i've been working at the local research center for education as well,
trying to use the ideas of Yrjo Engestrom and Pentti Hakkarainen to be
able to understand (the collapsing) working-life in finland.
Earlier i've been studying and researching also in Japan about 2 1/2
years, i was studying Buddhism at Kyoto University for some time, lived
also one month's time in a Zen-Buddhist monastery near Tokyo.
The link between buddhist thinking and activity theory i found first in
Engestrom's 'Learning by Expanding', where Engestrom writes about
G.Bateson's theory of learning and 'double-bind'. G. Bateson's theory is
partly inspired by old Chinese Zen-stories called 'Koan' in Japanese.
virtanen
e-mail: hvirtane@tukki.jyu.fi; www-page: http://www.jyu.fi/~hvirtane