I would like to take up Jay's point :-
"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 is this relationship (betwen product making and social relation ) that I think is so important in Kirsten Foot's paper. If we consider the formation of a discourse in pedagogic terms -- in some sense there is a pedagogic relationship bwteen the collective and the individual which as Jay points out may often involve conflict and mis / non communication --- then is it worth considering the structure of the discourse which is formed in the activity. Here I go back to Basil Bernstein's notion of a pedagogic discourse as a rule which embeds 2 discourses : a discourse of skills of various kinds and their relations to each other, and a discourse of social order, identity and relation. he uses the terms instructional (I) and regulative discourse (R) and argues that I is always embedded in R although the degree of the embedding may alter. Hence once could understand the shifts in Foot's data in terms of differences in degree of embeddedness between 2 two communities over time. Berstein's later work allows for the tentative specification of the structure of a pedagogic discourse in terms that may be related to the rules, community and division of labour of CHAT. This is undertaken through an analysis of power ( understood in terms of the ways in which boundaries are maintained and hence categories formed) and control. In this way it is possible to describe different positions within an activity. This also helps to provide a language of description which connects the different levels of analysis in CHAT.
Again -- this is a risk taking note -- I merely offer it as an early saturday morning muse.
Harry
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
Sent: 21 June 2003 03:43
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: chasing object(s)
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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