Conceptual frameworks for research: Intermediate Concept Construction

1
Conceptual frameworks for research Intermediate
Concept Construction Conceptualizing Units of
Analysis

• Conceptual frameworks for research
• Conceptualizing social practices
• Unit of analysis (activity theory)
• Intermediate concept construction
• Sociocultural or cultural historical school
• Contexts
• Alternative frameworks

2
Conceptual frameworks for research

• Conceptual frameworks for research
• Selective by necessity
• What do you want to know?
• How can you know about it? How can you see it?
• Who to include?
• Always Who, what, when, where, why and how?
• Building up understanding along the way as an
  individual researcher or in a research team
• Building a cumulative picture
• Mapping knowledge and understandings

3
Conceptual frameworks for research

• Conceptualizing social practices, activities, and
  interactions
• How do you conceptualize your object of inquiry?
• Visible lt-gt Invisible
• Front stage lt-gt back stage
• Production lt-gt Reproduction
• Roles, relations responsibilities
• Perspectives, identities
• How is the phenomenon held together?
• Intermediaries, coordination

4
Conceptual frameworks for research

• Contexts of activities
• Organizational context
• Sociohistorical context
• Situated contexts
• How contexts interact co-construct instances of
  activities

5
Intermediate Concept Construction
Conceptualizing Units of Analysis

• Unit of analysis (activity theory, K. Kuutti)
• Intermediate concept construction
• Activity between structures and individuals
• Between concepts (theory lenses) and data
• What you see in the field, on the ground
• How concepts live, situated in contexts in the
  field
• Making sense of field research
• Where and how to see activities (social
  practices, interactions)
• communication, coordination
• collaboration, co-construction
• Where and how perspectives come together

6
Intermediate Concept Construction
Conceptualizing Units of Analysis

• Unit of analysis (activity theory)
• One should be able to delineate the object of
  research and to draw a boundary between the
  object and the background, and one should be able
  to find an entity in which all the threads of
  research can be conveniently connected. (Kuutti,
  p. 249)
• Activity system (lifeworld)
• Object(s) of activity
• irreducibly material and ideal
• shared object(s)

7
Intermediate Concept Construction
Conceptualizing Units of Analysis

• Unit of analysis (activity theory)
• Activity system (lifeworld)
• Developmental work research
• Graphical representation (Engeström)
• Mapping, analysis, visualization
• Communities of practice, larger communities
• Networks of activity systems, communities

8
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks Cultural
Historical Activity Theory

• Sociocultural, cultural historical school
• Voice, social languages, genres
• Dialogicality, polyphony, heteroglossia (Bakhtin)
• Argumentative structure of thinking,
  heterogeneity
• Conversation analysis, discourse analysis are
  common methods

9
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks Cultural
Historical Activity Theory

• Cultural Historical Activity Theory
• Internal structure of activities (Leontiev)
• oriented by, guided by
• activity lt-gt object of activity (motive)
• actions lt-gt goals
• operations lt-gt conditions

10
Cultural Historical Activity Theory Context,
Intermediate Concepts Units of Analysis

• Cultural Historical Activity Theory
• Unit of analysis (activity theory, K. Kuutti)
• Contexts of activities
• In activity theory, the basic unit of analysis
  requires an intermediate concept -- a minimal
  meaningful context for individual actions . . .
  an activity. Because the context is included in
  the unit of analysis, the object of our research
  is always essentially collective, even if our
  main interest lies in individual actions.
  (Kuutti, p. 254)

11
Cultural Historical Activity Theory Context,
Intermediate Concepts Units of Analysis

• Cultural Historical Activity Theory
• Dialectical materialist perspective
• Development over time change over time
• Learning, expansive cycles
• Contexts of activities
• Organizational context
• Sociohistorical context
• Situated contexts
• How contexts interact co-construct instances of
  activities

12
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks Actor-Network
Theory

• Actor-Network (for example)
• Heterogeneous ensembles of people and artifacts,
  human and non-human actors/actants
• Semiotic analysis
• Technologies, systems, applications, artifacts as
  actors
• ontologies of non-human actants -gtactors
• Intermediaries between actors, co-constructing,
  enrolling, translating, inscribing, aligning
  actor-networks

13
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks Actor-Network
Theory

• Actor-Network Theory
• ex laboratory information system, defining the
  actor-network for standards-making (Hanseth
  Monteiro)
• ex middleware for interoperability virtual
  ethnography of technology-in-the-making and
  collaboration among competitors (semiotic
  analysis, including analysis of gestures,
  metaphors) (S. Newman)

14
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks

• Other examples
• Ex Participatory design of IS for a
  Film-Television-Radio company thinking about who
  to include in the research and development?
  (Kensing Simonsen)

15
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks

• Other examples
• Ex Unit of analysis for study of influence of
  television coverage of the Intefada, comparative
  study of Jewish and Arab Israeli families

16
Alternative Conceptual Frameworks

• Other examples . . .