Anticipatory Cultural Sociology: Creation, Projection, and Agency (Possible Book, 2026)
The Landscape of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS) v2.0
Oliver Ding
Founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.
From GO Theory to ACS and Beyond
To analyze Social Life Development at the cultural level, I needed a framework for the social world itself — not just a framework for the individual moving through it.
Supportive Self-Actualization as Anticipatory Activity
Self is not a single, bounded, present-moment entity. It has three layers — Sub-individual, Individual, and Supra-individual. Self-actualization, reconceived within the framework of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS), is not a final state to be achieved but an ongoing anticipatory activity
Engaging with Others for Developing Anticipated Identity
The expansion proposed here — from self-referential to other-directed RR practice — opens the theme of Revisiting and Rebuilding: A Strategy for Creative Identity Development onto the social space of Self-Other relations that is foundational to the Agency Cascade model from which it derives.
Revisiting, Rebuilding, Re-engaging with Past Selves
Furthermore, once Past Selves are established as a legitimate theoretical category alongside Present Selves and Possible Selves, a new possibility opens up: the three can be curated together into a coherent, dynamic framework of creative identity development.
Revisiting-Rebuilding: Agency Cascade and the Transformation of Self
When a creator returns to earlier work and rebuilds it from a more developed standpoint, they are not just producing a better theory. They are enacting a relationship between their past self and their present self — a diachronic Self-Other structure that drives the Transformation of Self.
The Landscape of Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (v2.0)
ACS v1.0 was a curation of meta-frameworks... Precisely these two needs have driven the development from v1.0 to v2.0: building out the operational layer and establishing the coordination structure that holds it together.
Activity Analysis Network #13: Learn, Weave, and Agency Frontier
These articles collectively mark a significant expansion of the World of Life framework, introduce Spatial Heuristics as a new methodological stream, and advance ACS to version 1.2 with a refined model of the actor.
The Landscape of ACS 1.2 and a New Model of the Actor
The ACS model is oriented differently. It is not primarily about constraint or calculation. It is about orientation — what directions are available, what positions are possible, what forms of action are open.
Appropriating Activity Theory #13: Agency Frontier Behind the Hierarchy of Human Activity (2020)
When I sat down to write this issue's column, I found myself asking a question I hadn't asked before: Does the tradition of Activity Theory have anything analogous to the four boundaries of the World of Life?