Although organizational cognition, organizational learning, and organizational knowledge are well-established topics, concept formation and conceptual change in organizations are curiously nearly absent in the literature. A search in Google Scholar in January 2021 yielded no hits for the expression “concept formation in organizations.” This is probably due to the fact that research on concept formation has been dominated by laboratory and classroom studies of what Greeno (Reference Greeno2012) calls “formal concepts,” that is, concepts that use formal logic or mathematics to derive implications of assertions. Concept formation and conceptual change are studied predominantly in laboratory and classroom contexts in which the focus is on individual learners and the concepts to be acquired are purportedly neutral and defined by the researchers or instructors ahead of time.

The formation of concepts in work and organizations, “in the wild,” has only relatively recently been identified as a research challenge (Engeström & Sannino, Reference Engeström and Sannino2012a). Embedded in organized activities, concepts need to be understood as collective, complex, emergent, contested, and volitionally charged constructs that have practical consequences. With Greeno, we may characterize concepts-in-activity as “functional concepts”: “By a functional concept (or a functional use of a concept) I refer to a cognitive entity that has meaning in a kind of activity, in which it contributes to the way participants organize their understanding of what they are doing.” (Greeno, Reference Greeno2012, p. 311) In a similar vein, Vidal-Gomel and Rogalski (Reference Vidal-Gomel and Rogalski2007, p. 49) suggest the notion of “pragmatic concept,” understood as “a component of professional competence and as an organizer of the activity at work.”

The challenge of the present chapter is to create a theoretical framework that allows us to identify basic types of functional concepts, their epistemic potentials, and their ways of being formed in organizational activities. The inquiry is guided by the following questions:

• - What different types of functional concepts may be identified?

• - What epistemic questions do the different types of functional concepts answer?

• - How are the different types of functional concepts formed?

This chapter is primarily a theoretical effort to formulate a skeletal framework for the study of the formation of functional concepts. In this effort, I draw on cultural-historical activity theory and on data and findings generated in an ongoing research program on concept formation in the wild (Engeström, Reference Engeström2020). My examples are necessarily limited, so the resulting framework needs to be tested and further developed with more diverse materials.

In what follows, I will first discuss existing approaches to concept formation in organizations. I will then develop a framework of five types of functional concepts. I will examine each proposed type with the help of data from organizational settings studied by my research groups. I will conclude by summing up the strengths and limitations of the different types and by discussing interconnections, movement, and complementarity among them.

4.1 Approaches and Attempts

In organization studies, notions such as “interpretive scheme” (Bartunek, Reference Bartunek1984) and “shared frame” (Orlikowski & Gash, Reference Orlikowski and Gash1994) have been used to denote phenomena that roughly correspond to what I call functional concepts. Bartunek (Reference Bartunek1984) pointed out that major changes in organizations occur through a dialectical interplay of old and new interpretive schemes or ways of conceptualizing the organization. Thus, any significant organizational transformation is inevitably also a process of collective concept formation. This becomes particularly important when we are concerned with a change from top-down management to some form of participatory management. It is crucial to understand how those who are involved in the organizational change effort actually conceptualize the emerging new system or practice. Collective formation of functional concepts is not a linear process of acquisition of prescribed meanings. It is typically a spiraling, perhaps even zigzagging, process of struggle and debate between alternative interpretations and standpoints. This can lead to the formation of a new, richer meaning.

The notion of organizational archetypes is also related to the challenge of concept formation in organizations. As Brock et al. (Reference Brock, Powell and Hinings2007, pp. 221–222) state, “an archetype is a configuration of structures and systems that are consistent with an underlying interpretive scheme.” Archetypes have often been presented as monolithic structures that resist change. There is fairly little literature that examines archetypes in action, embedded in and resulting from the actual activity an organization is performing. Conflicts and agency tend to be marginalized in the archetype literature (Kirkpatrick & Ackroyd, Reference Kirkpatrick and Ackroyd2003).

The notion of business model may be seen as another way of approaching concepts and concept formation in organizations. Zott and Amit (Reference Zott and Amit2010) and Beckett (Reference Beckett2016) have drawn on activity theory in attempts to analyze the design of business models. Again, little has been written about the actual formation and use of business models in the ongoing activity of an organization. Issues such as the possible discrepancy between administratively pronounced business models and the business conducted and implemented in practice have received relatively scant attention.

In studies of management fashions and new organizational forms, the notion of “concept” is frequently used (e.g., Heusinkveld & Benders, Reference Heusinkveld and Benders2012; Nicolai & Dautwiz, Reference Nicolai and Dautwiz2010). However, these studies quite systematically avoid questioning what is actually meant by concepts and how concepts are formed in organizations.

The paper by Bothello and Salles-Djelic (Reference Bothello and Salles-Djelic2018) on the evolution of conceptualizations of organizational environmentalism is a rare exception. Drawing on the tradition of conceptual history (Koselleck & Presner, Reference Koselleck and Presner2002) and on the historical sociology of concept formation of Somers (Reference Somers1995), these authors trace key steps in the development of the concept of environmentalism over the past 30 years. According to Bothello and Salles-Djelic, environmentalism follows a path characterized by episodes of reconceptualization and relabeling, from “sustainable development” to “sustainability” and more recently to “resilience.” Importantly, these label changes are not only symbolic markers but also performative, entailing consequential regime transformations with regard to environmentalism. The authors identify junctures where environmentalism meets with other institutional trajectories, facilitating shifts in meaning. They suggest four mechanisms of lateral interaction between institutional paths: assimilation, coalescence, co-optation, and recombination. These interactions between institutional paths are presented as the main source of conceptual change.

Bothello and Salles-Djelic analyzed the evolution of environmentalism as a transnational process, using large databases to chart the frequency of usage of terms related to environmentalism and the prominence of relevant labels in environmental news articles. They also constructed a chronology of important events in the evolution of environmentalism. However, as their focus is on interactions between different institutional paths, the actual contents and inner dynamics of the concept itself remain opaque. We might say that the authors are so preoccupied with the ecology of the concept that they all but ignore the anatomy of the concept. There are numerous studies devoted to, for example, the concept of sustainability (e.g., Benson & Craig, Reference Benson and Craig2014; Dixon & Fallon, Reference Dixon and Fallon1989; Goodland, Reference Goodland1995; Leal Filho, Reference Leal Filho2000; Marshall & Toffel, Reference Marshall and Toffel2005; Renn et al., Reference Renn, Jager, Deuschle and Weimer-Jehle2009; Sverdrup & Svensson, Reference Sverdrup, Svensson, Olsson and Sjöstedt2004). These studies are not discussed or cited by Bothello and Salles-Djelic.

An analysis at this level of aggregation and abstraction also remains distant from the concrete processes of concept formation by identifiable actors in specific organizations. In other words, the subjects and actions of concept formation disappear. What emerges is an image of concept formation as a universal, almost natural force above and beyond the influence of willful actions taken by local flesh-and-blood actors. This is even more the case in the recent sociological work of Hannan et al. (Reference Hannan2019) on concepts and categories.

A useful antidote to this abstract-universal view is offered by Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell (Reference Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell2008) in their analysis of knowledge practices in indigenous social movements.

Despite the limitations of their analysis, Bothello and Salles-Djelic draw a conclusion that is important for the emerging field of studies of concept formation in the wild.

This recognition of the fluid and multifaceted character of concepts is similar to Löwy’s (Reference Löwy1992) notion of “the strength of loose concepts,” based on a longitudinal analysis in the domain of immunology. When we follow the evolution of a concept for several decades, it is indeed likely that we find the formation of new interpretations and branches, perhaps also radical transformations of the concept.

