Review of “Triangles and Tribulations. Translations, betrayals, and the making of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory” by Clay Spinuzzi, MIT Press 2025
Spinuzzi has written an important overview of the evolution of CHAT from Vygotsky up to the present time. We live in a moment when many CHAT researchers are trying to turn CHAT to address the dominant societal challenges of our time - the climate crisis and the crisis of capitalism. Spinuzzi’s book sees this moment as one of a series of crises that CHAT has faced over the past century. As such, it deserves the attention of all CHAT researchers, especially those of us who are trying to take up these broader challenges.
In the mid-1990s, Spinuzzi was working as a technical writer producing software documentation for end users when he came across Engeström’s CHAT. He saw that Engeström was addressing problems of “small sets of people working and talking together, attempting to solve shared problems with tools and texts.” This was exactly the kind of problem he was interested in investigating. He was also interested in “Human-Computer Interaction,” where another scholar (Susanne Bødker) was already using a related version of Activity Theory. From that time forward and up to the present, Spinuzzi became an enthusiastic practitioner of “Engeström’s CHAT.”
I am here using Spinuzzi’s terminology to distinguish “Engeström’s CHAT” from the broad “family” of approaches which all trace their origins from Vygotsky. It is how Spinuzzi theorises this family and its formation which makes this book uniquely valuable.
Spinuzzi notes, correctly I think, that “CHAT is poorly equipped to analyze its own history.” To address this deficit Spinuzzi deploys the concept of “translation” from writing theory. Like most Anglophones, this author included, Spinuzzi is a monoglot, but with the concept of “translation” writing theory addresses the process whereby concepts and meanings are modified when a language or theory migrates or adapts to a new social situation.
Now, despite the fact that languages have evolved since the birth of the human species there is no such thing as a “more developed language.” Whatever the state of the forces of production and the social relations in which a language exists, it is no more or less complex or “developed.” Consequently, the metaphor of “translation” does not imply development, and there is no implication of “higher” or “lower,” no “pure” or “degenerate” version of CHAT.
And yet development is the heart and soul of Vygotsky’s approach to Psychology and has remained central to every variety of CHAT ever since. It remains impossible to imagine CHAT without the concept of development.
Development is absolutely central, with the implication of “higher” and “lower” psychological functions and the conception of sublation by which each new iteration incorporates the insights of its forebear, extending them at the same times as negating them. Each new version is “progress.” It is this feature which CHAT holds in common with all those theories in the lineage of Hegel and Marx which is the main target of postmodern (i.e., present-day mainstream) writers. It is contrary to the Zeitgeist to suggest that a child who acquires voluntary attention, language use and true concepts has developed in some way from a lower to a higher condition. Even Spinuzzi himself (p. 75) claims implausibly that “Vygotsky himself abandoned the distinction” between lower and higher psychological functions.
Whatever you make of psychological and personal development, there is a problem with claiming that an historically later iteration of an idea or culture is “higher” or “more developed” than an earlier version. Spinuzzi deploys translation theory to provide a more satisfactory account of the evolution of CHAT from post-revolutionary USSR, through the Stalinist regime to the late-twentieth century capitalist West and the present juncture when global crises dominate the attention of CHAT researchers. “Translation” offers a non-developmental approach to understanding the diversity of the CHAT family and its forebears.
I use the metaphor of “evolution” provisionally. Spinuzzi notes that three different metaphors are used by CHAT writers to express how their science relates to their forebears and contemporaries, viz., generations, strands and waves. Further, disagreements between variants often hinge around their fidelity to their lineage, be that from Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, Ilyenkov or Engeström himself.
Engeström’s claim to be a representative of a “fourth generation” of CHAT illustrates the problem with the application of the developmental conception of practices (and their theories).
Spinuzzi (p. 49-50) observes:
However, this ‘generations’ approach has been criticized for its narrative of progression, one that encourages us to understand CHAT as evolving linearly: the theory encounters a linear series of problems and is serially reformulated to address those problems.
This narrative has the effect of legitimizing specific problems and changes-those problems that most concern the narrator-while others are ignored. Yet others argue that activity theorists have discerned and addressed different problems, leading not to a linear set of developments but to an explosion of developments in various directions.
