The level of strategy is the level of realisation of activity. Activity is produced and reproduced in and by empirical texts and by empirical human subjects. That is to say, activity is (re)produced in/by texts and subjects. The relationship between activity and strategy is thus not strictly hierarchical, but dialectical. nevertheless, insofar as the aim of analysis is the description of activity - the structural level of the machine - then it must be regarded as (if it were) analytically prior to activity: strategies reproduce a prior activity or they produce, which is to say transform, a prior activity. Pragmatically, then, the level of strategy is characterised by a higher level of arbitrariness (ie in relation to choice of specific strategy) than the level of activity.

The textual realisation of position is voice; the textual realisation of practice is message. Thus strategies effect the distribution of message over a structure of voices.

Strategy operates via the recruitment of resources.

The (pragmatically) hierarchical nature of the social activity machine is inspired by Leontev's activity theory (1978, 1979); hence the use of the terms 'activity' and 'social activity machine'.