Last Updated on October 2, 2025, 1:33 pm ET
In 2008, technologist Chris Anderson famously predicted the end of theory, as massively abundant data reduced the need for researchers to develop and test explanatory models. “Who knows why people do what they do?” Anderson mused. “The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.” Yet social scientists today continue to engage with theory in their scholarship, even as they make use of new data sources and methods of analysis. A recent book by writing studies scholar Clay Spinuzzi sheds light on why, clarifying that for many social scientists theory serves as an orienting framework that brings certain facets of social life into focus. Triangles and Tribulations: Translations, Betrayals, and the Making of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (MIT Press, 2025; available open access) follows how one such framework was adapted over time to be useful in different scientific and political contexts, allowing researchers to delineate problem spaces that they could then seek to understand.
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), in Spinuzzi’s telling, is a family of conceptual approaches concerned with “social human beings learning and developing.” Its founding figure, Lev Vygotsky, worked in the early years of the Soviet Union to translate the field of psychology into a framework for realizing the perfectibility of humanity under socialism. Beyond the reflexes of stimulus and response, Vygotsky looked to artifacts like tools and symbols to modulate human behavior and allow the subject to achieve self-mastery. After his death in 1934, and amid the turn toward the command socialism of Stalin, Vygotsky’s colleagues distanced themselves from his idealism and regrounded the approach he inspired in the concrete activity of human labor. By the 1970s, an anthology of Vygotsky’s writings had captured the interest of Western social scientists looking for an alternative to the then-dominant information processing theory of mind. One of these was a young Finnish researcher named Yrjö Engeström, who would again reinterpret the tradition that became known as CHAT as a way of modeling work organizations and the difficulties they face in periods of technological change.
It would be easy to disparage the intellectual roots of CHAT as beholden to Soviet ideology, but Triangles and Tribulations shows that Engeström’s approach was no less influenced by Scandinavian workplace democracy—particularly its focus on enlisting the expertise of workers to reconfigure the conditions of their own labor. Spinuzzi also argues that, as CHAT was brought to bear on increasingly diverse and distributed empirical settings, it lost the boundedness that gave the framework its power to illuminate. He criticizes the “wildly mixed metaphors” that resulted from importing concepts from other schools of thought, as well as a turn toward public policy that he sees as limited to persuading participants to comply with preconceived solutions. At the end of the book, he imagines a revived Vygotsky experiencing “both the pride of providing a foundation for this later work and perhaps the horror of seeing what has been built on it.”
Yet Spinuzzi acknowledges that his investments in CHAT are just as situated as anyone else’s. He describes being introduced to the framework as a graduate student in the 1990s, searching for a language to express how prosaic workplace texts like software documentation took their place in broader genre ecologies. A second-generation photocopy of a book by Engeström, shared by his dissertation advisor, became his passage point into the CHAT tradition of which he has become one of the foremost chroniclers. Scholars of writing studies, Spinuzzi stresses, looked to CHAT to navigate a particular set of intellectual and professional impasses—and appropriated a version of the framework that was fit for this purpose. To criticize them for the selectivity of their appropriation would miss the point made in the title of Spinuzzi’s book: all translations are betrayals. Yet to renounce that process of translation in favor of a theory-free science emerging from correlations alone would be to dodge the distinctively human task of turning data into evidence of one knowledge claim rather than another.
Takeaways for Library Leaders
Triangles and Tribulations teases apart the complex skein of motivations that social scientists have for drawing on existing theory. Yet bibliometric efforts to classify citation motivations too often resort to binary distinctions of scientific and tactical aims, while tools that encode these structures settle for tallying up supporting and contrasting mentions of previous work. The progenitors of CHAT make it clear that engagements with social science theory can be marked by all of those qualities at once! Accordingly, libraries can prioritize citation analysis tools that draw on domain-specific or multidisciplinary corpora, and introduce students to the many meanings of citation through information literacy instruction.
Triangles and Tribulations also includes an insightful discussion of the metaphors researchers use to think about change within theoretical traditions: generations suggest linear progression and waves emphasize the degree of fidelity to source material, while strands allow for divergence and heterogeneity. For his part, Spinuzzi favors the metaphor of translation because it enables a “nondevelopmental account” of how theory could have evolved otherwise. By taking a collections-as-data perspective, libraries can collaborate with scholars to visualize, test, and explore the impacts of these different accounts of how theory changes. Distinctive collections of theorists’ unpublished writings could also enrich the outputs of AI tools trained on published sources, expanding their reach beyond specialists writing the history of theory.
As research data management becomes more and more central to how research libraries support the production of scholarship, libraries may wish to consider what contributions they can make to the (largely overlooked) realm of research theory management. This might start with paying attention to settings across the research life cycle where theory is made and mobilized, like the Activity Theory Summer School that appears in the acknowledgments to Spinuzzi’s book, and pulling their outputs into the scholarly record. It may also extend to supporting scholars seeking to counter the invisibilization of certain strains of theory that take root as a kind of cultural common sense. Data-intensive scholarship is here to stay, but Triangles and Tribulations makes it clear that the end of theory is nowhere in sight.
