Section 3.4 in Chapter 3 described my review of the field of multiple stakeholders and change, highlighting the limited examination of cultural mediation in existing studies. Existing studies have tended to neglect varied stakeholders’ criticisms and their relationships with the cultural mediation of activity, instead examining predetermined artefact-centred interventions designed by researchers in conjunction with strategists (noted by Bates & Sangrà, 2011: 10). This intervention has challenged the dominant research foci, which seem to be on top-down changes to digital artefacts with outcomes considered from partial perspectives. Instead multiple stakeholders’ diverse perspectives of cultural mediation, and relationships with organisational change, have led to the exposure and aggravation of contradictions to emphasise the importance of rules and division of labour, rather than solely artefacts. Two sub-sections describe the related contributions to the field: multiple stakeholder conflict and criticism; and activity’s cultural mediation.
7.4.1 Contributing to research on multiple stakeholder conflict and criticism
My findings make a modest contribution to the literature in this field, particularly in their relationships between negotiating conflict and the design of task stimuli. My findings have established that without participants’ conflicting motives and volition to act there would not have been transformative agency; their efforts would merely have yielded different forms of mediation (c.f. Sannino & Engeström, 2017: 60). By legitimising participants’ engagement in criticism with task stimuli, and normalising the negotiation of their resultant political conflict, task stimuli ultimately became wholly owned by them: first stimuli were compiled by them; second stimuli were identified and enriched under their own control; mirror data were identified and curated by them; and contradictions were collaboratively aggravated and negotiated in ways determined by them. This may, at least for this instantiation, counter concerns that research which uses CHAT can blur the concerns of subjects (cautioned by
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Bligh & Flood, 2017: 143). Without these troublesome negotiations of conflict and criticism, it is difficult to discern how the societal benefits of change could have sufficiently motivated
individuals’ actions. This potentially illustrates the role of stimuli and task design to “the organic connection between talk and consequential action [which] is an integral feature of these interventions” (Haapasaari et al., 2016: 234).
In common with a small number of projects in this field of literature, my results show that negotiations of conflict could be described as dialectical; commitments to take action seemed to disproportionately burden certain individuals, until the societal gain was
identified through dialectical turning points. Examples of such conflict in the literature seem to appear in longitudinal or follow-up studies of change efforts, rather than empirically using conflict to drive or catalyse change. Yet studies which have embraced conflict for
technology-related change suggest that results may be propitious. Miettinen and Virkkunen (2005: 449) discuss changing learning routines in reaction to crises and critical problems, identifying conflicting implications that may otherwise have remained unidentified. In Forman et al.'s (2015: 162) study of scenario planning with technologies, the authors identify defensive and conflictual needs of multiple stakeholders which were important local
considerations for sustaining change. As with my own results, it is difficult to see how these changes could have been sustained without embracing the conflict and criticism of multiple stakeholders, as shown in Sub-section 6.5.5 and its discussion of diverse expertise.
Having acknowledged commonality, my results have contrasted with many studies in this field of literature. Researchers seem to have generally concealed or overlooked the criticism and resistance of multiple stakeholders, or framed them as incidental to the research rather than lucrative for change. The TEL studies by Waring and Skoumpopoulou (2012: 513); Barak (2012: 135); Powell et al. (2015: 6) recognise diversity and lack of consensus, yet appear to have eclipsed issues of criticism and resistance. This approach may relate to the subsequent rejection of implemented technologies or their use to merely sustain pre-existing practices. Examples of studies which concealed the conflicting characteristics of stakeholders include: Blin and Munro (2008: 478), whose conflict between traditional practices and electronic assessment was acknowledged yet unexplored; and Magen-Nagar and Maskit's (2016: 215) whose bottom-up concerns during the top-down implementation of technologies were unresolved. Other empirical studies of technological change in HE have eclipsed what could have been intersubjective criticism and conflict by engaging only one stakeholder group (e.g. Zhu, 2015: 65; Wall, 2015: 393; O’Donnell, 2016: 101).
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7.4.2 Contributing to research on cultural mediation for organisational change
A further contribution of my findings appears to be in its use of task stimuli and mirror data to deliberately represent cultural mediation, including the creation of stimuli for the benefit of future consolidation. Participants created and curated task stimuli for future
interventions by others, to preserve their progress in negotiating changes to cultural
mediation. This contribution conveys the importance of task stimuli to cultural mediation of activity, related to an object which had eroded to the point where “the existing
conceptualisation of the object and the tools available no longer match with it” (Virkkunen, 2004: 43). My findings have exposed the futility of incremental and additive changes to technologies of production, without also reconsidering the object and changes to the cultural mediation of activity. My findings acknowledge the failed alleviation of historically embedded problems, which had been repeatedly attempted by strategists’ top-down implementation of digital artefacts, yet activity had retained its unchanged division of labour and rules until the intervention. My findings thus foreground the importance of cultural mediation to change, rather than limiting endeavours to the implementation of new instruments (Engeström, 2015: 261).
In common with limited studies in this field, my results recognise the growing importance of recognising the importance of cultural mediation as a reaction to the increasing availability of digital artefacts. Many authors share my concerns of technologies and political
domination in TEL, through the cultural reproduction of social conditions for learning. My own results have highlighted resilient secondary contradictions between rules and division of labour, which were so stubborn and historically embedded that resolution was impossible at the physical site, exemplified in Sub-section 6.4.4. In response, participants moved to a remote location to aggravate cultural mediation in a realistic and authentic setting.
Agherdien’s case study of academics’ development in Hardman et al. (2015: 163) recognises the importance of cultural mediation to sustaining authenticity when changing technologies of production. Rinne and Koivula (2009: 183) describe the need for cultural mediation (though not in those exact terms) when change in HE is undertaken in reaction to market orientation; a driver which typically increases expectations of the availability of artefacts yet backgrounds rules, community and division of labour. Like the authors above, participants curated their own stimuli for cultural mediation in the name of authenticity and vocational realism.
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In contrast with the majority of studies in this field, my results have legitimised participants’ identification, creation and curation of their own stimuli to redesign the cultural mediation of their own activity. My results show that collaboratively aggravating contradictions, and shaping rules, community and division of labour, is important for authenticity and for sustaining change in boundary-crossing TEL; Sub-section 6.5.2, for example, illustrates participants attributing blame for the misalignment of TEL tasks with vocational tasks. Authenticity has been examined elsewhere, for example by Zitter et al. (2012: 128) who study HE and vocational fields of digital communication, and Perret-Clermont and Perret (2011: 97) introducing vocationally realistic manufacturing technologies into education. Whilst these and other authors use notions related to cultural mediation, such as meaning schemes and compliance, they are seldom analysed as mediators of tripartite relationships in the way of rules, community and division of labour to expose and aggravate contradictions. My project’s participants recognised lucrative techniques to aggravate contradictions in cultural mediation, such as analysing authentic corporate documents, AV media of tasks and social network communiques; through these, participants designed and curated their own task stimuli to redesign activity’s rules, community and division of labour.