Institutional Innovation

Activity theorists provide a reasonably consistent set of malleable terms with which to structure an analysis of an activity system, and in embracing the concept of contradiction (reflection, tension and recapitulation) contribute to both understanding and explanation of the system under investigation.

As a support project manager I am exhorted to “speak to the projects” or “speak to the institutions”, as if projects and institutions were agents of whatever end was sought and had a simple identity, which could be addressed. One of the principal tensions or contradictions in the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme – and I suspect this is repeated across all education research and R&D programmes – is where to locate the main agency (active force) within the system. Does it lie with individual people: project and programme managers and team members? senior management teams? policy makers? Government? Does it lie with the collective team(s) or formally constituted associations, institutions and projects?

However, neither is it possible to fall back on a simplistic notion of only-human actors. As Latour (1999),  Law (ref) and other actor-network theorists have argued, convincingly, natural and made objects and even abstractions exert agentive force on one another. People and the things of their world (including institutions) – concrete and abstract – are mutually co-constituting. So, strictly, it is appropriate to speak of projects as being the agents in a network that is the Institutional Innovation programme. But, at the same time note that people do exert significant influence as individuals in the network due to a wide range of sometimes unrelated-to-the-system factors.
Allowing tensions, reflections and recapitulations across the system some house-room, it is possible, on another hand, to speak of projects not as agents but as the tools with which the actors in the system seek to influence or to work upon whatever their object or material might be.

Here again, we can see some of the tensions in the system. Projects may well be the tools, or mediational means: the social or technical enabling practices by which to act upon some object. But that object itself might be a social or technical practice which has been deemed in need of change. Which is not to say that the aim of a project is to act upon itself, but that a project may be a technical enabling practice acting upon a technical enabling practice. This is the case with pilot pedagogical innovation projects, for example.

I have set out the classical activity diagram (Engeström, 2001) with labels adapted slightly to fit the needs of this analysis.

Activity system

At each node similar questions can be asked. There are tensions, contradictions and ambiguities. However, being purposeful about it, we can fix some of the nodes for the sake of argument.

I propose to deal with the programme as the over-all system, with projects as the main agents in that system. I propose to treat the object upon which the projects are acting as the immediate project tasks and outputs: the local (or “micro”) problem to be investigated or solved. The outcome (or outcomes) is the wider issue, which the immediate object of the project is a partial reflection. I suggest that project make use of social and technical enabling practices as the tools with which they act upon their object. Simply put, projects use tools to act upon a problem to produce an outcome in a wider sphere.

Each node of the diagram is shown as a miniature of the overall diagram. This is to suggest that the principle of recapitulation operates in activity systems. One could conceive of the programme as the main actor, using projects as the tools by which to act upon an object to produce an outcome. Or similarly it would be possible to conceive of a project as a complete activity system within which people as actors used various tools to deliver work packages (objects). And, so on. Each node could be seen as an actor network in its own right. Deciding at which scale to fix the model in order to analyse the system is a necessary early task.

References

Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133 -156.
Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.