Merje gave us a long and intriguing list of ways in which the activity
theory notion of object has been specified, extended, and applied as:
•Object of activity/Y. Engeström
•Dual/double object/Miettinen
Epistemic object/Miettinen/Knorr-Cetina
•Emerging object/Hasu
•Partial object/Hasu
•Heterogeneous object/Contested
•field of negotiations/helle
•Shared object (in Competence Laboratory)/Ahonen
•Referential object/R.Engerström
•Boundary crossing object/Toiviainen
•Temporary object/activity in Border Crossing Laboratory/Kkerosuo
•Practical object of transformation/Miettinen/Hyysalo
•Objest as a learning Challenge/Seppänen
•Developmental task/Mott
•Object-tool shift/Miettinen etc
•Boundary actions/Kerosuo
•Boundary object/Star
•Levels of operations/Engeström Y.
Along with these we can perhaps also include notions of perceived object,
collective object, and dynamic (i.e. evolving) object.
There were some long discussions on xmca a (long) while back about
invariant objects vs. evolving or emerging objects, in which I took the
position that we need to pay at least as much attention to the latter as to
the former, despite the fact that some people felt that the activity itself
changes when its organizing object changes. But changes of the kind we see
in Foot's article, or in the examples in the earlier discussion, were often
not stark and discontinuous, but rather represented a sort of organic
evolution in which it was the very carrying out of the activity that led to
shifting views of the object, and in which the object was not just an
ever-receding horizon, but an ever-evolving one as well.
Further, there is the issue of multiple or mixed objects. I think that
today theorists and researchers recognize that in the study of human
activity "pure' or single-purpose, single-object activities are
idealizations or relatively rare kinds of occurrences and that for the most
part we live with mixed or multi-purpose activities. We are always carrying
out multiple agendas on multiple timescales, and activities afford us
resources and opportunities for all sorts of things we want to do,
individually and collectively. This seems very evident in the milieu of
school lessons and classrooms. There are many organizational levels of
activity, activities overlap and even contradict one another. As raised in
a question here, teachers and students perceive the objects of activity
often quite differently, and this only sometimes leads to breakdown of
cooperation, but at times it also seems to be the very basis of
cooperation. We can certainly engage in the same collective activity with
different perceived objects (in the traditional sense of Gegenstand), and
it is up to the analyst who senses the coherence of our collective activity
to define some common collective object which may not be perceptually real
for any participant.
This is perhaps where the notion of material object as organizing center
for collective action becomes particularly useful. Star's "boundary
objects" are a good case in point. We can unite our activity around the
building of a cathedral or the distribution and collection of census forms.
Material objects have a capacity to persist in time, crossing various
timescales of activity. They may also retain a unity and serve as a focus
of collective coherence, even if they have different meanings and different
functions for various participants. Note that in this sense, the social
community of participants in the activity can itself be regarded as a
material object.
AT seems to me to represent a considerable improvement on the classical
notion of Gegenstand insofar as it takes the relational property of this
notion beyond relationship to a conceiving mind and places it more as
relationship within collective activity. That collective activity is itself
interesting and meaningful mainly insofar as the collective object is not a
"bare" material form, but one endowed with (perhaps differing, but still
inter-related) meanings in the activity for the participants. For me this
brings it closer to a notion like that of "actant" in actor-network theory.
The difference is that the collective object has a privileged place as the
organizing focus of an activity in AT, while it is merely one among many
actants in a connected web in ANT. What matters in both cases is the
ontology of the object: deriving its reality from its role in a larger
dynamic social system/process. ANT somewhat neglects the importance of
attributed and available symbolic meaning for objects, but emphasizes that
their reality and properties arise from the collective, the network (of
human and nonhuman participants in activity). AT makes the "ideal" aspect
of the collective object more central, but may run the risk in some
versions (e.g. over-reliance on the perceived or mind-constructed object)
of reducing this to a sum of individual meanings. AT objects have their
reality, and their theoretical significance, both in their
activity-embeddedness and in their social-collective "ideality" or
meaningfulness.
Finally, I think that there is an interesting object-duality between making
products of activity and making communities for activity. Either may become
subordinated to the other, but neither aspect can be entirely lost because
each needs the other. It might be interesting to explore this theme more,
and it is certainly one of the most potentially "expansive" ideas put
forward in Foot's article.
JAY.
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