Double Stimulation in the Waiting Experiment with Collectives: Testing a Vygotskian Model of the Emergence of Volitional Action

The Training Setting as a Social and Liminal Space for Professional Hybridization

This article addresses the liminality concept as a way to explore a particular group context, relating to a training setting intended as a liminal space, and to highlight its potential to trigger evolutionary personal and organizational identity trajectories. Dealing with a contemporary uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous organizational scenario, people are asked for consistent and quick professional hybridization processes. This article refers to a case study related to an action research process aimed at a cultural transformation and nurturing organizational learning inside an extra-hospital Rehabilitation Center, challenged by a strong organizational reconfiguration and the creation of new functions and roles, among which the one coordinator, responsible for the operational activity to be managed within the units of the organizational context. This article also highlights both the main features that characterize a training setting as a liminal space and identifies the possible plots of professional hybridization paths that a training group as a liminal space can trigger and develop.

Learning Platforms for Implementing Formative Interventions to Promote the Health and Safety of Workers in Brazil

Formative intervention methodologies, such as the Change Laboratory (CL), are increasingly being used in work environments. However, the learning process entailed in the application of these methodologies has received insufficient attention and may be facilitated through the use of learning platforms. We examined the development of learning and training strategies for implementing formative interventions, drawing on the experiences of a research group focusing on workers' health. Information obtained from individuals involved in CL formative activities was analyzed and interpreted using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and the theory of expansive learning. The process of learning to implement formative interventions unfolded gradually, beginning with the interventionists' initial exposure to abstract concepts that they subsequently internalized via various mediations and applied in concrete situations. Four key interventionist training strategies used to foster collective learning were identified: (1) promoting dialogues and exchange of experiences, (2) creating environments for continuous learning and permanent discussion (seminars and post-graduate courses and the use of communication technologies), (3) creating spaces for experimentation and the practical application of concepts (case studies and participation in interventions), and (4) the use of the double stimulation method during training programs.

Changing the World for Children with Complex Feeding Difficulties: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Transformative Agency

How to bring about positive change is a key concern in cultural-historical theory. There is an urgent imperative to address questions of transformation at the nexus of the individual and the social. One way to approach this is through the concept of agency, the means through which people go beyond coping with problems or adapting to the status quo, instead striving to make the future that ought to be a reality. This paper takes up ideas from Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance (TAS), Sannino’s transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), and Edwards’ relational agency, tracing the emergence and enactment of agency among parents of children with complex feeding difficulties. These children were unable to eat orally, instead using a tube to feed. Each family strived towards, and realised, futures where their child was able to feed orally, without a tube. Parents acted agentically in ways that were contingent upon relevant cultural tools. Such tools are key to futures that are more inclusive, equitable and nurturing for all children and their families. The paper highlights the value of contemporary cultural-historical approaches to agency in understanding and provoking transformation at the nexus of the individual and social.

Cultural-historical activity theory: founding insights and new challenges

The article presents central ideas and future challenges of cultural-historical activity theory, focusing specifically on the work of the so-called Helsinki school of activity theory. We first introduce the revolutionary roots of the theory in the works of Marx and Vygotsky, and the evolution of the unit of analysis through different generations of activity theory. We then discuss the foundational role of historicity and dialectics in activity theory. We identify two central epistemological-methodological principles that guide activity-theoretical studies, namely the principle of double stimulation and the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. These principles lead us to emphasize formative interventions as a powerful way to conduct societally impactful activity-theoretical research. We conclude by pointing out some major challenges facing activity theory in the 21st century.

Co-generation of societally impactful knowledge in Change Laboratories

Formative interventions and the specific method of the Change Laboratory (CL) are presented as examples of intervention research that generates actionable and societally impactful knowledge. In contrast with stabilization knowledge that fixates phenomena into static categories, actionable knowledge is understood here as collaborative and generative possibility knowledge intertwined with transformative action. The article asks what can be learned from the different ways the epistemological principles behind formative interventions are implemented in different CLs. Three CL interventions are analyzed. The analysis is summarized with the help of a grid covering the key characteristics of formative interventions: contradictions, conflicts of motives, double stimulation, zone of proximal development, germ cells and emerging concepts. Comparison of the three cases shows that understanding the specific historical stage of the development of contradictions in a given organization is of foundational importance. In transformations induced by CLs, contradiction and conflict may be seen as acute push and the future-oriented concept as gradually emerging pull, with the change actions of the local practitioners in the middle. Constructing a germ cell and eventually an expanded concrete concept based on it are the most demanding challenges for CL interventions.

Double Stimulation in the Waiting Experiment with Collectives: Testing a Vygotskian Model of the Emergence of Volitional Action

This study explores what human conduct looks like when research embraces uncertainty and distance itself from the dominant methodological demands of control and predictability. The context is the waiting experiment originally designed in Kurt Lewin's research group, discussed by Vygotsky as an instance among a range of experiments related to his notion of double stimulation. Little attention has been paid to this experiment, despite its great heuristic potential for charting the terrain of uncertainty and agency in experimental settings. Behind the notion of double stimulation lays Vygotsky's distinctive view of human beings' ability to intentionally shape their actions. Accordingly, human beings in situations of uncertainty and cognitive incongruity can rely on artifacts which serve the function of auxiliary motives and which help them undertake volitional actions. A double stimulation model depicting how such actions emerge is tested in a waiting experiment conducted with collectives, in contrast with a previous waiting experiment conducted with individuals. The model, validated in the waiting experiment with individual participants, applies only to a limited extent to the collectives. The analysis shows the extent to which double stimulation takes place in the waiting experiment with collectives, the differences between the two experiments, and what implications can be drawn for an expanded view on experiments.