Yrjö Engeström
Biographic Data
| ID | 83802 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yrjö Engeström |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yrjö |
| FAMILY NAME | Engeström |
| SIGNATURE | ENGESTRÖM Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6949-4278 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
From contradictions to kinship
Introduction This article examines the Explorer Program, a culturally grounded credit-recovery pathway co-designed through the Indigenous Learning Lab at a rural high school in the United States. Grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Indigenous relational epistemologies, the study investigates how historically produced contradictions in schooling, particularly between punitive disciplinary regimes and Indigenous kinship-based…
The hybridisation of adolescents’ worlds as a source of developmental tensions
The article explores developmental tensions in Finnish adolescents’ accounts of their different worlds. By understanding tensions experienced by students, educators can develop their pedagogical practices to address those tensions. Building on cultural-historical activity theory, we analysed 12 interviews of 8th graders, focusing on their experiences in six worlds: family, school, peers, digital, civic, and future activity. The adolescents experi…
In Search of an Experiment
Contradictions as an entry into inclusive systemic design
The change laboratory in medical education
Using activity theory to transform medical work and learning
This article introduces key concepts of activity theory and expansive learning. Expansive learning builds on the foundational ideas of the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). It is a research approach designed for studying the complexities and contradictions in authentic workplace environments. Change Laboratory is a formative intervention method developed for studying workplaces in transition and for stimulating collaborative efforts to …
Digital peer learning for transformative professional agency
Digital lifelong learning and more specifically digital peer learning (DPL) can play a major role to foster transformative agency in professions and occupations which are critically positioned for responding to acute societal needs. Yet so far, no published studies seem to have focused on this. This article aims at filling this gap with the help of a study in which online workshops and web forums were created for supporting homelessness practitio…
Double stimulation for collaborative transformation of agricultural systems
This article describes an investigation into how to build agency among growers so they take the lead in transforming their own activity of managing whiteflies . The study shows how the principle of Transformative Agency by Double Stimulation (TADS) was applied in a formative intervention based on the Change Laboratory method for developing pest management among greenhouse vegetable producers in Finnish Ostrobothnia. The data comprise audio record…
From mediated actions to heterogenous coalitions
The article outlines four generations of theorizing and research on work and learning within the Finnish school of activity theory. The main focus of the paper is on the evolution of the unit of analysis through the four generations, from mediated action to a collective activity system, to multiple-interconnected activity systems, and most recently to heterogenous work coalitions aimed at resolving wicked societal problems. We examine how learnin…
Transformative agency for justice
In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social, and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive, equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’ identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured. To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support …
The contradictions within inclusion in Brazil
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Cultural-historical activity theory
The article presents central ideas and future challenges of cultural-historical activity theory, focusing specifically on the work of the so-called Helsinki school of activity theory. We first introduce the revolutionary roots of the theory in the works of Marx and Vygotsky, and the evolution of the unit of analysis through different generations of activity theory. We then discuss the foundational role of historicity and dialectics in activity th…
Conflict and Curiosity
This commentary explores conflicts and dissonances between my own views, based on cultural-historical activity theory, and three key ideas presented in the articles of this special issue, namely (a) technology as partner, (b) agency as hybridization, and (c) historicity without contradictions. I hope that the dissonances I put forward will evoke curiosity and further exploration. In his work, Naoki Ueno drew on multiple theoretical traditions. Th…
Studies in Expansive Learning
Professor Engeström's exciting approach sees expansive learning as the central mechanism of transformation in societal practices and institutions. For researchers and practitioners in education, this book provides a conceptual and practical toolkit for creating and analyzing expansive learning processes with the help of interventions in workplaces, schools and communities. Chapters 1-3 situate the theory of expansive learning in the field of lear…
The emergence of learners’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory intervention
Changes and transformations in organisations are traditionally initiated by the management. This approach does not, however, encourage the agency of all the members in an organisation to engage in cooperative development of the activity. This paper presents an analysis of the development of participants’ transformative agency in a Change Laboratory (CL) intervention. In a CL, the participants analyse conflicts and disturbances in their local acti…
Formative Interventions for Expansive Learning and Transformative Agency
This article examines formative interventions as we understand them in cultural-historical activity theory and reflects on key differences between this intervention research tradition and design-based research as it is conceived in the learning sciences tradition. Three projects, including 2 Change Laboratories, are analyzed with the help of conceptual lenses derived from basic epistemological principles for intervention research in activity theo…
From controlled experiments to formative interventions in studies of agency
The article explores the possibility of developing a methodology for studying the emergence of agentive action experimentally. It discusses the limitations of classic experimental research and seeks a different perspective on the issue of control. The argument starts by reviewing how the concept of an experiment has been expanded throughout the years in social scientific research. Then new openings are considered toward experiments beyond the con…
