Yrjö, thank you for your response from the other day. It clears up
some questions I've had. And evokes a number of thoughts I'd like
to share.
If I am reading you right, as a matter of principle, you and your
colleague's Change Lab work is non-profit, a university handles any
money paid for labor or overhead (if anything is paid at all),
results are made available to both management and workers and others
locally interested, when possible a trade union is involved, results
are published in publicly available sources, when possible at least
some of these publications are scientifically peer-reviewed, and the
methods and procedures used in the studies are made available for
anyone to evaluate. Is this a fair restatement of your principles?
This is certainly quite different from the characteristic way I
understand that the usual business management consulting firm
operates. Booz-Allen, one of the older US firms doing this kind of
consultation, was in my factory shop for a few weeks once in the
1990's, and I had a chance to get to know some of these consultants
and talk to them about what they were doing. Just as you suggest,
Yrjö, on every single point you raise, they did just the opposite of
what you do. Interestingly, since part of their job was to
interview workers on the shop floor, observe meetings that workers
attended, etc., they did the best they could to portray themselves
as acting in everyone's best interest. But when I talked things
over with them, they were honest enough to admit to all the points
you make about such operations.
Nevertheless, Yrjö, I am still pondering the difficult question,
despite the many principled differences that you point out between
these two kinds of approaches, whether or not a well-meaning
scientific organization coming into a capitalist workplace to make
analyses and recommendations is still **objectively** doing a form
of "business management consulting." In other words, this essential
relationship, advising the capitalist of how to make a profit,
increase productivity, etc. still holds, no matter how the
organization may or may not be compensated, with whom or in what
manner it shares its results, what recommendations it winds up
making, or how sympathetic it may be with the workers.
I am retired now, but while I was a machinist at a large airplane
factory I wound up doing a lot of work on many process improvement
teams and projects. Personally, in my involvements, except of
course for the aspect of publishing scientific papers, I consciously
followed the same basic principles you outline. Intuitively, all my
union co-workers did. Things like using transparent data collecting
methods, sharing whatever information was assembled, openly
discussing the various points of view that were raised, disclosing
what recommendations wound up being made, etc. etc. were always done
in ways that everyone who wanted to know about what was going on
could discuss and debate. I certainly made a point of this, perhaps
more consciously than most, but so did many others. It came
naturally for the workers to talk these things over openly and
frankly.
However, we were never under the illusion we were ever doing
anything but advising management. Management always got the final
word. Sometimes we had something of a voice, but we never had a
vote on the final outcome. Decision-making was exclusively the
right of management. In fact, that point is even explicitly made at
the beginning of our union contract.
Below I am going to reflect a little about my experience with
workers doing process improvement activities in a factory. Just as
I asked if a Change Lab or other such scientific group is doing a
form of "business management consulting" when it makes analyses and
recommendations, it is fair to ask if workers on a shop floor are
also actually just doing essentially that when they suggest
improvements. So I am asking this same question not only about the
Change Lab but about my own past activities, and those of my
coworkers. I will reflect on some of my experiences in considering
this question.
To be merciful and summarize my thoughts for those not wanting to
read too much farther (this is already a long post), I will explain
my reasons, which will be based on my perception of the reality of
capital, and answer that yes, I think even workers are indeed just
doing a kind of "business management consulting" when they engage in
process improvements. But this doesn't mean they shouldn't do it
when they feel so inclined, I will suggest, it just means that what
they are doing should be called what it really is. At the same
time, Yrjö, I think you make some very good points about the
differences between the kind of principled, worker-oriented,
materialist-based approach a Change Lab takes, and what a couple of
Booz-Allen dudes fresh out of graduate school are really doing when
they conjure up a bunch of charts and reports for local managers
about how to increase productivity. So perhaps a different term is
warranted. I'll return to that.
So here are some reflections on my experiences ...
