Two Constructions: Theoretical Statement and Historical Narrative in Creative Work
A Meta-Analysis of How Theories Come to Be and How They Are Presented
Oliver Ding
Founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.
Activity Analysis Network #14: Self, Other, and Supportive Self-Actualization
These articles collectively mark a milestone of the Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS) project. With the release of the ACS manuscript and the completion of the Self–Other series, the framework has reached v2.0 ...
Appropriating Activity Theory #14: Self, Other, and Embodied Social Forms (2017, 2021, 2025)
Tracing the Self–Other relationship back to its ecological foundations — from the Thing-People Relation model of 2017, through the Typology of Relevance in 2021, the Activity Circle, the ACS development of 2026
Anticipatory Cultural Sociology: Creation, Projection, and Agency (Possible Book, 2026)
The Landscape of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS) v2.0
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.
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.