Ritva Engeström

Voice as communicative action

In microsociological studies of talkas social action, the active subjectis typically depicted as someone who interacts rather than acts. In other words, conversations produce intersubjective understandings rather than meanings based on the referential and semantic contents of talk. This paper formulates an alternative approach to the analysis of institutional conversations, based on an expanded unit of action. In this expanded unit, people act on a jointly constructed object which is outside the “social system” constituted by the parties themselves. Bakhtins notions of utterance, social language, speech genre and voice are interpreted and integrated into a coherent system within the framework of activity theory. The proposed theoretical approach is applied in an examination of transcript data from videotaped doctor‐patient encounters from a Finnish primary care clinic. A set of voices present in medical consultations is identified. Analyses of data examples demonstrate the robustness of this set of voice...

Computerized medical records, production pressure and compartmentalization in the work activity of health center physicians

Silence has been recognized as a prevalent feature and source of trouble in doctor-patient relationships (e.g., Katz 1984). Less attention has been paid to problems of communication between physicians. In spite of the massive transition to group practices all over the industrialized world, the literature on communication in medical settings is still dominated by the image of the solitary doctor. In this paper, we examine some aspects of communication between physicians in a group practice. Our focus is on the central communicative artifact, the medical record especially in its computerized form.

The Trialogical Approach as a New form of Mediation

An emerging trend in theories about human learning and cognition is emphasizing collaboration, creative processes, and the use of new technology. Various changes in modern society form a basis for the change in learning theories, such as: 1) the rapid development of new technology which has formed and continues to form qualitatively new opportunities for distributed interaction and collaboration, 2) the pressure to create – and learn deliberately to create – new knowledge and transform existing practices in various areas of life, and 3) the complexity of modern society which means that people must combine their expertise to solve often unforeseen complex problems because individuals cannot solve problems alone.

Reflections on the use of DWR in Intercultural Collaboration

This article is a reflection on a Developmental Work Research project focused on the introduction of information and communication technology in schools in Africa. The longstanding project incited us to examine developmental research partnership as a joint mediated activity that takes place in a developing country. The data include several workshops, Change Laboratories (CLs) in three schools, and ethnography from these schools. By tracing the bottom-up approach of CLs, and to capture the complexity of the effects of related activities represented in the partnership, we were led to focus on dialogue where the dialectic of local and global forces evolve.

Intercultural Collaboration: A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

We are pleased that the article “Reflections on the Use of DWR in Intercultural Collaboration” has been given space for further discussion inspired by Robert Serpell’s commentary. Since the history of scientific knowledge about education is typically seen as “Western” and nonWestern contexts have been “only the objects of study upon which Western paradigms of inquiry are imposed” (Dasen & Akkari, 2008, p. 8), Serpell’s commentary has even greater weight. We have selected from the commentary three interrelated theses that we want to discuss. The first of these is that although the DWR/CL project explicitly sought to emphasize that the local participants should become agents of change within their own arena, the project seemed to import packaged models from the North to the South. The second claim is that by investing the authority of expert knowledge in the Northern partners, the project may have deprived itself of access to intuitive theoretical understandings that were more accessible to the partners in the South. The third concerns the asymmetry of roles assigned to the Northern and Southern participants in the project. To better orient ourselves and pursue a responsive understanding of these comments, which question, in fact, the basic premises of the BeST project, we started to read up on some works by our commentator, who is well known and highly experienced in African studies. This endeavor shed light on some confusion that had arisen in the authors’ minds. As Serpell himself has stated, his theoretical framework is inspired by the notions of guided participation and peripheral participation and ideas of Vygotsky as interpreted by Cole and others, about the embedding of children’s cognitive development and education within a sociocultural and politico-historical context (Serpell, 2007). The framework is also presented in the form of a diagram, which has an informative title: “Appropriation of Cultural Practices Through Participation in Activities With