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This paper aims to draw attention to the significance of “acculturation” in organisations and organising and how learning occurs as micro-practices (organisational poetics).

The recognition of the ontological significance of organisational acculturation invites a more critical view of the effects of organisational practices on individual identity, social norms and the accountability of organisations to society.

Organising and organisations are cast as nurseries of cultural practices that are so normalised we regard them as “unremarkable,” as “just the way things are,” yet “schooling” of identity and social norms.

If we want a better world, we should, as citizens, expect more from our organisations and their learning.

The significance here is, from a post-structural, relational stance, that organising and organisations are significant agents in the performance of what it is to be human and our social conditions. As well as goods and services, organisations produce “humans.”

As distinct from the canon of organisational learning literature which is primarily concerned with learning for the effectiveness and resilience of organisations for their own benefit, this paper asserts that what we learn and normalise in organisations structures society – the world we live.

This paper introduces some of the elements of Knowledge Management and outlines the approaches RM Consulting ‐ the internal consultancy of the Royal Mail and the Post Office ‐ is taking to support the development of knowledge enablers within the organization. A Knowledge Management approach is described which focuses on people (including the organizational structure), processes and technology. The initial Knowledge Management focus of the organization is aimed principally on explicit knowledge, and the establishment of tools which help to capture internal information. The long‐term challenge is to capture the knowledge of the organization in such a way that all of its employees can maximize the value they provide to the organization’s stakeholders.

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.

The invitation in this chapter is to see or remember¹ what can be gained and achieved by turning our attention from a style of thinking and speaking that focuses on the “truth about things” and shifting it to a recognition of the contribution of our own cultural practices in how things come-to-be what they seem. We are invited to look at human social processes and the relationships of how things in the world get caught up in these, historical or current but always active, processes and in so doing create meaning.The point here is to arrest or interrupt the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give “prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook.” ( Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 43 )We are invited to indulge a little less in the apparent “nature of things” and instead give a little more attention to the practices that make things happen and the relations between their inter-actors. Rather than having the relationship between “a directly perceiving mind and reality” as our primary focus we are looking afresh at those social processes that attribute characteristics to its actors and “cause us to hold beliefs.” We might call this “relational practicing.”² I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his [sic] psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another….. …Not, then, men [sic] and their moments. Rather moments and their men. ( Goffman, 1982, p. 2 )Goffman richly points out the variety of ordinary, everyday ways in which people participate in social encounters and how they conduct the minutia of constitutive relational practices. Goffman spent a lifetime illuminating the relevance of the almost hidden inter-participant grammar in cooperative performance of coordinated meaning and structure and also had much to say about the practical relationships between the actors and those prevailing enacted structures.

Offers a brief introduction to inter‐logics as method and shows, in outline, its origins, principles and application. The method, drawing on forms of enquiry and description made possible through social constructionist vocabularies – including pragmatics, critical linguistics and dialogics – has been developed specifically to enable more satisfying co‐operated action at the borders of communities and organisations where new forms of engagement and new possibilities for meaning and action can take place.

While the concept of the learning company has now become a fairly well‐established idea within academic and practitioner circles, it is still a concept which is in emergence and thus a certain amount of ambiguity and confusion surrounds it. It is, therefore, necessary not only to develop an understanding of the concept to the point at which it is possible to begin to understand the implications for practice, but also to establish the relationship between the presence and the development of learning company characteristics and organizational performance. Reviews the application of learning company ideas in a primarily small to medium‐sized enterprise environment, and using a case study approach considers the training, development and learning potential of one company after the application of The Learning Company Project questionnaire, developed by The Learning Company Project in Sheffield.

Discusses changes in individual learning capacity during the ten years up to 2004, including tree of knowledge (TOK) briefcases; cyborg technology; remodelling knowledgework; the flexible individual; and techneurology. Also discusses changes in organizational learning including dispersal of schools and universities; headquarters to conferential organizations; the fabricated organization; changes in information systems; and the shift in power.

Offers an overall framework for understanding the complexities of collaborative working. After an analysis of the forces against collaborating, a social constructionist perspective is taken. A model to connect and integrate individual and collective perspectives is then presented and examined.