The existing literature offers no systematic frameworks for identifying qualitatively different types of functional concepts in organizations. I will now propose such a framework of five types of functional concepts, starting with prototypes.

4.2 Prototype Concepts

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a prototype is “the first example of something, such as a machine or other industrial product, from which all later forms are developed.” This everyday understanding of a prototype is useful in that it speaks of material things, such as machines, rather than mental representations. This brings us close to the argument put forward by Brooks.

Now what does this have to do with concepts? Consider the following descriptions of the creation of Gothic cathedrals.

The Chartres Cathedral is both a material entity and a concept – it is a material concept. In the vocabulary proposed here, it may be called a prototype concept. It may have been later used by others as a model to emulate, but it was not created to be emulated. It is primarily a prototype of itself and for itself. To ask what it represents is somewhat like asking an artist what her painting represents. A common response is an annoyed look or change of subject. This applies also to conceptual art (Godfrey, Reference Godfrey1998).

What I here call a prototype concept should not be confused with the prototype theory of categorization put forward by Rosch (Reference Rosch, Rosch and Lloyd1978). For Rosch, prototypes are “the clearest cases of category membership defined operationally by people’s judgments of goodness of membership in the category” (Rosch, Reference Rosch, Rosch and Lloyd1978, p. 36). Furthermore, “to speak of a prototype at all is simply a convenient grammatical fiction; what is really referred to are judgments of degree of prototypicality” (p. 40).

Obviously the Chartres Cathedral is not a grammatical fiction. Its builders were creating a durable material concept that has later been tagged and labeled with the category of “Gothic cathedral.” You do not necessarily have to know of that label to marvel at the building’s beauty and sophistication. Once you know the cathedral, you may use it as a yardstick or example with which you compare other similar buildings – in other words, it may indeed become a prototype also in the sense Rosch uses that term. And I fully endorse the following characterization of the way in which prototypes are mentally experienced.

In her later work, Rosch (Reference Rosch1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, Reference Varela, Thompson and Rosch1991) actually came close to the idea of functional concepts, or concept formation in the wild. She argued that “concepts have a participatory, not an identifying, function in situations” (Rosch, Reference Rosch1999, p. 73).

Interestingly, Rosch talked about “situations” and “activities” as if they were synonymous. In an activity-theoretical perspective, it is important to distinguish between the two (Leont’ev, Reference Leont’ev1978). Situations such as taking an exam or playing a game are actions or bundles of actions, taken by an individual or a bounded group, with a predefined goal and finite duration. They are embedded in activities, or activity systems, such as studying activity or family recreation activity, carried out by collectives, driven by object-related motives, and continuing over long periods of time, commonly without a predetermined end point.

We recently studied concept formation in the work activity of a group of builders of large wooden fishing boats in the Bay of Bengal in India. Employing ethnographic methods for this purpose, a member of my research team, Swapna Mukhopadhyay, spent two periods of about five months each in Frasergunj,Footnote ¹ a small fishing village. The fishermen from this and surrounding villages set out on deep-sea fishing trips that typically lasted ten to twelve days. The boats they used were built locally by small groups of village carpenters whose work seems “primitive” at first sight. Their tools were simple, and they worked in a team almost silently, as if their actions were choreographed. In one of the early encounters at the site, when asked if they worked with a plan, the response was startling: “We only follow plans when it’s necessary for government jobs, and they slow us down.”

These wooden boats were totally handmade, and decorated and painted in bright colors following local traditions. The boats had names and license numbers. The fishing boats were composed of a cabin, a small compartment in which the crew slept and stored the supplies (such as water, ice, and food) and tools they needed during the fishing period. These deep-sea fishing boats were large in size – about sixty feet in length (Figure 4.1). Such a boat could support a crew of up to 12 people. The boats were inspected by a state government regulating agency which determined the basic safety requirements. In recent years the boats were required to be equipped with current technology, such as sonar and GPS.

Figure 4.1

Indian fishing boats of the type built in Frasergunj.

A crew of eight to ten people worked together for four to five months to complete the construction of a boat. The crew included a highly experienced crew leader and workers. The role of the crew leader was to supervise the ongoing construction and to help with occasional minor tasks. Generally he was not involved in the physically demanding groundwork. He kept the accounts, both in terms of purchase of raw materials and paying his staff. In this particular case, the crew leader was functionally illiterate and most of his workers were barely schooled.

The process of boat building started with the establishment of the keel. After establishing the keel, the hull of the boat was built by using the technique of lapstrake or clinker method of attaching strakes (or strips of planks), wherein the planks were bent to the desired curvature. Planks that came as straight pieces were bent by softening the wood with controlled heating. This was accomplished by creating a shallow pit of burning hay and wood shavings, and then the plank was bent manually. Two planks were joined together with rivets – small flat pieces of metal, locally called joloi, about two inches long and pointed at both ends. These metal pieces were hammered into the plank that already had precut grooves along its sides. The overall effect of joining was like adjacently stapling two pieces together. Visually it looks like stitched strips of material.

Once the hull was built, the ribs (bNak) were made, in situ, and fitted accordingly. The ribs were made with wood different from that of the body and were individually shaped by templates created for temporary use only. There is no evidence of saving the templates of a design for future use. Since these boats were not standardized in a strict sense, there was perhaps no need for it. In contrast to formalized boat building, vernacular engineering is adaptive to availability of material in the context – pieces of lumber or a rebar – for making a template. The approach is similar to that of a bricolage that optimizes local resources. The template then served as a crude guide in ascertaining the shape of the rib. Since the economy of material is one of the key features of vernacular engineering, the workers relied on their visual judgment of the shape of the hull before even trying the template on the available lumber. Thus, a worker used these seemingly coarse-looking templates in conjunction with his capacity of mental calibration to efficiently design the ribs.

The crew did not follow any written plans, as in blueprints or calculations. They did not explicitly follow any formulas either. The knowledge of boat construction requires rigorous understanding of mathematics and physics. This nautical engineering feat was orally held and shared. Many of the workers had either dropped out of formal education or never received any. What was the nature of the cognitive architecture of the men who created viable ocean-going boats, despite being mostly unable to read or write, having “never,” as one of the workers aptly said, “crossed the door to a school”?

The builders we observed did not use external representations of the boat. As stated above, even the templates were created for temporary use only. Paraphrasing Brooks (Reference Brooks1991), the boat was literally its own best model. Of course, this does not mean that the boat was built as if from scratch, without any guiding idea of how it should be. This idea, based on experience from building many similar boats before, was not primarily represented but enacted, step by step, through physical actions with the raw materials (on this understanding of enactment, see Hutto & Myin, Reference Hutto and Myin2017; Stewart, Gapenne, & Di Paolo, Reference Stewart, Gapenne and Di Paolo2010). In this sense, the very idea of the boat – the prototype concept – was built anew every time the crew built an actual boat.

What is the epistemic potential of a prototype concept? What kind of a question could it answer? If you stand in front of a boat like the one depicted in Figure 4.1, you may ask: “What is this?” The builders might answer: “Look at it, try it. It’s a fishing boat!” A prototype concept answers the question “What?”, not by listing attributes or explaining but basically by pointing and inviting the observer to touch and test. Standard ostensive definition specifies the meaning of an expression by pointing to examples of things to which the expression applies. A prototype concept moves the opposite way: it points to a prototype, and may (or may not) then give it a name. One may eventually identify other examples that one wants to group under the same name. But the primary function of a prototype concept is not naming or grouping, it is simply an invitation to observe and experience. Prototype concepts are oriented to the here and now.

