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1 – 9 of 9Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen and Bente Elkjaer
Telecare is a growing practice defined as diagnosis, treatment and monitoring among doctors, nurses and patients, which is mediated through ICT and without face-to-face…
Abstract
Purpose
Telecare is a growing practice defined as diagnosis, treatment and monitoring among doctors, nurses and patients, which is mediated through ICT and without face-to-face interaction. The purpose of this study is to provide empirically based knowledge about the organization of the use of ICT and dilemmas of this increasingly common practice in healthcare.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on observations, interviews and desk research in relation to a large €4.5m pilot project at four hospitals in Copenhagen regarding care of 120 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). The empirical study was carried out over four months. Online video consultations were observed alongside workshops focusing on nurses’ photo elucidation of the telecare practice. The analytical ambition was to start the study in the middle of things and explore the emergent design of telecare.
Findings
Telecare not only embraces new standards and possibilities for professional responsibility and accountability for nurses but also alters the relationship between doctors and nurses. This leads to a dilemma we characterize as “paradoxical accountability”.
Originality/value
The study draws on Star’s notion of “infrastructure”. In this perspective, infrastructure comprises human and non-human conduct embedded in organizational conventions, relations and sites. The analysis demonstrates that nurses are not only exposed to a new responsibility as all-round case managers but they also have less access to clinical decision makers. The notion of “paradoxical accountability” is developed to account for this dilemma.
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This paper aims to contribute to the debate on what is a learning organization (LO). The author proposes that pragmatist philosophy may be a source of inspiration in this endeavor.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to contribute to the debate on what is a learning organization (LO). The author proposes that pragmatist philosophy may be a source of inspiration in this endeavor.
Design/methodology/approach
The author revisits a 25-year-old case study in which the process of implementing an LO in a public enterprise was observed. This was in the heyday of LOs, when they were regarded as an organizational form that could provide solutions for almost all organizational problems. The author starts by considering this case using the first four types of understanding in Örtenblad’s LO taxonomy (2018): “learning at work,” “climate for learning,” “organizational learning” and “learning structure.” Then the author uses Örtenblad’s fifth version of LOs, the “social perspective,” to show that the pragmatist concepts of experience, inquiry and commitment are helpful in revealing and explaining how learning happens as part of the “social”.
Findings
The author proposes the sixth version of Los, involving letting experience and inquiry loose. This is an extension of Örtenblad’s fifth version of LOs, which rests upon collective as the learning unit and learning as context-dependent cultural or social activity. The sixth version makes it possible to understand organizational learning and LOs as recursive processes of inquiry into tensions in experiences and the organizational affordances of voicing and enacting these tensions.
Originality/value
Regarding LOs from a pragmatist perspective makes it possible to view learning as cultural and social activity without making learning a matter of either motivational persons for learning or organizations as “conducive” for learning, but understands the two as connected in recursive, iterative and rhythmic processes of tensions and resolutions.
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Bente Elkjaer and Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how workplace interventions may benefit from a simultaneous focus on individuals’ learning and knowledge and on the situatedness of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how workplace interventions may benefit from a simultaneous focus on individuals’ learning and knowledge and on the situatedness of workplaces in the wider world of changing professional knowledge regimes. This is illustrated by the demand for evidence-based practice in health care.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a case study in a public post-natal ward in a hospital in Denmark in which one of the authors acted as both a consultant initiating and leading interventions and a researcher using ethnographic methods. The guiding question was: How to incorporate the dynamics of the workplace when doing intervention in professionals’ work and learning?
Findings
The findings of the paper show how workplace interventions consist of heterogeneous alliances between politics, discourse and technologies rather than something that can be traced back to a single plan or agency. Furthermore, the paper proposes, a road down the middle, made up by both an intentional and a performative model for intervention.
Originality/value
Intervention in workplaces is often directed towards changing humans, their behaviour, their ways of communicating and their attitudes. This is often furthered through reflection, making the success of intervention depend on individuals’ abilities to learn and change. In this paper, it is shown how intervention may benefit from bringing in workplace issues like different professional knowledge regimes, hierarchical structures, materiality, politics and power.
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To explore whether deliberate organisational change of a public sector organisation (a local municipality) would create an avenue for organisational learning.
