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This study aims to adopt the institutional theory perspective to understand how institutional inconsistencies experienced by individuals translate into meaninglessness. Moreover, using the constructive development theory, it provides a plausible explanation to the enigma – why do some organizational members develop meaninglessness, while others do not?

This conceptual paper is based on a critical evaluation of extant literature that helped to develop the empirically testable propositions.

Grounded in the three types of mindsets as proposed in the constructive development theory, this paper suggests that, for socialized knowers, the degree of meaninglessness is directly related to the extent to which valued others perceive meaninglessness with respect to the institutional prescription creating a certain degree of inconsistency. The self-authoring knowers experience a higher degree of meaninglessness, if the alternative institutional prescriptions challenge the ones attached to their desired identity. While, the self-transforming knowers feel a higher level of meaninglessness, when they realize that the institutional inconsistency is strongly related to the experiences of others impacted by it.

This study adds a significant value to the streams of institutional and constructive development theories literature. It theorizes the variations in organizational members’ feeling of meaninglessness in the face of institutional inconsistencies while considering the shaping effects of field pressure and disposition. These propositions integrate the institutional theory and constructive development theory and present more socially acceptable justifications of the organizational members’ reaction of meaninglessness to institutional inconsistencies.

The most recent alteration in engineering technology education in South Africa is the establishment of a new degree qualification – Bachelor of Engineering Technology. The new qualification standards alone do not give a clear distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories. This lack of clarity about what knower the new programme is intended to produce is a stumbling block to educators who need to plan, develop and implement the new curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the intended knower dispositions for the new programme by carrying out a comparative analysis with the existing programme, thereby assisting curriculum designers particularly with development of effective scaffolding for engineering technology students.

In this paper, the authors conceptualise the intended knower dispositions for the new programme by carrying out a comparative analysis of the current and new exit-level outcomes. Each of the qualifications for the engineering technology programmes are comprehensively interpreted and analysed in this paper. This paper uses Bloom’s taxonomy and Luckett’s knowledge plane as lenses to perform the analysis and draw a distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories.

The analysis used in this paper suggests that the engineering technologist category exhibits a relative shift towards subjective and theoretical “ways of knowing”. It is found that the shift from practical ways of knowing to theoretical will evoke a shift from contextual to conceptual knowledge. The authors also flesh out how this shift could influence the new curriculum particularly with regard to developing effective scaffolding for engineering technology students. A useful tool for mapping these shifts in knowing is also established in this paper.

The most recent alteration in engineering technology education in South Africa is the establishment of the new Bachelor of Engineering Technology qualification. This qualification marks a paradigm shift in the nature of engineering technology education itself. In this paper, this paradigm shift is conceptualised. It is expected that the interpretation of the new qualification standards, and the influence of the shift in intended knower and exit-level outcomes on curriculum will be grappled with by engineering technology educators in South Africa in the coming years, as the new programmes are established around the country. This conceptual paper is significant because it marks the first work towards grappling these crucial and forthcoming issues in the country.

Purpose – To describe four instructional components teachers can use to help create more inclusive spaces for struggling readers: (a) language use, (b) repositioning struggling readers as primary knowers, (c) making struggling normal, and (d) creating reading partnerships.Design/methodology/approach – The chapter describes research findings from studies of middle grades students in English language arts, and theorizes work with struggling readers on the basis of identity theories, research about identifying and utilizing students’ own funds of knowledge, and research about the conditions for building reading self-efficacy, motivation, and engagement.Findings – Provides detailed descriptions of how teachers’ language use, reading partnerships, making struggling a normal part of reading processes, and helping struggling readers become full participants in classroom life, including models, examples, and interview data with middle grades struggling readers.Research limitations/implications – Adjusting teachers’ language use in discussions of how to read, using students’ knowledge of reading and other topics from outside of school, enabling collaboration through peer reading partnerships, and positioning all students to understand that struggling with reading is normal and not necessarily a sign of low ability.Practical implications – This is a valuable source for classroom teachers who are seeking successful strategies for engaging and supporting struggling readers while also creating a positive classroom environment for reading instruction in general.Originality/value of chapter – The environment a reading teacher creates, including the language that teacher uses, can have a powerful and positive impact on struggling readers’ classroom identities, self-efficacy, motivation, and ability to engage successfully with reading processes in school.

Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies.

Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances.

