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Occupation in context: A reflection on environmental influences on human doing

ABSTRACT When occupational science was introduced as a new field of scholarship, the environment was conceptualised consistent with broad assumptions of the day as a space where people function and over which they achieve mastery. Categorised as natural, and thus deserving protection, or artificial, it inevitably presented challenges to which people would respond. Consistent with understandings that the environment is a secular reality, human-environment interactions were theorised using open systems theory. Information was taken in, resources were marshalled, and adaptive responses stimulated skills development. This presentation surveys shifts in understanding of the environment since those early days, reporting movement towards a transactional perspective, acknowledgement that the sociocultural environment shapes people’s goals, and a more nuanced understanding of the ways people respond to environmental challenges. There is greater openness to the idea that the environment profoundly influences what people can access and do, and an emerging appreciation of indigenous challenges to the western perspective that people are somehow separate from the environment.