One Center, Multi-voices, and Multi-moves

A Case Study of Yrjö Engeström's Knowledge Enterprise

by Oliver Ding

May 13, 2026

This article is part of a possible book: Weave the Theory: The Art of Theoretical Activity and Knowledge Ecology

In 2020, I worked on the Activity U project — a knowledge curation effort aimed at mapping the landscape of Activity Theory and CHAT. The result was a series of articles examining representative contributions across different levels of theoretical and practical work. One of those articles, Activity U (IV): The Engeström's Triangle and the Power of Diagram, focused on the activity system model Engeström developed in 1987, approaching it primarily from the perspective of diagrammatic thinking.

That project asked: what is in the Activity Theory tradition? It used the Theme U model as its organizational framework — a mapping tool for presenting the internal diversity of a theoretical tradition across six types of knowing, from Meta-theory to General Practice. The work was knowledge curation in a precise sense: I was the curator, Activity Theory was the landscape, and the goal was a structured display of what the tradition contained.

This article takes a different approach. Rather than treating Activity Theory as a landscape to be mapped from the outside, it treats it as a theoretical tradition — which is to say, a knowledge ecology of a particular kind. The question is no longer "what is in this tradition?" but "how does this tradition work as a living system?" A knowledge ecology, in this framing, is not a static inventory but a dynamic environment: structured by its essential differences, shaped by the interactions of its contributors, and capable of generating new creative possibilities for those who engage with it.

To examine this ecology, the article focuses on one of its most generative nodes: the knowledge enterprise built by Yrjö Engeström and centered on CRADLE (the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning at the University of Helsinki). Two analytical tools from the Weave-the-Theory toolkit are used.

The first is the Weave the Enterprise toolkit — a set of frameworks for analyzing knowledge enterprises both diachronically (how they develop through time) and synchronically (what their full landscape looks like at a given moment). This toolkit includes the Platform Genidentity Framework, the Cultural Genidentity Framework, the Enterprise Development Framework, and the Landscape of Evolving Knowledge Enterprise.

The second is the Knowledge Discovery Canvas (KDC) — a model that maps a creator's knowledge activities across four areas (THEORY, END, MEANS, PRACTICE), revealing the characteristic pattern of how they inhabit their knowledge ecology.

A more detailed analysis of Engeström's creative moves through the KDC framework will be developed in Part 4 of this article. For Part 1, which provides the biographical background, a different analytical lens is in use: the Life-as-Activity Approach's distinction between events (social context) and projects (personal biography). What follows is a structured account of how Engeström's career unfolded — and an invitation to read it again, in Part 4, through a different set of eyes.

Contents

• Part 1. Yrjö Engeström's Creative Life
  • 1.1 Yrjö Engeström and the Finnish School
  • 1.2 Four Phases of Development
  • 1.3 Recent Developments and the Scope of This Article
• Part 2. Building a Knowledge Enterprise
  • 2.1 Diachronic Analysis: The Five-Stage Trajectory
  • 2.2 Synchronic Analysis: The Three-Dimensional Landscape
  • 2.3 The Diversity of Knowledge Centers
• Part 3. Multi-voices within a Creative Center
  • 3.1 CRADLE: A Creative Center
  • 3.2 Reijo Miettinen: Dialogue with Innovation Studies and Pragmatism
  • 3.3 Jaakko Virkkunen: From Expansive Learning to the Change Laboratory
  • 3.4 Sami Paavola: The Trialogical Approach and the Logic of Discovery
  • 3.5 Annalisa Sannino: Formative Interventions and Collective Agency
  • 3.6 The Pattern: One Center, Multi-moves
• Part 4. Multi-moves within the Knowledge Ecology of Activity Theory
  • 4.1 The Knowledge Discovery Canvas
  • 4.2 The THEORY Area: Building the Conceptual Foundation
  • 4.3 The END Area: Empirical Studies of Work and Transformation
  • 4.4 The MEANS Area: Developmental Work Research and the Change Laboratory
  • 4.5 The PRACTICE Area: Concept Formation in the Wild
  • 4.6 The Pattern: Four Moves, One Enterprise
• Part 5. Multi-voices outside the Finnish School
  • 5.1 Different Patterns of Engagement
  • 5.2 Political Orientation and Theoretical Motivation

Part 1. Yrjö Engeström's Creative Life

1.1 Yrjö Engeström and the Finnish School

Yrjö Engeström is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Helsinki and Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is the founder and director of CRADLE — the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning — at the University of Helsinki, and since 2018 has also led the RESET research group at Tampere University. He is internationally recognized for two foundational contributions: the theory of expansive learning, which theorizes how collective activity systems transform through the working-through of internal contradictions, and the methodology of Developmental Work Research (DWR), which operationalizes this theory through the Change Laboratory — a structured intervention method now practiced in more than 30 countries.

Within the Activity Theory tradition, Engeström occupies a singular position. If Vygotsky initiated the tradition and Leontiev expanded it from individual to collective levels, Engeström's contribution was to give the tradition its interdisciplinary form — a systematic framework capable of analyzing organizations, institutions, and historical transformations across domains as varied as health care, education, legal work, and industrial production. His 1987 book Learning by Expanding and the activity system model it introduced gave the tradition a new center of gravity, making Activity Theory not just a psychological or pedagogical framework but an analytical and interventionist approach to human sciences as a whole. CRADLE, as its institutional home, has become "a center of reference for theoretical and methodological development of activity theory... oriented toward the creation of a strong research community with high international impact, forming both a national and international hub of activity-theoretical and socio-cultural research" (Ploettner & Tresserras, 2016). It is in this capacity — as the architect of Activity Theory's interdisciplinary reach and the founder of its most influential institutional formation — that Engeström's knowledge enterprise is examined in this article.

1.2 Four Phases of Development

The Life-as-Activity Approach distinguishes between events and projects as two types of entries in a person's creative life. Events belong to the social context — activities in which the person is not the primary agent, but whose occurrence shapes the conditions of their life. Projects are activities in which the person is directly involved as subject. This distinction, applied to Engeström's career, makes visible the specific moments at which the wider world of ideas and institutions entered his personal trajectory and became resources for his own creative work.

According to Annalisa Sannino, Engeström's development as an activity theorist unfolds across four main phases: the European student movement of the 1960s and the discovery of Activity Theory; the study of instruction and the turn from school learning to workplace learning; Developmental Work Research and the theory of expansive learning; and the formation of activity-theoretical communities aimed at changing societal practices (Sannino, 2009, p.11).

Phase 1: Discovery

• Event 1: the European student movement of the 1960s.
• Project 1: Engeström wrote his first book (Engeström, 1970), Education in Class Society: Introduction to the Educational Problems of Capitalism (in Finnish).
• Event 2: Leontiev's Problems of the Development of the Mind, published in East Germany in 1973, and Davydov's Types of Generalizations in Instruction, available in East Germany in 1977.
• Project 2: Engeström discovered Activity Theory by reading Davydov's book and Il'enkov's essay on the dialectics of the abstract and the concrete.
• Project 3: Engeström adopted Activity Theory for his thesis, The Imagination and Behavior of School Students Analyzed from the Viewpoint of Education for Peace (in Finnish) in 1979.

