CHAT and practice: activities and contradictions

This section describes in detail CHAT’s view of practice as “activities”. This articulates how practice and power are conceptualised in the study, and thus how the 6P sensitivities are

operationalised using particular CHAT concepts. Activity systems, activity networks and associated contradictions are the core CHAT components in this study.

In CHAT, in-situ practice is traditionally understood as activities (Nicolini, 2012; Miettinen et al, 2009: 1317). Activities are analysed through activity systems and activity networks (Engeström, 1987; Karanasios & Allen, 2013: 300), which are changing over time due to historically and culturally facto. Activities involve subjects (e.g. people, groups), tools (concepts, technologies), and objects (purposes, goals) of activities (Engeström, 1987; Blackler & Regan, 2009). One account of CHAT’s evolution posits an expansion of the notion of activity over three generations. The first generation drew on Vygotsky’s (1978) concerns with how an individual subject’s consciousness develops through tools and concepts used in everyday learning activities. The second generation grew through Leontyev’s (1978) emphasis on collaborative group activity. And the third generation is associated with Engeström’s (1987) discussion of organisations as activity systems and networks.

Vygotsky (1978) explored the social and interactional basis of individual child language development within a Marxist psychology, radical at the time, which attempted to unite material and mental perspectives in a non-dualistic approach. Vygotsky understood meaning as formed through subjects, objects (or objectives), and mediating tools e.g. linguistic concepts or material artefacts (Figure 4.3). In this view, the individual learner, their goals, and available physical or knowledge resources contributes to outcomes, learning, change and wider culture.

Also important is Vygotsky’s view of activity as the methodological unit of analysis, which contrasts with the positivist “accepted scientific paradigm” according to Holzman (2006: 112a). In positivist thinking, method is understood as a tool separate to and yielding of representational results. In contrast, Vygotsky saw methods and results as elements within developing activities. In this view, evaluation methods are considered elements within evaluation activities, “simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result” (Vygotsky, 1978: 65; Holzman, 2006b). In short, methods and results are parts of ongoing practice, not external representations of it.

Vygotsky’s student and colleague Leontyev emphasised how group activity and interaction contributed to individual psychological development. A canonical example in Leontyev’s work is the hunting expedition as an illustration of the division of labour. For Leontyev, when primitive humans hunted game for food, individuals would take on different roles such as maintaining a fire, cooking, pursuing the game, or waiting to ambush it (Leontyev, 2009: 186- 187). This role specialisation contributed to diverse psychological development across populations and diverse possession of specialised knowledge. For Leontyev, this knowledge was relational and intricately tied to ongoing activity: “Knowledge of a thing is only possible in its relation to other things, in reciprocal action with them, in motion” (Leontyev, 2009: 25)

In today’s data/knowledge intensive development sector, Leontyev’s insight into knowledge in motion, is important for understanding the many locales of knowledge labour required to construct and circulate impact data, claims or narratives. Combining Vygotsky and Leontyev to look at aid sector evaluations implicates individuals in multiple groups that are constructing impact data, knowledge, methods, and results across dispersed organisational activities. Engeström’s work explicitly moves to this larger organisational scale.

To analyse organisational activities, Engeström (1987: 78) developed an activity system model for incorporating rules, social norms, communities and the divisions of labour that shape activities (Figure 4.4). Activity systems take shape and are developed over “lengthy periods of time” (Engeström 2001: 136). They are best analysed in terms of their historical development; that is, the “history of the theoretical ideas and tools that have shaped the activity” (ibid).

Figure 4.4: Activity systems including social relations (Engeström: 1987: 78)

CHAT acknowledges multiple, intersecting or interwoven activities in networks (Engeström, 1987: 103; Karanasios & Allen, 2013: 300), for example in Knowledge Management (Blackler, 1995; Worthen, 2008) or Development Studies (Karanasios, 2014; Kontinen, 2007) (Figure 4.5).

