This section shortly describes the basic notions of activity theory.
Human activity:
The fundamental unit of analysis in activity theory is the human activity (Russian: deyatel’nost’). A. N. Leont’ev defines an activity as:
“Activity is a molar, not an additive unit of the life of the physical, material subject. In a narrower sense, that is, at the psychological level, it is a unit of life, mediated by psychic reflection, the real function of which is that it orients the subject in the objective world. In other words, activity is not a reaction and not a totality of reactions but a system that has structure, its own internal transitions and transformation, its own development.” (Leont’ev, 1978; p. 50).
The category of activity has to be viewed as a whole with its internal com-ponents and its specific dynamics. These internal comcom-ponents and dynamics cannot be analyzed separately without violating the very essence of human
activity. These components are: anactive subject (S) who directs his activity towards an object in the world (O), mediated by an artifact or a tool (T).
This schema is illustrated in figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1: The basic structure of mediated human activity
Object-orientation of specific activity:
Every activity is specific and each activity is distinguished from one-another by their respective objects. It is the activity’s object that gives it a specific direction, i.e. is the objective of the activity (Leont’ev, 1981; p. 59). The notion of object in activity theory is not limited to the physical, chemical, and biological properties of entities. Socially and culturally determined properties are also objective properties that can be object for an activity, and hence also be studied with objective methods. An example of a cultural object is the highly prestigious position as a neurosurgeon.
The object is connected to themotive of the activity, hence a person’s activ-ity is motivated by the object and we thus call the activactiv-ity object-oriented (not to be mistaken for the programming paradigm). Becoming a neuro-surgeon can hence be an motive for a medical student. There can be no activity without a motive: “Unmotivated activity is not activity devoid of a motive: it is activity with a motive that subjectively and objectively con-cealed.” (Ibid., p. 59). This also means that people may not always be consciously aware of the objective of the activity in which they participate.
This subjective concealment of the objective of an activity plays an impor-tant role in understanding why work for some people in an organization can become routinized.
Social embedding of human activity:
The purpose that Leont’ev had by introducing the concept of activity was, however, concerned with the social institutional milieu in which psycholog-ical processes occur. The concept of activity is fundamental social in this sense and hence provides an excellent foundation for a further discussion of cooperative work activities.
“Human psychology is concerned with the activity of concrete individuals, which takes place either in a collective – i.e., jointly with other people – or in a situation in which the subject deals directly with the surrounding world of objects – e.g., at the pot-ter’s wheel or the wripot-ter’s desk. However, if we removed human activity from the system of social relationships and social life, it would not exist and would have no structure. With all its varied forms, the human individual’s activity is a system in the system of social relations. It does not exist without these relations.”
(Leont’ev, 1981; p. 47).
This social nature of human activity has been further elaborated by En-gestr¨om (1987), who in addition to the tool mediating the subject’s activity towards the object, identifies two other mediators: (i) rules and norms me-diating the subject’s relation to the work community and (ii) a division of work mediating the community’s relation to the object of work.
Mediation of human activity by artifacts:
The social nature of an activity also helps us understand the concept of an artifact and its role as both a mediator and a product of human activity.
The concept of a mediating artifact originates in the work of Vygotsky.
“Vygotsky identified two main, interconnected features [of human activity /jb] that are necessarily fundamental for psychology: its tool-like (“instrumental”) structure, and its inclusion in a system of interaction with other people.” (Leont’ev, 1981; p. 56).
This basic idea has several consequences in the analysis of human activity.
First, tools are functional extensions of the human body (“functional or-gans”) and hence shape the way humans interact with reality – “you see the world through your tool”. This is true not only for the interaction with the world of objects but also with other people. Second, tools are developed in the course of activity. An artifact is made to mediate a certain activ-ity and the mediating characteristics of an activactiv-ity is therefore crystallized into these artifacts, and through use, the artifacts are continuously modi-fied and shaped to meet the evolving changes of the activity. Third, this social embedded crystallization implies that a tool reflects the accumulated cultural-historical experiences of other people who tried to solve similar prob-lems before and invented or modified the tool to make it more efficient and useful. This experience is accumulated in the structural (natural) properties of the tool (size, shape, and material) as well as in the knowledge of how the tool should be used, i.e. the tool’s cultural-historical properties (Mammen, 1993). Fourth, by applying tools in activities, humans’ activity assimilates the experiences of humankind (Leont’ev, 1981; p. 56). This last property of tool mediation is critical for activity theory, because it means that a person learns about the very essence of being a human being, namely the cultural-historical properties of the embedding social system, by applying its tools to mediate his or hers activity.
