Note
Chapter 4 Methodology
3.2 Re-appropriating ‘context’
The re-framing of the notion of context is primarily based on the concept of mediation, a central ontological assumption of CHAT. Vygotsky (1978) argued that the relationship between the human subject and the ‘object’, or whatever is external to that object (the context, society, the world), is always mediated by what he referred to as tools and signs. These mediational means or artefacts in the form of ideas, conceptual tools, language, technological and physical tools, are cultural and historical productions. In the activity of the human subject in the world, the use of these mediational means fundamentally, and qualitatively, alters higher mental functions (the intra-psychological functions of the individual). This mediational model thus explicates how ‘context’ forms the basis of psychological processes. We are constituted by our practical activity in social and historical practices and the functions of our mind therefore cannot be innate or predetermined. In addition to this, the activity of the human subject in the world creates and transforms these mediational means, thereby constituting social relations. In this dialectical conceptualisation context is neither the
‘container’ of an ontologically separate ‘individual’, nor is it a ‘variable’ which impacts on the individual. The focus on activity, and the mediational conception of human mind, thus afford a dialectical conceptualisation of the individual-society relationship.
This re-conceptualisation transcends the classic dualistic conception of individual and context and counters the key assumptions of both individual-centred and context-centred behaviour change theories. The individual and society cannot be ontologically, or methodologically, distinguished. To understand human nature, one examines neither the individual through the
‘psychology of individual cognition’ (Vygotsky, 1978), nor the context ‘surrounding’ the individual, in the form of societal structures and sociology. Instead, the aim is to understand the way in which the ‘self’ is constituted in activity, and the way in which, in this activity, the
‘self’ constitutes the context/environment.
But how does one operationalise this dialectical conceptualisation? Firstly, as explained above, one adopts purposeful activity in a cultural historical context as the fundamental unit for the study of human behaviour. Secondly, one engages in a process of contextualising this activity. This is not a contextualisation in the sense of putting the research phenomenon in a container. Rather, the research activity is an engagement in the production of the context of the research phenomenon, that is, sexual activity. This contextualisation is achieved through adopting Engeström’s (1987, 1996) notion of an activity system which theoretically elaborates the notion of context.
3.2.1 Activity systems: the production of context
As discussed in Chapter 3, activities do not exist in isolation but are part of broader systems of relations which are generated, sustained and developed within social communities. This conceptualisation of activity as a collective activity system fundamentally reframes the concept of context.
Engeström (1996, p. 67) argues that “Contexts are activity systems. An activity system integrates the subject, the object, and the instruments (material tools as well as signs and symbols) into a unified whole”. This system is not immutable, but continuously constructed by humans in their activity. This reinforces the CHAT assumption that the focus in research is not on the development of the individual subject but on how the objects and structures of the world are created by humans (Engeström, 1987). In a research study the unit of analysis is thus the entire activity system; it is the “object-oriented, collective, and culturally mediated human activity, or [the] activity system” (Engeström & Miettinen, 1999, p. 9).
To engage with this unit of analysis, Engeström (1987) developed a model of human activity as a collective systemic framework with a complex mediational structure (Daniels, 2001).
This model, constituted by the subject, object, outcome, rules, community and division of labour, explicates the inner dynamic relations of an activity and allows the mediated, and historical, nature of an activity to be analysable (see Figure 11 in Chapter 3).
The methodological significance of the notion of an activity system is that an analysis of the system explores and exposes the individual-social dialectic. It is the mechanism of
contextualisation in which the triangular model of the activity system is the tool for the investigation, and production of context. This operationalisation is illustrated in detail in the section on data analysis below.
3.2.2 Activity system analysis: the mechanism of contextualisation
Wardekker (2000, p. 269) argues that contextualisation within the CHAT approach is not limited, as in the interpretive paradigm, to the “actual context-as-experienced”. Activity theory, and activity system analysis in particular, provides a way of engaging in the
‘contextualisation’ of a phenomenon without reducing context to a container or a variable.
One could argue that a research process from the CHAT perspective is a process of the production of context. In the research process the circumstances in which an event or phenomenon can be fully understood, are constituted. This ‘production’ of context is accomplished primarily through the construction, and analysis, of the activity system of the activity. This construction has at least two dimensions – current and historical.
3.2.2.1 Current activity system: current contextualisation
In this study the activity of the system was defined as sexual activity. The aim of the research process was then to construct an account of this activity system of sexual activity as it
currently occurs. In practice, this means constructing the model of the activity system to explicate its components (subject, object, outcome, mediating artefacts, rules, community and division of labour), and the internal relations of this system. Engeström’s (1987) model of the activity system contains a particular internal structure in which the activity is organised and constrained by the rules and structures of the social world; and in which human activity is always governed by a division of labour, and by the individual’s membership of a particular
group of people, their ‘community’. An analysis of the activity system of sexual activity articulates the dialectical relationship between subject, object, and outcome in the activity, and explicates the dialectical interaction between individual and society. The second form of contextualisation is historical.
3.2.2.2 Historical contextualisation
If the human mind is a result of a development process in which culture and history
“represented in and mediated by cultural artefacts” (Wardekker, 2000, p. 267) are primary, this limits the extent to which a descriptive analysis of current behaviour could provide an adequate basis for an explanation of what is observed (Wells, 2004). A central tenet of CHAT is that human psychological processes have emerged through culturally mediated, historically developing, practical activity. Engeström and Miettinen (1999) argue that ‘history’ is
inevitably present in the activity system, through the mediated nature of behaviour, and through the dependence of any activity on historically formed mediating artefacts in society.
History thus permeates current practices and an historical and ‘developmental’ form of explanation is critical in answering “the question of what a form of behaviour represents”
(Vygotsky, 1981, p. 147).
This historical perspective thus reveals the ‘generative mechanisms’ (Vygotsky, 1978) of a phenomenon and the various disruptions and disturbances which have occurred in the process of its development. Engeström (1987) argues that the problems and potentials of the activity can only be understood against its own history. Engeström (2001) suggests that one achieves this historical perspective by focussing on a ‘local history’ of the activity and its objects. In this thesis I argue that adopting the notion of historicity contributes to the production of context through acknowledging that activities are palimpsestic, bearing visible traces of an earlier form.
The third significant contribution of CHAT is its identification of the dynamic and turbulent nature of activity.