From GO Theory to ACS and Beyond
To analyze Social Life Development at the cultural level, I needed a framework for the social world itself — not just a framework for the individual moving through it.
Oliver Ding
Founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.
Supportive Self-Actualization as Anticipatory Activity
Self is not a single, bounded, present-moment entity. It has three layers — Sub-individual, Individual, and Supra-individual. Self-actualization, reconceived within the framework of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS), is not a final state to be achieved but an ongoing anticipatory activity
Engaging with Others for Developing Anticipated Identity
The expansion proposed here — from self-referential to other-directed RR practice — opens the theme of Revisiting and Rebuilding: A Strategy for Creative Identity Development onto the social space of Self-Other relations that is foundational to the Agency Cascade model from which it derives.
Revisiting, Rebuilding, Re-engaging with Past Selves
Furthermore, once Past Selves are established as a legitimate theoretical category alongside Present Selves and Possible Selves, a new possibility opens up: the three can be curated together into a coherent, dynamic framework of creative identity development.
Revisiting-Rebuilding: Agency Cascade and the Transformation of Self
When a creator returns to earlier work and rebuilds it from a more developed standpoint, they are not just producing a better theory. They are enacting a relationship between their past self and their present self — a diachronic Self-Other structure that drives the Transformation of Self.
The Landscape of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (v2.0)
ACS v1.0 was a curation of meta-frameworks... Precisely these two needs have driven the development from v1.0 to v2.0: building out the operational layer and establishing the coordination structure that holds it together.
Activity Analysis Network #13: Learn, Weave, and Agency Frontier
These articles collectively mark a significant expansion of the World of Life framework, introduce Spatial Heuristics as a new methodological stream, and advance ACS to version 1.2 with a refined model of the actor.
The Landscape of ACS 1.2 and a New Model of the Actor
The ACS model is oriented differently. It is not primarily about constraint or calculation. It is about orientation — what directions are available, what positions are possible, what forms of action are open.
Appropriating Activity Theory #13: Agency Frontier Behind the Hierarchy of Human Activity (2020)
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?
World of Life: Four Positive Frontiers of Project Engagement
I rediscovered a diagram I 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.