Hi Vera and Kathy and Helen,
The lesley mail server continued to be inaccessible until this afternoon-- perhaps linked either to what the news today indicated was a break in some telecommunications lines, or striking workers of the new telco "verizon". Fortunately xmca mail is archived on the web, and was readable from home, although the 24 hour turnaround does create a delay.
It helps to contrast the situations Kathy and I put ourselves in, with another. I have been examining Yrjö's change laboratory approach, through which the elements of activity theory per se are brought to bear in facilitating transformations. A model (i.e. activity system diagram) of the system to be transformed (i.e. a postal service) is constructed with the participants to express the historically developed contradictions in the system, and then in planning a new system. An important point that Yrjö raises (my rearticulated here) is that seemingly similar approaches such as Senge's (systems analysis) do not engage in the historical analysis, and thus are constrained to creating immediate and short term solutions. (1) What the change laboratory approach has built in is the explicit use of activity theory, and so I presume that participants agree to this form of mediation at the very beginning. What I see as one strength in the approach is the form the theoretical mediation takes: (1) to focus ongoing activity on how contradictions in the system have arisen, and (2) to foster creative resolutions of these troubles. With the change laboratory I have the impression that all or most of people within the system enact the change laboratory processes.
There are two ways in which situations that I am in differ from that of the change laboratory, the first being similar to Kathy's, and that is generally not engaging in an activity theoretical analysis with other participants of the project. To explain why adequately, I feel, requires more research than what i have done. The short answer is that it is difficult without sponsorship, and as a single agent, being one voice in the din. The second difference is the nature of the problem being addressed in relation to identifying theory, units of analysis, and emperical investigation.
With regard to the second, the research problem that I wish to address is explicating the relations between the development of individuals and the settings they participate in, as individuals and settings co-evolve. This focus crosses into the theoretical categories of 'the interactions among people and things" (Lang), "activity systems" (Engeström), and "mediated action" (Wertsch). With significant influence from these three formulations, and others unmentioned here, the problem has a high degree of theoretical dependence, and the methods of investigation necessarily address the elaboration of theory, perhaps in the form of models that bridge between theory and data. That is not to say that the research problem does not have a grounding in data -- the qualitative cases being developed are corresponding phenomenal instances of the theoretical issue, and with so much change being sought across national, state, and local agencies, with the addition of rapid technological changes, there are also compelling social implications.
It seems that case studies in education traditionally take as the unit of analysis as with the individual, if based upon psychology, or various grouping of individuals and roles, if based upon sociology (Mirriam), and these units are close to what is readily observed. One thing to notice is that these traditional units mostly seem to constitute people only, whereas semiotic ecology includes "people" and "things", and, in parallel, activity systems includes "instrumentality" (artifacts) and "subjects". The distinction can be rephrased more generally as having an emphasis on mediated action (as most people on this xmca may deem obvious).
The second thing to notice is that taking activity as a unit of analysis more abstractly, i.e. in a theoretically driven way, cuts across and enters between the traditional (natural) units of people and their collectives. Following the theoretical assertion that interactions are both between and among people and things and their collectives, observations of interactions are systematized by the theory. With both activity systems and semiotic ecology, one looks for mediation in particular forms. Both theories include a dynamic quality, a power for describing disturbances and changes, and each is formulated uniquely, but perhaps not incommensurately for doing so. Disturbances in activity systems arise as contradictions, and in semiotic ecology, changes are described by the development of potentials. Both address the creation of new artifacts and structures. So in observing during any microgenetic episode, and with all the things one could possibly record, one *looks* for signs of contradictions, potentials, and the creation of artifacts and structures, and while participating as an agent, one *looks to create* contradictions, potentials, artifacts and structures. Two good examples are Alfred's analysis of the perturbations created by the sudden arrival of a clothes chest, and the change laboratory approach of introducing triangle models that promote awareness of, and focus attention on, systemic contradictions and their resolutions.
What is interesting here, Helen, is a possible similarity to the system dynamics approach, with which one looks for "points of leverage" -- rephrased as places where one can make small changes in the structure of the system that result in big changes in the performance of a system.
Not surprisingly semiotic ecology and activity systems are useful in different ways but this will have to be elaborated later. Since my interest is in the co-evolution of individuals and their (to put it briefly) "contexts", the observations necessarily span across several combinations of these -- an enormous set of tasks, and so the practical considerations are what effectively constrain the study.
(1) The change laboratory as a tool for transforming work, lifelong learning in europe, (1996) p10-17
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College
29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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