Double stimulation in everyday work
Toward a Grammar of Collaboration
Inspired by Susan Leigh Star’s work, we propose a conceptual grammar for analyzing and comparing culturally and historically different kinds of collaboration. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theory and Bakhtin’s theorizing, the grammar is tested and concretized with the help of the macroscale case of different types of social movements and the microscale case of different types of collaboration in home care encounters. There is no direct …
Learning by Expanding
Learning by Expanding challenges traditional theories that consider learning a process of acquisition and reorganization of cognitive structures within the closed boundaries of specific tasks or problems. Yrjö Engeström argues that this type of learning increasingly fails to meet the challenges of complex social change and fails to create novel artifacts and ways of life. In response, he presents an innovative theory of expansive learning activit…
On the Methodological Demands of Formative Interventions
Bringing design-based research and activity-theoretical formative intervention research into dialogue is commendable. William R. Penuel contributes to this effort by examining two cases that he con
Activity Theory in Practice
La volition et l’agentivité transformatrice
Cet article traite de la formation de l’agentivité transformatrice au sein d’organisations, sous l’angle de la volonté et de l’action volontaire de la théorie de Vygotsky et du principe dialectique du mouvement ascendant de l’abstrait au concret comme point de départ. Le principe de la double stimulation de Vygotsky offre un cadre dans lequel les limites des conceptualisations de l’agentivité peuvent être outrepassées. Pour illustrer et examiner …
Whatever happened to process theories of learning
From communities of practice to mycorrhizae
When Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) introduced the notion of communities of practice in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation their ideas had a widespread refreshing impact on studies of learning. Acquisition was replaced by participation as the key metaphor and mechanism of learning. Analysis was extended beyond the skin of the individual, to encompass the entire community involved in a given productive practice…
How We Think They Think
How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Maurice Bloch. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. + 205 pp., notes, references, index
On the Life of the Object
Feuerbach] does not see how the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the previous one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying the social system according to …
Cultural-historical activity theory
The article presents central ideas and future challenges of cultural-historical activity theory, focusing specifically on the work of the so-called Helsinki school of activity theory. We first introduce the revolutionary roots of the theory in the works of Marx and Vygotsky, and the evolution of the unit of analysis through different generations of activity theory. We then discuss the foundational role of historicity and dialectics in activity th…
From communities of practice to mycorrhizae
When Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) introduced the notion of communities of practice in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation their ideas had a widespread refreshing impact on studies of learning. Acquisition was replaced by participation as the key metaphor and mechanism of learning. Analysis was extended beyond the skin of the individual, to encompass the entire community involved in a given productive practice…
Transformative agency for justice
In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social, and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive, equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’ identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured. To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support …
Quand le centre se dérobe
Contrairement à la plupart des recherches sur les activités de travail centrées sur des « centres de coordination » stables et nettement délimités dans le temps et dans l’espace, cet article traite d’un type d’organisation du travail presque opposé : un travail qui requiert la contribution active de combinaisons de personnes et d’artefacts en reconfiguration constante, œuvrant au gré de trajectoires temporelles étendues, et largement distribuées …
From controlled experiments to formative interventions in studies of agency
The article explores the possibility of developing a methodology for studying the emergence of agentive action experimentally. It discusses the limitations of classic experimental research and seeks a different perspective on the issue of control. The argument starts by reviewing how the concept of an experiment has been expanded throughout the years in social scientific research. Then new openings are considered toward experiments beyond the con…
La volition et l’agentivité transformatrice
Cet article traite de la formation de l’agentivité transformatrice au sein d’organisations, sous l’angle de la volonté et de l’action volontaire de la théorie de Vygotsky et du principe dialectique du mouvement ascendant de l’abstrait au concret comme point de départ. Le principe de la double stimulation de Vygotsky offre un cadre dans lequel les limites des conceptualisations de l’agentivité peuvent être outrepassées. Pour illustrer et examiner …
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory
Introduction When I write about the theory of activity, I am using a double-edged notion. On the one hand, it is necessary to emphasize the unique and self-consciously independent nature of the Soviet cultural-historical research tradition, which today is commonly called activity theory (see Leont'ev, 1978; Leontyev, 1981; Wertsch, 1981). On the other hand, this tradition is not a fixed and finished body of strictly defined statements – it is its…
Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition
Cognition and Communication at Work
This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract probl…
Interobjectivity, Ideality, and Dialectics
(1996). Interobjectivity, Ideality, and Dialectics. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 259-265
Innovative learning in work teams
Introduction Innovative organizational learning is collaborative learning in work organizations that produces new solutions, procedures, or systemic transformations in organizational practices (Engeström, 1995). Studies of innovative organizational learning have thus far produced relatively general conceptual tools (e.g., Argyris & Schön, 1978; Senge, 1990). Although it is commonly acknowledged that innovative learning at work has a complex cycli…
