MissinglinksintherhetoricofActivityTheory ClarisseSouza

(1)

Discussion

Missing links in the rhetoric of Activity Theory

Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza

*

Departamento de Informa´tica, PUC-Rio, Rua Marqueˆs de Sa˜o Vicente, 225, 22453-901 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil Received 12 April 2006; received in revised form 14 May 2007; accepted 14 July 2007

Abstract

This commentary on Victor Gonza´lez’s proposal to introduce the notion of working spheres/engagements in the traditional activity hierarchy adopts a semiotic perspective. It suggests that the beneﬁt of the proposed introduction is rhetorical rather than strictly con-ceptual. Thus, the commentary focuses on the importance of distinguishing between models (or descriptions) of activities and of ‘‘dis-course about’’ activities. It also illustrates some kinds of questions that might be asked and answered by virtue of such a distinction. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Activity Theory; Semiotic approaches to HCI; Sign mediation

In the opening chapter of Context and Consciousness – Activity Theory and Human–Computer Interaction, Nardi (1996) expresses her hope that the most immediate bene-ﬁt of AT ‘‘is the dissemination of a common vocabulary for describing activity that all HCI researchers would share’’ (p. 10). In the Epilogue, she says that activity the-orists’ ‘‘own practice of trying to understand practice causes [them] to search, recursively, for new mediating tools and representations’’ (p. 375). In Gonza´lez (2006)

the reader can follow an intellectual activity whose object is a mediating artifact for explaining practical human behavior. Based on empirical evidence obtained while observing workers in two companies, with respect to the theory and the topic of this special issue, he proposes that there is an intermediary representational stance between activity and action, namely working spheres or engagements.

Already inGonza´lez and Mark (2005), the author had noted that ‘‘a working sphere is closer to the notion of activity as deﬁned by Activity Theory, in the sense of con-necting sets of actions toward particular objects’’ but ‘‘lacks an emphasis on high-level motives as the notion of activity does (e.g. becoming a project leader) and focuses

instead on practical short-term purposes (e.g. enrolling and attending the training sessions on leadership)’’ (p. 4). A working sphere was also said to constitute ‘‘an interme-diate notion, equivalent to the notion of working spheres used for the information work domain, but which accounts for the aggregation of goal-oriented actions towards a par-ticular purpose, yet not described as being the higher and ultimate motive for the human work represented by activ-ities’’ (Gonza´lez, 2006, p. 10).

In his doctoral dissertation, the author proposes to change the hierarchy of activity levels by introducing the working spheres/engagements concept. Thus, the hierarchical schema of AT (Kuutti, 1996, p. 30) would have to be modiﬁed in the way suggested in Fig. 1

(which includes Gonza´lez’s Fig. 9.1 (Gonza´lez, 2006, p. 310)). Arrows and links to and from working spheres/ engagements have been subtracted from the middle col-umn schema precisely because they are under examina-tion in this commentary.

Following Kuutti’s explanation (1996, pp. 30–31), I’ll take ﬂ to mean ‘‘consists of [chains of]’’ and › to mean ‘‘belong(s) to’’. Gonza´lez suggests an aggregated unit of work between the levels of actions and activities, which at the same time hints at the idea of compositionality (aggregated) and value-meaning (unit). Throughout, this ambiguity persists. Here are some examples:

*

Tel.: +55 21 3527 1500x4344. E-mail address:[email protected]

www.elsevier.com/locate/intcom Interacting with Computers xxx (2007) xxx–xxx

(2)

1. While Gonza´lez is fairly careful to distinguish between the verbalised data he collects from his interpretation of it, he does conclude that, ‘‘the need for an intermedi-ate notion, placed between what we classify as activities and actions, emerges as an important empirical result from the study’’ (p. 309) and says that he ‘‘attended meetings where people presented their work to others in terms of working spheres, talking about the eﬀort required for each working sphere, the temporal frames of those working spheres’’ (p. 149). In fact, strictly speaking, the work does not present evidence that people talked about working spheres/engagements. They talked about projects, plans, things [they] have to do, which the researcher viewed as working spheres/engagements. The meaning of what people talked about may well be equiv-alent to that assigned by the author, but we do not see that they were verbalised as such.

2. ‘‘The notion of a working sphere emerged as a grounded empirical concept that serves to explain the practical instantiation of activities, guided by the responsibilities of the individual, and enacted through speciﬁc actions’’ (p. 9). Gonza´lez reports that he used a grounded theory approach, ideally equivalent to a purely inductive method of research. But, although observations were carried out by shadowing the partic-ipants, most of the argumentation is based on the dis-course they produced.

