Appropriating Activity Theory #13: Agency Frontier Behind the Hierarchy of Human Activity (2020)

This post is part of the "Appropriating Activity Theory" series, which reflects my creative journey of engaging with Activity Theory from 2015 to 2025.

by Oliver Ding

March 14, 2026

It is that time again — time to write another installment of the Appropriating Activity Theory series.

Over the past few issues, I have been working through the four patterns of the Bureaus of Agency framework, dedicating one issue to each: Cascade, Resonance, Threshold, and now Frontier. Each bureau describes a distinct structural configuration through which agency operates — not a personality type or a strategy, but a pattern in the terrain of activity itself. Agency Frontier is the fourth and final bureau in this cycle. As the name suggests, it describes the condition of working at frontiers — operating at the edges of established territory, where familiar frameworks reach their limits and something not yet named begins.

In my recent works, a central reference point is the World of Life — a framework I have been developing over the past weeks that maps the social world through four boundaries: Spirituality above, Science below, Collectives to the right, Individuals to the left. These boundaries have been generative in a particular way: they have guided a sequence of concept curation work, opening questions about where different frameworks live within this larger structure, and where they reach their limits.

When I sat down to write this issue's column, I found myself asking a question I hadn't asked before: Does the tradition of Activity Theory have anything analogous to the four boundaries of the World of Life? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed the answer was no — not quite. Activity Theory, across its various generations, has been primarily focused on the developed, functional structures of social practice and collective activity. It has powerful tools for analyzing what is already in motion. It rarely touches the edges, the frontiers, the zones where established practice meets what has not yet become practice.

And yet, when I went back to look at an article I wrote in 2020 — on the Universal Hierarchy of Human Activity — I found something unexpected. That article had, in fact, been working at precisely those edges. It had reached upward beyond what Activity Theory normally handles, and downward into territory the tradition had deliberately left to one side. At the time, I had no name for what I was doing. I was not thinking about Agency Frontier. I was just following the logic of the inquiry wherever it led.

This issue tells that story.

1

In September 2020, I published the sixth installment of the Activity U series, a long-running case study I had been developing to explore the intellectual history of Activity Theory. The topic that month was A. N. Leontiev's three-level hierarchical structure of activity, one of the foundational contributions of the entire tradition.

Leontiev's original framework was elegant in its simplicity. Activities are driven by motives. Actions are driven by goals. Operations are driven by conditions. Three levels, two-way relationships between them, and a clear psychological logic binding the whole structure together.

But the tradition had not stood still. By 2020, I had been tracing the ways in which Leontiev's framework had been extended, contested, and reinterpreted across decades of research. Engeström had introduced the activity system and the activity network, expanding the unit of analysis from the individual to the collective. Spinuzzi had proposed three levels of scope — macroscopic, mesoscopic, microscopic — as an analytical framework for empirical research in organizations. Gonzalez had argued for an intermediate level between activity and action, calling it the working sphere. Bedny and Harris had pushed in the opposite direction, developing a five-level structure that went all the way down to the function block — the micro-scale cognitive and motor components of task performance.

Each of these extensions had been made for good reasons, responding to real gaps in the framework. But they had never been brought together into a single comparative view.

That is what I set out to do. But the comparison did not stop at Activity Theory's own internal debates. The 2020 article also brought in perspectives from other traditions of social practice theory — Schatzki's hierarchy of doings, tasks, and projects; Opler's anthropological concept of cultural themes; Duckworth's hierarchy of life goals; and Gibson's ecological concept of affordance.

Each tradition had developed its own version of a hierarchy, from different theoretical starting points and for different purposes. Placing them side by side revealed both the overlaps and the gaps.

What emerged from this broader comparison was a picture of eight levels, spanning from the most abstract to the most concrete. From top to bottom: Theme, Activity Network, Activity (Activity System), Projects (Tasks/Engagement), Actions, Operations, Function Block, Affordances. I called it the Universal Hierarchy of Activity and Practice — not a new theory, but a meta-framework, a comparative map of the territory that different researchers had been charting from different starting points, now assembled into a single view.

