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On Theorizing and ClarifyingWolff-Michael RothPublished online: 06 Oct 2009.

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on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human CognitionISSN 1074-9039 print / 1532-7884 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10749030802186579

EDITORIAL

On Theorizing and Clarifying

Wolff-Michael Roth

During a recent plane ride to Australia, while trying to work on a presentation that Ihad agreed to give the following month on the topic of community and identity, I foundmyself scribbling in my notebook trying to jot down ideas in words, phrases, concepts,drawings, and so on. Eventually, an important issue emerged into my consciousness, onethat I had been wanting to think through (theorize) for a while but had not had the timefor: the similarities and differences between the concept of community of practice (Lave &Wenger, 1991) and the “community” that appears at the bottom of the mediational trianglein third-generation cultural–historical activity theory (Engeström, 1987). In my notebook Iwrote “community at large →society →” followed by two diagrams separated by the text“frequent confusion of ‘communities of practice’ and ‘communities.’” One diagram consistedof a network of tiny triangles linked up into a network, the other diagram described amediational triangle of chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks that they just fashioned(Figure 1).

As it often does, my diagram drawing illustrated a dilemma. I have already noted a numberof issues with the use of the term “community of practice” relating to research on education andschooling, such as the fact that school classes do not possess an internal memory. When the so-called “classroom communities” break up at the end of the year, these “communities,” initiallyassembled on administrative grounds, are disassembled for the same reasons. For the nextschool year, new classes with new teachers are assembled into equally arbitrary configurations.A classroom community, therefore, shares little with the kinds of communities that Jean Laveand Étienne Wenger have been writing about, in which renewal processes are build into theirconstitution.

In this editorial, I illustrate how to engage in theorizing cultural–historical activity theory bypushing its now-emblematic diagrammatic representation, as well as my own conception of thisrepresentation, to unfold and explicate more implicit understandings. In closing, I suggest thatin educational and psychological research there is need for more work that traces both historicaldevelopments and activity systems, rather than simply focusing on S→R-type responses

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FIGURE 1 Diagrams are excellent resources for theorizing.

(as in psychological laboratories) or tasks (as in schools). Let me return to the moment onthe plane when I was attempting to understand early cultural development using the triangleformalism to mediation.

THEORIZING WITH DIAGRAMS

In my notebook, below the initial diagram (Figure 1), I drew an assortment of diagrams, thekind of which I have drawn ever since I was first introduced to cultural–historical activitytheory. One of the mediational triangles has chimps as their subjects, termite hills as theobject, and the regionally differing sticks they fashion to pull the termites as the tools. I wrotenext to it, “Chimps have culture,” which alludes to an article several chimpanzee researchers,including Jane Goodall, published in Nature that provided clear meta-analytic evidence for thepresence of culture among these primates (Whiten et al., 1999). Another similar meta-analysisappeared in Science supporting the claim of culture among orangutans (van Schaik et al., 2003).I began to think that we need to have more cultural–historical reconstruction of fundamentalpsychological categories in the way Klaus Holzkamp (1983) and his associates have done,including a modeling of anthropogenesis.

As I thought about the emergence of human society from an environment that might haveresembled that of today’s chimpanzees and orangutans, I began to sketch a triangle for the veryearly humans captured in Alexei Nikolaevich Leont’ev’s (1978) example of hunters and beatersduring a battue (a form of hunt in which some drive the game out of bushes, furrows, andditches and toward the hunters who make the kill). This form of hunt is not unique to humansbut is also practiced among, for example, chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys. I thought thatfor the presentation I was preparing it would be interesting to model the historical emergenceof communities of practice from such behaviors as the collective hunt, and that in the process Imight come to better understand cultural–historical activity theory. In particular, this kind of aninvestigation could shed light on the conflation of the activity and action levels of analysis thatmany researchers appear to make (M. Cole, personal communication, May 1, 2004). A sourceof the confusion between the two terms activity and action may be the undifferentiated1 use

1“Undifferentiated” means, in cultural–historical activity theoretic terms, that the term is general (abstract), subjectto differentiation and therefore to development by means of a development from the abstract to the concrete.

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EDITORIAL 179

of the English term activity for two distinct forms of engagement. “Activity,” in English, isused to denote (a) engagement in a collectively motivated and structured form of production,which in Russian and German is referred to as deyatel’nost’ and Tätigkeit, respectively, and (b)engagement in something like a task, which in Russian and German is referred to as aktivnost’and Aktivität, respectively. Here, “societally motivated” means that activity in the former senseserves the satisfaction of collective needs and collective survival, achieved through the divisionof labor at the collective level into activity systems. Therefore, solving paper-and-pencil mathproblems or doing school science laboratories are not activities in this sense because the productsof students’ labor do not contribute to collective needs. Schooling, hunting, and manufacturingtools, however, are activities in this sense, for they benefit the entire group.

