THE CONCEPT OF ACTIVITY IN THE ANALYSIS OF
HETEREOGENUOUS NETWORKS IN INNOVATION PROCESS
By Reijo Miettinen
Centre for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research,
Department of Education, University of Helsinki
The background of cultural historical theory of activity
The history of the ANT in the social studies of science and
technology is well known among this audience. Cultural
historical theory of activity stems from different background.
It was formulated by the Russian literature scholar and
psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Vygotsky 1982) as an antidualist
solution to the crisis of psychology during the first decades of
this century. In those days psychology was characterized by two
opposing conceptions. On one hand, human consciousness was
studied as an autonomous agent independent of and opposed to the
material environment. The method used in research was
introspection: an individual observed his/her inner world and
stream of consciousness. On the other hand, psychological
processes were studied as an epiphenomenon of biology and
physiology. Reflectology and behaviorism tended to explain
consciousness in terms of elementary nervous mechanisms, using
the concept of reflect or stimulus-response connection.
In the 1920s Vygotsky formulated a completely new solution to
how to transcend these two opposing but equally unsatisfactory
explanations: the concept of mediated action (Vygotsky 1979)2. A
human individual never reacts merely directly (or merely with
inborn reflects) to the environment. The relation between the
human agent and the object is mediated by cultural means or
artifacts. The basic types of these means are signs and tools.
During socialization, an individual internalize, by
participating in common activities with other humans the means
of culture: language, theories, technical artifacts as well as
norms and modes of acting. Thus consciousness doesn't exist
situated inside the head of the individual but in the
interaction - realized through material activity - between the
individual and the objective forms of culture created by the
labour of mankind. Vygotsky applied to psychology the
philosophical concept of mediation formulated by Hegel and
further developed by Marx on an a materialistic basis (Vygotsky
1979, 54). Marx's idea of labour activity was an important
starting point for Vygotsky's analysis of artifact mediated
activity (Davydov & Radzikhovskii 1985).
During his short career Vygotsky concentrated on studying how a
child internalizes the most important of all cultural means,
language (1987). He formulated "the genetic law of cultural
development", according to which child's cultural development
takes place twice, or on two planes (Vygotsky 1981, 163). First,
it appears interpsychologically, in interaction between people
and secondly, within a child as an intrapsychological category.
"Social relations or relations of people genetically underlie
all higher (psychological R.M) functions and their relations"
(ibid). This law has a great significance outside the sphere of
language learning and ontogeny. It is a general formulation of
the mechanism trough which the forms of material culture are
internalized by an individual due to the participation in
collective material activities in the society.
Later Activity theory developed further the ideas of Vygotsky.
A.N. Leontjev, a disciple of Vygotsky stressed that activity is
also socially mediated: consciousness and meaning are always
formed in joint, collective activity (Leontjev 1978). As a
result, the unit of analysis in studying human mediated
activity, is an activity system, community of actors who have a
common object of activity (Engestrvm 1987, Cole & Engestrvm
1994). In this model social mediatedness is characterized by
division of labour and rules mediating the interaction between
the individuals in the activity system. The collective activity
system as unit of analysis connects the psychological, cultural
and institutional perspective to analysis. The study of activity
ceases to be psychology of an individual but instead focuses on
the interaction between an individual, systems of artifacts and
other individuals in historically developing institutional
settings.