I could use some help. I have found AT exciting in general as a
heuristic, a set of concerns to account for when determining what
counts as a socioculturally organized, motivated activity. I have had
difficulty (because of unfamiliarity with Marxist phil. no doubt)
understanding the "hardness" of the theory. It's plastic,
adaptable. In my way of thinking, a visit to a doctor's office
CAN be an object, if the patient and the doctor orient to the visit
as what must be done, what there is to do, at this time. The object
is what the subject orients to (I thought). The mediating instruments
would include the "genre" of patient-doctor visit, the architecture of
the office, the medical instruments used, charts, etc. Probably
the magazines in the waiting room, too. So the terms of the
theory have worked for me in part because of their metaphoric potential:
their adaptability to different perspectives on what is going on.
Now I think that my version of the theory may be fudging the historical
"real" that is at stake for Yrjo and other AT theorists.
I may be fudging the boundaries. So I look forward to continued
conversation on this topic.
Judy
>My colleagues and I have tried hard to make use of Leigh Star's notion of
>'boundary object' in concrete analyses of different activity systems. The
>more we tried, the more it seems to me that this notion is still mainly a
>provocative idea, or perhaps a metaphor, not so much an elaborated
>theoretical concept. What does it add to simply talking about an object of
>activity shared by multiple participants, or multiple activity systems, for
>that matter?
>
>From a CHAT viewpoint, it is particularly problematic that the relationship
>between object and mediating instrument is usually tacitly ignored when the
>notion of boundary object is employed. Looking over a number of recent
>studies where this notion has been used, it seems that it can be used to
>refer to practically anything that is somehow shared by a number of
>different participants. In that sense, the idea seems to run the risk of
>becoming an equally vague emblem as for instance 'situatedness'. Perhaps
>Leigh herself could help me out and elaborate a bit on her current thinking
>about the idea of boundary object?
At 10:48 AM 10/28/97 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Eugene, thanks for your comment. The idea that the visit itself is a
>boundary object never occurred to me. Wouldn't that reduce the notion of
>boundary object to some sort of frame, or participation framework (a la
>Goffman)? What would be left of the 'objectness', in the sense of something
>toward which the actions are oriented and which motivates the activity?
>
>Yrjo Engestrom
>
>
>
>
Judith Diamondstone
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