In the 1970's when I first started doing industrial work, the idea
of workers having a "voice" in production was, relatively speaking,
unheard of. In my airplane factory there was a "suggestion" system,
which would pay up to $10,000 for an idea (usually you were very
lucky to get $25). But that wasn't a voice, and was usually just a
way for one of the manager's friends on the shop floor to get a big
bonus. However, this general lack of "voice" in production
processes began to change in the 1980's.
My company got very interested in things like "productivity circles"
and "process improvement teams" in the mid to late 1980's as part of
their general "lean manufacturing" initiative, which in my neck of
the woods would wind up going on for about 15 years, more or less
accomplishing its aims within the constraints of their existing
factory machinery upgrades, possible process improvements, and
essential social relations, by the early 2000's.
Lean manufacturing - (I know you are very familiar with all this,
Yrjö) - refers to a large assortment of newer manufacturing
techniques (new since the '50's and '60's) that more or less
coordinate all the steps in production so that in-process
inventories are kept to a bare minimum, and kept moving very
efficiently, while productivity is also kept very high at each step
of the process.
To give an illustration of a key aspect of what has come to be
called lean manufacturing, my shop made large parts for jetliner
wings. It was once the norm for an average part (our shop term for
our objects of activity, the thing we produced) to take almost 100
days to be fully processed from raw aluminum to a part ready to be
installed on a wing. Including raw parts not yet in work this would
mean there would be 4, 5 or 6 months worth of work in the building
at any given time. The time span to produce a part from beginning
to end is called "throughput" - not a new term anymore, of course,
now that these ideas are widespread around the world. After
instituting a wide variety of process changes, where many work
processes radically changed over the course of about a decade (not
everything changed, of course!), "throughput" in my factory building
was reduced to about 15 days, more than one/sixth of what it once
once. That was actually a remarkable change. These are huge parts,
and now there was less than a month's worth of them lying around
instead of 6 months. It would be like the difference between having
six refrigerators in your kitchen instead of just one. Only in our
case it was like clearing many thousands of square feet of floor
space and making it a hundred times easier to find and move around
parts, which is a big operation involving giant crane systems.
The old industrial method was equivalent to doing say two-month's
worth of grocery shopping all at once to cook for a large family,
and do the cooking the old way - storing a large inventory, cooking
meals which purposely have many leftovers, cooking all day Sunday to
have food all week, etc. Think of all the food lying around when
you do that in relation to how much is actually eaten at a meal.
The lean manufacturing approach in its ideal form is the opposite -
it is the equivalent of having the food delivered to you from the
grocery store every meal so efficiently that you never have to even
put it away, you always use exactly what was delivered, you always
feed everyone just what they want, and you never have any
leftovers. The ideal is to waste no food or time and the only
"inventory" you ever have is the food being cooked.
During those years of converting to "lean manufacturing" the company
encouraged workers to engage in process improvement teams while it
was trying to figure out how to make many of these strikingly sharp
changes. (Each part in my factory went through about 10 to 20 work
stations - milling, sanding, forming, chemical treatment, painting,
etc. - so the changes had to be highly coordinated and often
incrementally implemented across many work processes over quite a
few years, and many improvements had to be invented as things
progressed.).
The old concept of production was based on the idea that once you
set up a work station for working on one kind of part you then spent
a few days or even weeks working on just that kind of part. The
motivation was to capitalize on long set up times, which were very
labor intensive. The new concept was based on the idea that each
work station should be able to immediately set up on any part. Set
up time reduction - with the goal of zero setup time - is a big
feature of lean manufacturing initiatives.
Toyota gets the credit for being the first huge factory system to
implement this general concept, so these lean manufacturing
techniques are sometimes called the Toyota Production System. There
are many other facets to this approach to manufacturing besides just
reducing in-process inventory, minimizing setup times, and
increasing throughput - for example, scheduling preventative
maintenance of the machinery (not waiting for things to break down),
process standardization, designing methods for keeping tools
organized, keeping supplies always on hand, reducing clutter, etc.
etc. Many of these aspects have now become norms for many
industries. One small but visual example is the "shadowboard,"
where every hand tool has a designated hanging place with its
outline demarcated. This is now a very commonplace technique,
including in retail stores, but not too many years (okay, decades)
ago in industrial work this was something you might have only seen
in the best organized, most elite workplaces, usually a small job
shop, or the personal workshop of someone unusually highly skilled.