Stetsenko (2021, p. 39) , for example argues:
CHAT today is a diverse framework consisting of various currents and trends-it is not easy to break them up by either geographic location or generation ... It is, in fact, one of CHAT’s strengths that it has evolved into and spawned heterogeneous, diverse collectives of scholars working all over the world ... (p. 50)
More pointedly, Bakhurst (2009) charges that “the account of the three generations of activity theory is something of a ‘just so’ story.” It also excludes every other present-day approach that does not align itself with Engeström.
Spinuzzi says that the metaphor of “strands,” to represent research which follows a particular paradigmatic work, presents a vision of diversity and heterogeneity. It is ecumenical, but it is still wedded to the demand for fidelity to the paradigmatic work. The criterion to “live and let live” remains tied to fidelity to the given landmark version.
The metaphor of “waves”
is mainly used for discussing how Vygotsky’s work was taken up: in critiques of hagiography, in additional Russian publications of source materials, and in English translations. Specifically, commentators using this metaphor tend to emphasize how the work was initially taken up poorly and how subsequent work has dispelled (or should dispel) poor uptakes. (p. 53)
Spinuzzi rejects these metaphors as inadequate and uses instead the concept of translation from writing studies, deploying a template of tests to examine how and why each version of CHAT emerged from the cultural and historical context in which it appeared and how it eventually fell out of favor in new circumstances.
Spinuzzi also draws considerably on Latour’s (1987) Actor Network Theory.
CHAT underwent translation with the launching of each new research strand and even within the life of a single strand. Spinuzzi uses the following concepts to describe and explain the life-course of each “strand.”
The Domain is the field of phenomena which the strand examines, such as Psychology, Defectology, Education, Work Design or Public Policy. “These domains have different needs, different associational networks, and CHAT had to be translated to address each” (p. 34).
The Project is the vision which a key figure in a new strand enunciates in order to recruit others to join them. This will be a vision which reflects deep cultural challenges of the times. The project could be the New Soviet Human, the compliant Soviet citizen, “supermediators” capable of resolving workplace contradictions or “alternatives to capitalism.”
In particular, the project can be characterized by what it claims to Master: self-control, compliance, documented and agreed work practices, for example.
Translation: when a researcher launches a new strand of research they “translate” the terms of the former strand to adapt the theory to a new domain and project. A famous example of such translations is Leontyev’s conflation of tool and sign, rendering signs as a species of tool and the interpretation of activity within the Marxist paradigm of “labor.”
The translation which seems to constitute the leitmotif of CHAT, however, is the successive translation of “unit of analysis,” a term originally appropriated by Vygotsky from Sociology. Each new translation adopts a new unit of analysis, adapting the theory to new tasks but inevitably leading accusations of “misunderstanding” or “distortion.”
The initiation of a new strand is usually marked by an Extraordinary Case, what Kuhn (1962) called a paradigm: a study which solves a formerly unseen or unresolved problem by the application of methods and/or concepts which are revolutionary at the time, reframing the entire field. After the paradigmatic work, research is reduced to “problem solving” and filling in “gaps.” Examples of the extraordinary case in the history of CHAT include Leonytev’s success in rehabilitating soldiers who had lost a limb or Vygotsky’s discovery of the changes in the way child memory worked at different stages of development.
On the basis, usually, of the extraordinary case, a new principal proposes a translation of a strand of practice, proffering a new project which the translation offers to realize. On this basis, the founders must negotiate a rhetorical Settlement in which a number of actors agree upon and are willing to participate in the new strand of research. However, citing Latour (1988):
In these settlements, a translation is always a misunderstanding, since the parties to the settlement always have different long-term goals.
Spinuzzi likens such “settlements” to the constitution of a newly founded state, and this writer has used the metaphor of a peace treaty to illustrate the same idea. The new translation is a “boundary object” which allows different parties to collaborate on shared projects while all the time harbouring differing interpretations of what they are doing.
Drawing on a study by Michael Callon (1986), a follower of Latour, Spinuzzi has appropriated several concepts which he uses to characterize the successive settlements that CHAT has made in its history.
The Problematization of a specific domain of activity which is deemed to require transformation and for which the new project is suited.
The Interest (interessement) certain groups of actors have in participating in the settlement, seeing that it can serve their own ends.
The Enrollment of such actors - Marxists, psychologists, educators, and especially influential figures in other domains of practice, and
The Mobilization of these actors across the relevant fields of practice as a result of the above features of the new translation.
Once a viable settlement is achieved and new actors enrolled in the practice, the new strand of CHAT can then be characterised by who is interested, who are enrolled, who is mobilised, what is mastered, what is problematized and the Mediators or means used to achieve the project’s vision.
