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3 references
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- Vol 6 RE: Chapter 13, App C, App D, App E
workplace learningactivity systemsexpansive learningorganisational contradictionstransformative agencycollective activityJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Engeström reconceptualises workplace learning for situations in which people must create a new activity rather than acquire a stable skill already known in advance. Using cultural-historical activity theory, he represents work as a collective system linking subjects, object, tools, rules, community, and division of labour.
Key ideas
Contradictions accumulated within this system appear as disruptions, dilemmas, and competing motives; analysing them can open a zone for expansive learning. Participants question current practice, trace its historical development, model alternatives, test and implement a new form, reflect, and consolidate change. The object of activity—and the participants’ collective agency—expands through this process. Engeström uses examples of transformation at work and discusses dimensions such as social-spatial, temporal, moral-ideological, and systemic expansion.
Why it matters
The theory cautions against reducing organisational learning to individual training or information transfer. Developmental interventions instead create tools and dialogue through which practitioners can examine evidence, surface contradictions, and construct solutions whose content is not predetermined by an external expert.
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- Vol 4 RE: App C, App D
collective transformationexpansive learningformative interventionsactivity systemscross-boundary collaborationtransformative agencyBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Engeström brings together studies that develop expansive learning as a theory of collective transformation in work and organisations. The central problem is how people learn when they face persistent contradictions and must construct an activity that does not yet exist.
Key ideas
Cultural-historical activity theory analyses the shared object of work together with mediating tools, rules, community, and division of labour. Across intervention studies, participants surface disturbances, examine the historical formation of problems, model alternatives, test and implement new practices, and build agency to sustain them. The cases show that expansion can cross organisational and professional boundaries and that learning trajectories contain conflict, setbacks, partial advances, and competing interpretations. Formative interventions therefore do not simply deliver an expert-designed solution; they provide conceptual and representational tools through which practitioners analyse and redesign their own activity.
Why it matters
The collection connects theoretical development with empirical methods and demonstrates why workplace learning cannot be reduced to individual skill acquisition or adaptation to an unchanged system.
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- Vol 4 RE: App D
concept formationcomplex activity systemstheoretical conceptsdouble stimulationtransformative agencyconceptual developmentJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Engeström proposes a research agenda for studying concept formation outside laboratories and formal lessons, where communities create culturally new concepts while confronting persistent practical problems. Drawing on cultural-historical activity theory and dialectical accounts of concept development, he advances five guiding ideas.
Key ideas
Concepts form within historically evolving collective activity systems; different kinds of concepts must be distinguished; theoretical concepts develop by ascending from an abstract germ cell toward a concrete system; concepts in practice are polyvalent, contested, and dynamic; and concept formation is intertwined with transformative agency generated through double stimulation. Concepts are therefore not merely static labels acquired by individuals. They can become future-oriented instruments that reorganise a shared activity, its relationships, and its possibilities for action. Research should follow concepts longitudinally across discourse, material tools, social relations, and organisational boundaries.
Why it matters
For education, the agenda connects classroom learning with wider productive activities and asks how learners participate in creating concepts capable of transforming the situations they address.
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Edition abbreviations
- TE
- Teacher Edition
- PE
- Practice Edition
- RE
- Research Edition
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