Interprofessional Activity in the ‘Space of Reasons’: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

摘要

The paper analyses a form of interprofessional working and learning (IPWL)—the fleeting spatial and temporal constitution of project teams with little prior history of working together—that is an increasing feature of work in the global economy. The paper argues firstly: (i) this form of working and learning is relatively under-researched in professional, vocational and workplace learning (PVWL); and, (ii) the research traditions—Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Cultural Anthropology/Symbolic Interactionist (CA/SI)—that some researchers in PVWL have drawn on to investigate IPWL do not allow them to capture the cognitive and symbolic complexity of this activity. Secondly, it is possible to reveal the nature of this complexity when the concepts and methods associated with CHAT and CA-SI-based approaches are supplemented with the concepts of ‘inference’, ‘space of reasons’, ‘restructuring and ‘recontextualisation’ (Guile, 2010). The paper demonstrates this claim by reinterpreting a classic study of the aforementioned form of working and learning undertaken by Hall, Stevens and Torolba that drew on concepts and methods from CA and SI (2002).