All issues published since 2000 (our Vol. 7) are now available
elecronically at the Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. website
(http://www.erlbaum.com). The electronic copies are available at no cost
if you have a current print subscription. The cost of an electronic
subscription only is $31.50.
Below are the abstracts for MCA which have appeared since the beginning
of 2000. Vol. 7 (Nos. 1&2) are included here. Those for Vol. 7 (No. 3)
will follow in a separate message. Vol. 7 (4) is in final stages of
production and should appear in a few weeks. I will then post those
abstracts also.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. pbengel who-is-at ucsd.edu.
Peggy Bengel
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Abstracts for Volume 7, Nos. 1 & 2 of Mind, Culture, and Activity
MCA Abstracts Vol. 7, Nos. 1&2
Embodied Practices of Engineering Work
Lucy Suchman
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
This paper explores relations between activity theoretic and
ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference
to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is
the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of
artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises
of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of
artifacts-in-use. I then offer a preliminary account of computer-aided and
paper-based design work in civil engineering, informed by both perspectives.
My account emphasizes the multiplicity of media and associated objects
involved in the work of engineering on the one hand, and their integration
in practice into a coherent field of action on the other. The paper
concludes by returning to the question of relations between ethnomethodology
and activity theory, focussing on differences in their respective stances
toward theory itself.
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Practices of Color Classification
Charles Goodwin
University of California, Los Angeles _
Color categories sit at the intersection of two central topics in the study
of human cognition: 1) the analysis of vision, and 2) the study of semantic
categories, or more generally processes of classification. Using as data
videotape of archaeologists filling out a coding sheet that requires
them to
systematically describe the color of the dirt they have excavated, this
paper describes the practices required to competently classify color within
the work life of their profession. The task of color classification is
embedded within a situated activity system, which includes not only several
different ways of identifying the same color (each designed for alternative
uses), but also cognitive artifacts, such as Munsell color chart, and
specific embodied practices. The chart creates a historically constituted
architecture for perception, a heterotopia that juxtaposes in a single
visual field two very different kinds of space. As multiple parties fill out
the coding sheet together the full resources of the organization of
talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the contingent tasks they are
charged with accomplishing. The present investigation of a situated activity
system encompassing not only semantic categories, but also physical tools
and embodied practices, contrasts with most previous research on color
categories, which has focussed almost exclusively on mental phenomena, and
not on how people perform color classification to pursue a relevant course
of action in the consequential settings that make up their lifeworld.
-----------------------------------
Organizing Multiple Vision
Yasuko Kawatoko
Daito Bunka University
On a factory that produces large quantities of precision metal parts through
the use of computer controlled lathes, workers from different divisions of
labour such as lathe operators, inspectors, and managers organize multiple
vision to make cutting processes and the quality of products visible. The
first part of this paper investigates how the lathe operators juxtapose a
range of different kinds of documents and artifacts to both program their
lathes and build a perceptual field where relevant events in the process
become visible. In the second part of the paper, particular attention is
paid to a "standard plan" as a
boundary object. A common standard plan is used in different ways in
different sections of the plant to accomplish their practice. A standard
plan organizes multiple, perspectival vision of the "same" events in
different sections, while simultaneously, it becomes a tool for coordinating
different divisions of labour.
-----------------------------------
Ecologies of Inscription: Technologies of making the social organization of
work and the mass production of machine parts visible in collaborative
activity
Naoki Ueno
National Institute for Educational Research, Japan
This paper focuses on technologies for making social organization, the work
and the mass production mutually visible in collaborative activity. I
describe how practitioners in a manufacturing factory mutually organize
accountability of their own social organization, the work, and the mass
produced products through using various inscriptions and other technologies
along with concretely demonstrating the above presuppositions of society and
the work. Among them, I focus on how multi-layered accountabilities are
organized, and on how the multi-layered accountabilities or multiply
organized activities are linked up, and coordinated with inscriptions and
other technologies. At linking points, mutualities of various divisions of
labour are organized. In addition, at a linking point, what occur is not the
transmission of invariant information, but the transformation of the
information. Imaging the relations across inscriptions as a linear chain can
be viewed as one of the more popular inscriptions locally utilized by
management on specific occasions.
------------------------------------
Configuring Action in Objects: From mutual space to media space
Christian Heath
Jon Hindmarsh
King's College London
It has long been recognised that the material environment is an essential
feature of the organisation of social action and interaction. It is only
recently however, that we have witnessed a burgeoning body of empirical
studies, from within both the social and cognitive sciences, which has begun
to delineate the ways in which objects are socially constructed and feature
in social relations and activities. Despite this growing interest in the
object in social life, there remains a paucity of research concerned with
how objects are reflexively constituted in and through social interaction.
In this paper, we consider how aspects of the material environment are
rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction, and the ways
in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and
activities of others. We examine interaction in both conventional working
environments and new experimental spaces created through advanced
telecommunication and communication technologies to reveal the ways in which
the sense and significance of social actions and activities are embedded in,
and inseparable, from the local ecology.
--------------------
Seeing What One Sees: Perception, Emotion, and Activity
Aug Nishizaka
In this paper, it is demonstrated (1) how seeing is organized in the
spatiotemporal arrangement of bodies and conduct within which the
participants display and manage their orientations to the ongoing activity,
and (2) how seeing and emotion are mutually constituted in the precise
coordination of conduct and how they, along with other various kinds of
things, can constitute resources for organizing the ongoing activity. The
view advanced in this paper sharply contradicts the traditional conception
of visual perception, according to which the verb 'see' names a discrete
process, event or state hidden under the individual's skin. Seeing is rather
an organizational feature of an embodied, visible activity.
------------------------------------
Patents, Promotions, and Protocols: Mapping and Claiming Scientific
Territory
Michael Lynch, Director
Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture, and Technology (CRICT)
Brunel University
Kathleen Jordan
Gerontology Center
Boston University
Scientific representations include a diverse and confusing array of maps,
descriptions, diagrams, and protocols. This study examines and compares the
practical and communicative uses of such artifacts. The main source of
material is the authors' ethnographic research on the polymerase chain
reaction (PCR), a laboratory routine which has numerous scientific, medical,
and forensic applications. Contextually relative versions of PCR are
examined: schematic diagrams for popular audiences; advertisements in
biotech publications; patent descriptions; praxiological descriptions
(recipe-like formulations); and material standards and references. These
renderings do not exemplify a single type of cognition or information
processing. Schematic diagrams, advertisements, patents, protocols, and
material standards are differently formed, and they information they convey
substantially differs from one form to another. This study contributes
to a
non-cognitivist understanding of representation that emphasizes diverse
communicative practices and material renderings.
---------------------------------
Invisible Mediators of Action: Classification and the Ubiquity of Standards
Geoffrey C. Bowker
Susan Leigh Star
University of California at San Diego
This paper is a methodological think piece about the ways in which
classifications (and standards) impinge in myriad ways on our daily lives.
We argue that although they are frequently invisible to us, they are highly
political and ethically charged. We suggest four principles garnered from
our own research and that of others that can together be used to give a
picture of their scope and reach: recognizing their ubiquity analyzing their
material texture; examining ways in which they reconfigure our understanding
of the past; and exploring their practical politics. Together, the
principles suggest a "reverse engineering" of classification systems to
reveal the multitude of local political and social struggles and compromises
which go into the constitution of a "universal" classification.
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