Certainly not a large factory! In fact, part of the lean
manufacturing initiative was about adopting and generalizing the
practices of a highly organized handicraftsperson. The preventative
maintenance part, on the other hand, remained one of the weak links
in my milling machine world, but that is another story - it was
apparently still cheaper to let the machines break down.
Computers, as everyone is now familiar, contributed to facilitating
various aspects of these kinds of improvements, such as monitoring
machine performance, keeping track of the movements of supplies,
etc. Many of these changes in industry are now so pervasive that
they have been become cultural norms. Some people think of them as
the "computer revolution." But it was actually a kind of industrial
revolution, significantly increasing productivity in basic industry,
reducing by well over half the total number of industrial workers in
many trades. My machinist's union local, one of the largest of its
kind in the US, dropped, over about a 20 year period, from 45,000 to
less than 18,000 members - yet the company was making more airplanes
than ever for a while there. Labor force reduction, especially
skilled work, was one of the key goals and outcomes of "lean
manufacturing."
Interestingly, in my factory building, as these major changes, or
newer forms of "doing business," as management called it, became
normalized, the improvement teams involving workers correspondingly
dwindled away and disappeared. The company shifted its attention
from developing new ideas about rationalizing and humanizing
collective production processes to how to increase productivity,
especially individual performance. From "lean" manufacturing
initiatives, shop floor management reverted to the more traditional
framework of "leaning on" the workers as hard as they could.
Workers tend resist this kind of thing as best they can, of course.
In my shop, they held their ground pretty well in the 1990's, but
some of their ability to resist has begun to slip away a bit over
the last ten years. Some of that has taken the shape of the company
gaining concessions in union contract clauses that cover work
relations and processes, such as now allowing vendors (outside
suppliers) to bring materials directly from the street to machines,
and a number of other erosions of union power on the shop floor.
I have touched on this little history spanning about 30 years to
bring up a key point. First, though, a word on the two sides of
this overall cycle with regard to how capital involves workers in
process improvement.
Sometimes capital finds it in its interest to engage labor in
certain kinds of process improvement. Generally speaking, whenever
new equipment was brought into my shop they would initially throw
extra labor at it. For example, I was part of the startup of a
whole new half a billion dollar building in 1994 that installed
brand new equipment that made my parts, introduced new forms of
automation, etc. They threw lots of labor at that whole new site,
just as they had at other capital projects. When they did that,
there would be a period where they would let us talk things over,
try to figure out how to best run the new equipment, experiment with
it, develop new processes, do some training, etc. This equipment,
which in my case included huge computer-operated mills with long
tooling beds to hold the parts, needed all kinds of adjusting,
tuning, adapting, modification. So there was a lot to do there.
New equipment and tooling often requires new kinds of smaller tools,
and in skilled work that usually means the workers themselves need
to be involved in choosing and designing them - no one else is going
to know what is needed. These dynamics are the case in any kind of
work, but they can get more exaggerated in a large factory,
especially if it is the only producer of a certain product.
Eventually, management comes up with solutions that best fit its
never-ending profit motive, the equipment budget gets trimmed to a
minimum, and the extra labor gets whittled away. There is always
"process improvement" going on in a modern factory, so that aspect
never entirely dies away. But after a while, once the capital
investment settles down for the long haul, the opinions of the
workers become less and less valued. The team meetings become fewer
and farther between. Suggested improvements are looked at more
skeptically. Team leaders, if there are even any teams remaining,
are more and more often selected based on their ability not so much
to help with improvements, but to represent the daily productivity
demands of the boss.
