ABSTRACT
A subject can speak as a member of a community associated with a specific work culture and ‘perspective’ or as a representative of an organization positioned at a particular level of policy enactment. Identities are often in flux and influenced by the experience of working with other people who challenge habitual ways of seeing the world. In sociocultural theory, the ‘object of activity’ encapsulates the motivation and goal to which people are orientated. Various objects of activity emerge and compete because contradictory sets of rules operate for different people in particular contexts. Also the object changes over time, and so the goal of the innovation process is constantly evolving. The object of an organizational partnership is especially elusive because the perspective of each partner contributes competing ‘objects of activity’. The vast array of partners of different types makes it more difficult to expand the object of activity through the synthesis of all these complex and elusive goals.
