1 Theoretical perspectives on and pragmatic concerns for Situated Action in relation to Information Technology.

Traditional social science research within the topic of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has relied to a great extent on cognitive psychology. The narrow focus of HCI on the individual and the human-computer interface has been criticized by several researchers. Situated Action is a class of theoretical approaches, mainly emerging from social anthropology and sociology, which have in common a general theoretical claim that cognition is situated and cannot be studied and meaningfully discussed without taking context and environment into account. The focus in Situated Action lies on manifest action rather than internal information processing. This paper examines three quite distinct perspectives on situated action which have more or less radical theoretical foundations and research agendas. Two of the perspectives, Person-Plus and Connectionism, mainly follow the theoretical perspective of traditional cognitive psychology and further investigate the inexplicable link between physical and social contexts on the one hand and mechanistic cognitive processes on the other. The aim is to understand how people's cognitive mechanisms are influenced or shaped by social and artifactual contexts. The Person-Plus perspective has a wide research agenda ranging from abstract information flow notations of how people use and distribute cognitiv