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This chapter outlines key areas of literature and policy that have influenced or affected our research on the comparative study of adult education. Policy influences include the growth of lifelong learning within a neoliberal framing since the 1990s and the rise of ‘evidence-based’ approaches with a narrow reliance on quantitative data. Much of our work has been inspired by the need to critique these trends, adopt broader approaches to lifelong learning and defend the more democratic traditions of adult education. Important areas of theoretical inspiration, many of which interrogate these policy developments, are also outlined. The critical reinterpretation of historical adult education practices is another important area of work and inspiration. In relation to sustainability, we have been influenced particularly by the capabilities approach.

The purpose of this paper is to set focus on, and discuss the concept of knowledge, and show how the interrelations between knowledge and other concepts, such as learning, have become a decisive element in managing human resources and firm performance.

The dimensions of knowledge management are identified and related to learning, organizational configurations, human resources management and institutional environments in order to identify and percent the most important approaches to knowledge management and the development over time.

Creating, transforming and utilizing various kinds of knowledge as a firm‐specific asset is a very important element of firm competitiveness and innovative performance. In managing knowledge learning and innovation learning approaches are central. The paper identifies various approaches to learning and strategies to innovation and illustrates how combinations of these might benefit firm performance. It also stresses the preconditions of employee involvement and participation to knowledge management and not least the importance of interaction with environmental resources. To improve performance firms should be aware of the importance of deliberately combining various approaches to innovation and learning in order to include a maximum of actors as sources in building knowledge assets and strategies.

Most of the empirical examples are from private sector enterprises, even though the theoretical arguments should also be valid for the public sector.

The paper relates knowledge management to theoretical approaches on learning, organization and innovation and shows the growing importance of these constructs in firm performance.

Standardisation in education is an ambiguous process. Standards of time, measurement, technology and other aspects have evolved historically as basic preconditions for social life and communication, in education as well as in society at large. But excessive standardisation, especially in domains of culture and knowledge, often works as cultural and symbolic violence, undermining the qualities of education and learning situations. This chapter investigates these ambiguities, presenting concepts of standards and standardisation and developing their implications for education through selected theoretical contributions and empirical cases. The theoretical contributions include Berger and Luckmann's constructivist sociology of knowledge, Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital and Habermas' theory of communicative action. The empirical cases include the processes of centralisation and standardisation of education in the United States and the process of standardisation in European higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on knowledge management in the firm.

The papers presented are all contributions dealing with knowledge in the firm.

This special issue is part of the scientific response to the increasing importance of knowledge and learning.

The papers in this issue provide a range of well‐documented responses to these methodological challenges, examples that may serve as inspiration for continued methodological development.

This study aims to examine the effect of organizational relationship style (employees' relationships with colleagues, supervisors, and the organization) on the sharing of knowledge in high‐tech companies; it goes on to determine which particular relationship style is the most important in accounting for the extent of knowledge sharing in these companies.

The study uses a quantitative approach. Research hypotheses are tested by statistical methods including Pearson Correlation and Structural Equation Modeling. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed, of which 182 valid questionnaires were returned (a 61 percent response).

An organization should establish, and maintain, relationships between employees to improve the sharing of knowledge within the organization, ensure a high interaction between employees, and create well‐arranged knowledge resources for the organization.

The research shows that managers in the high‐tech industry need to pay more attention to the interaction among organizational members. The relationship of an employee with the organization, supervisor and colleagues, and thus the willingness to share knowledge, can be improved via job rotation, implementation of a mentoring system, and role‐playing activities.

The significant findings of the study relate to high‐tech industry in Taiwan. The proposed model can be replicated in other industrial and country settings in order to test its generality.

The purpose of this study was to examine the antecedent, perception of the external environment, and its relationship to organizational learning, as well as explore the relationships between organizational learning and innovation performance at two levels, including individual and organizational‐level innovation performance.

Questionnaire data were collected from 268 senior R&D project team members who reported their perception about the external environment and organizational learning along with 83 R&D managers who evaluated their employees' innovative behaviors.

The results indicated that the antecedent of organizational learning, perception of external environment, was significant to organizational learning, and organizational learning was significant to both individual and organization‐level innovation performance and contributed more to the individual‐level than organizational innovation performance.

The value of the study lies in its contributions to the scholarly literature on organizational learning and innovation because examining the antecedent perception of the external environment and the relationships between organizational learning and innovation performance as well as the relationship between individual and organizational‐level innovation performance have not received considerable empirical attention.

