• University of Helsinki
    Department of Philosophy (Theoretical Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy in Swedish)
    Researcher
Helsinki, Finland
  •  55
    From Habituality to Change: Contribution of Activity Theory and Pragmatism to Practice Theories
    with Sami Paavola and Pasi Pohjola
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42 (3): 345-360. 2012.
    The new social theories of practice have been inspired by Wittgenstein's late philosophy, phenomenology and more recent sociological theories. They regard embodied skills and routinized, mostly unconscious habits as a key foundation of human practice and knowledge. This position leads to an overstatement of the significance of the habitual dimension of practice. As several critics have suggested this approach omits the problems of transformative agency and change of practices. In turn classical …Read more
  •  4
    Dynamics of Change in Research Work: Constructing a New Research Area in a Research Group
    with Eveliina Saari
    Science, Technology, and Human Values 26 (3): 300-321. 2001.
    The authors study how an aerosol technology research group constructed a research agenda for itself and how its activity was changed in the process. The group's research agenda was heterogeneous, comprising several research areas in which the knowledge of aerosols was applied in different industrial contexts. The authors analyze the development of one of these areas, the research on the production of ultrafine particles from 1992 to 1997, employing the concept of mediated activity that has been …Read more
  •  26
    Pragmatism and activity theory: Is Dewey's philosophy a philosophy of cultural retooling?
    Outlines. Critical Practice Studies 8 (2): 3-19. 2006.
    A philosopher of education, Jim Garrison, has suggested that John Dewey's philosophy is a philosophy of cultural retooling and that Dewey adopted both his conception of work and the idea of tool as "a middle term between subject and object” from Hegel. This interpretation raises the question of what the relationship of the idea of cultural retooling in Dewey’s work is to his naturalism and to his allegiance to Darwinian biological functionalism. To deal with this problem, this paper analyzes how…Read more
  •  26
    Contradictions of high-technology capitalism and the emergence of new forms of work
    In Annalisa Sannino, Harry Daniels & Kris D. Gutierrez (eds.), Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, Cambridge University Press. pp. 160--175. 2009.
  •  19
    Because of the gross difficulties in measuring the societal impact of academic research, qualitative approaches have been developed in the last decade mostly based on forms of interaction between university and other societal stakeholders. In this paper, we suggest a framework for qualitative analysis based on the distinction between three dimensions of societal impact: epistemological, artefactual and interactive-institutional. The epistemological dimension addresses what new research results a…Read more
  •  10
    20 Transcending traditional school learning: Teachers' work and networks of learning
    In Yrjö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen & Raija-Leena Punamäki-Gitai (eds.), Perspectives on Activity Theory, Cambridge University Press. pp. 325. 1999.
  •  1
    Activity theory: A well-kept secret
    with Yrjö Engeström
    In Yrjö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen & Raija-Leena Punamäki-Gitai (eds.), Perspectives on Activity Theory, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1--16. 1999.
  •  75
    The paper compares John Dewey's pragmatism and cultural-historical activity theory as epistemologies and theories of transformative material activity. For both of the theories, the concept of activity, the prototype of which is work, constitutes a basis for understanding the nature of knowledge and reality. This concept also implies for both theories a methodological approach of studying human behavior in which social experimentation and intervention play a central role. They also suggest that r…Read more
  •  35
    Perspectives on activity theory (edited book)
    with Yrjö Engeström and Raija-Leena Punamäki-Gitai
    Cambridge University Press. 1999.
    Activity theory is an interdisciplinary approach to human sciences that originates in the cultural-historical psychology school, 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 original chapters by authors from ten countr…Read more