Search results

Nursing has for a long time used a variety of technological tools to improve and support patient care. Tool use changes knowledge processes, offering opportunities to explore processes of specialization in this field. The purpose of this paper is to report from a collaborative process to achieve shared meaning potential while adapting a generic learning tool to meet learning needs of specialized nursing. A complex chain of actions, interactions and negotiations during the adaptation process is disentangled. The paper draws from the theoretical construct known as trajectories of participation.

The method employed in data analysis is interaction analysis, allowing detailed studies of the actions represented in the participants' intersecting trajectories.

The analysis shows how project members seek to combine different modes of knowledge when they sort out and establish shared meaning potential. Typically the negotiations start with a concrete problem arising from the current practice's use of tools. The participants clarify and specify a shared object of activity by mobilizing three different modes of knowledge (practical, diagnostic and technical). During this process, the participants' trajectories converge toward consensus. This consensus is a process of constructing and reconstructing tools and practices and an interdependency of tools and practices that is “materialized” in the adapted learning tool.

This analysis shows the importance of taking account of processes in the concrete settings when developing new tools for change in specialist nursing. Different trajectories of participation that intersected in the planning activities give insight into how knowledge is mobilized when tools and practices co-evolve on an interactional level.

This chapter takes as its focus a series of issues related to participation and the World Bank. First, it traces from 1980 to the present the trajectory within the Bank of thinking related to participation in development generally. Second, it unpacks the framework within which that thinking has been crystallized – namely, the Framework for Service Provision (FSP) delineated in the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People. Third, it shows how the work done by the Bank in the education sector has both paralleled and furthered the concepts embedded in the FSP. Focusing on the education sector is essential because it is the sector in which the Bank has perhaps been most active in theorizing and most successful in implementing its conception of participation. As the chapter shows, a particular approach to decentralization is central to the way the Bank advances that conception of participation and to the way that it supports the realization of participation in practice, both generally and with regard to education governance. Lastly, the chapter reviews and discusses the results of Bank-supported education decentralization projects in light of the theory elaborated to promote them.

The Wikipedia (2008) entry for mathematical sociology cites four books with ‘mathematical sociology’ in the title: Coleman (1964), Fararo (1973), Leik and Meeker (1975) and Bonacich (2008). Fararo (1973, pp. 764–766) provides a guide to the literature in mathematical sociology covering journals, bibliographies, reviews and expository essays, readers, texts, original monographs and research papers. Many of the references are either broader than mathematical sociology, for example, concerning the behavioural sciences in general, or narrower, dealing with a particular topic within sociology, or concerning a related field such as social psychology. Three classical original monographs are identified: Dodd (1942), Zipf (1949) and Rashevsky (1951). Included in a second generation of monographs is Coleman's (1964) ‘An Introduction to Mathematical Sociology’. Could it be that this is the first use of the phrase ‘mathematical sociology’?

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of a newcomer to the practice of policing to explore conceptualisations of learning through practice. It aims to position learning as the intersections of trajectories of being and becoming within a community of practice. The paper seeks to argue that learners need to be understood with respect to their personal histories and how these interact with the social and cultural dimensions of the workplace.

This paper is a case study of a new police officer with data collected through a series of interviews and observations over a two‐year period.

The case study presented demonstrates the relationship between prior experience, personal histories, participation and a sense of belonging in shaping the learning of early‐career police officers. It suggests that in considering newcomers to the workplace it is important to view the process of learning as being influence by these interconnected factors.

This study concludes that the position of the individual in the social learning of a community of practice is an important aspect that needs further exploration. Although the significance of learner identity with communities of practice is acknowledged by Lave and Wenger it remains underdeveloped, and continues to present as an area for further research.

Trajectories of learning for newcomers to the workplace are affected by their previous social and cultural experiences and expertise, the association that they bring from these to the new community and participation in practices of the community. There exists, therefore, a role for managers in shaping the organisation to be supportive of these informal learning experience and, thus, the selection and training of managers should be aligned to these goals.

This paper extends current understandings of learning and development in the policing context as well as contributing to the broader discussion of informal learning in the workplace and understanding of experts and novices within communities of practice.

Over the last 50 years the social legitimacy of public relations has improved by standardising and monitoring the education and training of its practitioners. While successful in developing a professional development trajectory from novice to competent practitioner, the profession has struggled to fully understand the development trajectory of its senior public relations practitioners. The diversity of occupational contexts in which public relations is practised, the condition of professional seniority and the knowledge and tools required for working at occupational boundaries is challenging for senior public relations practitioners. It is also a challenge therefore, for the profession to develop and support the learning required for senior practice beyond competency frameworks. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper employs socio-cultural learning theory and supporting empirical evidence gained in semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners in the field to explore what senior practice entails and how senior professionals learn.

Communities of practice is useful for understanding novice practitioner learning but has insufficient explanatory power for understanding senior practitioner learning. There is an urgent need for support for senior public relations learning that moves beyond reified competency frameworks and enables senior practitioners to function autonomously outside the core community of practice. Seniority requires its learners to embrace uncertainty and confront the challenge of creating new knowledges and in the everyday practices of their professional lives.

