An analytical unit of transformative agency: Dynamics and dialectics

Introduction: transformation and agencyGlobal issues and challenges, an increased turnover rate of knowledge production and networked technologies challenge educational research, systems, and practices worldwide.Increasingly, people face complex challenges and situations that require agents to change the situation they find themselves in, using or developing resources to break out of status quo and transform the situation (Aagaard & Lund, 2020).Such transformation in contexts and practices also means that we change as human actors (Packer & Goicoechea, 2000).Thus, transformation, unlike more superficial change, cannot be reversed but amounts to deeper and more sustained processes.In the words of Stetsenko (2017), "the emphasis is on people being transformed by their own transformative engagements, activities and social practices" (p.175).This involves an epistemic principle of "we-know-the world as we change it" and an ontological principle of "we-come-to-be-as-we-change-the-world" (p.197).The dialectics between the situation and the agent (s) enacting such principles requires capacity to instigate and sustain transformation in order to improve on the original situation, a capacity that tends to be overlooked in education (Graesser et al., 2018).In the following, we refer to this capacity as transformative agency.Education valid for the networked knowledge society requires students to face situations and challenges that are complex and context sensitive, do not have one correct answer, involve risk and uncertainty, require collaboration and productive use of sophisticated resources, and an active, future oriented transformative stance (Stetsenko, 2017).Whether we want to study phenomena that involve transformative agency or foster transformative agency in education, working life or various social settings, we need a unit of analysis that captures the dynamics and dialectics between problem situation and agentic and transformative use of resources.Such resources include recent development in digitalization, which has a direct impact on human agency.Digitalization does not merely result in powerful tools at our service but materializes in objects with intentions that interfere with and even override human decisions (Rozendaal, Boon, & Kaptelinin, 2019).In addition, as artificial intelligence continues to make fast progress, we encounter situations where fundamental questions related to ethics and essential human qualities such as consciousness meet superior computer intelligence (Harari, 2017;Tegmark, 2017).But digitalization also impacts on more commonplace educational situations where we seek to find productive courses of action when facing problems that exceed our current competence; consulting and navigating in infinite research archives online or finding a malleable digital representation of a naturalistic or social phenomenon (modelling climate change, manipulate correlations between income and life expectancy etc.).Thus, the interplay between humans and digital resources offers extended possibilities for transforming situations and practices.Against this background and these trends, we argue that we need a unit of analysis that suspends the more traditional separation between units that capture the individual, the collective, or the organizational phenomenon.As these units often have been associated with attempts to reduce a phenomenon to its minimal representation (e.g. an utterance) or capture its complexity (e.g. an activity system), they are suitable for examining entities but less suitable for examining transformative processes that also involve micro level interactions.A dialectic unit of analysis aims to capture reciprocity; the interplay between volitional action and use of resources to break out of difficult situations and resolve them.We aim to conceptually propose and empirically operationalize a unit of analysis that captures transformative agency, not to