Phase 2: The Turn to Work

• Project 1: Engeström attempted to change school instruction by bringing Davydov's ideas to politically and pedagogically radical Finnish teachers. He published a chapter in the 1984 book Learning and Teaching on a Scientific Basis.
• Project 2: Engeström started paying attention to workplace learning. His first work-related study (1984) examined janitorial cleaning — chosen precisely because it was considered the lowest-prestige occupation in Finland, and Engeström wanted to demonstrate that such work has an intellectual basis and developmental potential.

Phase 3: The Theoretical Crystallization

• Project 1: From 1986 to 1989, Engeström led a study with primary health care practitioners and patients of the city of Espoo, addressing excessive waiting times and lack of continuity of care.
• Project 2: Engeström adopted Davydov's "learning activity" to investigate and implement radical change at work.
• Project 3: Engeström developed the triangular model of activity systems and the theory of expansive learning and published Learning by Expanding (1987).

Phase 4: Community Formation

• Event 1: Michael Cole directed the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) at the University of California, San Diego.
• Project 1: Engeström was invited to work at LCHC.
• Project 2: Engeström initiated communities for adopting Activity Theory for changing societal practices in Finland.
• Project 3: Inspired by the LCHC, Engeström founded the Center for Activity Theory and Development Work Research at the University of Helsinki (later renamed CRADLE).
• Event 2: Georg Rückriem worked on translations of Leont'ev's works in Germany.
• Project 4: Engeström suggested the idea of a conference for scholars to discuss influencing human practices through Activity Theory; Rückriem organized the first ISCRAT conference in 1986.
• Event 3: LCHC published a quarterly newsletter titled Mind, Culture, and Activity.
• Project 5: Engeström suggested the creation of the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity.
• Event 4: In 1995, Finland struggled with the economic consequences of the Soviet Union's collapse; companies needed compressed, short-term solutions.
• Project 6: The Change Laboratory methodology was elaborated as a compressed intervention cycle, meeting the needs of organizations that could not sustain multi-year developmental projects.
• Event 5: The Center at Helsinki inspired similar institutions in Bath, Oxford, and Osaka.

1.3 Recent Developments and the Scope of This Article

The enterprise has continued to expand and deepen in the years since Phase 4. Since 2018, the Finnish school has operated across two institutional sites simultaneously — CRADLE at the University of Helsinki and the RESET research group at Tampere University. Within the AT tradition, this dual-site structure marks a new stage: the enterprise is no longer a single center but a distributed formation, capable of sustaining multiple lines of inquiry simultaneously. Theoretically, Engeström and Sannino articulated a fourth generation of activity theory in 2020, shifting the unit of analysis from interacting activity systems to heterogeneous work coalitions aimed at resolving wicked societal problems — homelessness, climate change, unsustainable production — and building practical alternatives to capitalism. The most recent major publication, Concept Formation in the Wild (Cambridge University Press, 2024), represents a sustained return to fundamental questions of how concepts are collectively formed in the unscripted contexts of everyday work and community life.

Within the AT tradition, Engeström's enterprise has moved from being the primary vehicle of the tradition's interdisciplinary expansion — the role it played in the 1990s and 2000s — to being one of several generative centers in a more distributed landscape. The Finnish school remains a distinctive and influential formation; but the tradition it helped to build has grown well beyond any single center's capacity to contain it.

This biographical account provides the background for the analyses that follow. The remainder of this article does not continue the biographical narrative. Instead, it turns to two analytical frameworks from the Weave-the-Theory toolkit to examine Engeström's knowledge enterprise from different angles: Part 2 uses the Weave the Enterprise toolkit to analyze the enterprise diachronically and synchronically; Part 3 examines the multi-voices that CRADLE cultivated as a knowledge center; and Part 4 uses the Knowledge Discovery Canvas to map the characteristic pattern of Engeström's moves within the knowledge ecology of Activity Theory.

Part 2. Building a Knowledge Enterprise

Activity Theory is a large theoretical tradition — one that has functioned, over nearly a century of development, as a Theoretical Platform: a structured environment within which successive generations of contributors have found the conceptual tools, social connections, and intellectual resources needed to develop their own work. Within this tradition, multiple knowledge enterprises have emerged — each anchored in the shared theoretical core, each developing it in its own direction.

The Finnish school is one such enterprise. Engeström and Sannino describe it explicitly: "Our own work has evolved within what is sometimes called the Finnish school of activity theory. Initiated in the early 1980s by an informal group, the Finnish school has developed since 1994 in the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning CRADLE at University of Helsinki, and since 2018 also in the RESET research group at Tampere University" (Engeström & Sannino, 2020, p.4). This self-description is significant: it locates the Finnish school as a branch of a larger tradition — a knowledge enterprise that has grown within the AT platform while developing its own distinctive identity, methodology, and community.

From the perspective of the Weave the Enterprise toolkit, this relationship can be stated precisely. Activity Theory is a Theoretical Platform — it has reached the Developmental Platform stage of the Enterprise Development Framework, functioning as a structured environment that actively supports the work of others. The Finnish school is a Knowledge Enterprise that developed within this platform, drawing on its conceptual resources while building something that, in time, itself became a Developmental Platform for subsequent contributors. The analysis in this part examines that enterprise — its diachronic trajectory through five developmental stages, and its synchronic landscape across three dimensions.

2.1 Diachronic Analysis: The Five-Stage Trajectory

The Enterprise Development Framework traces the development of a knowledge enterprise through five stages: Creative Theme, Scalable Focus, Center Development, Value Circle, and Developmental Platform. Each stage represents not merely a quantitative increase in scale or output but a structural transformation in what the enterprise is and what it can do. Engeström's career follows this trajectory with unusual clarity.

The Creative Theme stage is where an enterprise begins — not with a plan, but with a set of questions urgent enough to organize a life around. For Engeström, those questions crystallized in the 1960s and early 1970s, through the European student movement and his early engagement with education as a site of political and social transformation. His first book, published in 1970, addressed the educational problems of capitalism in Finland. The discovery of Soviet cultural-historical psychology — through Davydov and Il'enkov — gave him a theoretical vocabulary for the concerns the student movement had opened. The creative theme was established: understanding and transforming human activity as a collective, historically situated process.

The Scalable Focus stage is reached when a concept or model emerges with sufficient structure to sustain a cumulative line of inquiry across multiple contexts. For Engeström, this moment arrived in 1987 with Learning by Expanding and the activity system model. The triangular model placed individual action within the collective structure of community, rules, and division of labor — a structure scalable precisely because it could be applied to a primary health care center, a court of law, a post office, a school, without being reduced to any one of them. The theory of expansive learning provided the dynamic counterpart: a cycle describing how activity systems transform through the working-through of internal contradictions.

