Helena,
Thank you for bringing your own thinking into this forum. The topic of
your paper is provocative to those of us who share an interest in Activity
Theory. You mention that labor educators are likely to find activity
theory so intuitive that they will wonder why we're even talking about it.
I suspect this is also true with practitioners of organizational change
including active union organizers and, not surprisingly, with management.
Your paper is welcome and the workplace context which offers a natural
habitat for AT analysis. Engestrom emphasizes the heterogeneous and
multi-voiced nature of activity systems. An AT approach to the work
setting can address organizational complexity in ways that are easy to
grasp without undue reductionism. For me, such a context helps to clarify
some of the generalized, hard to reach aspects of AT in very concrete
terms.
I think the subject of 'the collective subject' lies at the heart of your
paper. The view that agency in an activity can be collectively shared is
a difficult concept to grasp. There is a tendency in AT literature to
reduce the collective subject down to some objective entity: e.g. a work
team, management, the union, the stock holders, consumers, ad infinitum.
The reality in the contemporary workplace is that our individual identity
is increasingly distributed across the range of these collective identies.
The identity of the wage laborer has been the fundamental morter that
holds together the structure of worker's organizations. The strength of a
workers' union is a function of this collective identity. This is why
organizing is the supreme activity of any viable workers' organization.
The forces that fuel organizing activities in the workplace are the
disturbances that result from the contradicting interests of those who do
the labor and those who profit from it. As Engestrom points out, these
disturbances give rise to innovations that tend to moderate the conflict.
The innovations that emerge are not exclusively those of labor. Among the
most effective innovations of management in recent years have been tactics
where corporate agency is suddenly shared with the workers in the form of
self-directed work teams, discounted stock offerings and profit sharing.
Such innovations serve to complicate matters of collective identity.
Today, it is not uncommon for a typical worker to be also a stock holder.
The company I work for offers employee stock purchase at a 15% discount.
This benefits those workers who can set aside a few investment dollars
each month. Senior employees who have accrued significant stock over time
have conflicting loyalties when it comes to layoffs and cost reductions.
Where companies offer profit sharing incentives based on quotas of
corporate earnings, the personal objectives of the wage laborer are torn
between conflicting agendas. Such divided identies seriously complicate
the activity of labor organizing. Corporate identities are more
pronounced as one moves up the workplace hierarchy. What Marx called the
'labor aristocracy' has always been the loyal ally of management in labor
disputes. Our postmodern world promises increasing difficulties for labor
organizing as the social sturcture of assembly lines gives way to isolated
cubicles and geographically dispursed activity systems.
You point out that the 'production process' is foregrounded above all
others in AT research. There is certainly an economic basis for such
forgrounding. Dispite its Marxist origins, AT is an analytical instrument
that lends potent support to management practices aimed toward process
improvement and tool design. Such analyses promise greater productivity
and higher profits, explaining why this area of AT research enjoys the
funding that others do not. The focus of 'agency' in AT analysis is a
distinct shift from traditional Cartesian design approaches where the
designer and user have never laid eyes on one-another. User-centered,
participatory design is a dominant force in engineering today and Activity
Theory is well emeshed in contemporary design literature. Despite the
preponderance of corporate funding for this research, I believe that the
benefits of participatory design are not limited to the interests of
management alone. However, you raise an interesting point of reflection
for those of us who ask the question, "whom do we serve". This question
greatly hinges on the a more fundamental question: "Who is this 'we', this
collective subject, that shares agency in our research activities?"
Martin R.
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