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As an interesting follow on Wenger’s talk, Englestrom takes a different perspective, but offers interesting insights into aspects of the same phenomena Wenger was talking about. He applies a biological metaphor through considering the notion of mycorrhizae as one means of understanding complex modern working practices - nodal, interconnected, mainly unseen, distributed… More notes taken during the session below…

  

• For example craft/nature of object = personal object cf. Craft/learning movement = peripheral participation gradual transition towards the centre. Social production/nature of object = runaway object cf. social production/earning movement = expansive swarming engagement, multi-directional pulsation
• Radical change in our understanding of what is work and business and what it means – concept of a career is a notion from the mass production phase!!
• Book – just for fun (Linus Torvalds) – doing things just because you like them
• In mass production was all about controlling and standardisation, now we are in a runaway world – look at development of Linux and open source movement more generally – has been a dramatic success. Has been successful in unexpected ways – hence a runaway object (is not controlled)
• Other runaway objects – diabetes type 2 or global warming – not such nice examples
• In world of work and organisations we need to pay attention to these kinds of objects, which have tremendous capacity to surprise us in both positive and negative ways, need to think of how we live with them, we can no longer control [Interesting compares with recent debates on loosely coupled systems vs. VLEs]
• Who and where are the people involved with this? Mycorrhizae is a good metaphor – growths which are largely invisble, can be huge, each node has a life of its own, but its connected also to a large network. Very hard to kill, but are vulnerable too, can go dormant for a long time, and then become active again.
• Actors come together for a particular purpose and then disperse again – pulsation of coming together and pulsating together in different combinations -= theorised as ‘swarming’, but difficult to capture and represent. Engagement and disengagement, modelling using tools of AI – a lot of work on this at the moment.
• Coordinating mechanisms need to negotiation and peer review – they are not process control that we are used to as a basis for mass production.
• What wildcat activities are not – not jut wikinomics or very large number of people engaged in something, not just social network spaces, not just the internet, they are not just open source.
• They might be: organisations seeking models that enable continuous engaged self-renewal, innovation and expansion, yet are sustainable and don’t burn out their own energy. There are activities that have such qualities – for example skateboarding, birding (bird watching), and disaster relief of the red cross. Cf. period of rapid and unsustainable economy growth that we are living through.
• These activities show remarkable sustainability and expansion in spite of severe adversities and constraints. Little money, need a lot of time, high risk of failure etc. Yet these activities are constantly learning to transcend the constraints and overcome the adversities.
• These activities are paradoxical – pop up and then appear to disappear, longevity and persist over time, dispersed and distributed, yet well coordinated and ware of the whole in each node, offer little publicly recognizable rewards but are extremely highly motivating.
• Importance characterisation
  • Strong object and use value orientation – resistance to thorough commercialisation – gift economy, peer to peer or social production – its not about rewards
  • Quick adoption and creative use of up to date information and communication technologies but little emphasis and dependency on them – no closed world of virtuality
• Theoretical perspectives  -Runaway objects
• There is no activity without an object (Leont’ev), object gives durable direction and purpose to activity it is the true motive of activity not reducible to conscious goals, it’s a moving target, never fully accomplished, multi-faceted – a mosaic of multiple interpretations, voices and positioning, objects resist and kick back
• Runaway objects diabetes, global warming etc
• Who’s object is global warming? This looks like an object without activity? Of course not  the very concept would not exist if researchers had not worked on it and identified the problem which activities takes responsibility for such a huge object
• Use of AT common representation of two interconnected activity systems
• Difficult to deal with large scale runaway objects – who should do what?
• Can we deliberately construct benign runaway objects?
• The object includes and involves constant feedback – for example Linux has a peer review approach to developments (Lee and Cole, 2003, p 639)
• What would be a wild cat community??
• Three levels – objects, movement and community that we need to research and understand more