Activity Theory

Introduction

Sociological theories tend to be concerned with issues such as social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, and other social aspects of human life. Psychological theories, in contrast, tend to focus on the individual, its behavior and mental processes – though social psychology does study the nature and causes of social behavior. Activity theory, at least in the intent of its main developers, constitutes the attempt to theorize the individual and collective dimensions of the human life forms together without reducing the social to the psychological or the psychological to the social. It is an explicit attempt to locate the origin and development of consciousness in culturally and historically specific, everyday human praxis.

Definition

The fundamental category of the theory is “activity.” It constitutes the smallest unit that allows us to make sense of events involving human beings. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, there is a lot of confusion arising from...