ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with a move from research that takes its major preoccupation as being that of cognition to a more concerted interest in action. Alongside this move there comes a more detailed analysis of social practices and social processes, rather than a primary focus on the investigation, description and analysis of cognitive processes. This is associated with a change in the ‘driving discipline’ from psychology to anthropology and also a shift in research topic from external systems (that of late have often been in the form of web designs or computer-based artefacts of some description) to historically more established forms of human activity – often that of traditional work. As Bredo (1994) notes, situated cognition may be seen as ‘shifting the focus from individual in environment to individual and environment’ (Bredo, 1994, p. 29), whereas theories of situated action and learning, as Lave (1988) notes, are more concerned with the ‘everyday activity of persons acting in [a] setting’ (Lave, 1988, p. 1); the latter’s emphasis being on the study of the ‘emergent, contingent nature of human activity, the way activity grows directly out of the particularities of a given situation’.