The formation of the prototype concept in our study took place as extended dwelling and moving in a bounded space around the material object. Ingold aptly characterizes dwelling as “active, practical and perceptual engagement” and as an alternative to “Western ontology whose point of departure is that of a mind detached from the world, and that has literally to formulate it – to build an intentional world in consciousness – prior to any attempt at engagement” (Ingold, Reference Ingold2000, p. 42; see also Chia & Holt, Reference Chia and Holt2009, on strategy as dwelling).

As mentioned above, the boat builders worked almost silently, as if their actions were choreographed. Marchand describes the collective dimension of this type of working and cognizing.

This corresponds to the mode of interaction Weick and Roberts (Reference Weick and Roberts1993) characterize as heedful interrelating.

The prototype concept of the wooden fishing boat in Frasergunj was at the same time unique and general. The builders made the boat without explicit reference to previously built similar boats, fully focused on the singular object at hand. On the other hand, they operated as if under the foil or within the scaffolding provided by the long history of boat building in the area. We may think of the tradition of boat building as a “source domain,” a notion put forward by Nersessian (Reference Nersessian2008). Nersessian emphasizes that solutions are not directly picked from the source domain; rather, the solution (in this case, the specific boat under construction) must be constructed as if on its own terms. “In effect, the model itself is treated as an analogical source” (Nersessian, Reference Nersessian2008, p. 203). The peculiarity of prototype concepts is that the model and the solution melt together.

4.3 Classifications and Categories

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines classification as “systematic arrangement in groups or categories according to established criteria.” Bowker and Star define it as follows.

Bowker and Star point out that the emergence of elaborate classifications is closely connected to the rise of modern Western bureaucracy. “Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories is a ubiquitous part of work in the modern, bureaucratic state.” (p. 285)

Studies of organizational categorization are mainly interested in the positioning of products and producers in markets, or simply “market categorization.” Furthermore, “the vast majority of research on categories has rested on family resemblance – assessments of how similar an entity is to exemplars stored in actors’ memory” (Durand, Granqvist, & Tyllström, Reference Durand, Granqvist, Tyllström, Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström2017, p. 11). The limitations of this stance are twofold. On the one hand, categorization tends to collapse when we face radical innovations that rely on decentralized development involving multiple parties with different objectives and backgrounds (Vergne & Swain, Reference Vergne, Swain, Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström2017). On the other hand, categorization is of little help in transformations in which actors struggle to forge a new purpose and meaning for their organization.

Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström (Reference Durand, Granqvist, Tyllström, Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström2017, p. 12) point out that there is little research on actual acts of categorization in organizations. Drawing on the available literature, they mention three types of actions: labeling, signaling, and producing legitimate criteria for an existing category. Vergne and Swain (Reference Vergne, Swain, Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström2017) observe that extant theory views the formation of categories as being driven by one or a combination of three mechanisms: similarity-based grouping, knowledge-based causal modeling, or goal definition. Based on their analysis of British media’s attempts to classify and categorize bitcoin, Vergne and Swain (Reference Vergne, Swain, Durand, Granqvist and Tyllström2017, p. 209) conclude that “none of these mechanisms seemed effective in our context.”

A recent special issue of Organization Studies set out to develop “a dynamic view on how categories emerge, change, dissolve, are combined, or contested” (Delmestri et al., Reference Delmestri, Wezel, Goodrick and Washington2020, p. 909). The editors of the issue sum up the outcomes as three challenges for categorization research: (1) maintenance of existing categories, (2) recategorization of mature categories, and (3) consolidation of emerging categories. Somewhat disappointingly, none of the three seems to address the very first question, namely how categories emerge in practice, by actions taken by flesh-and-blood human beings.

The editors of the special issue distinguish between two perspectives on categories. The first one sees categories as “shared typifications or typificatory schemes of actors and patterns of interaction which have prototypical structural properties and are experienced by actors as given, binding and ‘objective’ facts.” The second perspective sees categories as “ad hoc typifications used by individuals to deal with everyday life according to their situations and goals” (Delmestri et al., Reference Delmestri, Wezel, Goodrick and Washington2020, p. 916). The authors note that the second perspective is rarely considered by dominant approaches in organizational research “because, as structural theories, they do not conceptualize much agency operating at the individual level” (Delmestri et al., Reference Delmestri, Wezel, Goodrick and Washington2020, p. 916).

Bowker and Star identified anomalies and interruptions as a foundational mechanism of formation and re-formation of categories.

In other words, we should detect and trace anomalies and interruptions as generative mechanisms for category formation and category change. A recent example is provided by Johnston (Reference Johnston2020) in a study of mental-health consequences of gun violence. She analyzes how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as a “mental disorder” qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. What emerges is an anomaly, a conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering. When such anomalies become pressing, categories and classifications are revised and rearranged. But revising is hard work and radical revising is difficult. Bowker and Star (Reference Bowker and Star1999, p. 112) point out that classification systems are conservative in abandoning categories, tending to preserve anachronistic categories. This can be done by turning anomalies themselves into a category. Jutel (Reference Jutel2010, p. 229) shows how “in the absence of diagnostic category, medically unexplained symptoms are recast as a discrete category of their own.” Rasmussen (Reference Rasmussen2020) concludes that the category of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) has become an ordering device whose function is the containment of anomalies we want to keep but have nowhere else to put.

My research group studied the transformation of a surgical operating unit of a public sector university hospital in Finland. The unit consisted of approximately 200 nurses and 100 physicians representing surgical specialties and anesthesia. The unit belonged to the larger result unit of surgery and intensive care. Patients were transferred to the surgical operating unit mainly from the regular wards and from emergency units. The unit had 16 operating rooms for surgical specialties. Patients were treated postoperatively in two recovery rooms. The work was highly demanding, and the unit conducted the most demanding operations in the hospital district, which covered northern Finland.

Different professional groups, most importantly the nurses and the physicians working in the unit, maintained their own professional roles and organizational sectors, each with their own managers. These professional groups were further divided into the domains of surgery and anesthesia. In the years preceding our study, the surgical operating unit had functioned under increasing pressure to perform operations and satisfy demands for organizational effectiveness. Lack of personnel due to sick leaves and employee turnover had seriously eroded the unit’s ability to respond to the demands and pushed the unit close to a crisis, signaled by closures of operating rooms and simultaneous threat of state sanctions due to excessive patient cues and waiting times. These troubles and interruptions made the existing organization look increasingly like an anomaly in the eyes of the employees.

The unit’s organization was based on a hierarchical and sectoral model (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2

The old organization chart of the surgical operating unit.

In practice, the organization was divided into professional sectors: surgeons, surgical nurses, anesthetists, and anesthetist nurses. The combination of people working in a surgical team in an operating theatre at any given time would constantly change. The staff were preoccupied with experiences of loss of control of their daily work and an overall feeling of chaos.

We started a formative Change Laboratory intervention with the staff. In the very first intervention session, the participants made it clear that the large size and the sectoral and hierarchical organization made the unit very difficult to manage.

The crisis was not only a matter of technical efficiency. It was about identity, self-respect, and professional pride.

Already in the first session of the intervention, the participants concluded that the unit needed to be divided into smaller, more manageable subunits. The division of the unit into smaller areas was first articulated by the charge nurse. The idea was strongly supported and further specified by the surgeons. Revising and rearranging took off.