So much for the origins of each new strand of CHAT (or any other practice), but how does this approach understand the demise of a strand, or its eclipse by another theory or simply its failure to avoid parting ways with a significant part of its own ranks? It is here, I think, that Spinuzzi demonstrates that his approach out-performs the attempts of CHAT actors in describing and comprehending its own history. Spinuzzi’s approach enlightens us about how and why Leontyev’s Activity Theory “triumphed” over Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology in the 1930s USSR despite its evident deficiencies, why Leontyev’s Activity Theory failed to take root in the West and why Engeström felt compelled in recent times to move into new empirical domains. The explanation is not to be found in theoretical errors or innovations as such, nor misunderstanding, forgetfulness or distortions. Each “brand” of CHAT arose in certain, definite cultural and historical conditions, problematized domains that were already being called into question, raised visions which were in tune with the Zeitgeist, and was able to mobilize certain actors who, for their own reasons were able to embrace the new translation of CHAT.
But times change and a formerly well-supported settlement suddenly (usually) loses support and even becomes untenable. This was famously the case when Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology, with its emphasis on language, concepts and mind, found itself open to denunciation as “Idealist” under the Stalinist regime. Any association with Idealism, far less an interest in foreign writers, had literally lethal consequences in this time. The emphasis on words rather than labor marked Vygotsky’s project as explicitly anti-Soviet.
This illustrates what Spinuzzi calls the Trials that practices face. Can they survive the trial without changing the way they talk about what they're doing; can they survive at all? Vygotsky was both unwilling and unable to make the revisions to his theories to meet the demands of the Stalinist regime. Only those of his followers who were prepared to do what Leontyev did would live to pass on at least some of Vygotsky’ achievements, even if they had to wait 40 years for the atmosphere to clear.
The trials which Vygotsky faced are pretty clear. At the time they were called the Moscow Trials. But every turn in the social and political environment, every turn in the Zeitgeist, every migration to new lands, new domains, new problems, puts a theory on trial, so to speak. Invariably, projects “survive” these trials only by translating their work into terms adapted to the new social situation.
It is invariably the case that when a change in the social situation necessitates translation and the formulation of a new settlement, there will be those who see not a necessary (fortunate or unfortunate) change of direction in the face of changed circumstances, but a Betrayal. There is little doubt that Vygotsky saw as a betrayal what Leontyev did in conflating sign- and tool-mediation under a concept adapted to the orthodox Marxist conception of labor. And many of those who value Vygotsky’s Cultural Psychology in the present day still regard Leontyev’s move as a betrayal. A betrayal, it should be said, that allowed Leontyev to rise to the heights of the Soviet academy but also eventually led to Vygotsky’s popularity in the West.
I shall focus on one instance of “betrayal” which, I think, illustrates how problematic the implied slur of “betrayal” is, and that is the publication of Mind in Society by Mike Cole, Sylvia Scribner & Vera John-Steiner in 1978.
Cole had learnt about Vygotsky from Luria in Moscow in 1962, the same year that an English edition of Thought and Language had been published by MIT Press. The MIT edition had already been modified for a Cold War era American audience, but despite the publication of Vygotsky’s seminal work in the US, in English, Vygotsky remained an unknown and marginal figure.
In 1978, Luria sent Cole two manuscripts and urged him to publish them in English translation. Luria was the only one of Vygotsky’s loyal colleagues who had travelled in the West and was acquainted with Western scientists. Luria had seen with his own eyes how Vygotsky’s legacy and his own life had survived the Stalin era by a whisker. He was well acquainted with Vygotsky’s ideas and the different ways in which they could be expressed. Luria made a judgment in making the selection of texts he provided to Cole.
Using translations of previously unpublished manuscripts by Vygotsky provided by Luria, Cole and his colleagues edited them into acceptable terms in US English. However, the publisher who had agreed to publish them did not believe that Americans would understand these ideas. Cole, with the cooperation of Luria, used parts of these materials plus several of Vygotsky’s essays previously published in the USSR, to create Mind in Society, a little 133 page paperback. and “this book set off a Vygotsky boom in the West and popularized the cultural-historical school” (Spinuzzi, p. 38). Vygotsky currently has 600,000 citings on Google Scholar, and 30% of these citations are to Mind in Society. There would be no CHAT today without Mind in Society. And yet no book on CHAT has been the subject of more charges of “betrayal” and “misrepresentation” than this book.