And as we all know, and this needs to be mentioned as part of the
overall picture, the world began entering a global economic crisis
in the early part of the first decade of this century - a kind of
crisis that has not been seen since the late 1920's and early
1930's, and perhaps ever, and may continue to deepen for a long
time. This new economic reality has had very visible effects on
relations between workers and management in my old factory, such as
very real threats by the company to move large operations to other
states or countries if they are not given more concessions.
So now to my point. My point here is that the workplace, in the
last analysis, is really all about the relentless struggle of
capital against labor, about the constant demand by capital for
profit. There is no way to escape this reality - not within the
workforce, not within management, nor even by an outside
organization. There is no "no-man's-land" or "collective" change
agency that can transcend capital and achieve some higher level of
human relations - not without a socialist revolution, anyway (or
perhaps, in theory, some kind of retrogression to feudalism or some
kind of earlier society). Short of these alternatives, capital, as
I see it, rules the world today. There may be times when the
managers of capital may throw some money around and allow workers to
talk some things over, make some suggestions, improve some
processes. There may even be times where a few workers may get to
do a lot of that. I personally was kind of fortunate that way, in
that it kept things off and on interesting for me over the years.
And perhaps sometimes management may even bring in some progressive
scientists from the outside to contribute some of their methods and
imagination, which in turn may temporarily empower some of the
workers to participate in these improvement processes more
effectively, and perhaps, together, they may help make some viable
improvements that makes things better for some workers.
But in my experience times when workers are given such voice are
only temporary and ephemeral, and usually only happen during general
upswings or periods of investment. In a big factory, over time you
get to see a little more starkly what is really the case in all
workplaces in capitalist society, whether the economy is in an
upswing or a downswing, or what form work takes - be it in a small
business, large corporation, school, public hospital, or government
agency. And that case, as I see it, is this: that capital
functions like an enormous, constantly beating, all-pervasive,
heartless black hole. This is the defining power in all workplaces
in capitalist economies. Capital directly or indirectly rules over
all human social relations in the world today. When someone uses
the term "economy" or "economic" or "socioeconomic" in contemporary
terms they are referring in some way to capital. Capital is by far
the most powerful human entity on the planet (with the sole
exception being its great opposite - labor - which is even more
powerful, or can be). Capital subsumes all social relations under
its powers - directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, and
whether people are conscious of it or not. Capital is not found
only in factories - it is just a little more obvious there. And it
is fascinating to watch. In a factory one can see how its powers
are insidious, all-consuming, and hideously relentless. How it has
no respect for the living. How it doesn't care who gets injured.
How it cares nothing about safety. How it cares about nothing but
profit. How it knows no distinction between war and peace. How it
cares nothing about repression, racism, sexism, human rights,
economic crises, famines, epidemics, environmental destruction, the
non-sustainability of resources. That it only knows that it must
exploit labor and extract surplus value. That it is dead labor
ruling over the living. Private property ruling over human need.
Leisure classes living off the toiling classes with no regard for
the future. Liberal and far-sighted thinkers are often appalled at
these results of capitalism. They may seek to moderate it, slow it
down, smooth its edges, try to arrange for a more humane form of
capitalist economic organization. But capital itself has no such
ethic. It has no such concerns. It is a dagger that pierces the
heart of every living human being and every social system - **and
every activity system** - around the globe. It forces all active
humans, and all human activity, to live and behave according to its
demands.
OK, so I'll get off that soapbox. This is just the classic
historical materialist perspective, straight from Marx and Engels.
My experiences in these factories just made their perspectives about
the relations between capital and labor a little more visible than
one usually gets to observe. The principles are the same anywhere.
So how does this relate to the question of whether to call Change
Labs "business management consulting"?