One of the surgeons came up with the idea that the division of the unit into smaller areas with a clearer organizational structure would also enhance identity creation.

The notion of identity was elaborated further with the help of the notions of responsibility and “the ability to see the whole.”

The basic idea of the new team-based organization model was thus expressed in the very first session of the intervention. The remaining sessions were largely a process of painstaking elaboration, specification, and justification of the new concept. Soon enough it was represented by the operations manager as a new organization chart (Figure 4.3). During the intervention, the new organization chart was justified in written form, in a detailed document which the participants produced together in small groups. The new model was taken into use after the intervention. The model follows the idea of the division of the unit into four smaller, more manageable teams, called “activity areas,” organized according to the three main surgical specialties of (1) gastroenterology and urology, (2) thorax-vascular, and (3) orthopedics, plastic surgery, and hand surgery, with the recovery room (PACU) as the fourth activity area.

Figure 4.3

The new organization chart of the surgical operating unit.

In the new model, much of the managerial responsibility was reallocated to the activity areas. All staff members were given an opportunity to apply for a position in their desired activity area. A special emergency team consisting of skilled nurses from both anesthesia and surgery got the responsibility to assist in or take care of unexpected situations.

Like most organization charts, the new one created by the practitioners was a classification in the sense of “a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work” (Bowker & Star, Reference Bowker and Star1999, p. 10). Each box is a category with a name and defined members. As a whole, the new organization chart represents a classification concept that may be labeled “team organization.”

What is the epistemic potential of a classification concept? What kind of questions could such concepts answer? Obviously, a member of the hospital staff might ask: “Where am I in this chart? What is my position? What criteria are used to place me in that box?” A classification concept answers the question “In which location?” In this sense, classification concepts are primarily spatial. Their embedded categories answer the question “What are the defining attributes?”

The classification concept was formed as a response to an aggravated anomaly that called for revision and rearrangement of the organization. The organization was first divided into more meaningful units, then the functions of the units were defined, and finally they were filled with specific jobs and persons. It was a three-step process – divide, define, and fill – with some iteration between the steps.

4.4 Process Concepts

In the concept formation literature, Katherine Nelson has been a prominent and consistent proponent of a process view of concepts, largely crystallized in the notion of scripts.

Scripts are closely related to plans. Consider the famous example of the restaurant script (Shank & Abelson, Reference Shank and Abelson1977). A knowledgeable person follows certain scripted steps in visiting a restaurant, starting with reserving a table and ending with paying the bill. Now this general cultural script may easily be turned into a personal plan. I plan to visit a restaurant tonight, so I fill the general script with my personal choices – a specific time, a specific restaurant, a specific companion, a specific kind of meal.

Scripts are also related to stories, or narratives.

Scripts, plans, and stories capture processes, sequences of events moving in time. We may call them process concepts. A good example of process concepts common in organizations is pathway. In medicine, care pathways are important instruments for standardization and quality control. Similarly, for example in work with the homeless, the concept of homelessness pathway is widely used.

Care pathways or clinical pathways are basically normative or prescriptive descriptions of the steps that should be taken in the care of patients belonging to a specific diagnostic group. They are aimed at improving the quality of care by reducing undesirable variations in practice and standardizing care delivery (Allen, Reference Allen2009, Reference Allen2014; Martin et al., Reference Martin, Kocman, Stephens, Peden and Pearse2017; Pinder et al., Reference Pinder, Petchey, Shaw and Carter2005; Rycroft-Malone et al., Reference Rycroft‐Malone, Fontenla, Seers and Bick2009). A clinical pathway explicitly states the goals and main steps of care in order to increase efficiency in the use of resources by coordinating the roles and sequencing the actions of the different caregivers.

While it is supposed to be strictly based on evidence of best practices, the construction of a pathway can be a rather contested and conflictual process, with different professional groups and specialties clashing as they claim and defend their territories.

Schrijvers, van Hoorn and Huiskes (Reference Schrijvers, van Hoorn and Huiskes2012, p. 1) define a care pathway as serving “a well-defined group of patients during a well-defined period.” In other words, a care pathway is constructed for a specific diagnostic group and for a bounded duration.

In studies of homelessness, the notion of pathway has a different meaning. A homelessness pathway describes a typical trajectory into, through, and possibly out of homelessness. Anderson and Tulloch (Reference Anderson-Baron and Collins2000, p. 11) defined a homelessness pathway as a description of “the route of an individual or household into homelessness, their experience of homelessness and their route out of homelessness into secure housing.” Homelessness pathways are meant to be descriptive, not normative. As such, they are meant to help practitioners and policymakers to understand varieties of homelessness and to identify priorities for counteracting or reducing homelessness. Table 4.1 summarizes a few examples of classifying homelessness pathways in the recent research literature.

Table 4.1Examples of categorization of homelessness pathways

As may be seen in Table 4.1, homelessness pathways have been primarily constructed on the basis of statistical or interview data concerning “typical” background factors and critical steps or turning points of homelessness in a given population. This way pathways become categories or taxonomies of different “typical” clusters, profiles, or chains of factors that often lead to homelessness. Such categories are inherently top-down abstractions. Real individual people seldom if ever match fully a single prototypical pathway. Pathways experienced by real people are heterogenous hybrids. This means that the predominant pathway categories are problematic if used as practitioners’ tools for diagnosing, predicting, and planning steps or actions for specific clients. To use the available pathway categories this way, one has to force an individual client to match a predetermined pathway. Elements of this critique have been voiced by some scholars.

Frontline work with homelessness – both preventive and rehabilitative – operates with specific individuals. Practitioners need to understand the life courses of homeless people and people at risk of becoming homeless – as well as the courses of action taken by service providers and professionals. For this purpose, a radically different type of homelessness pathway is needed. They need to capture essential steps and features of the particular client’s life course and of the courses of action taken by professionals dealing with the client.Footnote ² Pathways need to be jointly constructed by a practitioner and a client. And they need to be constructed with the help of standard building blocks – a common vocabulary – so that they can be easily compared and critical phases and issues can be identified to enable intervention and transformation of practices.

This challenge was taken up in a formative Change Laboratory intervention conducted by the research team of Annalisa Sannino in 2019 in Helsinki. In this Change Laboratory, 27 homelessness professionals representing Finnish ministries, cities, and NGOs, supported by three researchers, analyzed the state of efforts to eliminate homelessness in the nation and designed an action program to move these efforts to the next stage. In one of the sessions of the Change Laboratory, the participants were asked to read two concise autobiographical accounts of homelessness (by Mikko and Tomi), published in a book of interviews titled Faces: Stories of Homelessness (Pyyvaara & Timonen, Reference Pyyvaara and Timonen2017). The participants were asked to construct homelessness pathways for Mikko and Tomi, using a notational template given by the researchers (Figure 4.4). The participants were asked to analyze what should have been done and what would need to be done differently and by whom in these cases.

Figure 4.4

Notational template for constructing homelessness pathways for possibilization.

The template moves in time from the situation before homelessness into the situation during homelessness and after homelessness. The idea is to capture and represent a homeless person’s trajectory as he or she experiences it, including anticipated future steps and actions. In the next session of the Change Laboratory, the participants presented and compared their pathway representations. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 depict one participant’s pathway representations for Mikko and Tomi.

Figure 4.5

A Change Laboratory participant’s representation of Mikko’s homelessness pathway.

Figure 4.6

A Change Laboratory participant’s representation of Tomi’s homelessness pathway.

