Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a theoretical framework to conceptualize and analyse the relationship between cognition (what people think and feel) and activity (what people do). The theory was founded by L. S. Vygotsky and Aleksei N. Leontiev, who were part of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology. The Soviet philosopher of psychology, S.L. Rubinshtein, developed his own variant of activity as a philosophical and psychological theory, independent from Vygotsky's work., V. Lektorsky in ; Brushlinskii, A. V. 2004 Political restrictions in Stalin's Russia had suppressed the cultural-historical psychology – also known as the Vygotsky School – in the mid-thirties. This meant that the core "activity" concept remained confined to the field of psychology. Vygotsky's insight into the dynamics of consciousness was that it is essentially subjective and shaped by the history of each individual's social and cultural experiences. Since the 1990s, CHAT has attracted a growing interest among academics worldwide. Elsewhere CHAT has been described as "a cross-disciplinary framework for studying how humans transform natural and social reality, including themselves, as an ongoing culturally and historically situated, materially and socially mediated process". CHAT explicitly incorporates the mediation of activities by society, which means that it can be used to link concerns normally independently examined by sociologists of education and (social) psychologists. Core ideas are: 1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via actions; 2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools to learn and communicate; and 3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning – and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting.
The term CHAT was coined by Michael Cole and popularized by to promote the unity of what, by the 1990s, had become a variety of currents harking back to Vygotsky's work. Prominent among those currents are Cultural-historical psychology, in use since the 1930s, and Activity theory in use since the 1960s.
Historical overview Origins: revolutionary Russia CHAT traces its lineage to dialectical materialism, classical German philosophy,Blunden, Andy. 2012, "The Origins of Cultural Historical Activity Theory" ; Blunden, Andy. Genealogy of CHAT (graph). and the work of Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei N. Leontiev and Aleksandr Luria, known as "the founding troika" of the cultural-historical approach to Social Psychology. In particular Goethe's romantic science ideas which were later taken up by Hegel. The conceptual meaning of "activity" is rooted in the German word Tätigkeit. Hegel is considered the first philosopher to point out that the development of humans' knowledge is not spiritually given, but developed in history from living and working in natural environments. In a radical departure from the behaviorism and reflexology that dominated much of psychology in the early 1920s, they formulated, in the spirit of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, the concept of activity, i.e., "artifact-mediated and object-oriented action". By bringing together the notion of history and culture in the understanding of human activity, they were able to transcend the Cartesian dualism between subject and object, internal and external, between people and society, between individual inner consciousness and the outer world of society. At the beginning of and into the mid-20th century, psychology was dominated by schools of thought that ignored real-life processes in psychological functioning (e.g. Gestalt psychology, Behaviorism and Cognitivism (psychology)). Lev Vygotsky, who developed the foundation of cultural-historical psychology based on the concept of mediation, published six books on psychology topics during a working life which spanned only ten years. He died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. A.N. Leontiev worked with Lev Vygotsky and Alexandr Luria from 1924 to 1930, collaborating on the development of a Marxist psychology. Leontiev left Vygotsky's group in Moscow in 1931, to take up a position in Kharkov. There he was joined by local psychologists, including Pyotr Galperin and Pyotr Zinchenko. He continued to work with Vygotsky for some time but, eventually, there was a split, although they continued to communicate with one another on scientific matters. Leontiev returned to Moscow in 1934. Contrary to popular belief, Vygotsky's work was never banned under the Stalin government. In 1950 A.N. Leontiev became the Head of the Psychology Department at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU). This department became an independent Faculty in 1966. He remained there until his death in 1979. Leontiev's formulation of activity theory, post 1962, had become the new "official" basis for Soviet psychology. In the two decades between a thaw in the suppression of scientific enquiry in Russia and the death of the Vygotsky's continuers, contact was made with the West.
Developments in the West Michael Cole, a psychology post-graduate exchange student, arrived in Moscow in 1962 for a one-year stint of research under Alexandr Luria. He was one for the first Westerners to present Luria's and Vygotsky's ideas to an Anglo-Saxon public. This, and a steady flow of books translated from Russian ensured the gradual establishment of a Cultural Psychology base in the west. The earliest books translated into English were Lev Vygotsky's "Thought and Language" (1962), Luria's "Cognitive Development" (1976), Leontiev's Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (1978) and Wertsch's "The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology" (1981). Principal among the groups promoting CHAT-related research was Yrjö Engeström's Helsinki-based CRADLE.Other CHAT-based centers of research and learning: Oxford Center for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT), International Society o Cultural and Activity Research(ISCAR), LCSD: Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), Kansai University (Japan) CHAT: Center for Activity Theory . BERA British Educational Research Association (CHAT Special Interest Group). In 1982, Yrjö Engeström organized an Activity Conference to concentrate on teaching and learning issues. This was followed by the Aarhus (Dk) Conference in 1983 and the Utrecht (Nl) conference in 1984. In October 1986, West Berlin's College of Arts hosted the first ISCAR International Congress on Activity Theory.History of ISCRAT (International Standing Conference for Research, on Activity Theory) The second ISCRAT congress took place in 1990. In 1992, ISCRAT became a formal legal organization with its own by-laws in Amsterdam. Other ISCRAT conferences: Rome (1993), Moscow (1995), Aarhus (1998) and Amsterdam (2002), when ISCRAT and the Conference for Socio-Cultural Research merged into ISCAR. From here on, ISCAR organizes an international Congress every three years: Sevilla (Es) 2005; San Diego (USA) 2008; Rome (It) 2011; Sydney (Au) 2014; Quebec, Canada (2017).
In recent years, the implications of activity theory in organizational development have been the focus of researchers at the Centre for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research (CATDWR), now known as CRADLE, at the University of Helsinki, as well as Mike Cole at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California San Diego.(Selective) list of other CHAT-related research groups and centers: ATUL (Activity Theory Usability Laboratory at the University of Wollongong Australia – "Organisations and communities of the Knowledge Age").; CHAT (Center for Human Activity Theory, Kansai University, Japan – "Links with Helsinki, Bath and California").; OSAT (Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research at Oxford University UK. – "Learning across the age range".); LIW (Learning in and for Interagency Working at the University of Bath, UK – "Effective multiagency working".)
Three generations of activity theory Diverse philosophical and psychological sources inform activity theory. In subsequent years, a simplified picture emerged, namely the idea that there are three principal 'stages' or 'generations' of activity theory, or "cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). 'Generations' do not imply a 'better-worse' value judgment. Each generation illustrates a different aspect. Whilst the first generation built on Vygotsky's notion of mediated action from the individual's perspective, the second generation built on Leont'ev's notion of activity system, with emphasis on the collective. The third generation, which appeared in the mid-nineties, builds on the idea of multiple interacting activity systems focused on a partially shared object, with boundary-crossings between them.; Engeström, 2008, "The Future of Activity Theory" p. 6. An activity system is a collective in which one or more human actors engage in activity to cyclically transform an object (a raw material or problem) to repeatedly achieve a desired result.
First generation – Vygotsky