On one hand, I think, Yrjö, that you justifiably argue that Change
Labs are something different from the usual outfit this term refers
to. Just as workers working on a process improvement, such as
designing a new hand tool, or recommending that management purchase
some equipment may initiate changes that could help make their
workday easier, and perhaps safer, and doing this could empower them
to think a little more deeply about their work processes and social
relations, a Change Lab could help push such processes along even
further. It could help sharpen existing conceptual tools, and
introduce some new ones. Moreover, a Change Lab can do something
more - it can share these experiences at the level of public
democratic scientific discourse, further empowering certain kinds of
intrinsic working class processes by seeking ways to generalize
them. I think these are all valid points.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake, in my opinion, to hope or
suggest that helping give workers some additional voice in workplace
process improvement somehow changes their **relationship** to
capital. This point is key. The relationship between capital and
labor, according to this argument, remains the same. In this sense,
any process improvement activity, whether by a for-profit consulting
firm, a group of worker-oriented scientists or just a team of shop
floor workers, is really just a form of "business management
consulting." The only "power" these workers (or others) at best
have is to collect some information, talk it over, and make some
recommendations. Whatever personally motivates these workers, such
as making things safer for themselves, and they may indeed improve
their health accordingly (for example, get rid of a toxic chemical),
it is still ultimately also a form of serving capital, of improving
profits, of complying with the dictatorship of capital in the
workplace. That is what it means to work in the first place. You
are making profits for the boss. I know this first hand - I've been
there! Done that! LOL Process improvement is just a form of
rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. Perhaps it will keep
you a little more out of the rain for a few days, but eventually ...
This doesn't mean, in my view, that workers shouldn't take advantage
of having some voice when offered it, or that scientists should not
get involved with process improvement efforts in workplaces when
they can. I think the principled worker-oriented basis that you
describe, Yrjö, for scientists to use when they get involved in work
places is a fine model. I would like to see other social scientists
emulate it. I think what I did was basically okay, too - I
essentially followed the same principles, although maybe sometimes I
went a little over the top with some of the privileges I sometimes
enjoyed. (For example, there were periods, when I was working with
more than one shift, when I was allowed to self-determine what hours
I worked, as long as I worked a full shift myself. My coworkers
always said "Why not? Go for it!" and so I did.) My point is, as
workers, when we are given a voice, when we get the chance to
practice speaking and thinking, we should take advantage of it.
Limited as these opportunities usually are, these are good things
for the oppressed classes. And it is a good thing when progressive
scientists and workers can work together.
But again, we need to be clear on the difference between thinking up
a tool to help the boss make a profit - and thinking about how to
organize a strike or demonstration, how to reach out to other
workers about pressing social issues, etc. etc. One ultimately
serves capital, and the other empowers its historical opposite, the
working classes and their allies. This is the kind of fundamental
distinction in motive and activity object that I think CHAT can
make, and which I believe the Change Lab approach, in principle,
strives to make.
So, to bring this back to the original question, it seems to me to
be fair to come up with a different description for Change Labs than
to just lump them in with "business management consulting." None of
your principles, Yrjö, are captured in that phrase. But insofar as
process improvements are being engaged in, some of the motives and
activity objects must also serve capital, so that truth is also
there. It is a highly contradictory situation, and I can very much
testify from personal experience to that! I don't yet have an
offhand suggestion for an alternative term, but I'm thinking.
Anyone have any ideas? Thoughts, Yrjö?
- Steve
On Sep 13, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Yrjö Engeström wrote:
A brief response to Steve Gabosch:
Business management consulting is a rather big for-profit industry.
Some of its basic characteristics are: (a) consultants do it to
make profit, (b) they produce their analyses and recommendations
for management, not for the entire working community of a client
organization to share, (c) the analyses and recommendations are
proprietary and confidential, they are typically not published, (d)
the methods and procedures used by the consultants are not subject
to critical peer review.
Every project I undertake to study an organization, including
projects which use the Change Laboratory as their method, follows a
set of entirely different principles, namely: (a) it is not
conducted to make profit; when the target organization agrees to
fund some part of a project, it does so by entering into a research
contract with my university, and the money received (besides the
overhead) is spent on the salaries of members of my research group,
typically doctoral students and postdocs, (b) the knowledge we
produce in a project is made available to the entire working
community of the organization, usually with special emphasis on
trade union representation in the monitoring of the project, (c)
the analyses and findings are published, preferably in peer-
reviewed journals and books but also in more popular publications,
(d) our methods and procedures are made explicit, published, and
subject to critical peer review.