With the above array of concepts drawn mainly from writing theory and Actor Network Theory, Spinuzzi relates the history of CHAT. He begins from Vygotsky’s recruitment into Kornilov’s Reactology, whose project at the time was recognition as the “Marxist Psychology,” through four phases of Vygotsky’s own work, through the Stalinist period of Leontyev’s prominence and the moment when Engeström’s work on Developmental Work Research was at its height to the current juncture when Engeström is endeavoring to meet the challenges of the present moment by turning CHAT to address the big questions of social policy and social movements.
I will not attempt to précis this history in my review. I could not possibly do justice to Spinuzzi’s detail and care. For that you have to buy the book.
The leitmotif of this narrative is the unit of analysis. I will return to the unit of analysis below, but the dominant development of this leit motif is that the unit gets bigger and broader at every turn. This is contrary to Latour’s (1986) observation that “No matter what the (reconstructed) size of the phenomena, [inscriptions] all end up being studied only when they reach the same average size” (p. 10) because the inscriptions are serving human, cognitive needs. However extensive the scale of the phenomenon being studied, its representation in scientific literature remains limited in size and complexity. Addressing the cognitive demands of large and complex phenomena was the raisson d'etre of units of analysis in Vygotsky’s work.
But throughout the history of CHAT, Spinuzzi claims, it has always turned out that to better understand the phenomenon under study, it was necessary to widen the focus to take account of the context. Spinuzzi gives a very convincing illustration of this in his retelling of Luria’s quizzing of the Uzbek peasants. Luria underestimated the impact of the state officials accompanying him as he asked the peasants apparently stupid questions which the subjects answered with extreme caution, as if they were trick questions. This was the first instance of observations by CHAT researchers being distorted by the context, rather than simply reflecting the nature of the unit under investigation.
As a result, Spinuzzi says, each successive translation of CHAT tended to widen the “unit of analysis” to subsume its immediate context.
I will return to the problem of “unit of analysis” in the concluding section of this review, but for the moment, along with Spinuzzi, I will uncritically accept the meaning given to this term by the various key figures in the history of CHAT.
As I remarked at the beginning, Spinuzzi was recruited to Engeström’s CHAT during the period when Engeström was engaged in addressing problems with “small sets of people working and talking together, attempting to solve shared problems with tools and texts.” Spinuzzi remains loyal to this variety of CHAT. For my part, I agree that while I retain considerable reservations about the theoretical apparatus which Engeström built on this work, I think the Change Labs and Germ Cell work are exemplary practices and I admire and support this work, even though my life circumstances have excluded me from this kind of undertaking. The work of the Change Labs is well documented so there is no need to repeat what is already fairly well-known among all CHAT scholars. What I wish to address in more detail is the recent move of Engeström to apply the famed triangle to capacious objects like the public policy on homelessness in Finland, the global climate crisis and social movements in general - Engeström’s “Fourth Generation” CHAT.
Many figures in CHAT have criticized Engeström’s Change Labs for aligning itself with managerial goals and for being apolitical. In the emerging social and political conjuncture around the 2010s, these accusations stung. They contradicted the self-image of Engeström’s group as a progressive force which promoted workplace democracy. As concerns with the climate crisis and the ills of capitalism came to dominate the consciousness of progressive people in Europe, Engeström and his colleagues responded with a new turn, a new translation of CHAT, which he dubbed the “Fourth Generation” of CHAT.
Fourth Generation Activity Theory are about alternatives to capitalism, Engeström and Sannino (2016, p. 403) claimed. They were interested in post-market society, not just post-bureaucratic work. They addressed learning in social issues and movements, methods for implementing public policy they saw themselves as seeking alternatives to capitalism.
In applying CHAT to public policy, Sannino and Engeström introduced a concept of the public as “heterogeneous coalitions” (c.f. Cole, 2006). The “unit of analysis” required to represent this new subject matter was an entire array of the change-lab triangles connected by multifarious links and the occasional ellipsis. Self-evidently, the cognitive function of this figure was negated by its expansiveness.
The Domain was now to be public policy, but Engeström did not appropriate concepts from the literature of public policy debates, social movement theory or Sociology generally, but simply extended the concepts generated from their work with the Change Labs, enhanced by an impressively rich deployment of metaphors.
The Project was the “implementation of public policy objectives to address acute societal problems.”
