Historical Currents in the Development of Activity Theory

Kaptelinin, V. & Nardi, B. A. (Date) in Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design

Despite being a student of Vygotstky, the Activity Theory that Leontiev developed did not follow in directly from Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology because Leontiev had his own research agenda.

Psychologist Mikhail Basov also made a major contribution to AT by developing a theoretical approach which understood human beings as "active agents in environments". Some of the ideas developed by Leontiev came from Basov's approach. Basov believed in an "equation with three variables - the human being, environment and activity" (Basov, 1930).

For Basov:

• Human activity is understood as an 'interaction of an organism with environment'
• Human activity combined with 'the way an organism establishes a relationship between itself and the world constitutes a 'special object of analysis'
• 'Mediating artifacts' are of particular importance, because 'the development of tools and other organisational forms of labour' changes not only the 'forms of social organisation' but also 'the individual organisation of all human beings'
• Both physical and social environments are not just collections of stimuli but rather are 'integrated wholes' 
• In the physical world objects are 'interdependent and interrelated', making the universe the ultimate physical environment for any organism
• There is a two-way interaction between human beings and environments, and each therefore mutually transforms the other over the course of activities. The resulting 'mutual adjustments of actors and environments' leads to an 'unstable, dynamic equilibrium'
• Environments are 'dynamic entities', and therefore the same environment can be at different phases of development for the same person

Although Leontiev's approach differed substantially from that of Basov, it can be argued that the ideas developed by Leontiev regarding the structure of activity stem more from the work of Basov than Vygotsky. Basov also introduced the concept of 'circular' responses in an attempt to move beyond the traditional behavioural model of 'stimulus-response'.

For Leontiev:

• The object of study were phenomena such as 'perception'
• The ultimate aim was to 'understand the nature of meaningful, purposeful acting in the world'
• Human beings actively transform their environments
• 'Psychological research should focus on the activity as a whole in order to understand the interdependent components of the activity'.
• All activities are social, whether carried out individually of collectively (Leontiev, 1978)

It is important to note that the standard 'two generations' view of AT does not sufficiently highlight the differences between Vygotsky and Leontiev, which are arguable as important as the similarities. Given their differences in research perspectives and individual approaches, it is possible to consider Leontiev's and Vygotsky's frameworks as two closely related but distinct frameworks rather than generations of a single approach (Zinchenko, 1993).

There have been several variations on activity-theoretical frameworks in Russian psychology. Sergey Rubinshtein is sometimes credited as the person to have introduced the concept of activity to psychology rather than Leontiev. Rubinschtein believed that 'activity as a whole cannot be the subject matter of psychology'/ Leontiev objected to this, arguing that 'psychological research should focus on the activity as a whole to understand the interdependent components of the activity'.

Galperin (1976, 1992) developed a theory which focused on the stage by stage formation of psychological functions which aimed to explain the process of internalisation. By revealing the mechanisms underlying internalisation Galperin hoped to develop an educational method which would 'facilitate learning by supporting internalisation'. He believed that the function of the mind was to 'orient the subject in the world'.

Davydov also developed a education-focused variation of Activity Theory in which the main aim for education is to create the 'optimal conditions for conceptual transformations of a special kind, called essential generalisations'. This is understood as the 'ability to reveal the underlying principle of a concept and apply this principle to scientific instances of the concept', and is the opposite of 'empirical generalisation' which is based on 'identifying an invariant property of a set of instances'. Davydov believed that it was not effective to simply tell learners the underlying principles; instead, education should aim to create conditions in which learners can 'rediscover the main ideas developed in the history of humankind'.

Zinchenko (1971, 1976) attempted to combine activity theory and cognitive psychology by proposing the addition of a fourth level to Leontiev's three-level model of activity. His work demonstrated that there was compatibility between activity theory and models of cognitive psychology.

The work of Galperin, Davydov and Zinchenko is understood as representing the Moscow School of Psychology which was most popular in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In the 1980s Boris Lomov challenged the views of Leontiev. For Lomov:

• An understanding of activity as a subject-object relationship went against the Marxist interpretation of activity as a social, historical process,
• 'The analysis of individual activities should be based on an analysis of the functions of individual activities in the larger-scale social context in which those activities are embedded'.
• Instead of focusing on the individual, subject-object orientation as put forward by Leontiev, Lomov proposed that collective (or joint) activity was the essential object of psychological studies.

But Lomov's criticisms of Leontiev were interpreted as fairly general and did not lead to a realistic alternative to Leontiev's approach.

The concept of the "collective subject" has been used to enable an analysis of human-human interactions within the AT framework. This concept interprets the 'subject' of an activity as a group or an organisation rather than an individual human being. The advantage of this is that 'communication can be understood as a relationship between component parts of the compound subject'.

Conclusion

Instead of providing a clear theoretical lens, Activity Theory constitues a 'history of conceptual, social and personal conflicts'. It provides a means of identifying problems with existing concepts and exploring ways to resolve them by creating new ones.