Using Leont’ev’s hunters and beaters, we can articulate the structures of the hunting activity,which satisfies the collective need for food. As long as an individual contributed to a hunt,he (most hunting primates appear to be male) got a share of the meat. In fact, there havebeen observations that link a female chimpanzee’s access to meat with the exchange of mating(Knight, 1995), and in some primate species, mating always occurs prior to the reception offood (Stanford, 1995). In this early activity system, hunters and beaters use spears and beatingsticks as their tools (Figure 2). Their object might have been “deer as food that will satisfy oureating needs” or the possible exchanges for reproductive favors. That is, the kill is reintroducedinto the activity system, where it is used in another activity (collective meal) and to mediateexchanges.

Although the original triangular representation of the structure of human activity includesthe terms production, consumption, distribution, and exchange (Engeström, 1987), these termsare seldom found in the theoretical articulations of (Western) authors who pledge allegiance tocultural–historical activity theory. This is unfortunate because these concepts are central to theelaboration of third-generation cultural–historical activity theory and therefore are intrinsic toits functioning.

The account I have provided of the collective hunt already includes these other momentsof the hunting activity that produce the food required for energetic needs (i.e., consumption,exchange, distribution). For example, in the process of hunting, energy stored in the bodiesof the participants was consumed, which made this form of consumption the reverse side ofproduction (Figure 2). In the process, those (males) who took part in the hunting had accessto food that others (females, offspring) did not, which led to an unequal distribution of theresource produced. Those individuals (males) with access to surplus food could have thenengaged in exchanges (as has been observed among chimpanzees to gain access to a female andreproductive opportunities). Hunting, therefore, would have served the group’s collective needfor survival and the maintenance of the particular life form. By contributing to the collectiveneed, individuals also secured their own (dietary) needs, therefore making an individual’ssurvival independent from whether or not he made the kill. The individual thereby comes to bebut a tool on the part of the collective to maintain its existence.

Figure 2 also shows how activity, actions, and operations clearly are distinctive but consti-tutive levels in the analysis of activity systems. The difference hinges on the nature of themediation between subject and object (or tool). Thus, in hunting, the object/motive is collective:the satisfaction of collective dietary/energetic needs. In hunting activity, however, there aremany goals that an individual sets and realizes in, and through, his or her actions. For example,the beaters must make decisions concerning where to beat and how to beat. Their object/goal

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FIGURE 2 The activity of hunting mapped onto the Engeström triangleat the three levels of engagement that A. N. Leont’ev articulated.

is to produce noise so that their game will be frightened and run out into sight. The hunters, onthe other hand, need to decide where and how to place themselves to be in the best position formaking a kill. All these concrete actions realize the hunting activity, but the hunting activitygives sense to these concrete actions. The same action of beating bushes has a different meaning,say, in the context of a hide-and-seek game. A similar dialectical relationship exists betweenthe goal-directed actions—for example, throwing the spear under these conditions in this waytoward that part of the animal—and the (unconscious or nonconscious) operations that realizethem. Operations are not mediated because there no longer exists a middle term (i.e., mean,mediator) in consciousness between the individual and the tool: They are conditioned (Roth,2007). Here, the current state of the action in the course of realizing the goal is part of theconditions that determine the operations employed—for example, how the spear is held or how

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EDITORIAL 181

the wrist is flicked to make for the best flight path (Figure 2c). Actions and operations aredialectically related, for specific operations are produced as part of goal-directed action; thisaction is realized only in and through the operations. Leont’ev was adamant that the threelevels be kept separate analytically rather than be conflated (as this occurs when school tasksare treated as “activities”); articulating the three levels precisely and distinctly is important toget the theory right in concrete research contexts.

Each of the four moments of the hunting activity—production, consumption, distribution,and exchange—can be analyzed as a productive activity in its own right (Marx, 1973). Thus,for example, we can imagine the hunters and beaters sitting around the campfire and, whileeating the hunted deer, enjoying a good meal and each other’s company (Figure 3). They mighthave used a flint blade to chop pieces of the carcass before eating it (raw or, later, cooked inthe campfire). The object/motive of this activity would have been the satisfaction of needs byeating the deer. In this production of consumption, we find the second type of consumption onceagain—the cutting, chewing, and digestion all require energy, which also has to be covered bythe meal.

These distinctions are important to me, because in the past I struggled to understand the fourterms within the triangle as a whole. For example, exchange may be understood as denotingthe triangle to the bottom left, in which the relationship between the hunting posse and theremainder of the community is mediated by rules, which we can now understand as thatgoverning the exchange of meat for copulation. But we could write the term exchange alongthe subject–community line (in the way production is written along the subject–object line)and then understand the subject–community axis as constituting an exchange relation mediatedby the object “deer that will satisfy dietary needs.” Because any pair of concepts could bechosen as the relation that is mediated by a third, an interpretive flexibility is introduced intothe theory, which requires authors to clearly specify how they understand the different aspectsof the triangular representation: Which is the pair of concept under investigation, which is themediational term chosen, and why is this term chose rather than another one among possiblecandidates? It is not sufficient to reference or cite the original work, assuming that everybodyunderstands what is meant. The theory has to be spelled out concretely in each text to provide(a) a description of what is there and (b) a pedagogy for learning how to read the diagram.