The Center Development stage involves the institutionalization of the enterprise in a dedicated organizational form. In 1994, the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research was established at the University of Helsinki — later renamed CRADLE. The center provided the conditions for sustained collective work: doctoral programs, a developing methodology of formative intervention, and a community of researchers contributing their own projects to the enterprise. It is at this stage that the enterprise ceases to depend on a single individual's energy and begins to reproduce itself across generations.

The Value Circle stage marks the expansion of the enterprise's reach across multiple domains and collaborating partners. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the activity system model and the Change Laboratory methodology spread into health care, legal work, postal services, education, telecommunications, and industrial design. Collaborations with Michael Cole at UCSD extended the enterprise across the Atlantic; the founding of the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity and the creation of ISCAR formalized its expanding networks. The Change Laboratory, first conducted in Finnish post offices in 1995, spread to over 30 countries. The enterprise was no longer primarily a single creator's project — it had become a genuinely collective undertaking, with contributors bringing their own questions and methods, feeding back into its development in ways no single actor could have planned.

The Developmental Platform stage is reached when the enterprise achieves the maturity and structural stability to actively support the work of others — not as a resource to be drawn upon, but as a structured environment within which new enterprises can themselves develop. CRADLE's current situation represents this stage. Since 2018, the enterprise has operated across two institutional sites simultaneously, with the establishment of the RESET research group at Tampere University. The theoretical ambitions have expanded toward a fourth generation of activity theory, oriented around societal-scale challenges. Expertise in Transition (2018) and Concept Formation in the Wild (2024) mark a Developmental Platform capable of opening new theoretical fronts while its methodology spreads independently through a global community of practitioners.

2.2 Synchronic Analysis: The Three-Dimensional Landscape

The Landscape of Evolving Knowledge Enterprise maps a knowledge enterprise across three simultaneous dimensions — Mental, Social, and Material — each with three hierarchical levels. Examining these dimensions together, at the enterprise's mature stage, reveals the distinctive shape of Engeström's knowledge enterprise and the specific way its three dimensions have developed in relation to one another.

The Mental dimension — the dimension of how the enterprise thinks — operates across three levels: Knowledge Elements, Knowledge Frameworks, and Knowledge System. At the Knowledge Elements level, the enterprise's foundational building blocks are drawn from three theoretical inheritances: Vygotsky's concept of mediation, Leont'ev's distinction between activity and action, and Il'enkov's understanding of internal contradiction as the motor of development. These elements were not adopted wholesale — they were selectively assembled around a specific theoretical question: what is the structure of collective, object-oriented human activity, and how does it transform? At the Knowledge Frameworks level, these elements were integrated into the activity system model and the theory of expansive learning — tools precise enough to guide analysis, flexible enough to be modified by the cases they encountered. At the Knowledge System level, the enterprise has developed a coherent meta-framework: Developmental Work Research as a complete methodology for understanding and changing collective activity, with its own coordination mechanism — the anti-dualist triadic operation that consistently takes an existing dualism, exposes its inadequacy, and introduces a third mediating element.

The Social dimension — the dimension of how the enterprise acts — operates across three levels: Circles, Projects, and Social Networks. At the Circles level, the innermost creative core of the enterprise consists of Engeström and his closest long-term collaborators: Annalisa Sannino, Ritva Engeström, Jaakko Virkkunen, and others who have engaged in direct, sustained theoretical exchange around the enterprise's foundational questions. At the Projects level, the enterprise has generated an enormous range of sustained research and intervention projects across decades and domains — from Finnish health centers in the 1980s to postal services in the 1990s, from fishing boat builders in India to home care for the elderly in Helsinki. These projects are the primary unit of activity within the enterprise: it is through projects that the Social and Mental dimensions connect, as conceptual work is always done by people pursuing specific questions in specific contexts. At the Social Networks level, the enterprise has built a broad and distributed community — over 30 doctoral graduates from CRADLE, a global network of Change Laboratory practitioners across more than 30 countries, and the institutional structures of ISCAR connecting researchers across the world.

The Material dimension — the dimension of what the enterprise makes — operates across three levels: Themes, Representations, and Things. At the Themes level, the core conceptual objects that define the enterprise's intellectual territory are well-established: mediation, object-orientedness, contradiction, expansive learning, knotworking, runaway objects, transformative agency — each a named and developed thematic space that organizes further work. At the Representations level, the enterprise's most widely recognized material artifact is the activity system triangle: a diagram that makes visible, in a single image, the collective structure within which any individual action is embedded. It is not merely an illustration — it is a theoretical argument in visual form, and its global circulation has given the enterprise a shared representational language across cultures and disciplines. At the Things level, the major books — Learning by Expanding (1987, second edition 2015), From Teams to Knots (2008), Expertise in Transition (2018), Concept Formation in the Wild (2024) — constitute successive material archives of the enterprise at different stages of development.

What the three dimensions reveal together is a knowledge enterprise of unusual integration. The Mental dimension's meta-framework gave the Social dimension a shared language; the Social dimension's projects provided the empirical encounters that drove the Mental dimension's revisions; the Material dimension's artifacts — most importantly the activity system triangle and the Change Laboratory protocol — made the enterprise's knowledge portable and reproducible across the Social network. This mutual reinforcement across all three dimensions is what distinguishes a Developmental Platform from a body of published work. CRADLE is not the archive of Engeström's ideas. It is the organizational form through which those ideas were tested, extended, transmitted, and made available as a structured environment for others to develop further.

2.3 The Diversity of Knowledge Centers

The Weave the Enterprise toolkit has its own developmental history. Its predecessor was the Creative Course Framework, developed within Creative Life Theory (v2.0) in 2023. At that stage, the framework offered a definition of the knowledge center that remains foundational: a knowledge center is a center that develops around a specific and distinctive knowledge enterprise — not a general research unit, but a formation organized around a particular thematic commitment and a particular way of developing it. This definition focused the framework on the Knowledge Center level, without yet covering the full five-stage trajectory from Creative Theme to Developmental Platform. The broader Enterprise Development Framework, which gave the toolkit its diachronic dimension, emerged through subsequent work in 2025.

Between 2023 and 2025, several case studies informed this development. The analysis of Ping-keung Lui's theoretical sociology and The Trojan Society for Theoretical Sociology provided one line of evidence. My own knowledge centers — the Curativity Center, the Activity Analysis Center, and others — provided another, more direct line of practice-based reflection. These cases shared a common character: they were individual-led or small-group enterprises, operating without formal institutional infrastructure, their development driven primarily by the intellectual commitments and creative energy of one or a small number of people.

