Activity theory

Why explain the mind from "activity"?

Early twentieth-century psychology had two main currents. One studied consciousness by introspection, people looking into themselves and reporting; the other, behaviourism and Russian reflexology, left consciousness out altogether and measured only stimulus and response. The first made consciousness a closed room cut off from the outer world; the second treated people like machines. Soviet psychologists who embraced Marxism tried to go beyond both.

The key they found was "activity" (деятельность). In the "Theses on Feuerbach" Marx criticized the old materialism for grasping the object only in the form of contemplation and not as "sensuous human activity, practice". People do not merely look at the world; they take up tools and change it, and change themselves in the process. Activity theory made this idea a principle of psychology. Consciousness does not exist apart before activity; it is formed in activity and shows itself in activity. To study the mind, then, one must study what people do, with what tools and words, and with whom.

The approach is used widely today in pedagogy, work research, human–computer interaction and organization studies. It is one of the longest-lived strands of Marxist scholarship born in the Soviet Union.

What did Vygotsky, Rubinstein and Leontiev each do?

The root is Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory. Vygotsky held that the higher mental functions, voluntary memory, attention and conceptual thought, are not biologically innate but are formed in activity shared with others through the mediation of signs such as language and of tools, and then internalized. Vygotsky, Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev were the "troika" that began this research. Vygotsky's theory itself is covered in the separate entry on cultural-historical theory.

The first to set activity up as a philosophical principle of psychology was Sergei Rubinstein. Trained in neo-Kantian philosophy at Marburg, he put forward the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity around 1922, and in "Problems of Psychology in the Works of Karl Marx" (1934) he formulated it on the basis of Marx's texts. The principle runs: mind and consciousness are formed in activity and manifest themselves in activity, so the question of which comes first falls away; consciousness and activity form an organic unity, though not an identity.

Leontiev moved to Kharkov in Ukraine at the end of 1931, and after Vygotsky's early death in 1934 he led the "Kharkov school" there, studying the structure of activity. The school pursued the problem of the common structure of external, practical activity and internal, mental activity. From the 1950s Leontiev became a central figure of psychology at Moscow University and the first dean of its psychology faculty, founded in 1966. His 1975 book Activity, Consciousness, and Personality became the school's canon. Rubinstein's and Leontiev's camps also criticized each other over how to understand activity.

How do activity, action and operation differ?

The structure of activity Leontiev worked out has three levels. At the top, an "activity" is a process that meets some need, and what drives it is a "motive". He wrote: "The concept of activity is necessarily connected with the concept of motive."

Итак, понятие деятельности необходимо связано с понятием мотива.

An activity consists of "actions", which are directed at conscious "goals". In Leontiev's words, "just as the concept of motive correlates with the concept of activity, the concept of goal correlates with the concept of action." Actions in turn consist of "operations", the ways the action is actually carried out, which are fitted to given "conditions": "Actions correlate with goals, operations with conditions."

Подобно тому, как понятие мотива соотносится с понятием деятельности, понятие цели соотносится с понятием действия.

Действия, как уже было сказано, соотносительны целям, операции - условиям.

Leontiev's famous example is the primeval collective hunt. The motive of the hunting activity is to obtain food. But what the beater does is frighten the game and drive it away, an action that taken by itself seems to lead away from food. It makes sense only within the collective division of labour in which other hunters kill the game. The meaning of an individual's action can be understood only by looking at the whole social activity to which it belongs. In today's terms, a worker tightening bolts in a factory does something meaningless in itself that gains its sense from the productive activity of making cars and from the motive of earning a living. The same act that was a conscious goal while being learned sinks into an unconscious operation once mastered: changing gear is a deliberate action for a learner driver and an operation for an experienced one.

What philosophical grounding did Ilyenkov provide?

The philosopher Evald Ilyenkov gave activity theory a philosophical foundation. He stressed that reality is given to human consciousness through the forms of activity and, continuing the tradition of Fichte, Hegel and Marx, interpreted philosophically the psychological activity theory of Rubinstein, Vygotsky and Leontiev. His theory of the ideal, that meanings and norms exist objectively not in individual brains but in the forms of social activity, matches the activity-theoretical view of learning as the individual's appropriation of those forms in activity.

Ilyenkov answered the discussion of the concept of activity that Leontiev opened in Voprosy filosofii with "On the Concept of 'Activity' and Its Significance for Pedagogy", calling the discussion "not only very timely but very precisely aimed". From 1975 until the end of his life he led a research seminar at the Moscow University psychology faculty at Dean Leontiev's invitation. The two also worked together in the education of deafblind children (the Zagorsk experiment).

Разговор, поднятый на страницах журнала «Вопросы философии» А.Н. Леонтьевым, мне представляется не только очень своевременным, но и очень точным по прицелу.

How was it used in schools?

It was the psychologist Vasily Davydov who brought activity theory into the classroom. Combining Ilyenkov's idea of the ascent from the abstract to the concrete with the Vygotskian tradition, he developed an original theory of the types of generalization in learning. The developmental education system he built with Daniil Elkonin has children engage not in "empirical generalization", memorizing many cases and extracting common features, but in "theoretical generalization", exploring the basic relation from which a concept arises, as their learning activity. Moscow's experimental School No. 91 was its testing ground.

The experiment had a political cost. Davydov repeatedly criticized the dogmas of official pedagogy, and after the 1981 publication of Philosophical-Psychological Problems of the Development of Education, which he edited, he was expelled from the party in 1983, removed as director of the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and barred from the School No. 91 experiment. A few years later, in 1986, he was rehabilitated with the Ushinsky Prize, and the Elkonin–Davydov system remains one strand of Russian primary education.

How did it continue outside the USSR?

Activity theory remained virtually unknown outside the Soviet Union until the mid-1980s, when Nordic researchers took it up. The Finnish educationist Yrjö Engeström published Learning by Expanding in 1987 and, based at the University of Helsinki, applied the theory to workplaces and organizations. To Leontiev's relation of subject and object he added the "community" (those who share the same object), "rules" linking subject and community, and the "division of labour" linking object and community, producing the triangular model of the "activity system". The name "cultural-historical activity theory" (CHAT), coined by the American psychologist Michael Cole and popularized by Engeström, aimed to unite the various currents descended from Vygotsky.

A key concept of this expanded version is "contradiction" within the activity system. When a hospital introduces a new computer system (a tool) that does not fit existing treatment rules or the division of labour between doctors and nurses, conflict arises. Engeström saw such contradictions not as mere problems but as occasions for an organization to learn by "expanding" into a new form of activity, in effect carrying Marx's concept of contradiction into a theory of organizational learning. Inside the USSR the "organizational-activity games" of the philosopher Georgy Shchedrovitsky were also influenced by activity theory.

What does it mean to read it today?

The basic message of activity theory is that human abilities are not locked in the head but move together with tools, language, community and division of labour. Now that digital tools and artificial intelligence are changing how people work, the view of technology not as a device bolted onto individual abilities but as a mediator that transforms the whole activity system remains highly useful. Its origin lies in Marx's idea that labour and practice make human beings. As activity theory has spread in English-language research, some critics argue that its Marxist roots, its concern with social labour and its contradictions, have faded.