This is interesting because the tempting equation of plans (verbalised in discourse) with working spheres/ engagements in this case would ﬁt nicely with Such-man’s (1987) suggestion that most often plans are rational constructs used to communicate (about) past or future behavior. Gonza´lez gives us a hint that there may have been a reinforcing factor motivating partic-ipants to frame their behavior in terms of purposeful action: ‘‘The methodology used in this investigation involved the use of a shadowing technique where informants were observed for a minimum of three working days while their activities were recorded in detail. The informants were also extensively inter-viewed to discuss their perspectives in regard to the

management of multiple activities, as well as to more details concerning some of the observed activities, and keep track of their changes’’ (p. 290). So, in fact, the emergence of working spheres/engagements may have been contingent to speciﬁc situations when peo-ple had to account (esp. verbally) for their action, which places researchers and participants side by side at the level of discourse about activity and action. Pre-vious work by the author (Gonza´lez et al., 2005) explicitly says that ‘‘conceptualization of practical activities is useful for our informants as it facilitates their management, provides a shared vocabulary to communicate with co-workers and establishes a mean-ingful structure for individual action’’ (p. 5). Hence the mutual inﬂuence of communicative strategies and conceptualizations is clear.

3. ‘‘This level of conceptualization could be identified in comments from interviews where participants directly discussed a particular work effort, in comments that were captured as part of my notes during the period of observation, or even in some of the documents that they shared with me. What became clear early on was that there was a distinct notion that people were using to conceptualize their practical units of work, a notion that transcended and thematically connected individual actions, a notion that served as a means to encapsulate their work efforts into distinct purposes’’ (p. 133). Since the notion of orientation has been explicitly related to that of plans (Kuutti, 1996), and assuming that plans provide a structure for assigning meaning to (and explaining) actions, if the thematic phrases allude to working spheres/engagements, they are more likely to express connotations of action than the structural con-stituency of activities. The aggregation in reference is critical for phrasing, communicating, and ultimately coordinating action and activity. But it does not seem to be as critical for describing an activity. So, is it really the case that working spheres are composed of chains of actions’’, as Gonza´lez suggests?

To illustrate this point, we can make the following test: (a) take any activity you wish; (b) elaborate a graphic description of this activity in terms of actions and opera-tions (forget about engagements); (c) write down a sensible text that expresses your description (stick to the words that appear in the nodes and edges of your graph – apart from those try to use only ‘‘glue words’’ to organize your text into an acceptable piece of natural language expression); and (d) have someone else read your text and ask this person a few questions to find out whether your description was properly understood. My guess is that: (i) it was; (ii) the person used various other words to answer to your questions; and (iii) many of these additional words would nicely fit into the working spheres/engagements category. If my guess is cor-rect, what we have touched on now is the difference between a dimension that is missing for descriptive purposes, and one that is missing for rhetorical purposes.

(3)

Begging forgiveness for my superﬁcial knowledge of AT, I suppose that the most immediate beneﬁt of introducing the notion of working spheres/engagements is that they are a powerful rhetorical mechanism. They allow outsiders like me to articulate ideas, to make useful associations, and to express certain models and perspectives that would be impossible to communicate and discuss without this piece of conceptual vocabulary. The rhetorical power of AT has been previously pointed out by Halverson (2002), who praised AT for being good at ‘‘naming’’ concepts. Unfortunately most of Gonza´lez’s work takes an endo-genic perspective, in the sense that the discussion of the proposal is carried out within the theoretical boundaries of a single theoretical perspective. As a result, the rhetorical power that I see in the notion of working spheres/engage-ments is not explored by him. He does not show how the notion he proposes to include in conceptual models of activities improves AT accounts of human activities when compared to those produced by other theories. Following Christine Halverson’s strategy, and hoping to inspire Gon-za´lez to explore further his proposals, I’ll elaborate on some points drawing on Peircean Semiotics (Peirce, 1992– 1998) and Semiotic Engineering (de Souza, 2005).

The compositional interpretation of arrows on the left-most column in Fig. 1, calls for further clariﬁcation, but unfortunately they do not appear in Gonza´lez (2006).

