The problem of cultural-historical typology is one of the most intriguing issues at the crossroads of psychology and cultural theory. This paper presents a preliminary sketch of the fourlevel-cognitive-development theory to look at this issue from a new perspective. According to the model suggested, three cultural types are marked out: prehistoric and hunter-gatherer culture, early theoretical ...

The holistic and insightful nature of the (cultural-historical) Activity Theory has led to its use by several researchers as a suitable vehicle for understanding and analysis in many areas of IS research and practice. This paper demonstrates the application of Activity Theory to the study of socio-technical systems which mediate complex, collective activities in the modern workplace and in ever...

Mediation is a key notion in dialectical approaches to understanding consciousness, thinking, and thought. However, the scholarly literature is replete with uses of the notion that are inconsistent with the dialectical framework within it, which has the specific function to articulate and explain the unit of a phenomenon and the corresponding unit of scientific analysis. The purpose of this pap...

Recently, a number of researchers within Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) have studied how discursive interaction unfolds between parent and child, as well as in the classroom (e.g. Matusov, 1996; Wells, 1996, Wertsch, 1985). Understanding such phenomena on the interpersonal plane is important given that the negotiation of intersubjective situation definitions is one of the vehicles o...

The computer support of cooperation and knowledge production across socially distributed activity systems has become an important topic in the context of the discourse on „knowledge management“. The present article will draw on concepts of cultural-historical activity theory to discuss the problem of how the notion of „knowledge“ is conceptualized and implicitly implemented in computer systems ...