Looking back over the past decade, it turns out that I have been struggling for some time tomake sense of the triangle that emblematically and metonymically stands for third-generationcultural–historical activity theory. But in these repeated interpretive struggles, I have come to

FIGURE 3 Consumption becomes an activity in itself. Following thehunt, the horde sits around the campfire eating and celebrating thesuccessful hunt thereby meeting fundamental needs (food, solidarity).

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better understand the theory. This enhancement of my understanding has occurred especiallyduring moments of trying to view concrete research situations in terms of the theory. In fact, Ihave come to understand the theory only because of existing practical understandings of howthe world under investigation worked—both the world that is denoted by language and otherrepresentational forms (diagrams) and the world that pertains to reading academic texts. Thus,my explanations enhanced my understanding but also presupposed it.

Let me return to the historical unfolding of activity and the formation of communitiesof practice. During the mentioned plane ride, I began with a possible scenario in whichearly hunter–gatherers made natural materials into tools similar to chimpanzees. These huntersproduced tools that would benefit not only their individual hunting effort but also the collectiveactivity of the hunt. The hunt, because it is a collective activity, provides possibilities fordifferential participation. At some point, perhaps because of some infirmity, some (male)individuals may have stayed in camp. Because of particular skills, they may have fashionedstone or bone tips for spears, which they traded for meat with the returning hunting party. It isat this point that the original activity system, which already embodied all the possibilities thatsubsequently were realized, split into two systems (Figure 4). That is, at the collective level, onehad the object/motive of killing game for satisfying dietary/energetic needs and the other hadthe objective/motive of tool making. Important here is that (a) tool making as form of activityalready existed as a possibility in the original, more general (or, in dialectical terms, moreabstract and underdeveloped) form of activity and (b) the two systems were not independent butinterdependent activities that are both required for the survival of the collective. We therefore

FIGURE 4 The original activity of hunting splits up as those unfitto hunt stay back in the camp to fashion tools, which they exchangefor food. The exchange, here barter, becomes an activity system in itsown right.

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see the community as a whole divided into communities (of practice) that specialized in termsof the collective objects/motives to be pursued and that develop special skills (practices). Thesepractices and associated skills (operations), therefore, were unequally distributed within thecollective.

The split also implied the exchange relations that provided hunting parties with the specialtools they needed and the toolmakers with food. Such early exchanges were the starting pointfor the classical cultural–historical analysis of the emergence and evolution of capitalist marketthat Marx (1976) provided in Capital. That is, the split of an ancestral form of activity, hunting,into hunting and tool making also implied a third form of relation (Figure 4). This third form ofrelation eventually became independent (merchants mediated between buyers and sellers) andan activity system that contributed to mediating the relations within society as a whole. In thisfigure, we also have the origin of the distinction between community as a whole (society) andspecialized communities of practice. Because community �= community, users of the conceptand of third-generation cultural–historical activity theory need to specify precisely what theymean when they use the term (e.g., in a triangular representation). For example, in the salmonhatching system that I researched extensively (Roth, 2007), there were multiple communitiesof practice involved—scientists worked in research laboratories; veterinarians; and hatcherymanagers, fish culturists, and temporary personnel. Each community, and even each hatchery,had (or may have had) a different motive, focusing on different fish species’ preservationor the enhancement of commercial possibilities (fishing fleets, First Nations providing fortheir own food, sports fishery). It therefore is important not to conflate all these commu-nities into one and to instead specify precisely what the term community denotes each time itis used.

CODA

Looking back over my notes, I realized that much of the work in education and educa-tional psychology that pledges allegiance to cultural–historical and sociocultural theories doesnot explicitly articulate in which way it understands theoretical terms such as “activity” or“community.” This situation can only lead to conceptual confusion; the city of Babel is repro-duced, this time with its citizens using the same words, or language, to refer to totally differentthings. Drawing a diagram in an attempt to articulate a theory that is normally described inwords can be very difficult. The drawer may struggle to express exactly what he or she intends;however, by striving to do so, a theorist is forced to find a way to be more lucid. Even withthis increase in clarity provided through the diagrammatic process, more theoretical work isrequired, as well as more empirical work to improve our theorizing. This is shown alreadyin the concept of activity, which, in its English (Anglo-Saxon) version, requires the samedifferentiation into a pair of terms that it has had in the German and Russian equivalents.

REFERENCES

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki,Finland: Orienta-Konsultit.

Holzkamp, K. (1983). Grundlegung der Psychologie [Foundations of psychology]. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus.

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