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The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications for adults of learning in a residential context and whether the residential aspect intensifies the learning process, and can lead to enhanced personal transformation, moving beyond professional skills and training for employability.

The paper reports on research, conducted in 2017, with 41 current and former staff and students (on both short courses and longer access courses) in four residential colleges for adults: Ruskin, Northern, Fircroft and Hillcroft Colleges.

Key findings include the powerful role residential education plays in accelerating and deepening learning experiences, particularly for adults who have faced extraordinary personal and societal challenges and are second chance learners. The colleges, all in historic settings, confer feelings of worth, security and sanctuary and the staff support – pastoral and academic, bespoke facilities and private rooms are vital enabling mechanisms. Seminar-style learning creates opportunity for experiential group learning, helping to foster critical thinking and challenge to mainstream views.

The colleges’ ethos, curricula and traditions foster among students an “ethic of service” and a desire to offer “emotional labour” to their own communities, through working for instance in health and social care or the voluntary sector.

Little research has been undertaken in contemporary settings on the impact of learning in a residential environment, particularly for second chance learners and vulnerable adults. Still less research has examined the wider implications of learning in a historic building setting and of learning which extends into critical thinking, intellectual growth, transformation and change.

This 230 page edited book attempts to capture the ethos of the age of learning and analyze its features. It questions its ethics from a variety of academic perspectives and discusses how the learning society actually functions. Traditional views are seen threatened, as education becomes a commodity. Education and learning are seen intertwined with global capitalism, and government policies and practices are increasingly viewed as treating learning as an investment, resulting in employability and work. A learning society emerges as one of the products.

This paper aims to explore the nature of effective schools serving socially disadvantaged communities, and to point to an overlooked feature in the literature on school effectiveness in relation to social inclusion.

As part of a trans‐European project, three English schools are investigated. A qualitative case study approach is utilised. The schools selected have high proportions of ethnic minority students with low socio‐economic status backgrounds, yet demonstrate successful results.

The data show the importance of high expectations, and the development of classroom and school‐wide systems to translate these into practice. This reflects areas highlighted by earlier research on schools in disadvantaged communities. The data also point to important conclusions about school ethos.

The findings are based on a sample of three schools. Though purposively selected (as successful in challenging circumstances), further research is needed into the role of an inclusive ethos in school effectiveness.

As Scheerens and Bosker argue, schools are most important for underprivileged and/or initially low‐achieving students. Improving the effectiveness of schools in disadvantaged communities is therefore vital, and an ethos of inclusion is an essential dimension in this.

The conclusions mirror in many respects the findings of earlier research on effective schools in socio‐economically deprived communities. However, the paper also draws attention to the importance of developing and sustaining an ethos of inclusion in schools serving disadvantaged communities.

This paper reviews changing government policy on adult education in England over the past 20 years and the funding regimes affecting adult and community learning and union-led learning, which play a major role in learning opportunities for socially excluded adults.

A review and analysis of extant literature, informed by previous involvement in the sector and ongoing collaborations.

Two decades ago, adult education in England provided a variety of learning opportunities for people who either had limited qualifications or who needed to reskill for whatever reason. Access to those opportunities has been reduced just when it is most needed.

This is a review and viewpoint paper based on experience in England, the limitations of which are discussed in the concluding section. Notwithstanding the institutional specificities of adult education in England, many of the implications are generic and have wider relevance beyond this country context.

Economic recovery post-coronavirus (COVID) and Brexit will require more access to adult education so people can prepare for labour market re-integration. The practical implication of extending provision in adult education to support labour market integration of vulnerable workers is relevant to most countries.

This paper takes a holistic view of adult education, with particular attention to adult and community learning and union-led learning.

While many of the most widely used treatment interventions engage with the psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of addiction, some of the biological aspects can at times be neglected. It is increasingly being recognised that there is a close, exacerbating relationship between problematic substance use and poor nutrition.

This paper aims to show agential realism as the basis for a pertinent framework with regard to the entwined, on-going and interpretative aspects of knowledge.

The knowledge flow phenomenon in the form of entanglement and agential “cuts” within the workplace is studied and described across a phenomenological ethnographic case study of two workgroups within an aircraft engine manufacturing context.

