How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Knowledge transfer: a basis for competitive advantage in firms

Cultural-historical activity theory has evolved through three generations of research. The emerging third generation of activity theory takes two interacting activity systems as its minimal unit of analysis, inviting us to focus research efforts on the challenges and possibilities of inter-organizational learning. Activity theory and its concept of expansive learning are examined with the help of four questions: 1. Who are the subjects of learning? 2. Why do they learn? 3. What do they learn? 4. How do they learn? Five central principles of activity theory are presented, namely activity system as unit of analysis, multi-voicedness of activity, historicity of activity, contradictions as driving force of change in activity, and expansive cycles as possible form of transformation in activity. Together the four questions and five principles form a matrix which is used to present a study of expansive learning in a hospital setting in Finland. In conclusion, implications of the framework for our understanding o...

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Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization.

Polycontextuality and Boundary Crossing in Expert Cognition: Learning and Problem Solving in Complex Work Activities.

Can a School Community Learn to Master its Own Future? An Activity‐Theoretical Study of Expansive Learning Among Middle School Teachers

Professionals make history in future-oriented discursive actions that can be made visible and analysable. The article analyses sessions in which medical professionals, together with the patient and researcher-interventionists, discuss the care of a patient with multiple chronic illnesses, aiming at the creation of a new, collaborative care practice. In these sessions, consequential decision-making and future-oriented envisioning are brought together. The analysis proceeds through three layers, from a substantive layer to a methodological layer and a metatheoretical layer. We argue that professional case meetings, enriched with an induced awareness of their history-making potential, are microcosms in which collective zones of proximal development can be articulated and enacted as practitioners look back on the history of their activity and engage in future-oriented framing experiments. For studies of professional discourse, such settings offer opportunities to capture how history is made in situated discursive actions. In these situations, researcher-interventionists make themselves contestable and fallible participants of the discourse, which means that their actions also become objects of data collection and critical analysis.

The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care

In microsociological studies of talkas social action, the active subjectis typically depicted as someone who interacts rather than acts. In other words, conversations produce intersubjective understandings rather than meanings based on the referential and semantic contents of talk. This paper formulates an alternative approach to the analysis of institutional conversations, based on an expanded unit of action. In this expanded unit, people act on a jointly constructed object which is outside the “social system” constituted by the parties themselves. Bakhtin's notions of utterance, social language, speech genre and voice are interpreted and integrated into a coherent system within the framework of activity theory. The proposed theoretical approach is applied in an examination of transcript data from videotaped doctor‐patient encounters from a Finnish primary care clinic. A set of voices present in medical consultations is identified. Analyses of data examples demonstrate the robustness of this set of voice...

Ritva Engeström

Papers

Polycontextuality and Boundary Crossing in Expert Cognition: Learning and Problem Solving in Complex Work Activities.

Can a School Community Learn to Master its Own Future? An Activity‐Theoretical Study of Expansive Learning Among Middle School Teachers

The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care

Voice as communicative action

Organizational forgetting: An activity-theoretical perspective.