Советская психологическая теория деятельности и психосоциальное старение

Soviet psychological framework
the psychosocial theory of aging

Activity theory (AT; Теория деятельности) is an umbrella term for a line of eclectic social sciences theories and research with its roots in the Soviet psychological activity theory pioneered by Sergei Rubinstein in the 1930s. It was later advocated for and popularized by Alexei Leont'ev. Some of the traces of the theory in its inception can also be found in a few works of Lev Vygotsky. These scholars sought to understand human activities as systemic and socially situated phenomena and to go beyond paradigms of reflexology (the teaching of Vladimir Bekhterev and his followers) and classical conditioning (the teaching of Ivan Pavlov and his school), psychoanalysis and behaviorism. It became one of the major psychological approaches in the former USSR, being widely used in both theoretical and applied psychology, and in education, professional training, ergonomics, social psychology and work psychology. Activity theory is more of a descriptive meta theory or framework than a predictive theory. It considers an entire work/activity system (including teams, organizations, etc.) beyond just one actor or user. It accounts for environment, history of the person, culture, role of the artifact, motivations, and complexity of real life activity. One of the strengths of AT is that it bridges the gap between the individual subject and the social reality—it studies both through the mediating activity. The unit of analysis in AT is the concept of object oriented, collective and culturally mediated human activity, or activity system. This system includes the object (or objective), subject, mediating artifacts (signs and tools), rules, community and division of labor. The motive for the activity in AT is created through the tensions and contradictions within the elements of the system. According to ethnographer Bonnie Nardi, a leading theorist in AT, activity theory "focuses on practice, which obviates the need to distinguish 'applied' from 'pure' science—understanding everyday practice in the real world is the very objective of scientific practice. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity." Sometimes called "Cultural Historical Activity Theory", this approach is particularly useful for studying a group that exists "largely in virtual form, its communications mediated largely through electronic and printed texts." Cultural Historical Activity Theory has accordingly also been applied to genre theory within writing studies to consider how quasi stabilized forms of communication regularize relations and work while forming communally shared knowledge and values in both educational and workplace settings. AT is particularly useful as a lens in qualitative research methodologies (e. g., ethnography, case study). AT provides a method of understanding and analyzing a phenomenon, finding patterns and making inferences across interactions, describing phenomena and presenting phenomena through a built in language and rhetoric. A particular activity is a goal directed or purposeful interaction of a subject with an object through the use of tools. These tools are exteriorized forms of mental processes manifested in constructs, whether physical or psychological. As a result the notion of tools in AT is broad and can involve stationary, digital devices, library materials, or even physical meeting spaces. AT recognizes the internalization and externalization of cognitive processes involved in the use of tools, as well as the transformation or development that results from the interaction.

The origins of activity theory can be traced to several sources, which have subsequently given rise to various complementary and intertwined strands of development. This account will focus on three of the most important of these strands. The first is associated with the Moscow Institute of Psychology and in particular the "troika" of young Russian researchers, Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Luria. Vygotsky founded cultural historical psychology, a field that became the basis for modern AT; Leont'ev, one of the principal founders of activity theory, both developed and reacted against Vygotsky's work. Leont'ev's formulation of general activity theory is currently a strong influence in post Soviet developments in AT, which have largely been in social scientific, organizational, and writing studies rather than psychological research and organization. The second major line of development within activity theory involves Russian scientists, such as P. K. Anokhin and Nikolai Bernstein, more directly concerned with the neurophysiological basis of activity; its foundation is associated with the Soviet philosopher of psychology Sergei Rubinstein. This work was subsequently developed by researchers such as Pushkin, Zinchenko & Gordeeva, Ponomarenko, Zarakovsky and others, and is currently most well known through the work on systemic structural activity theory being carried out by G. Z. Bedny and his associates, including a focus on the application of this theory as well as other related theories. Finally, in the Western world, discussions and use of AT are primarily framed within the Scandinavian activity theory strand, developed by Yrjö Engeström.

After Vygotsky's early death, Leont'ev became the leader of the research group nowadays known as the Kharkov School of Psychology and extended Vygotsky's research framework in significantly new ways. Leont'ev first examined the psychology of animals, looking at the different degrees to which animals can be said to have mental processes. He concluded that Pavlov's reflexionism was not a sufficient explanation of animal behaviour and that animals have an active relation to reality, which he called "activity". In particular, the behaviour of higher primates such as chimpanzees could only be explained by the ape's formation of multi phase plans using tools. Leont'ev then progressed to humans and pointed out that people engage in "actions" that do not in themselves satisfy a need, but contribute towards the eventual satisfaction of a need. Often, these actions only make sense in a social context of a shared work activity. This led him to a distinction between "activities", which satisfy a need, and the "actions" that constitute the activities. Leont'ev also argued that the activity in which a person is involved is reflected in their mental activity, that is (as he puts it) material reality is "presented" to consciousness, but only in its vital meaning or significance. Activity theory also influenced the development of organizational activity game as developed by Georgy Shchedrovitsky.

