Using activity theory: experiences of organizational authorship

Using activity theory: experiences of organizational authorship This special issue addresses the relationship between people and work organizations in uncertain and unstable situations in which organizational practitioners are required to deal with and manage complexity and change. Practitioners are asked to work and learn in globalizing contexts in which work processes, skills and conditions of employment are quickly shifting and often contingent or precarious. Competences of the actors are often judged on their ability to respond to and manage events and issues that seem to be unusual and unsolvable on the basis of the existing knowledge. Becoming creative producers of knowledge and choices, capable of critically dialoguing with the past and the future, requires new instruments and forms of collaboration that mediate between the actors and the often unpredictable objects of their activity. New dynamic balances have to be found between material and immaterial dimensions of the work, between stability and mobility and between standardization and differentiation. When changes seem to be out of control, alienation and withdrawal become a growing risk. The challenge is to stay active, not stopping the search for meanings and for sustainable courses of action. This means that it is crucial for the practitioners to become authors of their work, their professional lives and their organizations, that is, to create a sense of identity and to rediscover passion and pleasure for work. Authorship is a way of being, relating and dwelling in professional and organizational communities (Gorli et al., 2015). It means grasping and creating a shared sense of self and of the organizational landscapes as products of discourses and material practices. This implies transformative agency, breaking out of paralyzing conflicts by means of volitional productive actions that generate ethical and aesthetical relationships with work and professional objects (Sannino, 2015). This kind of authorship is a way of expanding the horizon of possibilities. Building this kind of authorship and transformative agency is perhaps the most important learning challenge of our time. Cultural-historical activity theory offers a perspective through which authorship and transformative agency can be promoted and developed in organizations (Engeström et al., 1999; Sannino etal., 2009). Activity theory sees organizations as activity systems that change and develop through historically accumulated contradictions and expansive learning processes. Activity theory provides lenses and tools to detect and analyze contradictions, steps in expansive learning cycles, conceptualizations of expanded objects of activity and potentials of novel mediating instruments and patterns of interaction. The theory of expansive learning (Engeström, 2015) represents a powerful framework with which practitioners and researchers may collectively question their everyday practices, find new ways of acting in their organizations and manage contradictions in their activity systems. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together recent advances in the use of activity theory in studies of workplace learning and organizational change. The articles represent research on workplace learning in two cultural contexts, namely, Finland and Italy. The traditions and conditions of these two cultures are sufficiently different to generate productive comparisons and exchanges, yet sufficiently similar to allow for fruitful collaboration and creative blending of perspectives. Interestingly enough, the JWL 28,4