Vygotsky in Perspective by Ronald Miller

Author:Ronald Miller [Miller, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology, General, Education, Educational Psychology, Developmental, Child, Philosophy; Theory & Social Aspects, Social Science, Sociology, Philosophy, Philosophy & Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781139501064
Google: uCFEW1T_k3cC
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-04-14T07:20:25+00:00

From the transitional structure depicted in the above figure it is but one small step to the full-blown final figure that represents the ‘whole structure of activity’ (p. 36). Before presenting the figure, Engeström provides a quotation and this, presumably, is intended as the rationale for the final form of the emergent embedded triangles as shown in the figure below.16

In considering the transition across the three triangles, a number of changes occur in the labels, some of which are subtle and others less so, but Engeström does not seem to believe that any explanation for these changes is required. For example, what starts off as an ‘individual member of the species’ lands up as a ‘subject’, and a ‘population’ consisting of ‘other members of the species’ turns into a ‘community’. Does this mean that subjects replace individual members of the species or that individual members of the species somehow become subjects? Similarly, do populations grow into communities or do communities outgrow populations? The terms ‘population’ and ‘species’ are not equivalent to ‘community’ and it is deeply misleading to substitute one for the other. Even more confusing is how the initial label ‘natural environment’ is supplemented in the transitional stage of ruptures by something called an ‘artificial environment’, which is also different from tools or instruments, and is finally replaced by an ‘object’ attached to an arrow that points at an outcome. None of these questions seem to concern the practitioners of this triadic art form,17 least of all Cole, who believes that it represents an extension of his basic mediational triangle that, in turn, harks back to the Russian cultural-historical psychologists.

Perhaps the most intriguing question confronting cultural-historical activity theory is the apparent fascination with things ‘triadic’. Of all the geometric shapes, the one that least conveys a sense of ‘activity’ is the triangle, whose attribute of stability and fixity seems to convey the very opposite of the sense of flow or movement associated with action. Engeström (p. 8) refers vaguely to ‘Hegel's insistence on the culturally mediated, triadic or triangular structure of human activity’ and seems to have an affinity for theorists of a triadic persuasion such as Peirce and Popper, among others. Cole appears to share this predilection for things that come in triplicate and also subscribes to a ‘distinctive, triadic relationship of subject–medium–object’. But in expanding his basic mediational triangle into Engeström's eruption of triangular forms, Cole seems to do a grave injustice to his own theoretical position. In the expanded activity system model, the three corners of the triangle bear labels that in Cole's terms amount to the very same thing. At the apex of the triangle are ‘artifacts’. In the corner on the left are ‘rules’ and, as pointed out, these are by Cole's own insistence also artefacts. In the opposite corner on the right we find the ‘division of labor’ that, in turn, is simply a specific set of rules that apply to the organization of labour and, hence, fall into the same overall category of artefacts.

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