What I want to focus on in this article, however, is not the middle of that hierarchy but its two ends. The topmost level — Theme — and the bottommost level — Affordances — are precisely the two levels that reach beyond the traditional boundaries of Activity Theory. How they got there, and what that reaching means, is the story that follows.

2

The topmost level of the hierarchy — Level 7, Theme — did not come from Activity Theory at all.

It came from Morris Opler, an anthropologist who in 1945 had developed the concept of cultural themes as a way of understanding the organizing principles of a culture. Themes, in Opler's sense, are dynamic affirmations that control behavior and stimulate activity across an entire cultural system. They are not activities themselves. They are the deep patterns that give activities their direction and meaning.

Placing Theme at the top of the hierarchy was a deliberate theoretical choice. Activity Theory, in all its versions, operates at the level of activities and the systems surrounding them. It has powerful tools for analyzing what people do and how they do it, for tracing the contradictions within activity systems, and for understanding the mediation of tools and signs. But it does not have a well-developed account of the cultural layer above activity — the layer where themes, meanings, and collective orientations operate before they manifest in any specific activity.

By reaching outside the tradition to Opler's anthropological framework, I was acknowledging a boundary. Activity Theory, for all its richness, does not extend all the way up to something beyond activity.

At the time, I framed this simply as a gap in the theory, filled by a resource from another discipline. Soon, I found that Andy Blunden's approach to Activity Theory — Activity as Formation of Concept — echoes what I see as the gap. That's the reason that I followed his approach and further considered theme and identity as core concepts of the Project Engagement Approach, my own contribution to Activity Theory.

3

The decision at the other end of the hierarchy was more contentious.

Affordance, as a concept, was originally developed by ecological psychologist James J. Gibson to describe what the environment offers the animal — the action possibilities that exist in the relationship between an organism and its surroundings. The concept was later adopted by Activity Theory researchers, but given a carefully limited role. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, two of the most influential voices in the field, had argued explicitly that affordances should be understood as a low-level concept, operating at the level of operations. Affordances, in their view, describe the action possibilities that physical artifacts offer to users at the most concrete level of interaction. They belong at the bottom of the existing hierarchy, not below it.

I disagreed — or rather, I saw a different possibility.

My argument was that affordance could function as a new level entirely, below the level of operations, marking the boundary between the actual and the possible. Operations describe what people actually do with artifacts. Affordances describe what artifacts make possible — the field of action possibilities that exists prior to any specific operation, prior to any conscious goal.

This was not just a terminological adjustment. It was a shift in the scope of the hierarchy itself — from a framework that mapped actual human activity to one that also included the possible level, the ecological ground from which activity emerges.

Activity theorists tended to treat affordance as a concept to be domesticated within the existing framework, assigned to its proper level and kept there. My choice was different: to treat it as a marker of the boundary itself, a concept that pointed to something the framework did not yet fully reach — the lower edge of the World of Life, where material conditions, ecological relationships, and embodied possibility begin.

This is what I mean by Agency Frontier at the epistemological level. It is not a dramatic rupture. It is a quiet but consequential choice: to work at the edge of an existing framework, to recognize where its boundaries lie, and to extend into the territory beyond rather than retreating to the safety of established ground.

4

The extension did not stop at adding a new level to the list.

In the same article, I introduced a framework I called Possible Practice — an attempt to expand the scope of contemporary practice theories from actual actions and existing practice to possible actions and possible practice.

The backdrop for this proposal was a broader conversation in the social sciences. Since the early 2000s, what researchers had called the Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory had brought a diverse group of philosophers, sociologists, and scientists together around the concept of practice as a fundamental unit of analysis. But as Davide Nicolini observed in his 2013 book Practice Theory, Work, and Organization, there was no unified practice approach. He documented six distinct traditions of theorizing practice:

• Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu
• Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
• Activity Theory / Cultural-historical activity theory (the Marxian/Vygotskian/Leont'evian tradition)
• Ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, 1954)
• The Site of Social (contemporary developments of the Heideggerian/Wittgensteinian traditions, by Theodore R. Schatzki)
• Conversation Analysis / Critical Discourse Analysis (the Foucauldian tradition)

Each defining its units of analysis differently, each populating the world with a different version of what practice is. Nicolini's own recommendation was to treat these not as competing theories but as a toolkit, moving between them as the inquiry demanded.

