Emotion at Work: A Contribution to Third-Generation Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

Abstract

Second-generation cultural-historical activity theory, which drew its inspiration from Leont'ev's work, constituted an advance over Vygotsky's first-generation theory by explicitly articulating the dialectical relation between individual and collective. As part of an effort to develop third-generation-historical activity theory, I propose in this article a way in which emotion, motivation, and identity can be incorporated into the theory. I provide case materials from a 5-year ethnographic research project in a salmon hatchery that underscores the important role emotion and the derivative phenomena of motivation and identity play in the workplace generally, and in mathematical knowledgeability particularly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was made possible in part by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada. I am grateful to YrjöEngeström for encouraging me to pursue this expansion of cultural-historical activity theory to include emotion, motivation, and identity. My thanks go to Leanna Boyer, Stuart Lee, and Yew Jin Lee for their assistance in the fieldwork; these thanks are extended to the members of the Chat@UVic group.

Notes

¹There are studies from a sociocultural perspective on identity (Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998), but here I contribute to theorizing identity within a radically dialectical and material cultural-historical activity theory framework consistent with current philosophical work on the topic.

²Intensity is measured on a logarithmic scale so that each 3 decibels (dB) in intensity corresponds to a doubling of speech intensity. Figure 1b shows much more than can be explicated here in any detail, including the pitch continuations in speaker–speaker transitions, which is an indication of solidarity and (unconscious) efforts to make the face-to-face meeting work (cf. Roth, Tobin, Carambo, & Dalland, 2005).

³I distinguish nonconscious and unconscious. Nonconscious aspects of life, such as operations that constitute an action, can be made conscious. Unconscious aspects, however, such as the current level of hormones that constitutes part of the conditions that bring about particular operations, cannot become available to a knowing consciousness.

⁴In English, activity in the sense of cultural-historical activity theory, and activity in the sense of doing things, are not distinguished, leading to considerable confusion in the research community because theoretically important distinctions are not made. Other languages, such as German, do make the distinction—Tätigkeit and Aktivität, respectively—and thereby avoid the theoretical confusion observable in the Anglo-Saxon literature.

⁵Only in a dialectical perspective, where emotions are both produced and reproduced in concrete practical activity, can scholars overcome “openly hedonistic conceptions, the essence of which is that all activity of man is in some way subordinated to the principle of maximizing positive and minimizing negative emotions” and the associated “hedonistic conceptions of motivation” (Leont'ev, 1978, p. 120).

⁶For information on apprenticeship as ethnographic method see Coy (1989).

⁷This software can be found at www.praat.org and is available for all major operating systems.

⁸Educators often use motivation to explain why students do not do what the teacher asks them to do. If some task does not lead to a payoff—emotive gains that come with the expansion of action possibilities students obtain by realizing an object/motive—there is no reason for them to engage and therefore they are “unmotivated.” This articulation shows the derivative character of the motivation concept. Further, this framing shows the nature of the traditional construct as the internalization of external constraints—“motivated” are those who do on their own what someone else wants them to do (Holzkamp, 1993).

⁹There currently are 18 federal hatcheries spread over a province 7.3 times the size of England and 1.4 times the size of Texas, the largest U.S. state.

¹⁰Buying into collective motives should not be seen in negative terms and as part of contextual (societal) determination of individual behaviour. Rather, there is a dialectic at work whereby in buying into, and thereby submitting to, collective motives, individuals open up possibilities for themselves and expand their control over their life conditions, and the room they have to manoeuvre in, in conducting their lives (Holzkamp, 1983).