Does Cultural Psychology Need the Concept of Activity? A Challenge to Ratner's Exposition (1996)

Abstract

While being productive in its way of counteracting mentalism, Ratner's (1996) activity approach yields many problems that are critically discussed in the present paper. First, activity theorists' legitimate claim that culture is more than interacting minds does not imply a mindless cultural psychology which overlooks the meaning of meaning, intentionality and semiotic mediation. Instead of participating in endless either-or fights, we could rather ask in which ways activity is semiotically mediated. In this context, it is especially interesting to analyse how the explicit absence of activities becomes a semiotic mediator for the development of psychological phenomena. Second, it is necessary to define explicitly what is meant by activity and related concepts, especially when those are imported from other theoretical traditions (here Bourdieu). Otherwise our theoretical thinking would take place in terms of what Vygotsky called pseudo-concepts. This may be helpful for the accumulation of symbolic capital in the field of science, but certainly does not improve our understanding of cultural facets of psychology. In addition, it has been problematic to put activity theory into concrete empirical research practice. It is especially difficult to relate macro-level aspects of the social structure to the person in meaningful ways. Thus, though sharing the general conviction that psychological phenomena are grounded in concrete social and material contexts, it is doubted that the concept of activity in its present state of elaboration is of key importance for our theoretical and empirical work in the field of culture and psychology.