Model of pseudo-activity manipulative strategies for building up social space

The article deals with a model, proposed for analyzing manipulative strategies for building up social space. These strategies are treated as forms of pseudo-activity that imitate productive activity, but being devoid of certain properties, they produce only relationships used to get psychological and sometimes material benefits. The author proceeds from the idea that productive activity should contain, as a condition, a combination of stabilizing and activating factors, object retention and impact on it. Pseudo-activity occurs when activity is reduced to one of them. J. Piaget believed that such two types of cognitive operations – embracing and aiming – underlie two types of space structuring by an immature egocentric consciousness: the "space of places" and the "space of projections". The idea is maintained that the two similar types of cognitive operations underlie the construction of manipulative-type social spaces. The author describes what such two types of social relations are like. The approach is illustrated by the analysis of two large social groups. The idea of the productive activity properties is grounded.