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From talk to action:
Experiencing dialogues in developmental interventions

Introduction

This paper attempts to highlight how discussions within Change Laboratory sessions, held as transformational interventions in workplaces, affect individual material actions in activities. How do Change Laboratory conversations lead participants to give meaning to an object, to appropriate it, and to invest in it with motivating power? How are the typical difficulties of articulating and reconceptualizing a complex object overcome in Change Laboratory discussions?

Discursive data from a Change Laboratory conducted in a Finnish school will be analyzed here from two points of view. On the one hand, I will use Vasilyuk’s (1988) theory of experiencing, developed within the general framework of cultural-historical activity theory. On the other hand, I will draw on an approach to discourse studies called interlocutionary logic (Trognon, 1999). My analysis aims at demonstrating that the practice of the Change Laboratory opens up new possibilities for developing and analyzing experiencing and interlocution, but these remain underdeveloped for the time being. Also the analysis wants to show that interlocutionary logic and Vasilyuk’s theory of experiencing, if integrated in the theory and practice of interventions, enrich our understanding of how change unfolds through discourse within the Change Laboratory.

The data analyzed in this paper have been collected during an eleven-week Change Laboratory intervention with the teachers in a middle school in Finland. The school is located in a disadvantaged area in Helsinki with high a rate of unemployment and large percentage of immigrants and refugees compared to other areas in Helsinki.

The paper is structured in four sections. The first section elaborates the research question by discussing the methodology of the Change Laboratory in the light of Leont’ev’s concept of personal sense. The second section of the paper presents the theoretical framework for the analysis, based on the theory of experiencing and on interlocutionary logic. The third section of the paper elucidates empirically the theoretical claims developed in the first two sections by analyzing samples of data from the middle school. The fourth and last section discusses the challenge of integrating interlocutionary logic and Vasilyuk’s theory of experiencing in the practice of conducting Change Laboratories. In order to meet this challenge I will examine the possibility of using the methodology of the Clinic of Activity - another interventionist approach within the broad framework of activity theory - to expand the resources of Change Laboratory.

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