The Development of Activity Theory: Relating the Individual to the

Vygotsky’s ideas were not developed fully during his brief lifetime, and his work was continued by Leont’ev, his student and colleague. Early Activity Theory was limited in its scope as it focussed on the individual, but Leont’ev extended the concepts in order to explain key differences between an individual action and collective activity (Engeström, 2001). While an action is concerned with an individual or group accomplishing a goal, an activity involves a community with an object and a motive (Bakhurst, 2009). For example, a candidate running for a political office campaigns in his/her constituency with a motive to obtain support to be voted in as a member of the government. This activity also involves a community of personnel who supports the candidate by scheduling the campaign sessions, organising the publicity, and ensuring the suitability and security of the campaign venues. This community shares the same motive with the candidate.

Leont’ev emphasised the significance of the object, which involves the product or the motive which the subject acts on during an activity, suggesting that activities are differentiated by the objects that are pursued (Barab et al, 2004). In describing the goals in activity, Leont’ev (1974) further distinguished them as immediate and the larger overall goals. He described activity as consisting of three hierarchical layers – activities, actions, and operations. At the top layer of this hierarchy is the activity itself and it is concerned with a motive which is the object. The object stimulates the subject to eventually attain it and in the process the subject transforms the object into an outcome. Activities involve actions, of which individuals are consciously aware and are often related to knowledge and skills. In the example of the communal hunt provided by Leont’ev (1981), the action of one group of hunters who beat the bushes to scare the animal in order to move them towards the direction of the second group who will kill it requires the related knowledge and skills. The beaters need to know when and how to beat the bushes

44

to ensure that the animal moves towards the desired direction, and ensure that it does not escape or attack them instead.

Actions, which are at the low level of the hierarchy, involve conscious goal- directed processes that need to be attempted to accomplish the object. For instance, making a hunting weapon is a low level action, which involves the finding of materials and tools that are suitable for that purpose. Operations, which are at the lowest ranking level are concerned with how action is actually conducted and largely involves automatic processes, as “every operation is the result of a transformation of an action, resulting from its inclusion in another action and its ensuing “routinization” (Leont'ev, 1974, p. 26-27). For example making a phone call entails the conscious action of dialling a phone number, but pressing the buttons on the phone is automatically performed.

Leont’ev’s (1981) view of activity as consisting of three hierarchical layers involving the actions of the individual as part of the wider collective object of an activity can be extended to the educational context. A group of teachers might be focussed on working with others to teach a particular topic as a collective object, which is shared with the immediate group. For example in the context of the language classroom, teachers could work together to design reading comprehension exercises to support the students’ development of reading skills. Although the activity involves working towards a collective object, the work consists of a number of individual actions such as searching, identifying, and evaluating the relevant resources that could be used to design the exercises. In turn, these individual actions consist of a variety of operations, which occur as habitual routines such as reading magazines or newspapers to select appropriate texts, adapting the selected texts to suit the level of the students, and formulating questions to assess students’ understanding of the text. These operations are shaped by conditions in the setting. For example, the ease of searching for the relevant reading text might be affected by a limitation of resources or the availability of suitable resources. This challenge delays the activity as the teachers have to be more meticulous when identifying, selecting, and adapting the reading texts. These actions may move upwards on the hierarchical activity and become a conscious action, which requires a degree of attention and effort instead of an

45

automatic process. The conceptualisation of activity as advocated by Leont’ev (1974, 1981) focuses attention on how activities can be disaggregated into sub- components, and how individual activity is both collective and individual at the same time (Barab et al, 2004; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006).

Although Leont’ev emphasised the significance of a collective system, he did not extend Vygotsky’s original framework model (Engeström, 2001) - it was developed further by Engeström (1987). His new structure emphasised the role of cultural mediation, the social, cultural, and historical context of activity, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Activity Theory advanced the idea that a natural focus for the study of human behaviour is activity systems, which can be understood as historically conditioned systems of relationships among individuals and their proximal, culturally-organised environments (Cole & Engeström, 1993). For example, to provide further practice to develop students’ listening skills, a teacher plans a lesson that requires the use of the school’s self- access facility. The realisation of this plan is dependent on a number of sociocultural conditions. The facility might not be available at the intended time and rescheduling the session affects another teacher’s subject schedule. Also, access to the facility might be hampered due to weather conditions of the day particularly when a shaded walkway is not available.

This expanded description of Activity Theory shifted from an emphasis on individual action and processes “to include a minimal meaningful context which is called an activity” (Issroff & Scanlon, 2002, p. 78). In describing this expanded model, Engeström (1987) conceptualised the activity system as comprising of six interacting components, which are the subject, the tool and signs, object, rules, community, and division of labour. Based on this conceptualisation of activity, the action of the individual becomes embedded as part of a system and meaning is derived from a community of people who share the same object (Engeström 1987, 2001). A diagram of this expanded description of Activity Theory which is also known as second generation Activity Theory is illustrated in Figure 2.3 on the next page.

46

Figure 2.3 The mediational structure of an activity system (Lim & Hang,

2003, p. 52, reprinted with permission)