The CRADLE case is structurally different. It is a knowledge center embedded within a major research university, sustained by institutional funding, doctoral programs, and formal organizational structures — with a continuity that extends across decades and multiple generations of researchers. Its complexity, in terms of governance, institutional reproduction, and the interplay between a founder's creative vision and the institutional life that outlasts it, goes substantially beyond what the earlier cases addressed. In this sense, the present analysis extends the toolkit's reach into new territory: the study of institutionalized, university-based knowledge centers as a specific and more complex form of knowledge enterprise.

This extension is itself evidence that knowledge centers are genuinely diverse — and that their diversity is worth analyzing systematically. The three-dimensional landscape (Mental, Social, Material) is one tool for doing this: different knowledge centers place their developmental emphasis differently. Some are primarily strong in the Mental dimension — conceptually dense, theoretically generative, but with limited social reach or material output. Others are strong in the Social dimension — broad communities, active networks — but with a thinner conceptual core. Still others are strong in the Material dimension — rich archives of diagrams, tools, and texts — without necessarily sustaining an active social formation. The CRADLE case, as Part 2.2 demonstrated, is unusual in the integration of all three dimensions at a high level — and this integration is itself a product of its institutional character.

The Knowledge Discovery Canvas, introduced in Part 4, offers a complementary analytical tool. Where the three-dimensional model maps the landscape of a knowledge center, the KDC maps the characteristic pattern of a creator's moves within the knowledge ecology — which of the four areas (THEORY, END, MEANS, PRACTICE) they inhabit most intensively, and how they move between them. Different creators have different patterns; and the diversity of those patterns is itself a form of knowledge center diversity, visible at the level of the individual creator rather than the institutional formation. Together, the two tools give the Weave the Enterprise toolkit the capacity to analyze knowledge center diversity at multiple scales — from the institutional landscape to the individual creative trajectory.

It is precisely this diversity — within CRADLE as a center, and within Engeström's own practice as a creator — that the remaining parts of this article examine.

Part 3. Multi-voices within a Creative Center

Parts 1 and 2 have examined the Finnish School as a knowledge enterprise — its developmental trajectory across five stages, and its landscape across three dimensions. This part turns the lens inward: not the enterprise as a whole, but the knowledge center at its core. CRADLE is not simply the institutional address of Engeström's ideas. It is a social formation in which multiple researchers, each with their own intellectual biography and theoretical commitments, have developed their own lines of work within a shared framework. What emerges from this examination is a picture of multi-voices not as a property of the tradition as a whole, but as a lived practice within a single institution.

3.1 CRADLE: A Creative Center

In 1999, introducing the first comprehensive presentation of contemporary work in Activity Theory, Yrjö Engeström wrote:

Activity Theory has its threefold historical origins in classical German philosophy (from Kant to Hegel), in the writings of Marx and Engels, and in the Soviet Russian cultural-historical psychology of Vygotsky, Leont'ev, and Luria. Today activity theory is transcending its own origins: It is becoming truly international and multidisciplinary... This expansion is not unproblematic. Some may fear that activity theory will turn into an eclectic combination of ideas before it has a chance to redefine its own core. Although I realize that such a possibility exists, I anticipate that the current expansive reconstruction of activity theory will actually lead to a new type of theory. Essential to this emerging theory is multivoicedness coexisting with monism. This may sound like a contradiction, and that is exactly what it is.

He went on:

Human activity is endlessly multifaceted, mobile, and rich in variations of content and form. It is perfectly understandable and probably necessary that the theory of activity should reflect that richness and mobility. Such a multivoiced theory should not regard internal contradictions and debates as signs of weakness; rather, they are an essential feature of the theory. However, this requires at least a shared understanding of the character of the initial cell and a continuous collective attempt to elucidate that cell.

When Engeström wrote this, he was describing the challenge facing Activity Theory as a tradition — a sprawling international enterprise with contributors working in 19 countries, each bringing their own theoretical inflections and empirical domains. The question he posed was: how do you maintain a recognizable theoretical identity while remaining genuinely open to the richness and diversity that a living theory requires?

This article takes that question and focuses it at a different scale. Rather than examining the entire tradition's multi-voices, it looks inward — into the knowledge center that Engeström himself founded. CRADLE, as an institutional formation, was built to embody exactly the principle Engeström articulated: a shared theoretical core sustaining genuine intellectual multiplicity. What follows is a close examination of how that multiplicity actually manifested in the work of several representative members — each of whom developed a distinctive voice while remaining anchored to the center's foundational commitments.

Multi-voices at the tradition level is a well-documented phenomenon. What is less often examined is how it operates within a single knowledge center — in the day-to-day life of doctoral supervision, collaborative research, and the sustained encounter between different intellectual biographies gathered around shared questions. CRADLE is an unusually rich case because its founder was himself a theorist of multi-voices, and because the center produced contributors who did not simply apply Engeström's framework but genuinely extended and diversified it.

3.2 Reijo Miettinen: Dialogue with Innovation Studies and Pragmatism

Reijo Miettinen, professor of adult education and a founding CRADLE member, brought Activity Theory into sustained dialogue with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and John Dewey's pragmatism. His work addressed a question that the core activity system model had left partially open: how do novelty and innovation emerge in heterogeneous, distributed networks of actors?

In his 1999 paper "The Riddle of Things," Miettinen systematically compared Activity Theory and ANT as approaches to studying innovations. He clarified that Activity Theory's distinctive strengths lie in its capacity to explain historical development and systemic contradiction — why certain innovations stabilize while others fail — while ANT offered a more sensitive vocabulary for tracing the micro-dynamics of association. From this dialogue emerged the concept of the epistemic object (developed with Jaakko Virkkunen, 2005): an inherently open-ended object of inquiry that drives collective knowledge creation precisely because it is never fully defined. His book Innovation, Human Capabilities, and Democracy (2013) represents the mature synthesis of this line of work, connecting Activity Theory to questions of how democratic institutions enable transformative learning.

This is a distinctively outward-moving voice within CRADLE. Miettinen extended the tradition's core concern with object-orientation through a path — innovation studies, science policy, Deweyan democracy — that the initial crystallization of Activity Theory had not anticipated. In doing so, he expanded the Value Circle of the enterprise into new disciplinary territories.

3.3 Jaakko Virkkunen: From Expansive Learning to the Change Laboratory

Jaakko Virkkunen, professor emeritus of developmental work research, represents the methodological voice within CRADLE's multi-voiced formation. If Engeström's foundational contribution was to theorize expansive learning, Virkkunen's was to operationalize it. As a key architect of the Change Laboratory method, he translated the abstract principles of Activity Theory into a structured, replicable intervention methodology that practitioners could use to analyze and transform their own work.

