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Record W2118908845 · doi:10.1080/00131910902846916

Reflections on activity theory

2009· article· en· W2118908845 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEducational Review · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicInnovative Education and Learning Practices
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
FundersUniversity of Birmingham
KeywordsActivity theorySociologyArticulation (sociology)EpistemologyPhilosophy of educationSocial sciencePedagogyHigher educationLawPolitical sciencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract It is sometimes suggested that activity theory represents the most important legacy of Soviet philosophy and psychology. But what exactly is activity theory? The canonical account in the West is given by Engeström, who identifies three stages in the theory's development: from Vygotsky's insights, through Leontiev's articulation of the fundamental structure of activity, to a still‐emerging third generation incorporating difference, discourse and dialogue into the framework. This paper argues that the resulting position is in fact in tension with the concerns of the Russian founders of the tradition. While the latter saw the concept of activity as a fundamental category to address profound philosophical questions about the possibility of mind, activity theory in the West has principally become an empirical method for modeling activity systems. The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of views on both sides of the contrast and examines its consequences for the future of the activity‐theoretical tradition. Keywords: activitydevelopmentmindobjectRussian philosophy and psychologyselfsubjecttheorytransformation This article is part of the following collections: The Educational Review Hall of Fame Acknowledgements Jan Derry, who encouraged me to write on this topic in the first place, provided insightful comments, as did Octavian Busuioc, who also gave invaluable help with the diagrams. Versions of this paper have been presented to audiences at Griffith University, the University of Birmingham, Bath University, the Institute of Education, London, and at the first annual conference of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) in Seville, 2005. I am indebted to the participants on these occasions for their questions and objections. The paper read in Seville was published in Russian translation as "K voprosu ob evoliutsii teorii deyatel'nosti" in Kul'turno‐istoricheskaya Psikhologiya, 2006, 4: 79–84.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.916
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.237
GPT teacher head0.588
Teacher spread0.351 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it