Overall, the participants found the proposed template and symbols easy to use. Many of them generated also additional symbols. In Figure 4.6, the very first symbol was added by the participant. It represents Tomi’s childhood and family situation.

One of the participants, a manager of supported housing for formerly homeless clients run by a major NGO, took the assignment to a group of clients. These clients were residents of a supported housing unit, with a background of lengthy periods of homelessness. Working in pairs, members of this group produced their own solutions to the assignment. Figure 4.7 is a photo of one of the resulting representations.

Figure 4.7

Representation of homelessness pathways produced by two formerly homeless residents of a supported housing unit.

Notable in Figure 4.7 is the detailed elaboration of symbols. The authors of this representation added symbols for the hospital, for the prison, for drugs, for social security benefits, for the adjustment of debts, and for several other components in pathways of Mikko and Tomi, including “memories of a bad adolescence.” This richness of details clearly stemmed from the personal experiences of the participants.

The experience gained in the Change Laboratory indicates that this kind of representation of homelessness pathways is a potentially powerful tool in the service of analysis and forward-oriented planning conducted in dialogue and negotiation between a client and a professional. It seems particularly apt to serve as an instrument of criticism of past failures or mistakes that can be turned into poignant plans for and commitments to near-future emancipatory actions.

The manipulability and malleability of the symbols in the template is an important characteristic of this instrument of possibilization (Engeström, Reference Engeström2007a, Reference Engeström, Rogers, Russell, Carlino and Marine2023). Writing is here intimately intertwined with pictorial representation and the possibility of playing with alternative material symbols and their positions. The pathway representation affords a degree of decontextualization in the sense of representing uniquely personal experiences with the help of general symbols, and recontextualization in the sense of building a tailor-made trajectory that is meaningful and challenging for both the client and the system of services. The idea of this kind of a pathway representation echoes an observation made by Bazerman (Reference Bazerman2018, p. 301): “models are for users rather than analysts and are invoked situationally and mutably.”

What is the epistemic potential of a process concept, such as a pathway representation? What kind of questions could such concepts answer? Process concepts tell us how to proceed or how things move forward in time, through what steps and in which order. Whereas classification concepts are primarily spatial, process concepts are primarily temporal.

Different kinds of process concepts have different epistemic potentials. Table 4.2 summarizes key qualities of three types of pathway concepts.

Table 4.2Qualities of three types of pathway concepts

Care pathways are typically prescriptive and normative. They answer how practitioners should proceed in the course of a patient with a specific diagnosis. Mainstream homelessness pathways are descriptive. They answer what types of trajectories into, through, and possibly out of homelessness have been observed among some populations or samples. In other words, while in the form and content these concepts are processual, in practice they are mainly used for purposes of classification. Finally, what in Table 4.2 are called co-creation pathways are prospective and volitional projections by means of which clients and professionals may negotiate improvements in services and plan future steps in the life of the client. This kind of process concept answers the question “How could we possibly move forward?” Returning to the beginning of this section, we might think of care pathways as scripts, mainstream homelessness pathways as stories, and co-creation pathways as plans.

Prescriptive care pathways are ideally constructed on the basis of statistical evidence concerning the most efficient and impactful courses of treatment. As Hunter and Segrott (Reference Hunter and Segrott2014) show, in reality care pathways are outcomes of often conflictual negotiations between different professional stakeholders. Descriptive homelessness pathways are constructed by obtaining accounts of homeless people’s trajectories and grouping them into clusters and eventually typologies, exemplified in Table 4.1. Co-creation pathways are constructed and monitored through joint negotiation, envisioning and planning by the professional(s) and the client. This volitional quality of moving from history to future possibilities makes co-creation pathways a particular kind of process concept, something that tends to blur the boundary between empirical and theoretical concepts.

4.5 Systems Concepts

Although systems thinking has been marketed to organizations and managers for decades (e.g., Ackoff, Reference Ackoff1974; Campbell, Coldicott, & Kinsella, Reference Campbell, Coldicott and Kinsella2018; Checkland & Poulter, Reference Checkland and Poulter2007; Jackson, Reference Jackson2006; Reynolds & Holwell, Reference Reynolds and Holwell2020; Senge, Reference Senge1990), it is difficult to find discussions of concept formation in the extant literature on systems thinking. Ever since Ackoff’s (Reference Ackoff1971) early paper, the notion of “systems concepts” has been basically reserved for general ideas of systems theory. There has been little interest in examining the formation and uses of substantive systemic concepts of specific organizational realities and practices.

Senge’s (Reference Senge1990) Learning Laboratories may be seen as an important effort to move closer to concept formation for addressing organizational realities. Senge focused on the “mental models” of managers, guiding them to construct and use systems models to analyze difficult organizational problems and to identify solutions to them. Senge and Sterman (Reference Senge and Sterman1992) identified conceptualization as the first task of such a process.

What emerges is a systemic model that can be used to detect causes of recurring trouble. I would call this outcome a systems concept. Instead of representing a single trajectory of events or actions as is done by the process concepts discussed in the preceding section, systems concepts represent a bounded world of interconnections and reciprocal relations that allows us to examine multiple different processes, both simultaneous and successive. Calling systems concepts “mental models” is somewhat misleading as this kind of representation typically needs to be externalized and turned into shareable graphic diagrams in order for the participants to be able to examine, use, and develop them further.

Senge’s Learning Laboratories deal with actual contents of management and business processes. However, it is not clear just how concretely a Learning Laboratory goes into the history, culture, and overall purpose of a given organization. Being a management training tool, it seems to be aimed at relatively quick fixes to problems in specific business domains with the help of general heuristic devices such as the “system archetypes.”

Members of my research group, Irene Vänninen and Marco Querol, conducted a Change Laboratory intervention among the greenhouse vegetable producers of a village in the region of Ostrobothnia, Finland (Vänninen, Querol, & Engeström, Reference Vänninen, Pereira-Querol and Engeström2015, Reference Vänninen, Querol and Engeström2021). The Ostrobothnian greenhouse cluster on the West coast of Finland consists of about 145 enterprises located in close proximity to one another, facilitating dispersal of both established and potentially new pests among greenhouses. Since 1995, there has been a rapid expansion of year-round production in the area based on heating and lamp-based lighting. This improved revenues of greenhouse firms through exploitation of a new market position during the winter months in the competitive market of greenhouse vegetables. However, year-round greenhouses sustain pest problems because there is no cold period to kill nonindigenous pests and because they produce a higher number of pest generations per year due to the long or successive cropping cycles. Furthermore, some natural enemies, the principal means of managing the pests, perform suboptimally in the winter time.

The seasonal production concept includes a production break in wintertime that efficiently kills all nonindigenous pests due to their lack of cold tolerance. Due to the risks described above, the interdependency of greenhouse firms through shared pests needs to be taken into account in the plant protection strategies of producers. This was the context for the demand for the Change Laboratory intervention. Participants in the intervention were the producers and other actors whose roles were linked to improving pest management in the area. The prevalent whitefly pest, Trialeurodes vaporariorum, was the model organism used to develop collective pest management by the producers. This species served as a proxy for developing management options for additional nonindigenous species that were still absent in the area.