Fundamentally important for this study is the ability to analyse how one evaluation activity produces knowledge or data that is then used in follow-on activities, or how knowledge is “in motion” in Leontyev’s terms. Worthen (2008) discussed similar parallel processes of knowledge production in everyday work, and this motion is well-illustrated by Miettinen et al (2012) in relation to the design of physical products: “a product designed & fabricated becomes a tool for use in another activity” (Miettinen et al, 2012: 11).

Conceptual products are considered outcomes of activities, but during their production - within and between activity systems - tensions and contradictions arise. These manifest to researchers as localised “problems, ruptures, break downs, and clashes” (Kuutti, 1996: 37), and can arise as symptoms of deeper activity use/exchange value contradictions. Engeström (1987) describes four kinds of contradiction within activities and between activities (Table 4.1).

Contradiction Description

Primary (1) Within single activity system elements, e.g. within a rule or a tool Secondary (2) Between activity elements, e.g. between a tool and the community

Tertiary (3) Between an activity and its earlier formation, e.g. old/new farming methods Quaternary (4) Between activity systems in a network, e.g. marketing and production

Table 4.1: Description of kinds of activity system contradictions

As we have seen in section 4.3.2, CHAT interventions support dialogue and collaboration with participants in organisations to resolve work contradictions and explore opportunities for expansive learning and new ways of working. Kontinen (2007) has identified six such contradictions directly relevant to and likely to be experienced in development and NGO work. These contradictions generate conflicts and dilemmas for practitioners, that become embedded into “historically formed institutions, discourses and ideas” in development (ibid: 9-10). Kontinen advises researchers to be aware of these contradictions, but to also be open to novelty and unexpected findings (ibid: 13). The contradictions are listed below and inform the case analysis and discussion in later chapters. Development work contradictions: development

discourse versus development practice; rationalised input/output project blueprints versus messy, complex social processes; equal versus unequal ownership of initiatives; external/distant control versus immanent control by local communities; technical and professional development logics emphasising solution management versus moral development logics emphasising social justice and political change; and, critical analysis as “a commitment to improving practices” (ibid: 12) versus research that is critical of development itself. Activities are traditionally understood in activity theory as part of institutional work. Historically, such institutions have dominated activities, producing stable activity systems such schools or clinics (Hedegaard et al, 1999):

“Different institutions - home, daycare, school - were dominated by different activities; the dominating activity in an institution acquired the role as leading activities in different periods in a person’s life”. (Hedegaard et al, 1999: 14).

However, views of activities and their boundaries have expanded in CHAT. Hedegaard et al. acknowledged Elkonin’s (1972) role in diversifying the view of traditional and stable institutional activities. Engeström’s (1987) early work on activity systems and networks added to this expansion. In his more recent work on the fluidity of contemporary activities (Engeström, 2009) and how they can be conceptualised as organic patterns (e.g. mycorrhizae process trails) or runaway collaborative objects that go viral, Engeström shows this to mean that activities do not necessarily have a centre or a controlling core. They are globally diffused, as in the case of Wikipedia. In a similar way, knowledge construction today is less likely to be purely local or occurring in small groups and bounded activities. NGO impact evaluation is subject to what Blackler & Regan call (2009: 164) “distributed agencies”, where methods, demands, subjects, data, and results are globally distributed. Describing distributed activities across systems, networks or chains supports a more nuanced understanding of power, data and knowledge relations relevant to the 6P sensitivities as: “Human activity does not exist except in the form of action or a chain of actions (Leontyev, 1978: 64; Engeström 2000a: 307)

In summary, a key aspect of the approach builds on how CHAT has over time broadened its view of how situated practices are formed, sustained, stabilised and changed, from the level of individuals, to groups, systems, networks and globally distributed activities. In the next section, the novel notion of CHAT-based temporal sequences of distributed activities is introduced as a key analytic for understanding activity sequences and power, data, knowledge relations.