Perspectives on activity theory
Activity theory is an interdisciplinary approach to human sciences that originates in the cultural-historical psychology initiated by Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria. It takes the object-oriented, artifact-mediated collective activity system as its unit of analysis, thus bridging the gulf between the individual subject and the societal structure. This volume is the first comprehensive presentation of contemporary work in activity theory, with 26 or…
Activity theory and individual and social transformation
The internationalization of activity theory in the 1980s and 1990s has taken place in the midst of sweeping changes in the political and economic systems of our planet. During a few months, the Berlin Wall came down and Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. Those were only two among the visible symbols of the transformations that continue to amaze the most sophisticated observers
Expansive Visibilization of Work
A Web on the Wind
How We Think They Think
How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Maurice Bloch. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. + 205 pp., notes, references, index
Activity theory as a framework for analyzing and redesigning work
Cultural-historical activity theory is a new framework aimed at transcending the dichotomies of micro- and macro-, mental and material, observation and intervention in analysis and redesign of work. The approach distinguishes between short-lived goal-directed actions and durable, object-oriented activity systems. A historically evolving collective activity system, seen in its network relations to other activity systems, is taken as the prime unit…
Activity Theory and the Social Construction of Knowledge
Expansive Learning at Work
Cultural-historical activity theory has evolved through three generations of research. The emerging third generation of activity theory takes two interacting activity systems as its minimal unit of analysis, inviting us to focus research efforts on the challenges and possibilities of inter-organizational learning. Activity theory and its concept of expansive learning are examined with the help of four questions: 1. Who are the subjects of learnin…
The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care
Journal Article The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care Get access Yrjö Engeström, Yrjö Engeström Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ritva Engeström, Ritva Engeström Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Hannele Kerosuo Hannele Kerosuo Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 24, Issue 3, September 2003, P…
Developmental Work Research
Developmental work research is an innovative approach to the study and reshaping of work and learning. It expands cultural-historical activity theory by bringing it to the domains of work, technology and organizations.The world of work is in turmoil, increasingly dominated by 'runaway objects' generated by globalization and greed. Developmental work research rediscovers and expands use values in runaway objects. In workplace interventions it enga…
On the Life of the Object
Feuerbach] does not see how the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the previous one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying the social system according to …
Critical Perspectives on Activity
The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This unique collection is the first to explicitly reach back to the tradition's original critical impulse within which the writings of Karl Marx played such a central role. Each author pushes this impulse further to address leading contemporary questions. It includes a diverse array of international scholars working from the fields of…
From communities of practice to mycorrhizae
Enriching the Theory of Expansive Learning
An intervention study aimed at analyzing and transforming work and learning in three organizations (a bank, a primary health care center, and a hi-tech company) allowed us to investigate forms of coconfiguration work in which there is a focus on the development of products and services that adapt to the changing needs of users. The working hypothesis of our study was that the forms of expansive learning (that is, the processes by which a work org…
Entwickelnde Arbeitsforschung
Die Entwickelnde Arbeitsforschung ist ein innovativer Ansatz zur Untersuchung und Neugestaltung von Arbeit und Lernen. Sie erweitert die Kulturhistorische Tätigkeitstheorie durch ihre Einführung in die Bereiche Arbeit, Technologie und Organisationen.Die Welt der Arbeit befindet sich im Umbruch und wird dabei in zunehmendem Maße durch Konflikte und Widersprüche beherrscht, die in Folge von Globalisierung und Profitlogik entstehen. Die Entwickelnde…
Quand le centre se dérobe
Contrairement à la plupart des recherches sur les activités de travail centrées sur des « centres de coordination » stables et nettement délimités dans le temps et dans l’espace, cet article traite d’un type d’organisation du travail presque opposé : un travail qui requiert la contribution active de combinaisons de personnes et d’artefacts en reconfiguration constante, œuvrant au gré de trajectoires temporelles étendues, et largement distribuées …
Studies of expansive learning
Commentary
From the 1960s to the present, four distinct cultural psychologies have evolved. The «mind and culture» account, typifying research until the 1970s, treated culture and cognition as separable. Mind was regarded as a set of logical-scientific, abstract cognitive abilities, and the effect of cultural variables such as schooling on these abilities was examined. Subsequent cultural psychologies came to treat mind and culture as inseparable. The «mind…
Discursive manifestations of contradictions in organizational change efforts
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new methodological framework for the identification and analysis of different types of discursive manifestations of contradictions. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on the dialectical tradition of cultural‐historical activity theory. The methodological framework is developed by means of analyzing the entire transcribed corpus of the discourse conducted in a change laboratory interv…
Sociology (37 works) · Innovative Education and Learning Practices (27 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Epistemology (26 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Pedagogy (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Engineering (16 works) · Social science (13 works)