When we do something, it involves our motives. I work on my group assignment because I think high marks will get me a good job; or because I find the topic fascinating; or I don't want to let my partners down; or I want to please my teacher. How I engage in the activity is profoundly affected by my motives. If we are interested in children's behaviour, learning and development, then we need to understand their motives, and to understand children's motives, we need robust and rigorous theory and research. This is where this book comes in: it is one of the few places that you can access a coherent and consistent set of ideas that you can use to understand children's motives and how their motives interact with learning and development.

So, who are the contributors and why should we bother working our way through their sometimes turgid prose? Except for Michael Cole and the UCSD group, and Engeström and his Helsinki-based CRADLE group, all the big names from cultural-historical theory are here. Most are grandees of cultural-historical theory and, as such, each has their own theoretical innovations to expouse. They generally do this by giving a thumbnail sketch of their theory and then reporting on children's motives from one of their research projects. They are united by grounding their thinking in the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev.

There are two ways to use this book: (1) as an introduction to thinking about how we can use cultural-historical theory and research about motive, emotion, and personality to understand children's learning and development; or (2) you can look at a chapter that is directly related to your own research or interest.

I will spend the first part of this review discussing the former issue and then give a (necessarily) brief comment on each chapter.

We all know that motives and emotions are critical in our children's development, but how do we think about them in a coherent and rigorous manner? This book provides a good introduction to the ideas generated by a body of theoretical and empirical research here labelled cultural historical but also known as cultural-historical activity theory, socio-cultural and a whole zoo of relatives and offspring. This body of theory owes its genesis to Lev Vygotsky in post-revolution Russia and the Ukraine.Footnote ¹ Vygotsky, working with street children and orphans of the war and revolution, sought to develop an understanding of the development of higher mental functions and introduced ideas such as mediation, zone of proximal development, double stimulation and perezhinvanie.

Vygotsky died tragically young at 32 in 1932, but being a charismatic genius, his legacy was continued in Russia by his colleagues, notably in the discussion of motives by Aleksei N. Leontiev, before his work begun to be translated into English in the seventies and was taken up and extended by scholars, including many of the authors of this book. Dying young and being concerned with the development of real children, Vygotsky never developed his ideas into a coherent, consistent theory, and most researchers have taken one of his ideas and developed and applied them,Footnote ² and this collection exemplifies this. There is very little mutual citation; the only common citations across all authors are Vygotsky and Leontiev. As Seth Chiaklin writes in the final chapter:

Cultural-historical theories have the advantage of being realist because they evolved from Hegel through Marx, and because they have been developed by theorists, Vygotsky chief among them, who are passionately concerned with the development of real children, they speak to the practical while also attempting to be intellectually rigorous (sometimes too theoretically rigorous).

The book is organised into three sections. The first brings together some of the (mainly Russian) theoretical big-hitters to riff on motive. The second brings together mostly younger researchers who discuss motive in relation to their research projects. The final chapter collects together the two giants of English cultural-historical theory, Anne Edwards and Harry Daniels, and a maverick, Seth Chiaklin.

The first chapter is, fittingly, from Mariane Hedegaard. She organised the symposia and retreats that resulted in this book and she is cited in most of chapters. She has been researching young children for as long as anyone can remember and has developed a model relating the child to society through the mediation of cultural traditions of school, after-school and home practices, and activity settings that she applies to children doing homework. The next chapter is by Elena Kravtsova (Vygotsky's granddaughter) and her husband Gennady Kravtsov of the Vygotsky Institute of Psychology at the Russia State University, whose work on children's play is entirely theoretical and largely an exegesis on Vygotsky. This is followed by Fernando González Rey, a Cuban who has done most of his study in Moscow, again theoretical but locating motive in children's development and replacing it with his concept of subjective configuration. Vladimir P. Zinchenko, also from a dynasty of Russian psychologists, who died shortly after this contribution, follows with a theoretical riff that can be traced back to Vygotsky on, as one of his section headings says explicitly, the ‘unity of word, image and action in children's development’, to which he adds, as do many of the contributors, emotion.

Marilyn Fleer (2013), an eminent Australian researcher in early childhood education, leads the next section with a dissection motive of her research on children's play. Taking her lead from Hedegaard, motives are developed as mediators between society and the child. There follows a quartet of European research teams who describe the role of motive in each of their projects. Medina and Marinez look at peer interactions, again during play, in the Netherlands and Spain. Winther-Linquist looks at children transitioning to a village school near Copenhagen from day care. Stenild and Iversen developed an eBag, a web-based portfolio that can operate with students’ mobile phones and computers, and then developed a model of IT-supported motivation to understand its use. Of interest is the way they employ Wartofsky's (Reference Wartofsky1979) model of artifacts in their analysis. Finally, in this section, Wardekker, Boersma, Ten Dam, and Volman return to the Netherlands to try and motivate secondary students in a national volunteer program, Make a Difference Day. Because the students are working in teams, hereafter known as communities of learners, they use the theoretical firepower of Lave, Wenger, Rogoff, van Oers, and Engestrom in a sensible discussion of how to motivate recalcitrant teenagers.

The last section is somewhat at odds with the preceding sections but worth a look nonetheless because it will acquaint you with some powerful thinkers. Anne Edwards (Reference Edwards2010) uses her idea of relational agency to discuss how knowledge and motivation interact in professional teams dealing with children at risk from a huge English study she led. Harry Daniels, who studied with the great educational sociologist Basil Bernstein, tries, as he had throughout his career, to combine Bernstein's acute theory of pedagogic discourse with Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory. Finally, except for the fact that for a novice it is too dense, it may be worthwhile to start with Seth Chailkin's final chapter. It is an odd chapter in the context of the book and is written with a slightly exterior perspective. Chaiklin (Reference Chaiklin, Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev and Miller2003) is given to writing precise and fine-grained analysis of the history of an idea (I have mined his deconstruction of zone of proximal development). Here he gives a historical analysis of the genesis and development of motive in cultural-historical theory and then poses some abstruse continuing problems.

So, here it is: if you are interested in the concept of motive in children's development (and if you are an educator you should be) this as good as it gets. Even if you do not read this book or even a chapter, and most of us will not, there is one thing I would like you to remember: if you are planning an activity, any activity with humans, you will be more successful if you consider the motives of your participants: motives matter.