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This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

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*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under ed psych 711, sociology, musings, ethnomethodology, academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.