This concept formation effort needs to be seen against the background of the sixty-year history of the concept of integrated pest management (IPM), “one of the most robust constructs to arise in the agricultural sciences during the second half of the twentieth century” (Kogan, Reference Kogan1998, p. 243). Throughout its history, IPM has endeavored to promote sustainable forms of agriculture, pursued sharp reductions in synthetic pesticide use, and therefore resolved myriad socioeconomic, environmental, and human health challenges. However, as Deguine et al. (Reference Deguine, Aubertot, Flor, Lescourret, Wyckhuys and Ratnadass2021) show in their thorough critical review, several top-down IPM programs have failed to account for local agroecological or socioeconomic contexts, and once supportive policies and funding were removed, pesticide use surged again. IPM research seldom uses systemic and participatory approaches and only scant attention is paid to social sciences (Dara, Reference Dara2019). IPM also suffers from a lack of farmer involvement during research. Deguine et al. (Reference Deguine, Aubertot, Flor, Lescourret, Wyckhuys and Ratnadass2021, p. 6) conclude that “more than half a century after its conception, IPM has not been adopted to a satisfactory extent and has largely failed to deliver on its promise.”

The Change Laboratory conducted with the Finnish greenhouse vegetable growers may be seen as a local bottom-up step to contest, break out of, and transcend the limits of IPM understood as a top-down, decontextualized technological regime. In order to proceed toward alleviating the whitefly problem, the growers had to first understand why they had the problem: how the problem began and was sustained and what was their own role in sustaining it. To achieve such understanding, the problem was modeled first to visualize it for collective scrutiny and analysis. The idea of the process was defined by framing the problem loosely as follows: there is a need for a regional approach to the whitefly problem, but it is not known how this can be achieved. Nine year-round and five seasonal growers of tomato and/or cucumber as well as representatives of the research and advisory collectives, a local packing house, and a plant protection authority participated in the Change Laboratory sessions.

The principal conflict of motives at the beginning of the intervention was the following: the growers had to solve the whitefly problem but could not do so using traditional methods incorporating chemical and biological control applied by individual greenhouse growers in isolation from one another. This included also a conflict between the motives of seasonal growers and those of year-round growers, regarding who was responsible for the problem and, consequently, who should solve the problem. Seasonal growers did not acknowledge the problem and their role in it to the same extent as year-round growers did, and were therefore not keen to collaborate. Year-round growers acknowledged the problem but did not want to solve it alone.

The key contradiction hindering preventive actions by seasonal growers was that such actions involved costs, the redemption of which was not guaranteed. Control always involves costs that must be covered by the reduction in crop losses achieved by the actions. If a grower does not acknowledge the losses, preventive actions are not taken. So, the challenge was to measure whether preventive actions were worth taking or not. The first hints of the new emerging solution, “monitoring,” appeared already in the first session. Two year-round growers pointed toward monitoring as the solution. However, monitoring remained at the level of an individual isolated action at this point.

Year-round growers acknowledged their responsibility and mentioned that, for their part, they had already tried some actions to improve the situation. Year-round grower Tom acknowledged the interdependence of growers in the pest issue, which would require a systemic approach to its control: “I wish we could break this circulation with pests that we exchange with each other.” The year-round growers expressed a conflict of motives between a strong desire to be independent and a desire to control the pest collectively. As a group they felt the pressure from seasonal growers, suggesting that the year-round growers bore the biggest responsibility for solving the problem. The year-round growers acknowledged that both types of growers should take action, but at this point the suggested actions were still taken independently. The challenge was to reconceptualize the problem so that growers would design and implement collective solutions, involving both types of growers.

During the first session, the researcher-interventionists introduced external stimuli, called “mirror data” in the Change Laboratory, to prompt discussion on what the precise problem was with the whitefly. How did the problem manifest itself? The mirror data consisted of (1) an excerpt from an interview with a retired advisor expressing the historical changes that led to the problem; (2) annual control cost data from a seasonal grower on the cost of managing whiteflies coming from his year-round near-neighbor; (3) annual variations in numbers of whiteflies in year-round greenhouses, showing the potential of learning from the differences that existed between firms; these data were important as they prompted the researcher-interventionists to ask whether growers shared information on what was happening in their greenhouses and why some had more whiteflies than others; (4) photos of undesirable practices that contributed to whitefly dispersal between firms; and (5) a timeline of planting schedules in seasonal and year-round crops to visualize the interdependence between growers through the whiteflies’ potential to move between seasonal and year-round firms.

After presenting the mirror data, a discussion was initiated around the causes of the problem. The discussion prompted a stepwise construction of a critical auxiliary artifact (second stimulus), that is, a model of the systemic nature of the whitefly problem and its different, interdependent components and how both grower groups contributed to it. The process of producing the second stimulus through dialogue between the practitioners and the researcher-interventionists required a total of three sessions. It began in the first session with the construction of a list of causes of the problem, which helped the participants to identify and share different perspectives regarding the causes. To delimit the problem and to focus the discussion, participants were asked at the end of the first session to vote for those causes that they saw as contributing to the problem the most. After voting, again the discussion returned to monitoring as practitioners reached an agreement that whitefly monitoring was pertinent for alleviating the pest problem, no matter what the eventual solution, as a whole, might be. After the first session, the facilitators continued working on the rudimentary systemic model, producing in session 2 a tentative version that could potentially work as a second stimulus.

In session 2, the discussion returned to the lack of motivation of seasonal growers to take preventive actions. The researcher-interventionists decided not to show their tentative model to participants all at once; instead, they provided its four components on pieces of paper and made the participants discuss and complement them and arrange the components on the wall into a systemic model whose different parts were interdependent. Although the researcher-interventionists’ own model was not used in the session, it helped them to guide the further participatory development of the model in session 3. In the next version of the model, the interdependent elements were more numerous, but their mutual arrangement was not yet satisfactory. For example, planting time occupied a central place in the model. It was removed from the final model because the growers considered that not much could be done about it.

For session 3, the researcher-interventionists prepared a full-fledged model that contained the insights from the preceding discussions (Figure 4.8). This model was stabilized and began to influence the discussion immediately.

Figure 4.8

A systemic model of the whitefly problem.

By “these boxes” Paul referred to inappropriate information and limited learning that led to starting biological control too late or using too small amounts of beneficials, resulting in ineffective biological control. The boxes in question suggested solution elements lacking in the current system: a shared method to monitor whiteflies so that results between firms could be compared, systematic control plans for the pest, thresholds for decision-making for control actions, better understanding of release rates for biocontrol agents guided by the thresholds, and learning from one another.

Systemic understanding of the problem was facilitated by the model and led to considerations of appropriate actions to be taken.

The model (Figure 4.8) presents seasonal and year-round crops as separate but interdependent of each other. It also shows the indoor and outdoor components as separate but interacting. This helped the participants to figure out what actually could and could not be done with the pest, to move to the phase of designing a solution. It was suggested that the monitoring information should be put on the social media so that all involved parties could see it and learn from each other. A discussion ensued about the pros and cons of sharing monitoring and pest control data through a web page. A competing option for information- and knowledge-sharing medium was brought up by a grower.

The discussion was expanded to include also improvements for information and knowledge sharing among the advisors’ collective as well as including researchers in the new model of activity to interpret the statistical meaning of data. Working with the model of Figure 4.8 and complementing it in the third session led the participants to start envisioning the new shape of their pest management activity. Its key components emerged as information and knowledge sharing about the pest, and a standardized monitoring method to produce comparable data on pest densities in crops. The detailed design of the medium for information and knowledge sharing and collaborative learning continued through several steps in later sessions.

