Uses of History in Change Laboratory Interventions: A Methodological Framework

• In Event: Formative Interventions for Justice, Futurity, and Sustainability

Abstract

Change Laboratory interventions are based on cultural-historical activity theory and historicity is a built-in principle in them. To enable well-grounded and far-reaching envisioning and redesign, the participants of a Change Laboratory are invited to analyze the historical development of their activity systems and their inner contradictions. Practical and conceptual instruments have been developed to facilitate such analysis. These include schemes of broad historical types of work (e.g., Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013, p. 55-59, p. 95) and techniques such as collective remembering and building a “history wall” based on the participants’ experiences and available documents (Egelström & Spante, 2021). However, very little systematic research has been done on how historicity is played out in real Change Laboratory interventions, and there is a lack of methodological frameworks for conducting such analyses. A paper by Paniza and Cassandre (2018) is a first attempt to open this domain of inquiry.

In this paper, we present a tentative methodological framework for empirical analyses of the uses of history in Change Laboratory interventions. We test the framework by analyzing the entire sets of recorded and transcribed discourse data from two Change Laboratories. The first one was conducted with the managers of the municipal home care service of the city of Helsinki in Finland (see Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The second Change Laboratory was conducted with the workers and managers of a supported housing unit for formerly homeless youth, also in Helsinki, Finland (see Sannino, 2020; 2022).

Our methodological framework offers a coding scheme for identifying and classifying discursive expressions of uses of history. We propose four broad types of use of history in Change Laboratories: (1) anecdotal uses of history, (2) personal-emotional uses of history, (3) analytical uses of history, and (4) projective uses of history. These four broad types are further divided into the following ten sub-types:

1.1. Descriptive statements about past events or conditions
1.2. Evaluative statements about past events or conditions
1.3. Narratives about past events or conditions
2.1. Statements or narratives expressing personal emotional experiences of or reactions to past events or conditions
3.1. Efforts at identifying structural relationships or causal connections between past events or conditions
3.2. Efforts at periodization of past development
3.3. Efforts at systemic modeling of past development
3.4. Efforts at identifying systemic contradictions in past development
4.1. Efforts at historically grounded envisioning or projection of future development
4.2. Efforts at historically grounded formulation of future solutions or designs

We will elaborate and substantiate this framework with the help of theoretical literature and data from the two Change Laboratories.

Authors

• Yrjo H. Engestrom, University of Helsinki
  Presenting Author

• Annalisa Sannino, Tampere University
  Presenting Author