Activity theory and the view from somewhere: Team perspectives on the intellectual work of programming

An ethnographic investigation of the cognitive work of three programming teams found that the institution was not totally successful in dictating their work; the teams' perspectives were collectively developed over the course of the project and they diverged.

Abstract

The study we describe here, an ethnographic investigation of the cognitive work of three programming teams, led us to emphasize an aspect of situatedness that is relatively unexplored: the developing perspective ofintellectual workers on their contexts of action. We followed teams composed of students in a Department of Computer Science as they were being taught "software engineering." Despite their subordinate position as students, we found that the institution was not totally successful in dictating their work; we could not assume a similarity of work activity across teams. Instead the teams' perspectives on their projects were collectively developed over the course of the project and they diverged. Consequently, the teams differed in their construal of the objects of their intellectual work and in the significance and time they devoted to the components of their work, and to the ways in which they carried them out. In this paper we recount these differences and relate them ultimately to ongoing tensions and contradictions within, and external to, the university. "Perspective," we argue, usefully extends the applicability of theories of situated cognition, especially activity theory, to the type of diversity we encountered.1