In session 5, the year-round growers and the interventionists succeeded in attracting two additional seasonal growers to experiment with the monitoring method over the summer. A large year-round firm suffering from serious whitefly problems and spreading them to their neighbors in another village joined in with monitoring and became an important test bed, which showed the effect of routine monitoring for control of the pest. After the summer, growers from two additional pilot villages joined in session 6, in which pest control thresholds were discussed as further tools for decision-making. The systemic approach was summarized aptly by Tom who foresaw how the future would look due to implementing a collective approach.

The model shown in Figure 4.8 visualized the systemic nature of the whitefly problem without blaming one or the other production form. It also implicitly contained the desirable future state of the socio-ecological system, where growers of both production forms would take responsibility for managing the pest due to their interdependence – that is, transforming their pest management approach from individual actions to collective activity. In this way, the outdoor part of the model came to represent the developmental possibility: spreading information instead of the pest.

What is the epistemic potential of systems concepts? What questions do they answer? Clearly the model of the whitefly problem served the purpose of diagnosis, answering the question “Why?” Why did the growers have this destructive pest? Why were they stuck in a paralyzing conflict of motives in the face of this problem? A systems concept does not give a simple answer or a single culprit. It shows that the causes are reciprocal and dynamically distributed in the entire system. The case of the whitefly problem demonstrates that a systemic model can effectively function as a second stimulus that triggers and sustains transformative agency among the involved actors (Vänninen, Pereira-Querol, & Engeström, Reference Vänninen, Pereira-Querol and Engeström2015, Reference Vänninen, Querol and Engeström2021).Footnote ³

A systems concept is not formed easily or quickly. It requires painstaking analysis and stepwise construction, built on rich data that illuminate key aspects of the problem in focus. In contrast to traditional views of externally induced change, the agentive actions in the Change Laboratory were performed by the growers themselves instead of external consultants. There would have been no point in preaching the general principles of IPM to the participants. They needed to build their own model and concept.

4.6 Germ Cell Concepts

I introduced the notion of germ cell concepts toward the end of Chapter 3, using as an example the concept of “expansive degrowth” developed by the participants of a food cooperative to deal with the contradiction between financial viability and the need to produce healthy local food without stress (Figure 3.3). I will now plunge into another example, with more attention to details and consequences.

My team conducted a Change Laboratory intervention in the library of the University of Helsinki. The project was titled “Knotworking in the Library.” The broader background of this project was the emerging crisis of university libraries worldwide. The nature of the crisis was aptly sketched by Greenstein (Reference Greenstein2010).

Why invest much at all in the university library when journals, reference works, and soon tens of millions of books and monographs, both in and out of print, will be available effortlessly and online? (Greenstein, Reference Greenstein2010, pp. 121–122).

Greenstein like many others argued that academic libraries must radically reinvent themselves.

However, such a radical redefinition of the university library is not easy: “Changes in the library’s scope of operations are more difficult to predict than trends affecting historic information access functions and collection management.” (Greenstein, Reference Greenstein2010, p. 125).

In 2009, the library of the University of Helsinki asked our research group to conduct an intervention study that would help the library professionals and managers in their efforts to redefine the services, ways of working, and organization of the library. The university library was organized into four campus libraries and a central unit responsible for centralized electronic services and administration. The university library had approximately 250 employees and its annual budget was over 21 million Euro. About 2.5 million loans were handled annually. The university management had decided to develop the library without radical cuts in personnel.

The library’s services for students using textbooks and preparing their theses, as well as centralized digital services, were well understood. Services for researchers and research groups were not well understood. This was the domain on which our project focused its efforts. We suggested that the project would be devoted to developing new services for research groups and new models of collaboration between library professionals and research groups. We used our work on co-configuration and knotworking (Engeström, Engeström, & Vähäaho, Reference Engeström, Engeström, Vähäaho, Chaiklin, Hedegaard and Jensen1999; Engeström, Reference Engeström2008a) as the leading idea of the project.

In the case of this intervention, the otherwise loosely connected actors would be the librarians and the research groups on the different university campuses. The project was carried out in two main phases. In the first year, we conducted a Change Laboratory in the Science Library in the campus of the biological and environmental sciences. The following year, we conducted a Change Laboratory in the Central Campus Library, responsible for human, social, and behavioral sciences. In both campus libraries, the Change Laboratory consisted of eight two-hour sessions and a follow-up session held about five months later. In both interventions, the library invited selected research groups from the campus to participate as pilots. In the first intervention, two pilot research groups participated; in the second intervention, four pilot research groups took part. In the first sessions, the library professionals on their own designed and discussed their preliminary offer for new services to research groups. In the subsequent sessions, the research groups reacted to the preliminary offer and brought up their own needs and priorities.

On the basis of the feedback and ideas developed with the research groups, the library professionals then revised and specified their offer and presented it to the research groups. On this basis, a number of concrete services and ways of collaboration were agreed upon and plans were made to implement and test them in practice. Finally, in the last sessions, the library professionals on their own designed and discussed changes in their internal organization required by the new services and ways of working with research groups. In the follow-up sessions, the library professionals and their management reported on the implementation and its impact and discussed ideas for next steps in the process. Various aspects of this Change Laboratory process and its consequences have been analyzed in earlier publications (Engeström et al., Reference Engeström, Kaatrakoski, Kaiponen, Lahikainen, Laitinen, Myllys, Rantavuori and Sinikara2012; Engeström, Rantavuori & Kerosuo, Reference Engeström, Rantavuori and Kerosuo2013; Kaatrakoski & Lahikainen, Reference Kaatrakoski and Lahikainen2016; Sannino, Engeström, & Lahikainen, Reference Sannino, Engeström and Lahikainen2016). In the following, I will focus on concept formation in the second Change Laboratory intervention conducted in the Central Campus Library.

The intended first stimulus or mirror data in the intervention consisted of selected interview excerpts collected before the laboratory sessions from library workers and representatives of the pilot research groups. We selected excerpts that seemed to contain or imply various tensions and conflicts between the current library practices and emerging new expectations of both researchers and library workers themselves. In particular, we looked for and used expressions of needs that were not met. This kind of mirror data did evoke rich discussions and a fair amount of resistance among the library staff. However, the actual encounters between the library professionals and researchers in the Change Laboratory sessions tended to follow a rather traditional “instructional script”: the library workers would present some possible new services, and the researchers would listen and passively accept the ideas. This type of discourse seemed to be deeply engrained in the culture of the library and the researchers were surprisingly unwilling to challenge it. Clearly, it was a far cry from the idea of genuine negotiation and co-configuration inherent in the notion of knotworking.

There were a few critical encounters in which this script was challenged and broken. In the third session of the Change Laboratory, the library professionals presented to the researchers a new service called FeedNavigator. This was a web-based service developed in the Medical Campus Library of the university to enable researchers to follow and obtain relevant new articles immediately upon release according to their personal preferences and keyword profiles. The Central Campus Library offered the pilot research groups an opportunity to add into the service all journals they wanted in social sciences and humanities and to test the service personally or as a group, with the direct help of library professionals. When this service was introduced in the Change Laboratory session, a researcher reacted in an unexpected way.

[…]

[…]

This episode was significant in two ways. First of all, it broke the routine of researchers passively listening and accepting suggestions from the librarians and forced the library professionals to rethink their own approach and their own competence. Secondly, the researcher’s response brought up a novel variation of agency, that of questioning and resisting a suggestion from a partner. The episode opened up a conflict of motives: the motive of continuing with the comfortable one-way instruction vs. the motive of taking the researchers’ practices as a possibility of developing something new. In this sense, this episode represents an actually experienced first stimulus – something more powerful and consequential than the planned and preselected mirror data excerpts could accomplish alone.

