Activity Theory

Historical Origins

Cultural historical activity theory has arisen in response to idealism, which splits concrete human activity from abstract thinking. Grounding their work in the dialectical materialist approach of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Soviet psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky worked to establish a theory that could simultaneously account for knowledge as the result of concrete human actions and of sociocultural mediation; this is now known as first-generation activity theory. Other Soviet psychologists, including Alexander Luria and Alexei Leont'ev, further elaborated this position by including a dialectical relationship between the individual and collective (culture, society); this is now known as second-generation activity theory. Their work constituted the basis for more recent, Western European developments: the Finnish scholar Yrjö Engeström developed a structural perspective on activity systems, whereas the German critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp worked out a theoretical and methodological framework that focuses on a subject-centered perspective of human activity. Third-generation activity theory is concerned with understanding and modeling networks of activity systems.

Power to Act, Agency

Fundamental to CHAT is the human ability to act or agency. Individual knowledge can be thought of in terms of the action possibilities (room to maneuver) individuals have in concrete situations; an increase in action possibilities constitutes learning and development. Culture and cultural knowledge can then be theorized as the generalized action possibilities, which exist at the collective level—any action, even the most atrocious war crimes, are then concrete realizations of possibilities for which the culture as a whole is responsible. Importantly, existing culture is reproduced and new culture produced in the concrete actions of individuals. These actions always arise from the (dialectic) relation of the social and material (i.e., sociomaterial) structures in concrete settings, on the one hand, and the internal, mental structures (schemas) that enable perception of these external structures, on the other.

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