This is a case study paper. A major research goal of this study is to extend the existing theories of learning organization put forth in the 4I model by adding more complicated ideas to it. One minor goal of this research is to show that the first stage of organizational learning, “intuiting”, is the hardest to implement when starting a learning organization. Particular attention should be paid to this step, and with the addition of adult learning theory, the possibility of facing a negative situation should be reduced. A second less important goal is to explain how to assess organizational learning, and how the flow of single‐ and double‐loop learning takes place within a learning organization.

This study adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative survey methods to study the effectiveness of the new mode of transformational activity practiced in Firm A.

Statistical evidence showed that the practice was successful. It solved the issue that expertise and top managers mostly protest against learning.

This paper brings a new and more adaptive perspective for building a learning organization upon existing organizational learning theories. Through this case study, the integration and transformation from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, intuition to institution (the 4i model), and individual level to organizational level are illustrated. The practices of single‐loop and double‐loop learning are also well depicted by this study.

The aim of this study is to examine whether the relationship between knowledge management (KM) strategy and firm performance is contingent on human resource management (HRM) control systems.

Surveys were collected in computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing industries in Taiwan. A total of 111 presidents returned usable questionnaires.

When firms emphasize personalization strategy, the use of behavior control will enhance firm performance. In contrast, when firms emphasize codification strategy, the use of output control will make firm performance better. If personalization and codification strategy were emphasized simultaneously, firms would not use single HRM control system to better performance.

First, the use of a self‐rating performance measure may constitute a limitation of the study. Second, this study is confined to a limited scope of control system. Third, perhaps the most obvious limitation is inherent to the selected research methodology that the one‐time data resemble a snapshot. Finally, it is not known how the selection of industries and geographical areas affect this study's findings.

Results from this study suggest that managers can leverage their best performance by matching the HRM control system to a particular KM strategy.

This study contributes to the knowledge about the importance of HRM control for KM methods. The firm's HRM control systems can be expected to contribute significantly to KM‐performance. Understanding how an organization can use its control systems to support KM will help firms sustain their competitive advantage.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate organizational development projects considered as ways of implementing new methods – technologies and ways of organizing work in organizations.

The empirical study presents four organizational development projects (covering the organizations as a whole) run by four Danish upper secondary schools (“gymnasium”). The study included questionnaires as well as interviews with the management and staff, as well as a survey of selected written materials and documents.

The empirical study offers a description of the activities actually organized by the projects, as well as the various ways in which different groupings among the staff and the management are relating to the project. A special focus is directed towards the different perspectives on the projects established by the staff and the management and what consequences these different perspectives have on what is actually learned. Another finding is the weak links that exist between what is known by the staff as “ordinary problems” of the organizations and the objectives and goals of the development projects.

The possible transformation of management emerging through the development projects, should be outlined and discussed in an open and explicit manner instead of constituting a hidden – and often highly controversial – agenda for the projects.

A typology of development projects is presented and discussed as a tool to describe and understand different ways of framing organizational learning processes. The study also points out a possible relation between loosely coupled organizations (Weick, 1976; Brunsson, 2003) and the learning outcome of organizational development projects.

The purpose of this research is to assess the validity and reliability of the measurement scores related to the learning organization culture, the Dimensions of Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ), in an Iranian context. This research can contribute to the growing literature of learning in organizations.

The data were collected through distributing questionnaires to 54 service firms and manufacturing companies in ten major cities of Iran during the third quarter of 2010. Rigorous translation procedures, including both forward and backward processes, have been used to guarantee the relevance of this instrumentation in different cultural contexts. Confirmatory factor analysis, simple item‐internal consistency estimates, and item inter‐correlation analysis were performed to test the validity of DLOQ.

There are five positional limitations. First, this study relies on self‐report and different perceptions of questions can bring about percept‐percept bias. Second, the nature of this research is cross‐sectional which may cause causality among variables. Third, the various organizational levels in the questionnaire can render some misinterpretations while answering the questions. Furthermore, the length of the original questionnaire (43 questions) could cause lack of concentration and boredom, which in turn, can impact the results. Last, two constructs related to performance (knowledge and financial performance) in the questionnaire were omitted.

This study confirms, according to some statistical results, that the Iranian version of DLOQ has produced reliable measurement scores with the construct validity sufficient to measure the learning organization culture in the Iranian context.