The Change Laboratory is not simply an application of existing theory — it is a theoretical artifact in its own right. Through the design of "mirror data" and the structured sequence of questioning, modeling, and implementation, it embodies Activity Theory's deepest commitments: the principle of double stimulation (from Vygotsky), the centrality of contradiction as a source of change, and the insistence that practitioners are agents, not objects, of transformation. Virkkunen's 2013 book The Change Laboratory: A Tool for Collaborative Development of Work and Education is both a manual and a theoretical argument that methodology is a site of theory development, not merely theory application.

Virkkunen's co-authored 2005 paper on epistemic objects with Miettinen is a concrete instance of CRADLE's multi-voices at work: a theoretical concept from one line of inquiry meets a methodological challenge from another, and the encounter produces something neither voice could have generated alone.

3.4 Sami Paavola: The Trialogical Approach and the Logic of Discovery

Sami Paavola, professor at the University of Helsinki and a CRADLE doctoral graduate, developed the Trialogical Approach — a reframing of learning that introduces a third metaphor beyond "acquisition" and "participation": learning as collaborative knowledge creation. Drawing on the pragmatist philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, particularly the logic of abduction (the reasoning pattern through which novel hypotheses are generated), Paavola argued that Activity Theory's account of expansive learning needed a more precise epistemic mechanism.

The Trialogical Approach, developed in collaboration with Kai Hakkarainen and others, specifies how learners collaboratively create and transform shared objects of knowledge through mediated, artifact-driven processes. Paavola's work on Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a "mediating digital object" in design collaboration exemplifies this synthesis. His more recent explorations of Artificial Intelligence as a "catalyst for co-creation" extend the inquiry into new territory.

This is a voice that returns — in a sense — to Vygotsky's semiotic roots, but through a path neither Vygotsky nor Engeström had taken: Peircean semiotics, computer-supported collaborative learning, and the analysis of digital artifacts. It is a backward-looking voice in the best sense: one that recovers dimensions of the tradition's founding questions that subsequent development had partially set aside.

3.5 Annalisa Sannino: Formative Interventions and Collective Agency

Annalisa Sannino, currently a professor at Tampere University and formerly a researcher and docent at CRADLE, has developed a line of work focused on formative interventions and collective agency. Her research foregrounds the transformative and activist dimensions of human development — the capacity of individuals and collectives not only to appropriate existing practices but to critique and actively transform them.

Sannino's work extends Engeström's expansive learning theory by sharpening the analysis of the specific moments when actors break away from given conditions and take transformative action. Her concept of transformative agency by double stimulation is a theoretical contribution that deepens the tradition's understanding of agency as a mediated, collective phenomenon rather than an individual trait. Her empirical work — in education, housing, and workplace settings, including a sustained engagement with homelessness policy in Finland — exemplifies the interventionist methodology that CRADLE pioneered, while pushing it in a more explicitly activist and politically engaged direction.

3.6 The Pattern: One Center, Multi-moves

Seen together, these four contributors reveal CRADLE as a particular kind of knowledge center — one that operated not through the enforcement of a single theoretical orthodoxy but through the cultivation of multiple, generative moves. Each move is distinctive:

Miettinen moved outward into innovation studies and social policy. Virkkunen moved downward into the details of intervention methodology. Paavola moved backward into the philosophical logic of discovery. Sannino moved forward into the analysis of agency and activism.

None of these moves were random. Each was anchored in the shared theoretical core that CRADLE sustained — the activity system model, the principle of mediation, the centrality of contradiction, the commitment to object-oriented collective activity as the unit of analysis. But each took that shared core in a direction that Engeström had not fully foreseen or developed. This is multi-voices not as fragmentation but as disciplined creativity: diverse voices building the tradition by extending it into new territory, then bringing their insights back to enrich the shared intellectual resources of the center.

This pattern is precisely what Engeström theorized in his 1999 call for an evolving multivoiced Activity Theory. CRADLE, as an institutional realization of that vision, demonstrates that a knowledge center is not a "closed, artificially static system of logically interlocking concepts." It is a living formation where multiple voices, pursuing multiple moves, collectively sustain the tradition's development precisely because they are always stretching it beyond its current boundaries.

Part 4. Multi-moves within the Knowledge Ecology of Activity Theory

Part 3 examined multi-voices within CRADLE — the diversity of intellectual directions cultivated inside a single knowledge center. This part shifts the analytical lens from the center to the founder. Rather than asking what CRADLE produced collectively, it asks: what is the characteristic pattern of Engeström's own moves across the knowledge ecology of Activity Theory? The tool for this analysis is the Knowledge Discovery Canvas (KDC), which maps a creator's engagement with a core theme across four areas. Applied to Engeström's career, it reveals a pattern that is unusual within the tradition — and that helps explain why CRADLE became the kind of center it is.

4.1 The Knowledge Discovery Canvas

The Knowledge Discovery Canvas (KDC) divides a creator's engagement with a core theme into four areas, each corresponding to a different mode of knowledge activity. In this case, the core theme is Activity Theory, and the four areas map the terrain of its knowledge ecology:

• THEORY: the development of abstract concepts, models, and frameworks — the work of building a theoretical structure.
• END (Empirical/Normative Direction): the encounter with concrete reality — empirical research, case studies, fieldwork — where abstract claims are tested against the world.
• MEANS: the development of methodological tools — instruments that translate theoretical commitments into practical procedures for analysis and intervention.
• PRACTICE: the reflective engagement with one's own activity as a creator — concept formation in the context of lived experience, knowing-for-me and knowing-for-us.

These four areas are not sequential stages. They are simultaneously active dimensions of the knowledge ecology of Activity Theory, each enriching the others. What the KDC reveals, when applied to a creator's career, is the characteristic pattern of how they inhabit these four areas: which areas they developed most intensively, how they moved between them, and what their pattern of movement says about the structure of their enterprise.

4.2 The THEORY Area: Building the Conceptual Foundation

Engeström's theoretical work spans more than four decades and constitutes one of the most sustained programs of theory-building in the contemporary human sciences. Its trajectory can be understood as a progressive expansion of the unit of analysis — from mediated action, to collective activity system, to networks of interacting activity systems, and toward a still-emerging fourth generation that engages with global challenges and alternatives to capitalism.

The foundation was laid in the 1980s with the activity system model. Building on Vygotsky's original triad of subject, object, and mediating artifact, Engeström incorporated the collective dimensions that Leont'ev had theorized but not formalized: community, rules, and division of labor. The now-famous triangular representation, first published in Learning by Expanding (1987), gave the tradition a new center of gravity. As Engeström would later reflect, these models were never intended as canonical structures: they were conceptual tools "to be used and tested and changed and modified" — instruments for further theoretical development rather than fixed destinations.

The second major theoretical contribution was the theory of expansive learning. Engeström argued that most learning theories were inherently conservative: they assumed that what is to be learned is already known by those who teach or manage. Expansive learning theorizes the process through which learners create something that does not yet exist — new knowledge, new practices, new forms of activity. The expansive learning cycle — questioning, analyzing, modeling, examining, implementing, reflecting, and consolidating — provided a dialectical account of how activity systems transform through the resolution of internal contradictions.