The boundary construction phenomenon is a key process helping us to depict knowledge entanglement (tacit and explicit) across dialogue and non-verbal actions. Dialogue brings forth the aspect of knowledge as interpretations or “cuts.” A phenomenological analysis allows us to identify and describe various levels of tacit–explicit knowledge entanglement depending on the mode of coping at hand. Also highlighted was the importance of heuristics carried out by knowledge experts, often in the form of abduction (i.e. leading to rules of thumb).

It is acknowledged that the relatively narrow context of the empirical work limits the ability to generalize the findings and arguments. As such, additional work is required to investigate the validity of the findings across a wider spectrum of workgroup contexts.

Agential realism allows for the analysis of organizations as a world of practice and actions, whereby long-established categories can be requestioned and challenged with the aim of sharing the full richness and benefit of embodied knowledge between human actors.

Ethnographic descriptions of the entwined nature of tacit and explicit knowledge, the embodied and activity-based dimension of knowledge and learning, as well as the characteristic of knowledge as possession, correspond well to an agential realist concept of phenomenon, entanglement and cuts. Furthermore, agential realism offers the opportunity to view the workplace as individuals (or groups) who act out embodied tacit-explicit knowledge in conjunction with non-human entities (such as objects, as well as communication and information technologies), with the latter acting as enhancers of knowledge creation and sharing.

Knowledge management is shot through with complex questions. This is certainly the case with regard to boundaries, as they constitute both a bounding line that has to be crossed if the knowledge required for innovation is to be diffused and a form of protection for scientific and technological organisations and institutions. This examination of boundaries leads to a state-of-the-art review that begins with the question of knowledge transfer. The authors start with foundations of the knowledge dynamic within organisations. Nevertheless, certain gaps were identified in the theory, as it did not seem so easy to carry out transfers. This led in turn to attempts to identify the boundaries that were causing difficulties and that had to be crossed. This led to an examination of the role of boundaries. What status could boundaries have when knowledge was expanding enormously within communities? Finally, the authors come face-to-face with knowledge management systems that have tended to redefine the forms that boundaries take.

The paper uses a conceptual approach and is a meta analysis of the state-of-the-art review conducted to introduce the Special Issue “Knowledge Across Boundaries” JKM Volume 19, No. 5, 2015 (October).

The notions of transfer and boundary demonstrated their usefulness in the development of a new theory, namely the knowledge-based view. These concepts were then critiqued, with reference, first, to the contexts in which communication takes place and, second, to the cognitive dimensions of the activity. Finally, studies showed that the cognitive and organisational approaches can be linked and that they shed light on many knowledge-sharing situations. Boundaries are no longer the object of attention, the focus having switched to the collective process of creating new concepts.

This state-of-the-art review is limited to the papers about Management Science.

Knowledge hybridization is possible but must be referred to resources made available by the division of labour between disciplines (Shinn, 1997). Expansive learning (Engeström, 2010) is close to boundary construction (Holford, 2015) to indicate the dialectical view between instituting and instituted society (Castoriadis, 1975, 1987). We are now perhaps at the point of transition between the interest in “boundary spanners” and a new concern with “boundary construction”.

This paper introduces a methodology of knowledge transfer knowledge transfer in firms strategies of learning.

The paper provides the concept (with examples) of ‘boundary construction’.

The war cut off students in England from foreign countries at the same time as it awakened an increased interest in their affairs, and, compelling the inquirer to fall back on English or American resources in his studies, brought a realization of the deficiencies of our libraries. With the gradual re‐establishment of relations, it is worth assessing the situation revealed by the years of isolation, if only because this necessary task does not seem to be anybody's responsibility.

This paper proposes a dialogical approach for analyzing and presenting Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) data in organizational research.

The paper explores the story behind a story, showing how qualitative research can be fictionalized and reflexively framed in contemporary organizational settings, illustrated by IPA research conducted by the authors, into selection interviewing in Australia. Drawing from researchers' narrative notes that reflexively interpret interview data in narrative form, the data were re-interpreted in fictionalized dialogical form, enabling findings to be analyzed and presented more interactively.

The application of new interpretative techniques, like fictionalized dialogue, contributes to a richer interpretation of phenomena in qualitative organizational and management research, not limited to IPA studies.

Fictionalized dialogue brings to the surface an additional level of analysis that contributes to thematic analysis in a novel manner, also serving as a communicative tool.

THE appointment of a Vice‐Chancellor for the University of Warwick was announced towards the end of 1962. The Registrar was next appointed and then the librarian, who arrived on the scene in July 1963. The building which is described in this article was envisaged in a programme handed to the architects, Messrs. Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, early in December 1963.