The Translations “are still ongoing, so it’s unclear what settled method for implementing public policy will result” (p. 189).
And “this nascent settlement is currently undergoing Trials, including continued scepticism from outside and inside CHAT circles” (p. 189).
The Extraordinary Case in which Engeström and Sannino have invested considerable energy is to be the eradication of homelessness in Finland along with an alliance of NGOs called Finnish Housing First, which already has a model which it promotes among government and charity organisations in the homelessness industry. The aim is to implement a “concrete utopia” (c.f. Esteban-Guitart, Rajala & Cole, 2023). Despite claims by Sannino that “Finland is the only country in Europe that has had a consistent reduction in the numbers of homeless people since 2008” homelessness remains a continuing societal problem in Finland.
However, Spinuzzi points out that in contrast to the participation of subjects in supported democratic deliberation about solutions to an organisation’s problems which characterized the Change Labs, Sannino (2018, p. 390) argues, that
“Counteracting the stigma of homelessness ... requires re-educating actors and institutions to engage in interactions in which the Housing First client is an interlocutor and a responsible agent.” Put another way, in this project, the policy objective (eliminating homelessness) and policy (Housing First) are already decided upon and set. The ‘utopia’ has already been settled. The actors’ roles are to be persuaded to actively comply in two ways: (1) to be educated to engage in interactions, and (2) to identify ways to implement the socially correct choice in the dilemma. (p. 191)
From being a practice of democratic deliberation, CHAT had been transformed into a technique for gaining compliance with the existing Housing First policy. In this sense, the Fourth Generation of CHAT was returning to the vision of Leontyev’s Activity Theory which sought compliance with Soviet policy.
Stepping back from supermediators, Engeström and Sannino have returned to Leontiev’s supervised citizen. ... Double stimulation is offered here as a management tool. (pp. 199 & 200)
Spinuzzi believes that this failure to live up to their own project results from the error of trying to stretch the existing “unit of analysis” by multiplying it to deal with the public and open ended societal problems. Further, they were doing so without any attempt to draw on the insights of experts in public policy or the achievements of the history of social and political science.
Spinuzzi points out that the drive to successively expand the breadth of the “unit of analysis” arises from the discovery that there is always a context outside the unit of analysis which is a necessary part of what is going on within the unit of analysis. This problem is solved by expanding the unit of analysis to include the context in some way. (c.f. “mediated action in context as a basic unit of analysis,” Wertsch et al, cited in LCHC 2010). Before coming to Spinuzzi’s examination of “units of analysis” I shall add one observation of my own.
All Vygotsky’s founding experiments were carried out under conditions where the context and the motivation of the subjects were shaped by the researcher. Despite Vygotsky recognizing that “the affective and volitional tendency stands behind thought. Only here do we find the answer to the final ‘why’ in the analysis of thinking,” he was never able to account for motivation. It was left to Leontyev to examine the source of subjects’ motivation.
Mike Cole seems to suggest that the problem of context can be tackled by simply making the context is part of the unit of analysis (See LCHC above), which under any definition of “unit of analysis” is a contradiction in terms.
Even when Engeström and Sannino widened the “unit of analysis” to tackle nationwide societal problems and activities, they have persisted in the CHAT tradition of focusing on the qualitative examination of localized interactions, excluding the wider social, cultural and political processes which are actually determining what is taking place in their experiments and observations.
In 2015, this author published a book on collective decision making. This work was based on a lifetime of work in the social movements, including 30 years as an elected trade union representative at various levels. Nonetheless, I took a year to immerse myself in the literature of Deliberative Democracy and 1960s-70s social change activism, and made a close study of the history of collective decision making going back to 300ad, using facsimiles of original documents. On the basis of this I was able to determine a unit of analysis and described a set of paradigms of collective decision making and negotiation which shed considerable light on the problems that all voluntary groups were experiencing with collective decision making.
Sannino (2020) also published a paper on collective decision making, proffering some engaging metaphors for her findings. This study was based on one observation of the famous waiting room experiment with a group of Sannino’s own students and several observations of interactions in their Housing First project. Sannino was just as blind to the cultural processes at work in her “experiment” as Luria was to the impact of the threatening crowd of Stalinist officials observing his questioning of the Uzbek peasants. Her results were, frankly, totally inadequate, seen from the point of view of the literature on collective decision making. It is quite unacceptable to enter a domain of science without first conducting an immanent critique of the existing literature on the relevant empirical domain. Like Marx, Vygotsky always did such a critique, a practice which was extremely dangerous in the Soviet Union where scientists were expected to restrict their reading to the classics of Marxism-Leninism, eschewing foreign authors.
