Occupation as Transactional Experience: A Critique of Individualism in Occupational Science

Abstract

Occupational science uses various concepts to denote occupation as residing within the individual. That is, despite recognizing the role of a context for the individual and her or his occupation, occupational scientists have continued to implicitly or explicitly create a dualistic view of person and context (environment). The dualism creates a problem for understanding occupation as well as the relationship of person and context. In this paper we present occupationally‐focused case studies of two individuals and assert that existing concepts of occupation in the discipline cannot encompass the situations represented by these cases. We propose the Deweyan concept of transaction as an alternative perspective for understanding occupation. The relational perspective of transactionalism means that occupation is no longer seen as a thing or as a type of self‐action or inter‐action arising from within individuals. In this view, occupation is an important mode through which human beings, as organisms‐in‐environment‐as‐a‐whole, function in their complex totality. As such, occupations become more central to the scientific understanding of person‐context relations.