Nardi (1996)warns us against the temptation to map AT elements onto GOMS (Card et al., 1983) elements. She says that ‘‘AT has a simple but powerful hierarchy for describ-ing activity that [. . .] has a superficial resemblance with GOMS but goes beyond GOMS in essential ways, espe-cially in describing the dynamic movement between levels of activity rather than assuming stasis’’ (p. 10). Kuutti (1996)clarifies that actions may belong to different activi-ties, and remarks that ‘‘for example, the action of reporting on the progress of a project will have a different connota-tion1if it belongs to the activity of competing for promo-tion [than if not]’’ (p. 31). Moreover, ‘‘before an acpromo-tion is performed in the real world, it is typically planned in the consciousness using a model. The better the model the more successful the action. This phase is called orientation. Thus, models and plans are not rigid and accurate descrip-tions of the execution steps, but always incomplete and ten-tative – resources in the sense ofSuchman (1987)’’ (p. 31). Throughout the dissertation, Gonza´lez has related plans and working spheres/engagements a number of times, espe-cially when illustrating the typical kinds he identified (pp. 155–170). The ontological relationship between plans and working spheres/engagements, however, is not explicitly discussed. (N.B. inGonza´lez (2006), plans are most usually included in lists with goals, schedules, etc.) In fact, we have reason to believe that Gonza´lez doesn’t think they are ontologically relevant for AT. Typically, the notion of plans is absent, for example, from the following: ‘‘The

pur-poses achieved transcended the limited scope of each action. In that sense, it was clear that the notion of a work-ing sphere was more complex than the notion of action proposed by Activity Theory. It went beyond a simple interaction with an artifact, or another individual. Conse-quently, trying to match the working spheres within the Activity Theory hierarchical framework will force us to place them beyond the level of simple actions. However, at the same time, it became obvious that those thematic ref-erences were not in themselves activities’’ (p. 308). There-fore, it is uncertain how the expansion of the AT hierarchy can be used to expand our perception of the strengths and weaknesses of AT compared to classical Arti-ﬁcial Intelligence approaches for modeling collaborative activity, for example.

Recent work by Grosz and Hunsberger (2006), for instance, discusses the nature of intentions in group activ-ity, aiming at the construction of agents operating as indi-viduals in collaborative multi-agent systems. The work is firmly seated in the rational AI tradition that AT and other theories set out to question. Gonza´lez comments that ‘‘individuals focus their attention flexibly to filter and seek information’’ (p. 303). Compared to Grosz and Hunsber-ger’s perspective, an interesting contrast can be noticed. In the AI approach, the authors are talking about opportu-nities being generated (not detected, or interpreted as such in contingent situations) and surviving filtering processes (not resulting from a hunch, or betting on a guess). Notice that this sort of vocabulary creates a clear-cut cleavage between the human and the computer model. We, humans, do not usually generate opportunities (we wish we did!) – most of the time the best we can do it to spot them as soon as they arise. Also, opportunities do not seem to be the outcome of our filtering reality, but rather of our interpreting reality in a productive way. What the clever ones do is to sense an opportunity, where the others sense threats or trivia.

Interestingly, Gonza´lez does not discuss opportunities for action or activity, and the role of working spheres/ engagements in accounting for opportunistic behavior. In my semiotically biased view, opportunities can be viewed as interpretations of how actions (shorter-term, local) sig-nify activities (longer-term, global). In Peircean Semiotics, interpretation is an ongoing and unlimited process. As soon as we produce (verbalise, instantiate, conceptualise) an interpretation for whatever we can observe physically (e.g. somebody’s frown) or mentally (e.g. the fear that somebody disapproves of what we are doing), another interpretation is produced (e.g. the reason for the frown and disapproval), and by the same token allows us to pro-duce the next one(s). Notice that in this semiotic frame-work, the ultimate motive is in fact a moving target. As soon as we produce a sign to represent it, another post-ulti-mate motive can be produced as a result of our interpreta-tion of what the ultimate motive means. Hence, the ﬁrst question we can ask is: What is the ultimate motive of a given activity? Especially in group situations, the answers to this question will show that people have a myriad of

(4)

interpretations for ‘‘ultimate motive’’, to begin with, and for whatever they say is the answer to the question (e.g. ‘‘market a product’’, ‘‘ﬁnish this project’’, ‘‘do my job’’). This variation of meanings is the seed for opportunistic behavior, which can only be interpreted in contrast with rational behavior. Consequently, another question can be asked: ‘‘In this new version of AT, would working spheres/engagements help account for opportunistic behavior?’’

The interesting aspect of opportunistic behavior, espe-cially in collaborative work, is that it often requires expla-nations, precisely because the causal link between action (plus its rationally assigned goal) and the culturally estab-lished rational motive of the group’s activity has gained an unexpected interpretation. The explanation hinges essen-tially on purposeful chains of actions, which seem to be the very nature of working spheres/engagements. What this line of argument may lead to is a question about the ontol-ogy of AT: Is there a place for opportunity and opportunis-tic action/activity in the theory? The answer will certainly help clarify the ontological vs. rhetorical role of working spheres/engagements, which Gonza´lez has not explored.