What struck me about all six traditions, however, was something they shared despite their differences: they were all fundamentally concerned with actual, existing practice. They described what people do, how practices are structured, how they reproduce and transform over time. None of them had a systematic place for the possible — for the action opportunities that exist before they are taken up, for the practices that could emerge but have not yet.

Possible Practice was my attempt to name that edge. I placed it at the center of a diagram that included three surrounding nodes — Ideal Practice at the top, Normal Practice at the lower left, and Novel Practice at the lower right — connected by three dynamic zones: Normativity, Curativity, and Creativity. The whole structure was embedded in a larger context called Settings.

I consider actions at the individual level and practice at the collective level. The four types of actions correspond to four types of social practice:

• Possible Practice — Possible Actions
• Normal Practice — Normal Actions
• Novel Practice — Creative Actions
• Ideal Practice — Exemplary Actions

Why place Possible Practice at the center of the new framework? Because I consider it the origin of all types of practice. If we trace back the historical development of any social practice, we can always find that its source is possible actions. In order to build the concept of Possible Practice, I use Possible Actions to replace Imagined Actions — and I consider affordance and imagination as two sources of possible actions.

The diagram above illustrates the relationship between Contemporary Practice Theories and the Ecological Practice Approach, represented by Possible Practice, its first principle.

This is Agency Frontier not as a single dramatic crossing, but as a sustained orientation: staying at the boundaries of available frameworks, working in the space between what is actual and what is possible, and treating that space not as a gap to be filled but as a generative territory to be explored.

5

Five years passed between that article and the next moment I want to mark.

In 2025, I was writing Homecoming: A Thematic Trip and the World of Activity Approach — a book that took a distinctive form: a three-dimensional weaving of life narrative, theoretical development, and cultural reflection. It was not purely a personal account, nor purely a theoretical argument. The three dimensions were inseparable — the journey back to Fuzhou, the city where I grew up, became a case for theoretical exploration and a site of cultural reflection.

In the process of writing that book, something happened that I had not anticipated. The theoretical work and the life experience began to speak to each other in a way that felt new. I had been developing the concept of World of Activity — the idea that each person's life is bounded by fundamental givens, the aspects of existence that present themselves as already there, prior to any choosing. Inspired by phenomenological thinking and Chinese philosophical imagery, I had identified four such givens: Birth and Death, Heaven and Earth — or in the terms I was developing, language and culture above, environment and geography below, beginning and ending on either side.

What the Homecoming journey revealed was that these were not just theoretical categories. They were the actual structure of my own creative engagement with the world. My work with language and concepts was a response to the given of Heaven — the cultural inheritance I had been born into and had spent years appropriating and transforming. My work with environments and platforms was a response to the given of Earth. My relationship to project beginnings and endings was a response to Birth and Death as the temporal boundaries of any creative enterprise.

The insight that crystallized in that writing was this: creative engagement with givenness is not a single act but a lifelong orientation. The four givens are not problems to be solved or obstacles to be overcome. They are the permanent boundaries of the territory in which creative life unfolds — and working creatively at those boundaries, rather than ignoring them or being defeated by them, is what Agency Frontier means at the most fundamental level.

This was the moment when the epistemological work of 2020 — the quiet choices about where to place Theme and Affordance, the proposal of Possible Practice as a boundary framework — became legible as something larger. They had been expressions of the same orientation that the Homecoming journey was now naming directly: the orientation of creative engagement with the given boundaries of a life.

It was also, I now understand, the creative origin of what would become the World of Life framework. The World of Activity had been built around the idea that each person's life is bounded by four fundamental givens — the unchangeable conditions that frame any individual creative enterprise. When I later expanded the scope from the individual level to the broader social world, the same structural logic applied. In September 2025, the World of Life first emerged as the larger container — not one person's world of activity, but the interconnected network of worlds within which cultural and historical life unfolds.

