[Xmca-l] Re: Leontyev's activities

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Two things Greg.

Firstly, most definitely the caddy and the player are involved in the 
same project or activity. Self-evidently. Each are also involved in 
other activities, and reflecting on these other activities may shed 
light on how they come to be collaborating in the shared project of the 
player's game. Like master and servant, people always collaborate in a 
particular mode. The archetypes of these modes of collaboration are 
master-servant, customer-provider and collaboration per se. It is 
important to recognise these different modes of collaboration because 
otherwise we tend to force *all* collaboration into the same mode, which 
may cause us to misconstrue some relations. The fact that different 
participants have different social positions within a project means that 
they each are bound by different sides of the same norms. That is, the 
norms of meaning, belief and action prevailing in the project mandate 
different meanings, beliefs and actions for different participants. The 
tensions arising from these asymmetrical relationships is one of the 
motors of change.

Secondly, no, projects do not exist *between* persons, persons exist 
*between* projects. This is just another effort by you, Greg, to make 
the unit of analysis the individual person. The relevants units of 
analysis of Activity Theory are operation, action and activity. :)

Andy

Greg Thompson wrote:
> ...
>
> "Motive" seems a slippery concept to rest too much on. Andy I'm 
> wondering how you answer the question you put to Roland, namely 
> whether or not master and slave are participating in the same 
> activity/project? Or, what about a golfer and caddy? And so on down 
> to, as Phillip and Carol point out - the different participants in a 
> discussion on XMCA.
>
> ...
>
> Goffman's answer is interesting in that he doesn't rely on the motives 
> (motivational relevancies) of the participants, but rather creates a 
> notion of the local context as a "frame" that exists somewhere between 
> participants. No one person can dictate the frame (even dictators have 
> to deal with the possibility of duplicitousness - the word with a 
> side-wards glance - hence irony is a powerful weapon of the weak - 
> even if James Scott didn't recognize this, Bakhtin clearly did). 
> Frames emerge as participants take parts in the unfolding play of some 
> event or happening, and, to a certain extent, without regard to 
> alignment of the motives of the participants. Every once in a while 
> the motives of all participants create a frame may be relatively 
> closely aligned, but it seems much more common that frames are built 
> out of a plethora of motives.