What unit did I use to examine the vast cultural and historical domain of real collective decision making? - three or more people in the same room making a mutually binding decision on a shared project.
The use of such a small unit to examine cultural norms and forms of government begs the meaning of the term “unit of analysis.” I will briefly outline my own answer to this question before presenting Spinuzzi’s helpful immanent critique of CHAT’s own conception of the “unit of analysis.”
The term “unit of analysis” was current in social science and economics in Vygotsky’s day, although it was not critically examined until the post-World War Two period. When Vygotsky appropriated the term in the 1930s he cleverly invested it with a new meaning suited to his own project - making Psychology’s “own Das Kapital” (Vygotsky, 1927). There is no “unit of analysis” in Das Kapital, but what Das Kapital does have is the “economic cell-form” (the commodity, the unit of value) and the embryo of capital (in German: Schmetterlingsentfaltung, literally the larva of a butterfly, in Russian: личинкa), a single capitalist who Marx called “Mr. Moneybags,” the unit of capital). There are in fact 15 units or germ cells in Das Kapital (see Blunden, 2025).
Most sciences have at least two units: word-meaning and concept, action and activity, cell and organism. (I believe Spinuzzi’s introduction of a “unit of observation” only confuses the matter at issue here. Observation should never be constrained). But it is a fact that most figures in critical social science have used only one unit of analysis in their work. Among philosophers, Kant takes the judgment as the unit of experience, Frege takes the smallest expression to which pragmatic force can be attached as a unit, Wittgenstein takes the smallest expression whose utterance makes a move in a language game, Robert Brandom takes the proposition as his unit of analysis and for Bakhtin the unit was an utterance. The only writers I know who have used numerous different “units” in their original research are Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky.
It is only in the first chapter of the posthumously published Thinking and Speech (1934) that Vygotsky gives us a definition of “unit of analysis” and it is manifestly at odds with the usual meaning found in sociology and economics. Vygotsky’s concept of “unit of analysis” corresponds to Hegel and Marx’s conception of “cell.” The concept of “germ cell” was revived and used to great effect by Soviet Activity Theorists and Engeström himself. Activity Theory, however, overlooked the fact that for Vygotsky, “unit of analysis” was the same entity as the “germ cell.”
I accept Spinuzzi’s insight into the fruitlessness of denouncing other CHAT researchers for “betraying” or “abandoning” Vygotsky’s conception of “unit of analysis.” The Activity Theorists from Leontyev on have used the “unit of analysis” to refer to a figurative conception of the subject matter of their research objects, more or less in line with the meaning of “unit of analysis” in post-War Sociology. Despite Stalinism, Leontyev made revolutionary discoveries in Psychology. Spinuzzi, in my view has correctly diagnosed the problem that CHAT has had with its units of analysis - the persistent disruption of the unit by its context and its expansion beyond the point where it performs any useful cognitive function.
The point is that a recovery of Vygotsky’s (and Marx’s) conception of unit offers a solution to the crisis which has infected Engeström’s CHAT in its attempt to tackle the “big questions” of the global crisis of capitalism, to take CHAT into the wider socio-cultural domain.
Spinuzzi cites the economist Fred Boucke’s 1923 definition of “unit of analysis” which, consistent with present-day conceptions in Sociology, notes that the social sciences commonly have nested units such as communities, families and individuals. In a similar manner, Leontyev defined units as activities, actions and operations. Leontyev’s work mainly focussed on how the activity provided the motive for actions and only rarely (and ineptly) did he venture into the study of relations between activities - the units of an entire social formation. The absence of useful work using activities as units of analysis is nothing to do with the concept of activity and is solely to do with the dangers of doing social theory in Stalin’s USSR.
Engeström followed Leonytev’s lead in his Third Generation unit - an activity was to be the subject matter of analysis, a.k.a. the “system of activity,” but when he moved to account for the context of the activity, instead of following Leontyev in using the activity as a unit, contradicting the very meaning of word “unit” Engeström “expanded the basic model is to include minimally two interacting activity systems” (citing Engeström, 1987/2014). The “network” which results is a larger social formation (such as a hospital) which has activities as units. The so-called “Fourth Generation” is in reality a return to Leontyev’s conception.