As the theory matured, Engeström extended it toward increasingly complex configurations. The third generation of activity theory moved the analysis from single activity systems to the interplay between multiple systems. Concepts such as boundary crossing, knotworking, and runaway objects were developed to capture the dynamics of an interconnected world. His 2008 book From Teams to Knots brought together these theoretical extensions with sustained empirical cases.

More recently, Engeström and Sannino have articulated the contours of a fourth generation of activity theory, oriented toward heterogeneous work coalitions and societal-scale alternatives. In a 2016 interview, Engeström stated the challenge directly: "The challenge of fourth generation of activity theory is alternatives to capitalism. How you build sustainable viable resilient alternatives to capitalism especially understood as the neoliberal global regime" (Engeström & Sannino, 2016). Concept Formation in the Wild (2024) marks the most recent theoretical advance: a dialectical theory of how concepts form collectively in everyday practical activities — going beyond the understanding of concepts as individually acquired static labels, and making concept formation itself the central object of analysis.

4.3 The END Area: Empirical Studies of Work and Transformation

Engeström's empirical work represents sustained inhabitation of the END area. His empirical trajectory spans multiple domains, each study designed to encounter the theory with a domain different enough from previous ones to test the theory's reach and progressively earn its claim to generality.

The empirical foundation was built through longitudinal studies in the 1980s and early 1990s: cleaning work (1984), primary care health in Espoo (1986–1990), 21 health centers across Finland (1990–1993), Finnish lower courts (early 1990s). In subsequent decades the empirical scope expanded into newspaper editorial offices, telecommunications companies, postal services, schools, a fishing boat builders' community in India, home care for the elderly in Helsinki, and homelessness work at the national level.

A distinctive feature throughout is the rigorous use of ethnographic data — transcripts, videos, material artifacts — as primary evidence, reflecting a theoretical commitment: if activity is the unit of analysis, empirical work must engage with activity as it actually unfolds.

Alongside these empirical studies, Engeström and colleagues sustained a parallel program of formative interventions through Developmental Work Research (DWR). The following books document this sustained empirical and interventionist program across different stages of the enterprise's development:

• Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research (1987; 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2015) — the foundational work, presenting the cleaning work, medical work, and other early cases as an integrated empirical-theoretical argument
• From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (Cambridge University Press, 2008) — empirical studies of collaboration and knotworking across multiple organizational domains
• Studies in Expansive Learning: Learning What Is Not Yet There (Cambridge University Press, 2016) — an integrative account of empirical studies and conceptual developments in expansive learning theory, including cases from banks, schools, hospitals, and disaster relief
• Expertise in Transition: Expansive Learning in Medical Work (Cambridge University Press, 2018) — thirty years of research and intervention in medical settings, condensed into a single sustained argument
• Concept Formation in the Wild (Cambridge University Press, 2024) — studies of how teachers, doctors, journalists, and agricultural workers form concepts in everyday practical activity

4.4 The MEANS Area: Developmental Work Research and the Change Laboratory

Engeström's work in the MEANS area is embodied in the methodology of Developmental Work Research (DWR) and the Change Laboratory method. The method emerged from a practical recognition: the earlier, multi-year intervention studies were becoming difficult for organizations to sustain. As Engeström explained in a 2023 interview: "We started thinking of how to make these processes more compact so that we could take advantage of the energy in an activity system when it is ready for a focused effort which would not necessarily take many years but might happen for instance in a year" (Engeström, 2023).

The name Change Laboratory first appeared in print in 1996, but the concept crystallized through the doctoral program at CRADLE in 1995 — in sustained discussion between Engeström, Virkkunen, and doctoral students including Juha Pihlaja and Merja Helle. The first implementation took place that same year in the Finnish Postal Services, which were facing the opening of mail delivery to private competition. Working with mail carriers directly, Pihlaja and Engeström designed and conducted a series of Change Laboratory sessions — planning each session and each intended learning action meticulously. The intervention proved highly effective, producing both practical transformation and Pihlaja's dissertation. A Change Laboratory in the editorial office of Finland's main newspaper followed shortly after, opened by journalist and doctoral student Merja Helle.

The Change Laboratory brings practitioners together for a structured series of sessions — typically around ten — to analyze the history of their activity, identify its systemic contradictions, model a new form of activity, and implement concrete changes. The sessions begin with mirror materials — empirical evidence about current practices presented back to practitioners — and ask participants to confront and interpret these materials. The method is theory-driven (Vygotsky's principle of double stimulation, the centrality of contradiction) but equally practice-driven: practitioners are not objects of analysis but active agents of transformation.

A defining feature is that even the problem is not predetermined: "It is a distinctive characteristic of Change Laboratory that even the problem is not predetermined by the researchers. It is one of the critical differences between Change Laboratory and many other intervention approaches" (Engeström, 2023). The first Change Laboratory was conducted in 1995 in Finnish post offices. By 2023, Engeström reported the method had been conducted and studied in over 30 countries.

As the enterprise moved toward fourth-generation activity theory, the Change Laboratory itself faced new challenges. When Sannino's group conducted a Change Laboratory at the national level of homelessness work — involving a dozen different activity systems including ministries, NGOs, and cities — the standard approach of analyzing each activity system separately became impossible. Engeström described the methodological challenge: you cannot model each system separately, yet if you start with a shared abstraction, participants risk feeling it is too remote from their own situation. This tension — between the necessary common ground and the irreducible diversity of activity systems — is one the fourth generation has yet to fully resolve, and it opens a new zone of proximal development for the method itself.

Engeström's advice to anyone wanting to use the Change Laboratory carries the character of the MEANS area: "Don't do this alone. If you do it alone, you don't have anybody to discuss and reflect and find ways of moving forward. Having colleagues and students working and reflecting with you is better than any recipe. Change Laboratory is not something to do alone" (Engeström, 2023).

4.5 The PRACTICE Area: Concept Formation in the Wild

Engeström's work in the PRACTICE area — the domain of the individual actor engaged in reflection on meaning-making and development — is not as immediately obvious as his contributions to the other three areas. But a sustained engagement with concept formation in the wild reveals a long-standing concern with precisely this kind of reflection.

In a 2013 interview, Engeström described the emerging direction: "Concept formation and conceptual change have traditionally been studied mainly in really controlled environments such as classrooms and laboratories... Now, I feel that at the moment in the world the most interesting process of concept formation happens outside laboratories and classrooms, when people have to face these new difficult phenomena. That is a tremendous task of concept formation. What do you call it? How do you understand it? How do you create a concept that would make sense and give some coherence to this phenomenon?"

He elaborated the significance: "These are processes that are very distributed; people around the world in different places are struggling with the same issues... So that people would not be totally at the mercy of what they are reading in the newspapers or see on television, but there would be a bit more grounded local capabilities in collectives of people to create concepts to guide their own activities."

