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Making Expansive Decisions: An Activity-Theoretical Study of Practitioners Building Collaborative Medical Care for Children

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Decision Making: Social and Creative Dimensions

Abstract

Cultural-historical activity theory (Cole & Engeström, 1993; Engeström, Miettinen & Punamäki, 1999; Leont’ev, 1978) places decision making in the context of object-oriented, collective and artifact-mediated activity systems constantly undergoing developmental transformations. Decisions are not made alone, they are indirectly or directly influenced by other participants of the activity. Decisions are typically steps in a temporally distributed chain of interconnected events. Decisions are not purely technical, they have moral and ideological underpinnings with regard to responsibility and power. And the content of decisions is not restricted to the ostensible problem or task at hand; they always also shape the future of the broader activity system within which they are made.

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Engeström, Y. (2001). Making Expansive Decisions: An Activity-Theoretical Study of Practitioners Building Collaborative Medical Care for Children. In: Allwood, C.M., Selart, M. (eds) Decision Making: Social and Creative Dimensions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9827-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9827-9_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5671-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9827-9

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