Spinuzzi contrasts Engeström’s move to use a bundle of units as a “unit,” with the work of Jornet & Damşa:
Ecological units denote evolving social wholes that are not pre- established but actually found in and through inquiry. (Jornet & Damşa, 2021, p. 4)
And further observes that:
Like Blunden, they draw on the language of the germ-cell to identify a core phenomenon that develops through concrete history.
These approaches draw on Vygotsky’s conception of “unit of analysis” in which selection of the unit is the product of an insight into the larger phenomenon, or context. This view contrasts with the meaning of unit in Sociology which Spinuzzi cites.
In Spinuzzi’s words:
qualitative research methodologists do not use the term unit of analysis in the same way Blunden advocates, partly because Blunden’s definition is difficult or impossible to operationalize in a qualitative research study, (p. 248)
It is true that I do not use the concept of “unit of analysis” in the same way as Sociology does or in the same way as other Activity Theorists. I embrace Vygotsky’s appropriation of the term from Sociology in which he gave it a Marxist/Hegelian meaning. I accept that it is difficult to “operationalize” this conception. It demands an insight into the subject matter, and you cannot really “operationalize” the insights which found a new paradigm.
Spinuzzi sees “two basic paths in CHAT work:
“The first path is to reject translation, sticking with the requirements for a unit of analysis that Vygotsky set out in the 1930s ...”
“The second path is to embrace translation, seeking to understand units of analysis in other traditions and striking new settlements that make CHAT useful to and compatible with these traditions.”
As it happens, these two paths are not mutually exclusive. Every researcher who has taken up the CHAT tradition translates its terms so as to be appropriate to the problems they seek to resolve. Vygotsky himself used four different units in the course of his work and I reject claims that these translations (which Spinuzzi outlines in his history of CHAT), implied that Vygotsky “abandoned” earlier work. And when a new insight into the subject matter demands a new unit, this by no means demands denigration of the work of other CHAT researchers or one’s own earlier work. In his conclusion, Spinuzzi affirms this approach to units of analysis in his “second path..”
The generations [and strands] metaphor emphasizes fidelity to its lineage in a story of inevitable progress ... Fidelity dreams of diffusion, ... [but] ideas do not travel by diffusion but by translation. (pp. 261-262)
According to Spinuzzi, “Engeström’s CHAT does not support a strong political- rhetorical critique in either the third or fourth generation. It has instead developed an apolitical, managerial stance, originating in Leontiev’s savvy bureaucratic maneuvering” (pp. 266-267).
Engeström’s CHAT has proffered a series of units of analysis to progressively expand its analysis: from an activity system to linked activity systems to activity networks to coalescing cycles of expansive learning. These ever-larger units of analysis correspond to ever-larger empirical scope, and arguably, its empirical and analytical methods have not caught up. (p. 266)
In fact, the units have been expanded to the point where the supposed unit escapes the cognitive bounds for which an insight such as a germ cell is possible. This is the negation of Vygotsky’s real revolutionary insight. Vygotsky’s insight was not an interest in word-meanings or concepts. Rather, his paradigmatic study was the whole series of works applying the method of analysis by units to a range of problems! The method of analysis by units can be applied to any other subject matter by “translating” the unit into a different subject matter, suitable for the chosen empirical domain.
Spinuzzi’s proposal that CHAT researchers analyze their own history with the concept of “translation” should be accepted. I agree that simple multiplication of Engeström’s unit loses what was valuable in the Change Lab and Germ Cell studies of his earlier work while failing to offer a viable alternative to existing social science paradigms.
“Activity” and “artefact mediated action” are not actually units of analysis in the conception offered by Vygotsky (and Vygotsky never said they were. See Veresov 2025). They are schemas for the formation of new units of analysis suitable for the analysis for new problems and the synthesis of new programs and interventions. The “units” must be particular kinds of action and activity. It is in the selection of the kind of actions and activities which reflect insights into a given phenomenon and characterize the successive versions of CHAT. Vygotsky’s original insight sheds light on how the translation of CHAT through its various instantiations has been carried out.
I fully support Spinuzzi’s “second path”:
The second path is to embrace translation, seeking to understand units of analysis in other traditions and striking new settlements that make CHAT useful to and compatible with these traditions.
But let’s do so by immanent critique of existing social theory and “sticking with the requirements for a unit of analysis that Vygotsky set out in the 1930s.”
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