This research program culminated in Concept Formation in the Wild (2024). The book makes visible what had been a relatively hidden dimension of Engeström's intellectual enterprise: studies of how teachers, doctors, journalists, agricultural workers form concepts in their everyday lives for the purpose of reflecting on and transforming their own activity. What Engeström is studying in others mirrors the very process he himself has undergone as a theorist. The PRACTICE area contribution represents a kind of closing of the loop: the theorist, after decades of building frameworks for understanding how others transform their activity, turns his attention to the most fundamental question — how does anyone, in any context, form the concepts that make transformative action possible?

4.6 The Pattern: Four Moves, One Enterprise

Seen through the KDC, Engeström's enterprise reveals a characteristic pattern. The THEORY area developed the structural models and concepts that gave the enterprise its center. The END area tested those concepts against diverse empirical territories, progressively earning their claim to generality — from single workplaces to national networks, from Finland to India. The MEANS area translated them into intervention methodologies that practitioners could use to transform their own activity, with the Change Laboratory spreading across more than 30 countries. And the PRACTICE area returned, in the later phase of the career, to the most fundamental question — how do humans form the concepts through which they understand and transform their own activity? — a question that encompasses the theorist's own practice within its scope.

The four moves are not sequential but simultaneously active dimensions of a single enterprise, each enriching the others. Empirical encounters revealed gaps that led to theoretical revision. Intervention experiences generated new concepts — boundary crossing, knotworking, transformative agency — that fed back into the THEORY area. Reflection on concept formation deepened the understanding of what the entire enterprise had been about from the start.

What this four-area analysis makes visible is that Engeström's contribution was never confined to theoretical innovation. He modeled, through his own practice, the kind of multi-moves across the full knowledge ecology that a living theoretical tradition requires. CRADLE, as an institutional form, was built to enable others to pursue their own multi-moves — and Part 3 of this article has examined how Miettinen, Virkkunen, Paavola, and Sannino each did so in their own distinctive ways. But the founder's own trajectory established the pattern: a center is multi-voiced not despite having a founder with a strong theoretical vision, but because that vision included, from the beginning, the recognition that a living theory must be developed through movement across all four areas of the knowledge ecology — and that no single person's voice can exhaust what those movements can produce.

Part 5. Multi-voices outside the Finnish School

Part 5. Multi-voices outside the Finnish School

Parts 3 and 4 have examined multi-voices and multi-moves within the Finnish School — inside CRADLE, and within Engeström's own practice. This part widens the lens. Activity Theory as a tradition contains many voices beyond the Finnish School, each engaging with the tradition's knowledge ecology in its own way. Two dimensions of this diversity are examined here: the pattern of engagement as revealed by the KDC, and the political orientation that shapes different contributors' relationship to the tradition's interventionist commitments.

5.1 Different Patterns of Engagement

The Knowledge Discovery Canvas is not only a tool for analyzing one creator's trajectory — it is also a comparative tool. When applied across multiple contributors to the same theoretical tradition, it reveals that different people inhabit the knowledge ecology of Activity Theory in structurally different ways. These differences are not merely personal preferences; they reflect different theoretical motivations, different institutional contexts, and different conceptions of what a theoretical tradition is for.

Andy Blunden's engagement with Activity Theory is among the most philosophically deep in the tradition. Where others moved the tradition forward into new empirical domains, Blunden moved it backward — toward its Hegelian, Marxist, and Vygotskian philosophical foundations. His work operates almost entirely within the THEORY area: the development of Project as the unit of analysis of activity (An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity, 2010), the account of Activity as Formation of Concept (Concepts: A Critical Approach, 2012), and the sustained philosophical elaboration of Activity Theory's Hegelian-Marxist-Vygotskian foundations. Blunden rarely moves into the END area through large-scale empirical studies, and his engagement with the MEANS area is minimal — his contribution is at the level of the conceptual architecture of the tradition. This is not a limitation but a distinctive choice: Blunden inhabits the Curativity Line of Activity Theory's development, doing the work of unifying and deepening the tradition's conceptual foundations rather than expanding its empirical reach.

The pattern among North American CHAT scholars is different again. Researchers like Bonnie Nardi, Victor Kaptelinin, Clay Spinuzzi, and Russell and Yee's collaborators have worked primarily across the THEORY and END areas: appropriating Activity Theory's conceptual vocabulary and bringing it to bear on empirical domains — HCI, workplace studies, writing research, educational technology. Their work has been crucial for the tradition's expansion into new disciplines and for demonstrating the analytical power of the activity system model in diverse applied contexts. But the MEANS area — the development of structured intervention methodologies like the Change Laboratory — has not been a primary focus for most North American contributors. The Change Laboratory requires a particular institutional infrastructure, a long-term commitment to specific organizations, and a willingness to combine research with formative intervention in ways that sit uneasily within many North American research cultures. Most North American scholars have engaged with Activity Theory as an analytical lens rather than as an interventionist program.

This difference in KDC pattern is visible in the published record. The North American AT literature is rich in case studies, theoretical comparisons, and methodological discussions of how to apply the activity system model to specific research domains. It is comparatively sparse in accounts of sustained, multi-year formative interventions of the kind that CRADLE has produced for four decades. The Finnish School's MEANS area contribution — the Change Laboratory and its global network of practitioners — is genuinely distinctive within the tradition, representing a form of knowledge that most contributors, wherever they are located, have not developed.

5.2 Political Orientation and Theoretical Motivation

The difference in engagement pattern is connected to a deeper difference in orientation — one that involves not just methodology but political stance.

The Finnish School has always had an explicitly transformative, interventionist commitment. Engeström's theoretical vision has been inseparable from a commitment to changing work practices, empowering practitioners, and addressing societal contradictions. In recent years this commitment has become even more explicit: the fourth generation of Activity Theory, as articulated by Engeström and Sannino, is oriented toward building alternatives to capitalism as a neoliberal global regime. Anna Stetsenko's Transformative Activist Stance, developed within the broader CHAT tradition, takes this orientation further — explicitly grounding theoretical work in ideals of social justice and egalitarian transformation.

This political-ideological stance is not universally shared among Activity Theory scholars. Many North American contributors have engaged with AT precisely because of the three major intellectual turns that reshaped the social and cognitive sciences around 2000 — the Practice Turn, the Materiality Turn, and the Post-cognitive Turn. Each of these turns created a demand for theoretical frameworks that could account for the embeddedness of human action in material, social, and historical contexts. Activity Theory, with its activity system model and its account of artifact-mediated collective practice, answered this demand — but for many researchers the attraction was analytical rather than political. They needed a framework; Activity Theory provided one. The transformative intervention agenda was, for them, a separable feature of the tradition's Finnish branch, not a necessary commitment that came with adopting the theoretical vocabulary.