By December 2025, I had developed its own four boundaries: Spirituality above, Science below, Collectives to the right, Individuals to the left. The same principle, operating at a different scale. And once those four boundaries were in place, they began to generate — opening a series of new inquiries that have been unfolding in my work ever since.

6

In the summer of 2024, I exchanged a series of emails with a friend I will call Vera. She had been reading my work, and she wrote to me with a directness I have come to value precisely because it is rare. Her observation was simple: my writing lacked emotional presence. Not coldness exactly — but something more fundamental. When she faced my texts without activating her analytical mind, almost nothing came through. The writing did not arrive.

I remember how I responded. I sent her diagrams. I explained my theoretical framework. I was, as I now understand, doing exactly what she was describing.

Vera did not continue the correspondence after a point. She had said what she came to say.

What she had identified was real, and it took time to receive. The shift came not through argument but through practice. Over 2024 and into 2025, my work moved from knowledge innovation toward cultural innovation — a transition I made deliberately, with a clear awareness that the two operate by different standards. A scientific concept system demands precision and accountability to evidence. A cultural concept system demands resonance and transmissibility. These are genuinely different criteria. To work at the cultural level means accepting that emotion is not noise to be filtered out — it is the medium through which concepts travel.

And this led me, eventually, to a structural question I had not asked before: why do certain kinds of knowledge reach millions of people, while others — sometimes more carefully built — reach almost no one? Why do some epistemically dubious knowledge systems persist for centuries?

This week, I published an article that attempts to answer this question: World of Life: Four Negative Frontiers of Knowledge Engagement. The World of Life framework offers a way to think about the structure of the knowledge ecosystem. Within the square defined by its four boundaries — Spirituality above, Science below, Individuals to the left, Collectives to the right — cultural development happens. Knowledge flows, concepts travel, practices take root or dissolve. But each boundary also has what I now call a negative frontier: a direction of drift that, when entered, transforms the generative potential of that boundary into something closed, extractive, or entropic.

The four negative frontiers are: Mystification (drifting beyond the Spirituality boundary), Dogmatism (drifting beyond the Science boundary), Echo Chamber (drifting beyond the Individuals boundary), and Tragedy of the Commons (drifting beyond the Collectives boundary). They are not distant dangers. They occupy the zone just outside the working space — adjacent to every boundary, always within drift.

This is Agency Frontier encountered from the other direction. Where the 2020 article explored what becomes possible when you work at the edges, this week's article maps what becomes closed when you fall through them.

7

The day after publishing the negative frontiers article, something unexpected happened.

I was editing the negative frontiers article, going back to check some source material on the four boundaries of the World of Life framework. In the process, I rediscovered a diagram I had made in 2022 — the Shaman's Mandala — which maps four concepts from the Ecological Practice Approach onto a four-boundary structure: Affordance, Supportance, Attachance, and Curativity, each occupying a distinct position.

I had seen this diagram many times before. But this time, something clicked.

These four positions map directly onto the four boundaries of the World of Life.

If the negative frontiers article had identified what goes wrong at each boundary — Mystification at Spirituality, Dogmatism at Science, Echo Chamber at Individuals, Tragedy of the Commons at Collectives — then here, already waiting in a diagram from 2022, were the corresponding positive frontiers. Not invented for the occasion, but discovered through a structural resonance between two theoretical projects developed independently over several years.

I published the result as World of Life: Four Positive Frontiers of Project Engagement.

The four positive frontiers are:

• Affordance at the Science boundary — the action opportunities that material environments and objects offer. The corresponding practical orientation is Material Adaptability: learning to perceive what an environment actually offers, rather than what our habits expect.
• Supportance at the Collectives boundary — the supportive action opportunities embedded in social environments. The corresponding orientation is Social Adaptability: reading what a community or platform genuinely offers to someone who participates with good faith.
• Attachance at the Individuals boundary — the action opportunities created through attaching and detaching. The corresponding orientation is a Sense of Boundarylessness: cultivated mobility, the ability to form genuine commitments and release them when the time comes.
• Curativity at the Spirituality boundary — the action opportunities of turning pieces into a meaningful whole. The corresponding orientation is a Sense of Wholeness: the felt experience of a life whose fragments have been gathered into coherence.