AT remained virtually unknown outside the Soviet Union until the mid 1980s, when it was picked up by Scandinavian researchers. The first international conference on activity theory was not held until 1986. The earliest non Soviet paper cited by Nardi is a 1987 paper by Yrjö Engeström: "Learning by expanding". This resulted in a reformulation of AT. Kuutti notes that the term "activity theory" "can be used in two senses: referring to the original Soviet tradition or referring to the international, multi voiced community applying the original ideas and developing them further." Some changes were introduced, apparently by importing notions from human–computer interaction theory. For instance, the notion of rules, which is not found in Leont'ev, was introduced. Also, the notion of collective subject was introduced in the 1970s and 1980s (Leont'ev refers to "joint labour activity", but only has individuals, not groups, as activity subjects).

The application of activity theory to information systems derives from the work of Bonnie Nardi and Kari Kuutti. Kuutti's work is addressed below. Nardi's approach is, briefly, as follows: Nardi (p. 6) described activity theory as " a powerful and clarifying descriptive tool rather than a strongly predictive theory. The object of activity theory is to understand the unity of consciousness and activity Activity theorists argue that consciousness is not a set of discrete disembodied cognitive acts (decision making, classification, remembering), and certainly it is not the brain; rather, consciousness is located in everyday practice: you are what you do." Nardi (p. 5) also argued that "activity theory proposes a strong notion of mediation—all human experience is shaped by the tools and sign systems we use." One stream of research has focused on technology mediated change and the implementation of technologies and how they disrupt, change and improve organisational work activity. In these studies, activity systems are used to understand emergent contradictions in the work activity, which are temporarily resolved using information systems (tools) and/or arising from the introduction of information systems. Information science studies use a similar approach to activity theory in order to understand information behaviour "in context". In the field of Information and communications technology (ICT) and development (a field of study within information systems), activity theory has also been used to inform development of IT systems and to frame the study of ICT in development settings. In addition, Etengoff & Daiute have conducted recent work exploring how social media interfaces can be productively used to mediate conflicts. Their work has illustrated this perspective with analyses of online interactions between gay men and their religious family members and Sunni Muslim emerging adults' efforts to maintain a positive ethnic identity via online religious forums in post 9/11 contexts.

The rise of the personal computer challenged the focus in traditional systems developments on mainframe systems for automation of existing work routines. It furthermore brought forth a need to focus on how to work on materials and objects through the computer. In the search of theoretical and methodical perspectives suited to deal with issues of flexibility and more advanced mediation between the human being, material and outcomes through the interface, it seemed promising to turn to the still rather young HCI research tradition that had emerged primarily in the US (for further discussion see Bannon & Bødker, 1991). Specifically the cognitive science based theories lacked means of addressing a number of issues that came out of the empirical projects (see Bannon & Bødker, 1991): 1. Many of the early advanced user interfaces assumed that the users were the designers themselves, and accordingly built on an assumption of a generic user, without concern for qualifications, work environment, division of work, etc. 2. In particular the role of the artifact as it stands between the user and her materials, objects and outcomes was ill understood. 3. In validating findings and designs there was a heavy focus on novice users whereas everyday use by experienced users and concerns for the development of expertise were hardly addressed. 4. Detailed task analysis and the idealized models created through task analysis failed to capture the complexity and contingency of real life action. 5. From the point of view of complex work settings, it was striking how most HCI focused on one user – one computer in contrast to the ever ongoing cooperation and coordination of real work situations (this problem later lead to the development of CSCW). 6. Users were mainly seen as objects of study. Because of these shortcomings, it was necessary to move outside cognitive science based HCI to find or develop the necessary theoretical platform. European psychology had taken different paths than had American with much inspiration from dialectical materialism (Hydén 1981, Engeström, 1987). Philosophers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein came to play an important role, primarily through discussions of the limitations of AI (Winograd & Flores 1986, Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986). Suchman (1987) with a similar focus introduced ethnomethodology into the discussions, and Ehn (1988) based his treatise of design of computer artifacts on Marx, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The development of the activity theoretical angle was primarily carried out by Bødker (1991, 1996) and by Kuutti (Bannon & Kuutti, 1993, Kuutti, 1991, 1996), both with strong inspiration from Scandinavian activity theory groups in psychology. Bannon (1990, 1991) and Grudin (1990a and b) made significant contributions to the furthering of the approach by making it available to the HCI audience. The work of Kaptelinin (1996) has been important to connect to the earlier development of activity theory in Russia. Nardi produced the, hitherto, most applicable collection of activity theoretical HCI literature (Nardi, 1996).