Vygotsky extended the notion of mediation by tools to mediation by signs.
He specifically differentiated between technical tools and psychological signs where psychological signs are means of controlling human behavior – both one’s own and others. Hence systems of signs mediate the coordination of one’s effort with others and the self-regulation of the activity. There is thus an instrumental as well as acommunicative side of any activity. When speaking of mediation, the term sign system are used rather than the term language, because it should encompass all kinds of human interaction, including in-dexical, symbolic, iconic, and conceptual communication (Wertsch, 1981; p.
24).
The structure of an activity:
One of the most important parts of Leont’ev’s work was his analysis of the structure of the activity. Activity theory differentiates between three
func-tionally subordinated hierarchical levels of components: activity (Russian:
deyatel’nost’), action (Russian: deistvie), and operation (Russian: operat-siya). The characteristics of the activity as motivated, object-oriented, me-diated, and social have already been described. Actions are goal-directed processes that are carried out to achieve different results. These results then in turn realize the object of the activity and the actions are hence subordi-nated to the overall activity. The goal and result are for the action what the motive and the object are for the activity. For example, the request of an X-ray examination is an action in the diagnosing activity of the physician.
Actions are conscious; people are aware of their goals. Goals can be broken into lower level subgoals, e.g. the request for the radiology examination can be broken into filling in a request form, handing it to the radiology depart-ment, and later on look for the result of the examination. As we shall return to, the actions that realize an activity might have internal dependencies and therefore have to be ordered in some sense. The activity and the action cannot be reduced to each other; they are genuinely different components that explain the activity at two different levels: the activity explainswhy the activity is taking place (the motive) and the actions explain what must be done to achieve this objective (the goals).
An action has its own components, namely the operations, which are the pro-cesses that carry out the action. This operational level of the activity explains how the activity is performed. Moving down the hierarchy from actions to operations we cross the border between conscious and automatic processes.
Operations are carried out automatically accordingly to theconditions of the situation and thus do not have their own conscious representation.
Humans have a repertoire of actions and operations to apply in different sit-uations and for different purposes. Hence, one and the same action can be instrumental in realizing different activities, and one and the same operation can be used in several different actions. For example, the radiology examina-tion is used in the diagnosing activity as well as in the activity of monitoring the progress of a treatment. Similar, the operations necessary for filling in the order form are applied in many other circumstances. This means that the activity is ‘content-free’ in the sense that it is not tied to a particular set of structural defined steps, but can be realized in many different ways (Wertsch, 1981; p. 20).
Another important aspect of this three-level hierarchy of an activity is the
constant transformation that takes place between its levels – both vertical and horizontal. An activity can loose its motive, whereupon it becomes an action. Conversely, an action can acquire an independent, energizing force and become an activity on its own. Actions transform into operations when they become routinized and unconscious with practice. The other way, an operation can be conceptualized into an action; either deliberately as a way of enhancing them (e.g. in athletics) or involuntary in “those cases in which the action is performed under conditions that make it difficult to carry it out with the help of operations that have been formed earlier” (Leont’ev, 1981;
p. 66). This is what Bødker (1991) following Winograd and Flares (1986) calls a breakdown.
A fundamental characteristic of human actions is that “one of the actions involved in an activity in one situation may be considered to be an entire activity in another situation” (Wertsch 1981 p. 19). The analysis of activities depends on the subjective stance in the web of activities. Thus, for the intern assigned to provide a diagnosis of a patient this might be at the level of an activity, whereas for the senior physician in charge of the overall treatment, the diagnosing is but the first action in a long line of interdependent actions that he has distributed onto other actors within the hospital.