Re: Boundary object

(no name) ((no email))
Mon, 27 Oct 1997 20:23:13 +0200

My colleagues and I have tried hard to make use of Leigh Star's notion of
'boundary object' in concrete analyses of different activity systems. The
more we tried, the more it seems to me that this notion is still mainly a
provocative idea, or perhaps a metaphor, not so much an elaborated
theoretical concept. What does it add to simply talking about an object of
activity shared by multiple participants, or multiple activity systems, for
that matter?

=46rom a CHAT viewpoint, it is particularly problematic that the relationshi=
p
between object and mediating instrument is usually tacitly ignored when the
notion of boundary object is employed. Looking over a number of recent
studies where this notion has been used, it seems that it can be used to
refer to practically anything that is somehow shared by a number of
different participants. In that sense, the idea seems to run the risk of
becoming an equally vague emblem as for instance 'situatedness'. Perhaps
Leigh herself could help me out and elaborate a bit on her current thinking
about the idea of boundary object?

Yrjo Engestrom