At the end of the 1990s, a group of Russian and American activity theorists working in the systems cybernetic tradition of Bernshtein and Anokhin began to publish English language articles and books dealing with topics in human factors and ergonomics and, latterly, human–computer interaction. Under the rubric of systemic structural activity theory (SSAT), this work represents a modern synthesis within activity theory which brings together the cultural historical and systems structural strands of the tradition (as well as other work within Soviet psychology such as the Psychology of Set) with findings and methods from Western human factors/ergonomics and cognitive psychology. The development of SSAT has been specifically oriented toward the analysis and design of the basic elements of human work activity: tasks, tools, methods, objects and results, and the skills, experience and abilities of involved subjects. SSAT has developed techniques for both the qualitative and quantitative description of work activity. Its design oriented analyses specifically focus on the interrelationship between the structure and self regulation of work activity and the configuration of its material components.

This section presents a short introduction to activity theory, and some brief comments on human creativity in activity theory and the implications of activity theory for tacit knowledge and learning.

Activity theory begins with the notion of activity. An activity is seen as a system of human "doing" whereby a subject works on an object in order to obtain a desired outcome. In order to do this, the subject employs tools, which may be external (e. g. an axe, a computer) or internal (e. g. a plan). As an illustration, an activity might be the operation of an automated call centre. As we shall see later, many subjects may be involved in the activity and each subject may have one or more motives (e. g. improved supply management, career advancement or gaining control over a vital organisational power source). A simple example of an activity within a call centre might be a telephone operator (subject) who is modifying a customer's billing record (object) so that the billing data is correct (outcome) using a graphical front end to a database (tool). Kuutti formulates activity theory in terms of the structure of an activity. "An activity is a form of doing directed to an object, and activities are distinguished from each other according
to their objects. Transforming the object into an outcome motivates the existence of an activity. An object can be a material thing, but it can also be less tangible."

Activity theory provides a number of useful concepts that can be used to address the lack of expression for 'soft' factors which are inadequately represented by most process modelling frameworks. One such concept is the internal plane of action. Activity theory recognises that each activity takes place in two planes: the external plane and the internal plane. The external plane represents the objective components of the action while the internal plane represents the subjective components of the action. Kaptelinin defines the internal plane of actions as "[ ] a concept developed in activity theory that refers to the human ability to perform manipulations with an internal representation of external objects before starting actions with these objects in reality." The concepts of motives, goals and conditions discussed above also contribute to the modelling of soft factors. One principle of activity theory is that many activities have multiple motivation ('polymotivation'). For instance, a programmer in writing a program may address goals aligned towards multiple motives such as increasing his or her annual bonus, obtaining relevant career experience and contributing to organisational objectives. Activity theory further argues that subjects are grouped into communities, with rules mediating between subject and community and a division of labour mediating between object and community. A subject may be part of several communities and a community, itself, may be part of other communities.

Human creativity plays an important role in activity theory, that "human beings are essentially creative beings" in "the creative, non predictable character". Tikhomirov also analyses the importance of creative activity, contrasting it to routine activity, and notes the important shift brought about by computerisation in the balance towards creative activity. Karl Marx, a sociological theorist, argued that humans are unique compared to other species in that humans create everything they need to survive. According to Marx, this is described as species being. Marx believed we find our true identity in what we produce in our personal labor.

Activity theory has an interesting approach to the difficult problems of learning and, in particular, tacit knowledge. Learning has been a favourite subject of management theorists, but it has often been presented in an abstract way separated from the work processes to which the learning should apply. Activity theory provides a potential corrective to this tendency. For instance, Engeström's review of Nonaka's work on knowledge creation suggests enhancements based on activity theory, in particular suggesting that the organisational learning process includes preliminary stages of goal and problem formation not found in Nonaka. Lompscher, rather than seeing learning as transmission, sees the formation of learning goals and the
student's understanding of which things they need to acquire as the key to the formation of the learning activity. Of particular importance to the study of learning in organisations is the problem of tacit knowledge, which according to Nonaka, "is highly personal and hard to formalise, making it difficult to communicate to others or to share with others." Leont'ev's concept of operation provides an important insight into this problem. In addition, the key idea of internalisation was originally introduced by Vygotsky as "the internal reconstruction of an external operation." Internalisation has subsequently become a key term of the theory of tacit knowledge and has been defined as "a process of embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge." Internalisation has been described by Engeström as the "key psychological mechanism" discovered by Vygotsky and is further discussed by Verenikina.