Cheers,
Yrjö Engeström
Steve Gabosch kirjoitti 12.9.2010 kello 23.42:
Yrjö, along with Peter I have also had the apparently false
impression that doing things like setting up a Change Lab in a
hospital is a form of business management consulting. The goal of
helping to "construct settings more conducive to collective
productivity" was explicit in articles I've read, and that seems
consistent with essential goals of business management
consulting. I've heard this conception of the Change Lab
mentioned at least verbally by many people, including myself.
This description is not meant to be anything but an objective
description of essential relationships. I worked in a factory for
years, and if someone had set up a Change Lab, it would have
looked and acted exactly like business management consultants
interacting with people on the floor. Such interactive projects
did appear periodically, sometimes led by Japanese "lean
manufacturing" oriented consultants. I suspect others besides
myself have used the same reasoning to view the Change Lab as a
form of business management consulting. No one, of course, wants
to misrepresent anything. Would you please set things straight?
Other than methods of arriving at suggestions and recommendations,
what is the difference?
- Steve
On Sep 12, 2010, at 5:02 AM, Yrjö Engeström wrote:
This is a brief comment to Peter Smagorinsky's message, copied
below.
Quixotian attacks on triangles have been a relatively common
genre for some years now. I usually do not get involved in those
discussions because I don't find them productive. However, I am
slightly bothered by the following sentence in Peter's message:
"Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it [the
'triangle framework'] as a consultant to business management to
help construct settings more conducive to collective productivity."
Since I have never done business management consulting, I would
like to know on what readings Peter might be basing his statement.
Cheers,
Yrjö Engeström
-----
smago kirjoitti 10.9.2010 kello 22.29:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA
Mike Cole is heading out on vacation, and so asked me to start
the discussion of the MCA article "Construction of Boundaries in
Teacher Education: Analyzing Student Teachers' Accounts," which
the electorate identified as this issue's paper for us to
consider on the network. I didn't know that Mike actually took
vacations. But I did agree to help launch this discussion, and
help to sustain it once it gets going. I have done a number of
studies with similar populations to those featured in this
article-that is, I've studied the transition that teachers make
when moving from their university preparation through the first
year of full-time teaching. I've also been part of a university
teacher education program in English Education (which is the
teaching of literature, writing, and language; it is not ESOL)
for the last two decades, and before that regularly mentored
student teachers in my jobs at secondary schools in the US. So I
do have some familiarity with the issues at stake in this article.
One difference: Jahreie and Ottesen use what they call "Cultural-
Historical Activity Theory" to motivate their work, and I once
did too. But as CHAT has gravitated to Engeström's
interpretation and exposition via his Triangle, I have moved
away from this orientation and now only claim to use Vygotskian
principles to formulate my analyses. So if I were to pose an
opening question that perhaps might appeal to those who aren't
interested in teacher education, it would be: What is CHAT, and
which version of it do we invoke when we claim to use it? Cole's
Cultural Psychology did include the famous Triangle, yet seemed
very ecumenical in drawing on a host of sources so that it was
not the centerpiece of his conception of CHAT. Engeström's
system seems more closed to me, involving a specific set of
terms and constructs all bound in The Triangle. Perhaps because
I entered this field through the writing of Vygotsky and Wertsch
(and Engeström is clear in the introductory chapter to
Perspectives on Activity Theory that Wertsch is not an activity
theorist, nor are Lave and Wenger), I don't equate Engeström
with either Activity Theory or CHAT, and have disavowed that
nomenclature in my more recent work. So what is it about the
Triangle that has become so alluring that it has squeezed out
other compelling conceptions of Leont'ev's reformulation of
Vygotsky's work so that it shifts attention from the individual-
in-context to the collective itself? I find this shift to be
particularly troubling in U.S.-based scholarship in which the
Triangle is often thrown up on conference screens but never put
to any evident use in the research reported. For Scandinavians
and others from nations with more collectivist orientations, the
adoption of a wholeheartedly Marxist approach makes better
cultural sense. And with that I will move to the article in
question, authored by faculty members from the University of Oslo.