The second stimulus offered by the interventionists consisted of the notions of “knot” and “knotworking.” These were briefly explained to the library professionals at the beginning of the intervention. We hoped that the practitioners would pick them up and start using them as mediating devices in their efforts to analyze and redesign their activity. Table 4.3 shows the frequency of the subsequent use of these terms in the intervention sessions, excluding the use of the project’s official name.

Table 4.3Frequency of use of the terms “knot” and “knotworking” in the Change Laboratory sessions (excluding use of the name of the project)

The table shows a marked increase in the use of the two key notions, starting in session 5 and culminating in sessions 7 and 8. In the early sessions, these terms were practically exclusively used to refer to collaboration with external clients, the research groups. But starting in session 6, the key terms were increasingly used to actually envision the way the library professionals wanted to learn to work and interact internally, within their own organization. This shift was something the interventionists did not expect or plan.

This shift came to completion in the follow-up session held in May 2011. As a result of the previous Change Laboratory, the Viikki Science Library created special web pages which gave advice to researchers on how to store large sets of data in safe and well-organized ways. This initiative was picked up by practitioners of the Central Campus Library.

In this excerpt, Librarian 4 displayed several intertwined aspects of emerging transformative agency. First of all, she displayed envisioning new patterns or models for the activity: “Our dream is to make it a good tool that we can genuinely offer to researchers. So these are our dreams about this.” Secondly, she criticized the existing activity and organization: “We thought that if we get something very official, it will not make progress.” And thirdly, she reported on having taken consequential actions to change the activity: “We have met once and interacted a lot in other forms. So far we have done fine-tuning [in the web pages] and added information concerning the Central Campus, so that it is not anymore just a service for Viikki.”

The excerpt demonstrates how the idea of knots and knotworking was appropriated by the practitioners. The idea of knot served as a second stimulus for Librarian 4 in her effort to explain to the audience the fledgling ways of working she and her colleagues had initiated. This was further demonstrated when the interventionist asked the library director how the new organizational model of the central campus library, designed by the practitioners toward the end of the Change Laboratory process, was functioning in practice.

In this excerpt the library director conveyed a trajectory of the development of a knot as a theoretical abstraction for her personnel. The knot was appropriated as an initial simple relationship which first served the purpose of collaborating with the researchers, but which was now leading to envisioning other concrete applications. This indicates that the second stimulus was taking the function of an initial abstraction, a germ cell, from which the practitioners could ascend toward the concrete. The excerpt by Librarian 4 represents more than breaking away from a paralyzing conflict; she was referring to the rooting of this knot and its becoming a general way of thinking and acting.

Also, the director’s statement exemplifies envisioning as a form of transformative agency. The words “hope” and “we aim at” are typical expressions of this. However, what is not typical is that in her speech the director mixed the past, the present, and the future tenses in an interesting way. She said that “we have clear development responsibilities” and that “we gather appropriate experts.” This was strengthened by the statement that “such ad-hoc groups have emerged.” In other words, we have here something like enacted envisioning, a perspective based on ongoing events rather than merely on hopes and aspirations.

The excerpts from Librarian 4 and the director illustrate transformative agency as willful collective engagement in overcoming critical conflicts with the help of a second stimulus. The second stimulus was appropriated and turned into a germ cell with interesting expansive and generative potential for multiple concrete applications.

In this case, the second stimulus and the initial germ cell abstraction practically coincided. The idea of the knot served as both a second stimulus and germ cell abstraction. By becoming a germ cell, the second stimulus opened up possibilities of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. The coinciding of these two functions in this case demonstrates that double stimulation and ascending from the abstract to the concrete can be organically intertwined in concept formation.

The excerpt in which Researcher 9 contested the librarian’s offer of FeedNavigator was a genuine first stimulus in that it made conflictually and openly clear to the librarians that they could not continue their activity in the mode of one-way lecturing and advising. The excerpt in which Librarian 4 described their new editorial team demonstrates the use of the idea of knot in breaking out of the hierarchical mode of working. The director’s excerpt represents a step in which the second stimulus had taken the function of a germ cell and served as a means for moving toward multiple concrete applications of knotworking. These three steps may be seen as a chain of actions of forming a germ cell concept, distributed among different actors and different levels of the hierarchy (Figure 4.9).

Figure 4.9

Chain of distributed actions in the formation of a germ cell concept in the library.

When in the case of the library the term knotworking was first introduced, it practically meant next to nothing for the participants, compared to what they themselves did with it later on in the Change Laboratory process. The excerpts of Librarian 4 and the director indicate that the knot was progressively filled with both theoretical contours and empirical contents. Knotworking for them was still a concept in the making, rather than a fully formed concept. In the ending session of the Change Laboratory, the library director asked the participants whether to continue using the term knotworking or if they wanted to change the name. A decision was made to keep using this term as it was working for them. By questioning her personnel whether to continue using the word “knot” or to find some other word, the director acknowledged that the term was brought to them; it did not initially fully belong to them. Yet by the end of the intervention, the term had become an emergent concept, perceived as their own.

The germ cell concept formed in the library may now be represented as a diagram (Figure 4.10). The foundational contradiction emerged between self-contained library work focused on the collections and a co-configurational mode of library work focused on rapidly changing needs of creation and management of knowledge. These opposite forces represent two sides of the object of library work: the collections and the clients. These two sides both repel one another and require one another. A solution cannot be accomplished by simply choosing one over the other. In the Change Laboratory, this contradiction was experienced as a conflict between the motive of lecturing and advising and the motive of listening and negotiating with the client. Breaking out of this paralyzing conflict of motives required appropriating the idea of a knot as a second stimulus and enacting it by initiating collaboration across administrative boundaries to generate novel services. The critical action of taking such an initiative involved literally stepping out of one’s customary niche, both by physical movement away from one’s desk and by mental and discursive movement into the terrain of another activity system, in this case initially the other campus library: “At the moment it has members from the Central Campus Library and from the Viikki Science Campus Library, but of course we hope to get members from other campuses as well.”

Figure 4.10

The germ cell concept of knotworking in the university library.

What is the epistemic potential of germ cell concepts? What kind of questions do they answer? As I argued in the preceding section, systemic concepts serve the purpose of diagnosis, answering why something happens or does not happen in a system. Germ cell concepts serve the purpose of projecting the next, qualitatively new phase and shape of the system itself. In other words, a germ cell concept answers the question “Where to?” In this sense, germ cell concepts are primarily devices of history making, or enacting utopias (Sannino, Reference Sannino2020).

As indicated in the discussion summarized with the help of Figure 4.9, germ cell concepts are formed through a stepwise process of ascending from the abstract germ cell to an expanding system of concrete applications and extensions. I will elaborate on this process in more detail in Chapter 5.

4.7 Five Types of Functional Concepts

I have now presented five types of functional concepts, with an example of each type. The typology may be summarized with the help of Table 4.4.

Table 4.4Characteristics of five types of functional concepts

Each type of functional concept has its own specific strengths and affordances. In other words, one type is not “better” or “more advanced” than the other. However, many complex activities would benefit from making use of the complementarity of different types of functional concepts. “Tools become powerful when they become an interconnected instrumentality” (Kerosuo & Engeström, Reference Kerosuo and Engeström2003, p. 351). Recognizing the different conceptual resources – and conceptual gaps – in an activity system opens up the possibility of building a conceptual instrumentality, that is, a repertoire of different but complementary and interconnected types of concepts available for the practitioners for conducting and developing their collective activity.