But, from a semiotic perspective, there is yet another intriguing question about the status of working spheres/ engagements, be it ontological or rhetorical. They are mediators between actions and activities, just like interpre-tations (technically, the interpretant) are mediators between representations (technically, the representamen) and their referent (technically, their object2). Representations signify their referent by virtue of intermediate interpretations. We are thus tempted to examine the similarities suggested in

Fig. 2.

WhatFig. 2suggests is that actions signify activities by virtue of mediating interpretations – ‘‘engagements’’ or working spheres – where purpose and structure bring sense to lower-level goals in terms of upper-level motives. This mediating principle, however, should not be an exclusive property of these three elements of the hierarchy. Isn’t it

the case that operations can signify actions in the same way? What is the mediating interpretation in this case?

In conclusion to this commentary, I suggest that Gon-za´lez may have touched on a powerful explanatory mecha-nism for AT, but that its semiotic value is possibly greater than its structuring value in the AT hierarchy. The exam-ples offered suggest that people shift up and down across the hierarchical levels of activity, talking about what the analyst might identify as activities when perhaps they should be talking about what might be identified as actions, or something in between (working spheres/engagements). I suspect that this shift is a more general phenomenon. If we think about unlimited semiosis, we realize that the ulti-mate motive that defines an activity can always be (re)inter-preted in terms of an expanding context where ‘the ultimate’ becomes ‘penultimate’. This is not only psycho-logically plausible, but also practically plausible, since time and its contingencies may always turn what seemed to be ultimate motives into the equivalent of intermediary goals for further motives. An activity may easily turn out to be instrumental to another activity in time. As a result, we are likely to have chains of activities, just like we have chains of actions or working spheres/engagements, which ‘belong’ to some higher-order activity. The ultimate is likely to be dependent on contingent perceptions of mediating stances, which cannot be fully predicted as a fixed unit of work. In other words, the problem of mediation is not restricted to the level of actions and activities, but it also applies recursively to activities that (opportunistically?) prove to support to other activities, whose meaning emerges along an ongoing process of individual and collec-tive sense making. This semiotic stance of working spheres/ engagements is not better than what Gonza´lez proposes, but it helps us to ask interesting questions about some underlying assumptions regarding the status of meaning and interpretation in AT. Most of all, I believe that postu-lating working spheres/engagements as a generic kind of purposeful, middle level, aggregation – not only between action and activity, but also between recursive structurings of activities – will probably give us new insights about the ‘‘dynamics’’ (Gonza´lez, ibid.) really means, in both theoret-ical and practtheoret-ical terms.

References

Card, S., Moran, T.P., Newell, A., 1983. The Psychology of Human– Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.

de Souza, C.S., 2005. The Semiotic Engineering of Human–Computer Interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gonza´lez, V. 2006. The Nature of Managing Multiple Activities in the Workplace. Doctoral dissertation in Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine.

Gonza´lez, V., Mark, G. 2005. Managing currents of work: multi-tasking among multiple collaborations. In: European Conference in Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2005. Springer Verlag, Paris, France. Gonza´lez, V.M., Nardi, B., Mark, G. 2005. Conceptualization of practical

activities: an information worker’s perspective. Position paper pre-sented at the Workshop on Computer Support for Human Activity.

2 _{The term object is used by Peirce originally in a very speciﬁc sense, not}

to be confused with that of object in Activity Theory. The object of a sign is that which the representamen signiﬁes by virtue of the interpretant. The reason for keeping the term in its original form is to avoid introducing confusion for readers who are familiar with semiotic theory, or those who may wish to do further readings in Semiotics.

Fig. 2. Mediation and signiﬁcation in the sign structure and in the AT hierarchy.

(5)

ECSCW 2005. Available from: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bardram/ ecscw2005/papers/gonzalez.pdf(last visited in April 2007).

Grosz, B.J., Hunsberger, L. 2006. The dynamics of intention in collab-orative activity. Cogn. Syst. Res., in press (Corrected Proof, Available online through Science Direct on 3 March 2006).

Halverson, C.A., 2002. Activity theory and distributed cognition: or what does CSCW need to do with theories? Comput. Support. Coop. Work 11 (1/2), 243–267.

Kuutti, K. 1996. Activity theory as a potential framework for human– computer interaction research. In: Nardi, B.A. (Ed.), Context and

Consciousness. Activity Theory and Human–Computer Interaction, pp. 17–44.

Nardi, B.A., 1996. Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human–Computer Interaction. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Peirce, C.S. 1992–1998. In: Houser, N., Kloesel, C. (Eds.), The Essential Peirce, vols. 1–2. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Suchman, A., 1987. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.