Jahreie and Ottesen's article concerns the conflicting demands
of the different settings faced by student teachers-those who
are at the end of their university teacher education programs
and beginning to transition to school-based teaching positions
by apprenticing under the mentorship of a full-time teacher,
ideally one who is a "master" teacher (but as I know from
experience, this is not always the case). In my reading of the
paper, I see an effort to use Engeström's terminology to account
for processes involved when student teachers engage with
established members of different settings that inevitably
provide different "objects" for activity: the university with
its effort to produce a particular kind of teacher, and the
schools with their efforts to produce a particular kind of
student. A second general question I would pose is: From what I
can tell, most countries have settled on a very similar model
for teacher education: general education coursework, specialized
disciplinary course work, education course work, field
experiences, student teaching, and then the first job. Given
that this model seems to occur worldwide-amidst nations of
different emphasis, orientation to learning, economic structure
and process, history, demographics, and so on-what broader
activity setting seems to suggest this approach as the most
efficacious in the preparation of new teachers, regardless of
national character and culture? In the U.S. there are presently
moves afoot to provide alternative pathways to teaching careers,
but most university programs follow this sequence. Apparently
this process, with expected variation, is universal. But why?
To return to a separate point emerging from this same general
observation: The authors say (p. 231) that "The object of the
activity for the [university Department of Teacher Education] is
student teachers' learning trajectories. The object of activity
for the schools, however, is pupils' learning." Actually I think
it's more complicated than that, at least in the schools, where
a primary problem facing educators is agreeing on the purpose of
education. Even "student learning" is a highly contested
construct, one that creates the sort of boundary problems
elaborated in this article. In schools, it's often the ability
to perform on tests, while in the "progressive" university
environment, it might involve learning more about the self and
how to express or explore it. Or something else. For some
people, schools exist to socialize young people into adult
roles, often based on the economic circumstances of their
families. For others they should promote upward mobility. Or
learn a trade, or become better informed citizens, or learn to
follow authority, or learn to question authority, or learn how
to memorize information, or learn how to construct knowledge, or
learn how to answer questions, or learn how to pose questions,
or do any of many other things. I've referred to this problem as
the "mixed motive" of the setting of schools, one that can shift
from teacher to teacher, which complicates the idea that the
"object of activity for the schools is student learning."
Another question thus might be, For complex settings like
schools, how do we know what the object of activity is? (I'm
using the authors' language here; I'm more comfortable with
Wertsch's use of "motive" [1985] to describe the overriding
teleological goal toward which activity in a setting is directed.)
I'll pose one final question before inviting others to
contribute to the discussion: What are the perils involved in
using The Triangle as an a priori framework for studying
activity? Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it as
a consultant to business management to help construct settings
more conducive to collective productivity. To what degree can it
then be extrapolated to other kinds of settings that do not
share the business environment's relatively closed-ended motive
(to produce and sell widgets, etc.)? When the objects/goals/
motives are less amenable to agreement, how appropriate is The
Triangle as a template for understanding activity, or promoting
activity of a certain sort? When the transfer of The Triangle
involves a great leap, as from a post office to a school, to
what degree might it serve as a Procrustean Bed rather than a
useful heuristic for understanding activity? (Procrustes was an
Attican thief who laid his victims on his iron bed. If a victim
was shorter than the bed, he stretched the body to fit; if the
victim was too long, he cut off the legs to make the body fit.
In either case the victim died.)
OK, that's enough of a starter kit. Please join in and feel free
to ignore what I've written and launch something else, or help
me clarify my confusion regarding the questions I've raised.
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