At the center of all four stands Genidentity — not as one of the four concepts, but as their condition of possibility. Genidentity refers to recognizing a thing's uniqueness and the differences between it and others. At the personal level, it means awareness of one's own irreducible particularity — the specific configuration of themes, commitments, and experiences that constitutes a singular life.

Why does Genidentity belong at the center? Because the four positive frontiers are not generic opportunities available to anyone in the abstract. They must be recognized and actualized by a particular actor in a particular situation. Without Genidentity, the four frontiers collapse into noise. With it, each becomes genuinely navigable.

But there is a deeper reason. Opportunity, by its nature, brings change. And every change carries the risk of crossing the boundary of what is most essentially one's own. This is the core tension of GO Theory: Opportunity without Genidentity is drift. Genidentity without Opportunity is stagnation. The practice of creative life development is learning to hold both — to pursue the possibilities at each frontier while remaining, through all the changes, recognizably oneself.

Looking back from here, the arc of this article becomes visible. In 2020, working on the Universal Hierarchy of Activity and Practice, I made two quiet choices: to place Theme above the known territory of Activity Theory, and to place Affordance below it. Those choices were, I can now see, the earliest gestures of Agency Frontier in my theoretical work — a reaching toward the edges of an established framework, into territory not yet named. Five years later, those edges have become a map.

8

But revisiting is never only revisiting. It generates.

While preparing this article, I found myself constructing a new diagram — a new curation of the World of Life that places four concepts at its center: Opportunity, Theme, Identity, and Pattern. Each has its own logic, but together they describe the structure of Agency Frontier as it operates in a life.

Opportunity is what the frontier offers — the action possibilities that open at each boundary, waiting to be recognized and actualized. Theme is the deep organizing thread of a creative life — both the themes of the person and the themes of the projects they take on. Identity is the accumulated shape of who one has become through engagement — the self that enters each new frontier already formed by all previous ones. Pattern is what emerges from the encounter between a person and their frontier conditions — the recognizable signature of how a particular life engages with its particular edges.

The diagram above maps this dynamic spatially — I call it the Four Boundaries of Strategic Curation. Weave sits at the center, surrounded by the four concepts that correspond to the four boundaries of the World of Life: Curativity above, Affordance below, Attachance to the left, Supportance to the right.

Why Strategic Curation? In the Nine Aspects of Strategic Agency — the cognitive-level framework that mirrors the Four Bureaus of Agency — Strategic Curation is the core. The Nine Aspects describe how agency operates at the level of individual cognition; the Four Bureaus describe how agency is structurally positioned in the social world. These two frameworks are mirrors of each other: one maps the inner capacity, the other maps the outer configuration.

Agency Frontier is the Bureau that operates at the outermost structural level — engaging with the fundamental boundaries of existence itself. Strategic Curation is its cognitive counterpart — the inner practice of gathering, connecting, and making whole. The Four Boundaries of Strategic Curation is where these two meet: a map of how the innermost practice (Weave) is oriented by the outermost conditions (the four boundaries).

Agency Frontier, understood this way, is not a single dramatic act. It is the ongoing pattern of how we respond to the exploratory, frontier-facing opportunities that social life continuously presents. Our choices at those frontiers are never made in a vacuum. They are shaped by who we are — our individual themes and identity — and by the nature of what we are working on — the themes and identity of the project itself. The four concepts hold this dynamic together: Opportunity names what is offered, Theme and Identity name what we bring, and Pattern names what gets made in the encounter.

The four boundaries of the World of Life, the four negative frontiers, the four positive frontiers — they are all elaborations of the same impulse: to work at the boundaries, to find what becomes possible there, and to stay long enough to bring something back.

v1.0 — March 14, 2026 - 4,247 words