This distinction matters for understanding how theoretical traditions develop. The three turns created what can be called a Creative Delta — a moment of broad cross-boundary expansion in which a theoretical tradition enters many disciplines simultaneously, attracting contributors with diverse motivations and institutional contexts. When Activity Theory entered HCI, educational technology, writing studies, and organizational research through the 1990s and 2000s, it did so primarily through the analytical resources it offered — not through the Change Laboratory. Researchers found in the activity system model a vocabulary for something they were already trying to do: understand human action in context, beyond the individual subject, in relationship to tools, community, and history. The political dimension of the tradition's Finnish branch was absorbed selectively, or set aside entirely.

The multi-voices of Activity Theory, in this light, are not only voices within institutions or within traditions — they are voices with different relationships to the question of what theoretical work is ultimately for. Some contributors develop Activity Theory as an instrument of social change. Others develop it as an analytical framework for understanding human activity in all its forms. Both orientations have generated significant contributions to the tradition; and the tradition's vitality, over nearly a century of development, has depended on holding both without collapsing one into the other.

Postscript

May 13, 2026

Writing this article, I found myself returning to a 2023 analysis of Robert Kegan's knowledge enterprise, also conducted with the Knowledge Discovery Canvas. Reading the two cases together — the activity theorist and the practicing psychologist — raises questions that neither alone could generate. What do their differences tell us about the possible forms a knowledge enterprise can take?

Two clusters of difference stand out. The first is substantive. Engeström, as an activity theorist, built an enterprise that is social and systemic: it integrates theory, method, institution, and global network into a single knowledge ecology. Kegan, as a developmental psychologist and practicing therapist, built an enterprise that is interior and longitudinal: it tunnels into the structure of meaning-making, then extends outward through clinical tools and organizational applications. One expands through breadth — across workplaces, countries, disciplines. The other deepens through depth — across stages of consciousness, therapeutic encounters, developmental transitions. Their patterns of multi-voices also differ: CRADLE cultivated a center-radiating network of collaborators moving in different theoretical directions; Kegan's Harvard circle operated more as a master-apprentice formation, extending the core vision through applied variation rather than foundational divergence.

The second cluster is methodological. The KDC, in Engeström's case, needed to expand its unit of analysis from the individual creator to the institution (CRADLE) — because his enterprise had become a Developmental Platform. In Kegan's case, the canvas could remain focused on the person, because his enterprise remained, even at scale, deeply personal. This raises a question the KDC does not yet answer: under what conditions does a knowledge enterprise outgrow its founder as the natural unit of analysis?

I want to spend the remaining space on a third cluster — one that the previous two discussions gestured toward but did not fully unpack. This is the question of the PRACTICE area in the KDC: the domain of the creator's own reflective engagement with their activity, their own "concept formation in the wild" about their own work. In both case studies, the PRACTICE area was the least visible and the most difficult to document. For Engeström, I identified it with Concept Formation in the Wild (2024) — his late turn toward studying how practitioners in everyday settings form concepts to guide their own activity. For Kegan, I noted his reflections on "natural therapy" and the therapist's proper stance — but these were scattered across prefaces and asides, never consolidated into a dedicated PRACTICE-area text.

For Engeström, Concept Formation in the Wild (2024) studies how teachers, doctors, and postal workers — people in everyday practical settings, outside laboratories — form concepts to guide transformative action. The book does not claim to study the theorist's own concept formation. But this raises an open question that the PRACTICE area invites us to ask: Can Engeström's own creative life be considered a "wild" context for concept formation? Not in the sense of matching his empirical subjects, but in the sense of sharing the same essential conditions — working without a script, facing novel problems that resist existing solutions, forming new concepts through collective struggle in a resource-constrained, socially distributed environment.

Kegan's PRACTICE area is quieter but no less present. His early commitment to "natural therapy" — the idea that therapeutic environments exist outside formal clinical settings, and that the careful study of them might guide practice — is already a reflexive move. It says: before I tell you how to intervene, let me understand how healing already happens. His insistence that the constructive-developmental clinician is a "phenomenologist" who takes the interior perspective, and that "much of human personality is none of [the professional's] business," is a boundary statement about the limits of professional knowing. These are PRACTICE-area claims: they are about the stance of the knower toward the known, the limits of intervention, and the ethics of claiming to help.

What these two cases suggest is that the PRACTICE area may be less a location within the KDC than a relationship the creator has to the other three areas. It is the capacity to turn the framework back on oneself — to ask, not only "how do others form concepts?" but "how am I forming concepts right now?"; not only "what is the client's immunity to change?" but "what is my immunity to change as a theorist or therapist?" A knowledge enterprise that lacks this reflexive loop may be productive, even influential, but it risks a kind of asymptotic rigidity: the tools keep improving, but the creator's own relationship to them stops evolving.

The difference in their primary identities — activity theorist versus developmental psychologist — is not a superficial label. It shapes what kind of reflexivity is possible and where it appears. The activity theorist works in the social and institutional world; his reflexivity, when it comes, tends to take the form of a public theoretical return — a book that reframes the entire enterprise from a new angle. The practicing psychologist works in the intimate space of the consulting room; his reflexivity is embedded in the method itself, in the stance he takes toward the client and the limits he places on his own authority. One makes reflexivity an event. The other makes it an ongoing discipline. Neither is superior; both are faithful to the demands of their respective domains. But recognizing this difference helps us see why the PRACTICE area has been under-theorized in the KDC. It does not look the same across knowledge enterprises. It takes its form from the kind of knowing the enterprise is built to produce — and from the kind of relationship the creator has, finally, to their own work.

The comparison between Engeström and Kegan is not a competition. It is an invitation to see that knowledge enterprises can be successful in structurally different ways — and that one dimension of that success, often overlooked, is the creator's capacity to remain a subject of their own theory rather than its sovereign exception. The KDC made this dimension visible. Activity U (IV): The Engeström's Triangle and the Power of Diagram (2020); Weave the Enterprise: Theoretical Platform and Theoretical Enterprise (May 5, 2026); Weave the Theory: The Journey of Activity Theory and CHAT (Since 2000) (May 7, 2026); and the situational notes for this article (May 12, 2026).*

Sources cited: Engeström, Y. & Sannino, A. (2020). From mediated actions to heterogeneous coalitions: four generations of activity-theoretical studies of work and learning. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 28(1), 4–23. Engeström, Y. (2023). Interview on the Change Laboratory. Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory, No. 5, 41–54. Lemos, M., Pereira-Querol, M.A., & Almeida, I.M. (2013). The Historical-Cultural Activity Theory and its contributions to Education, Health and Communication: interview with Yrjö Engeström. Comunicação Saúde Educação, 17(46), 715–727. Ploettner, J. & Tresserras, E. (2016). An interview with Yrjö Engeström and Annalisa Sannino on activity theory. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 9(4), 87–98. Sannino, A. (2009). Teachers' talk of experiencing: conflict, resistance and agency. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 838–844.