Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research

Engeström, Y. Engeström, R. & Kerosuo, H (2003). The Discursive Construction of Collaborative Care, Applied Linguistics, Special Issue 24 (3), 286-315.

Professionals make history in future-oriented discursive actions which can be made visible and analyzable. The article analyzes sessions in which medical professionals together with the patient and researcher-interventionists discuss the care of a patient with multiple chronic illnesses, aiming at the creation of a new, collaborative care practice. In these sessions, consequential decision-making and future-oriented envisioning are brought together. The analysis proceeds through three layers, from a substantive layer to a methodological layer and a metatheoretical layer. We argue that professional case meetings enriched with an induced awareness of their history-making potential are microcosms in which collective zones of proximal development can be articulated and enacted as practitioners look back on the history of their activity and engage in future-oriented framing experiments. For studies of professional discourse, such settings offer opportunities to capture how history is made in situated discursive actions. In such settings, researcher-interventionists make themselves contestable and fallible participants of the discourse, which means that their actions also become objects of data collection and critical analysis.