Thinking-Space as Research Creation: The Opportunity for a Qualitative Better Welfare Just Like That

Abstract

Purpose

This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

Design/methodology/approach

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

Findings

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Practical implications

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.

Citation

Amhøj, C.B. (2016), "Thinking-Space as Research Creation: The Opportunity for a Qualitative Better Welfare Just Like That", Developing Public Managers for a Changing World (Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 285-315. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2045-794420160000005014