT upto now was centered on the various different
interpretations of the general approach to the human sciences labeled
"activity theoretical", our main concern being to make explicit the
difference between Rubinshtein's and Leontyev's formulations.
I think that King Beach in his addendum of May 1st has given an excellent
reason for Leontyev's introduction of "concrete activity" as the uppermost
process level in his scheme, distinguished from the level of action:
Leontev ... seems to use activity to expand what is deemed as a
legitimate object of psychological study. Here I think particularly of
the movement between different structural-functional levels and the
development of an activity.

Since King did not anticipate the necessity to explicate these levels and
the "movements" between (e.g.) activity and action, I will try to do that
now for the benefit of all the listeners to XACT whose doubts you, David,
have voiced.

There is no dissent between action regulation theory and activity theory
that the process level of goal directed action makes up the *center* of the
object domain of psychology. Further, both "schools" agree that actions may
be decomposed into (are realized by a chain of) operations, and recognize a
kind of "movement" between actions and operations (with practice an action
will become "automatic", will turn into an operation, etc.).
In a general way there is even no dissent that we have to look also at
the *contextual* processes in which actions are embedded (one item on your
list of distinctions). To fixate this generally accepted view, I propose
the following scheme:

- contextual processes (yet to be defined)
:- spatiotemporal biggest scale
- focussed processes (= goal directed, consciously regulated action)
:- middle scale (span of local awareness of the actor)
- realizing sub-processes (= embodied, "automated" operations, "skills")
:- finest scale in time and space.

As Yrjo Engestrom has noted in his "Learning by Expanding" (1987 p. 154),
such a tripartite scheme has been proposed independently by at least three
(groups of) authors, to which I can add a fourth: Rainer Oesterreich
(1981), and a fifth: Norbert Groeben (1986).

The different definitions for the topmost level are:

* Harre, Clarke & DeCarlo (1985): Deep structure of mind, social order.
* Bateson (1972): Tertiary Learning (restructuring the way to learn).
* Leontyev: Concrete activity; "motivated" by the (societally co-defined)
concrete *products* of the chain of actions that are possibly discrepant
from anticipated goals, and not necessarily conscious.

* Groeben (1986): Doing ("Tun") something without full awareness, while
pursuing possibly discrepant goals.
* Oesterreich (1981): Coordinating different spheres or "fields" of action,
understood as a planning process (we might suppose that this happens also
as a self-organizing process without global awareness).

I have ordered these conceptions of the contextual level according to the
reflexive effort that the actor has to invest to become aware of it in the
opinion of the respective authors.

None of these authors consideres an alternative interpretation of
"contextual process": the interacting group to which the actor belongs.
This shows that King has indeed hit the point when he stated that such
formulations of the contextual level expand the scope of usual main-stream
experimental psychology that focusses mainly on the level of operations,
while occasionally also considering actions, but never the *personal
context*, that is: the spatiotemporal connectedness of conscious actions of
*one and the same actor*.

Leontyev's formulation now focusses on the fact that this connectedness
is not only produced by the actor himself, but is also heavily constrained
and influenced by the societal definitions of what the results of action
chains *should* be to ensure reproduction of the social order (Harre et al.
do also take this into account, but additionally stress -- in a Freudian
vein -- other determinants).

Lia DiBello's formulation: "Activities as psychological entities and
activities as social constructs co-exist, develop in parallel and
dialectically transform one another" beautifully captures also the
subjective side of these contextual forms in which our action chains are
embedded. But this is also a very optimistic formulation, because not every
actor is able to muster the reflexion effort necessary to become aware of
them -- and, sadly enough, too many psychologist also shy away from the
conceptual work necessary to produce social instruments that are helpful in
achieving a more global awareness of one's own activities.

Arne Raeithel