Dartmouth discussion: What's wrong with "What's wrong with CHAT?"?
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Transcript of Dartmouth discussion: What's wrong with "What's wrong with CHAT?"?
What’s wrong with CHAT?
Clay SpinuzziUniversity of Texas at Austin
What’s wrong with “What’s Wrong with CHAT?”?Clay SpinuzziUniversity of Texas at Austin
A quick word about what I’ve been up to for the last 20 years
Field studies of workplaces
Field studies of...
Software developers
Traffic safety workers
Telecommunications workers
Office workers
Freelancers
Search engine optimization specialists
Coworkers (in coworking spaces)
Innovators learning to be entrepreneurs
Common threadsin these studies
Multiple, often quotidian texts
Composed and assembled innovatively, sometimes idiosyncratically
Yielding solutions that balance stability and flexibility (centripetal/centrifugal)
Within bounded cases (bounded by a relatively stable, mutually defined activity)
Activity theory
Activity theory...
… and Bakhtinian genre theory (Tracing Genres, 2003)
… and actor-network theory (Network, 2008)
… and organizational networks (All Edge, 2015)
AT is overly complicated. We can talk about it if you want...
Choose your own adventure!“Your conceptual framework”: Basics of AT?
“Your methodology and methods”: AT and methodology?
“The conclusions you are drawing”: Rhetorically pivoting AT?
“[How] your work could speak to or be used by scholars from a different discipline”
“Your conceptual framework”
Stimulus-response (this is how animals live!)
S R
Mediation through physical or psychological tools (ex: egocentric speech)
S r
m
Mediation at the social level (cyclically repeated labor) (also handy for bounding case studies of work)
Subject (actor/s) object(ive)(material, projective)
Mediating artifact(s)
Community (stakeholders)
outcome
Rules Division of labor
Levels of activity: To explain learning and development in collective activities
Level of activity CharacteristicsActivity (Macro level)
Culture, history; objectives and outcomes; usually unconscious
Action (Meso level) Actions and goals; consciousOperations (Micro level) Habits and reactions; unconscious
“Your methodology and methods”
Field research in case studies (not ethnographies)Observations
Interviews
Artifact analysis (including textual analysis)
Others as they might be useful
Cf. Topsight (2013)
“The conclusions you are drawing”
“I’m using a Soviet theory to study
entrepreneurship.” — me, 2014
“Generations” of AT, with historical accretions of concepts** An ANT-based translation analysis
1GAT
2GAT3GAT
mediation, internalization, proximal development
activity system, structure of activity
activity networks, contradictions, rules
3GAT was applied to
design research
And consequently changed in fundamental ways
From research subjects to participants
From individual to collective subjects
From prediction to description (and deliberation)
From individual activities to networked activities
1GAT2GAT
3GAT
4GAT
Rhetorical pivots—as assumptions and justifications reach their shelf life
The next pivot?
A “rough draft”
Application: Apply AT to sociocognitive, not just social, research into writing
Theory: Rebuild activity theory around dialogism
Phenomenon: Understand the object(ive) as multiple
Development: Theorize interfering cycles of development
“[How] your work could speak to or be used by scholars from a different discipline”
Applications in...
Professional writing
Technology studies
Human dimensions of organizations
Studies of work
HCI/CSCW
wherever AT has spread.