At 11:39 -0700 26.7.1997, Edouard Lagache wrote:
>I see your point, but I disagree with your methodology for describing
>communities.
--Edouard, I fail to see where exactly you disagree with my "methodology of
describing communities"? Would you care to clarify what you mean by my
methodology and where you disagree with it.
>Activity systems it seems to me pose the same dilemma. Are they analytical
>structures that researchers impose upon the world, or are they existential
>objects?
--That's a relevant question (within activity theory, it was posed
forcefully by the important Russian philosopher Yudin in the 1960s). But
now Edouard says that activity theory and the communities-of-practice
viewpoint "pose the same dilemma." Edouard's initial point was that there
is a serious conflict between the two views - this was what prompted me to
intervene in the first place. Is that conflict now vanishing?
>LCHC is an activity system that serves as host of a myriad of ghostly
>communities of practice. Yesterday, we held a meeting on a NSF request for
>grant proposals - it is conceivable to me that for that 1+ hour a tiny
>community of practice formed. If it did, I can just about assure you that
>it vanished at the end of the meeting. Yet it may spawn other communities
>with longer duration. Yrj=F6, you were not a part of that community of
>practice, but you may well play an important role in the communities that
>are spawned from that meeting. If communities of practice as fleeting as
>that, I dare you to capture all that detail with one ethnographer trying
>to "inhabit" an activity system like LCHC! :-)
--I don't think it's wise to call a meeting a "community of practice". And
I don't think that LCHC "serves as host of a myriad of ghostly communities
of practice." I think that this way of thinking leads to hopeless inflation
of the notion of community. To avoid such an inflation, which would indeed
lead to a hopeless task for researchers, I suggest focusing on the object.
Yrj=F6 Engestr=F6m