“Communities of practice” has been influential in the fields of management and organisations (Bolisani and Scarso, 2014). This paper employs the idea of a learning process that takes place in “constellations of practices” (Wenger, 1998) to offer a view of senior practice as boundary dwelling (Engestrom, 2009) rather than boundary spanning and learning as situated (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the liminal spaces those boundaries provide.

Set theory provides a foundational approach to mathematics, and mathematics provides an abstract way of looking at social reality. The first section presents some of the elementary concepts of set theory. The second section presents a variety of examples of social reality and shows how the abstract features of reality can be modelled by set theory. The third section shows how set theory can provide a way of looking at the accounts of social reality presented in humanities disciplines such as history and literature. The fourth section briefly indicates how set theory and the concept of a structure provide a foundational approach to mathematics. The fifth section looks at the debates surrounding realism and, albeit warily, espouses mathematical social science realism.

There is a great deal of research examining the factors that lead people to start protesting in their youth, but little work has been done on first-time protesters later in life. In this research we examine these “late bloomers,” those who protest for the first time later in life, to see if and how they differ from those who protest at different periods in life. We use data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Survey, which is a panel study of people in four waves from 1965 to 1997. We find, of the people who protested later in life, half had never protested previously. Additionally, there are significant differences between people who never protested, people who only protested early in life, people who protested repeatedly throughout life, and those who protested for the first time later in life. The latter group is more likely to attend church more, never have been married, and have lower incomes than people who protested early in life and then did not protest again. Late Bloomers are also more likely less educated and to be Independents than Democrats compared to the Repeat Protesters. This research adds to contemporary research examining differential protest participation patterns.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are increasingly being created to facilitate knowledge mobilization in organizations. This paper aims to elucidate an underexplored aspect of participation in mandated CoPs – identity reconciliation. Specifically, the authors explore how actors reconcile their existing identities with becoming members of new knowledge mobilization CoPs.

The authors conducted a longitudinal qualitative case study over a 12-month period to explore identity reconciliation practices during the formation of the “ED CoP” – mandated by policymakers to mobilize knowledge between process improvement advisors and clinicians from various hospitals. Observation and interviews allowed us to uncover “front stage” and “backstage” practices of identity reconciliation.

The findings reveal two key unexpected modes of identity reconciliation – “distancing” and “peripheral lurking”. These modes resulted in different trajectories of participation of two of the key participant groups – “veteran” improvement advisors and “veteran” clinicians.

Different modes of identity reconciliation of different participants impact the formation of CoPs and how knowledge mobilization occurs within them. This paper offers a sensitizing lens for practitioners creating CoPs which enhances awareness of hidden identity practices, and recommendations to enable practitioners to effectively facilitate CoP formation.

This study suggests that identity reconciliation is an integral aspect of CoP formation, and essential for knowledge mobilization within CoPs. Whereas studies on CoPs in the knowledge management literature have mostly assumed that collaboration produces beneficial knowledge mobilization outcomes, the findings build a more nuanced picture of the processes involved in producing these outcomes.

Mathematics is associated with abstraction, generality, and simplicity, whereas reality is associated with specificity and complexity. Because of this, it might be argued that the humanities disciplines are better than mathematics at providing accounts of the history of societies and the lives of individuals. The aim here is to counter this argument by presenting a mathematical account of a specific complex social reality. This is in accordance with recent appeals to peace scientists to engage with scholars in history and other humanities disciplines. Here, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is studied. The advantage of studying this piece is that the set of events is sufficiently complex to present a challenge to the modeler and yet sufficiently circumscribed to allow a reasonable coverage of the entire reality within the space of a paper.

The play is analyzed in terms of mathematical social science concepts. The analysis considers how people and groups participate in within-group and between-group activities over space and time. The value and power relationships in the activities are analyzed and the following concepts are deployed: roles, rules, hierarchy, anarchy, social divisions, and inequality. Some of the activities involve movement through space-time, and the set of movements can give rise to encounters. These may or may not be planned, and so alternative histories are in play. The analysis then switches to a more detailed level, and dialogic expressions of power relationships are noted. Finally, the logical structure of beliefs and dialogue is analyzed using “dynamic social propositional calculus.”

Many initiatives are seeking to engage children in learning to code. However, few studies have examined how children’s engagement in learning and using coding develops over time. This study aims to seek young people’s perspectives on what they viewed as important in their long-term participation in a coding community.

This study identified youth with a high level of participation and who demonstrated emergent leadership in the Scratch online community. Using methods from qualitative research on youth development, individual interviews were conducted in which these youth were asked about memorable moments in their participation and how these experiences influenced them.

While each young person described a unique pathway and perspective, this study identified key experiences that motivated their participation, influenced their development and inspired their emergent leadership. These experiences included opportunities to learn through exploration, to receive feedback from peers, to engage in creative collaboration and to contribute to the community.

This study discussed these findings in light of previous research on youth development, and it suggests that building on practices and principles from research on youth programs can help more young people become engaged in developing broader skills with coding.

Youth highlighted experiences that enabled them to express their ideas, to build relationships, to help others and to see themselves in new ways. Their perspectives expand beyond the predominant focus of coding initiatives on computational thinking and problem-solving skills to also support social, leadership and identity development.