Abstract
Purpose
To explore whether deliberate organisational change of a public sector organisation (a local municipality) would create an avenue for organisational learning.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study was set up to study the means by which the organisational change towards a digital administration was to come about. The organisational change was interpreted through the optics of theories of organisational learning. A pragmatic version of these theories is presented and applied in the study in which learning is understood as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty and the relation between the individual and the organisation (subject‐world) as transactional (a continuous mutual formation).
Findings
Viewed through the lenses of a pragmatic understanding of organisational learning it is possible to extend this understanding to an understanding of organisations as arenas made up by social worlds created and held together by commitments to organisational activities. Further, elaborating the idea of learning as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty into the organisational arena, it is possible to characterise organisational tensions made up by different commitments to the organisational change and development as tensions between social worlds. It is argued that these tensions may act as closures or openings towards organisational learning understood as the continuous transformation of the organisation.
Originality/value
This paper offers an understanding of organisational learning that ties the subject‐world, the individual‐organisation, together in a way that is coherent with the learning theory. Further, it offers possibilities for working with the enhancement of organisational learning by way of paving a way for joint critical thinking or inquiry.
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Bente Elkjaer and Barbara Simpson
In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field…
Abstract
In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. This chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Schön. Finally we turn to consider Weick's organizing and sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely continuity of past and future in the present, the transactional nature of social agency and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work.
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Jonas Sprogoe and Bente Elkjaer
Induction is the process of newcomers entering and becoming part of an organization. In one sense newcomers represent an opportunity for organizations to learn and change, but in…
Abstract
Purpose
Induction is the process of newcomers entering and becoming part of an organization. In one sense newcomers represent an opportunity for organizations to learn and change, but in another sense newcomers are instigated into an existing institutional order. The purpose of this paper is to explore how induction of newcomers can be understood as both organizational renewal and the maintenance of status quo, and to develop ways of describing this in terms of learning.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is designed as a qualitative study of induction practices in two branches of a Danish retail bank and a Danish management consulting company. The data are based on 30 semi‐structured interviews and on some observations in the case companies. The data have subsequently been analyzed phenomenologically and thematically in light of a pragmatist understanding of learning.
Findings
The paper provides two main findings. The duality of induction, in terms of organizational renewal and the maintenance of status quo can be conceptualized and meaningfully discussed through the metaphors of organizational rhythm and generative dance. And if this ambiguous dimension of induction is recognized, organizational idiosyncrasies, ways of doing and taken‐for‐granted aspects can be thrown up for discussion and thus potentially change or stabilize organizational practice based on persons and institutional order.
Research limitations/implications
The paper adds to the growing academic debate of the complex nature of practice in general, and induction in particular. In addition, the paper has implications for practitioners involved in induction, as the paper highlights the need to rethink induction as both an opportunity to create organizational renewal and a way of maintaining status quo.
Originality/value
Seeing the duality of induction and exploring it through the metaphors of organizational rhythm and generative dancing is original and potentially enriching for researchers and practitioners.
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David Higgins and Chris Elliott
The paper aims to explore the changing influences and relevance of passive and experiential methods of learning within what can be described as a new era of entrepreneurial…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to explore the changing influences and relevance of passive and experiential methods of learning within what can be described as a new era of entrepreneurial education. What still largely remains unaddressed in the literature is how are entrepreneur's best educated and developed in a manner which can have a direct impact on their personal and business development.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper suggests that learning is action oriented, and that entrepreneurs are not merely “doers”; they are “practitioners”. An integral part of being a “practitioner” is the use of practice to help move the firm beyond the “adaptive” learning which takes place in naturally occurring non‐contrived learning occasions. The paper is theoretical in its intent and adopts a social constructionist view of knowledge and learning. The research approach is informed by practitioner‐based practice and research, education and participation as a process of social learning.
Findings
The development of experiential knowledge in entrepreneurs is an incremental process that evolves throughout the course of their working lives. This means that attempts to stimulate “real life” experience through formal modes of passive education and training are unlikely to have a strong influence or impact on the development of the entrepreneur as a practitioner.
Practical implications
The paper sets out to develop an argument against the traditional “passive” means of business education, by suggesting that entrepreneurs who are exposed to passive learning are spectators rather than active participators.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to our current understanding of entrepreneurial learning by recognising that entrepreneurial learning in the context of higher education takes place beyond the domain of the classroom learning experiences, through experiential and discovery‐based learning which questions traditional orthodox pedagogies. The paper illustrates how knowledge is constructed through a situated practice of knowing, and demonstrates how a practice‐based perspective might be useful for the study of entrepreneurial education.
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