By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

Many studies document the importance of learner-centered active teaching to improve college students' critical engagement with challenging problems presented by our information-rich twenty-first-century environment. Others indicate that students from less privileged backgrounds often struggle even in well-designed classrooms. What is lacking is a mechanism for understanding these divergent outcomes and designing courses that better meet the needs of the diverse students in the college classroom. In this chapter, an argument is presented for understanding college student learning and curriculum design through the lenses of epistemological development and behaviors of learning. The consensus model presents descriptions of four epistemological stages, creating a framework to help classroom practitioners and administrators better understand the abilities of their students. The foundational assumption is that using appropriate curricular components will support student engagement and epistemological and self-regulation growth. To support this assumption, the model is accompanied by research-supported activities and strategies that benefit learners at different developmental stages and with different degrees of self-regulation. Moreover, intentional and reflective teaching has the potential to improve faculty understanding about the nature of learning and acceptance of learner-centered pedagogies, which will also have positive consequences for students. The end result will be a more inclusive learning environment with improved outcomes for a wider range of students.

Drawing upon the concepts of transmodernity, pluriversality and border thinking the author stands in a more practical fashion for the co-creation of an-other performative CMS which fosters the decolonization of (critical) management studies – as a way to contribute “to concretely changing the world(s) for the better” (as claimed by the organizers of the symposium “should critical management studies get anything done?” held at the Academy of Management Meeting in 2012 in Boston).

From a more practical and less opaque perspective on border thinking it is shown how and why border thinking can both enable and constrain critical scholars and people to move across the borders of the colonial difference and from Eurocentric modernity toward transmodern pluriversality.

The current performative turn of CMS fails to address the agency of critical knowledge as a potential reworking of Occidentalism which can be mobilized to “manage” the rise of alternatives and knowledges from the rest of the world in general and from emerging economies in particular.

Border thinking as a crucial concept from the coloniality/modernity research program from Latin America is taken as an important contribution from the colonial difference to the co-creation of decolonial management studies (DMS), an-other performative CMS which fosters the construction of a world in which many worlds and knowledges can coexist as a way to change it for the better.

The purpose of this paper is partly to complete Earl's framework, but more importantly to seek out the limits of what can be known and what cannot be known by each of the schools in his taxonomy, by addressing the absent epistemological foundation of what is being managed in his seven schools of knowledge management.

For each of the seven schools, the paper explores three related issues: the role of knowledge management systems in mediating between individual knowers and the community that needs to know; the context of Earl's knowledge management schools in terms of their focus on process and problems; and the consequences of the processes for identifying and validating knowledge.

Earl's framework survives this examination of its knowledge basis, suggesting that it is more robust, and captures more differences, than originally claimed. However, revelations about what can and cannot be known in each school suggest that knowledge management cannot be “done” until users and designers have greater sensitivity to the epistemological plasticity of what they purport to manage.

The paper's value lies in the re‐direction of knowledge management it suggests – a re‐direction away from technical solutions and towards examination of the epistemological and philosophical problems which are the chief reason for the continuing disappointment with knowledge management in many quarters.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a dynamic and integrative epistemology as a substitute to normative epistemology.

A philosophical argument based on the critique of literature.

Normative epistemology implies that knowing leads to certainty, and it has to be objective and universal because it is an accurate representation of reality. Dynamic and integrative epistemology uphold that knowing leads to accumulating insights though information processing. Knowing is a unified but fourfold process of experiencing, understanding, judging and acting (Lonergan, 1990). It occurs at four levels of consciousness: the empirical, the intellectual, the evaluative and the pragmatic (Lonergan, 1990). Dynamic and integrative epistemology extends rationality, knowledge and intelligence to non-humans because institutions have substantive, structural, behavior and teleological dimensions and processes that enable them to process information, i.e. to know.

Translating a conceptual paper into practical action, organizational structuring or product design can be difficult.

Extending the concept of rationality to non-humans implies realizing that human abilities are limited and need to be augmented by proper institutional design and artificial tools.

The design of intelligent organizations, societies and artificial tools.

Normative epistemology which considers reason and faith, empirical (experience) and rational (understanding), positive (facts) and ideal (principles, representations or wishes), physical (objects) and “mental” (ideas or concepts), practice and theory, knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa), reflection and action as opposed and mutually exclusive can be replaced by a dynamic and integrative epistemology which puts emotional, intellectual, evaluative and pragmatic dimensions of human knowing in an order of succession through a unified but yet differentiated process which can be augmented by non-human “experts”.

Some researchers claim that trust can directly affect knowledge sharing but others consider that it is a mediator between some independent variables and knowledge sharing. So the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether trust is a mediator for knowledge sharing in the construction industry.

Personal construct theory is employed to test the mediation role of trust in architectural design teams. A questionnaire survey of architects is conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Qingdao, People's Republic of China. The mediator model is tested using structural equation modeling.

The paper shows that the mediation role of trust between two personal construct based factors, i.e. social interaction (SI) and attitude on work (AttonW) and willingness to share knowledge is supported.

As the paper focusses on architects working in the early-design stage of a project, the findings may not be applicable to other stages. In future, other project actors should also be considered so as to investigate the issues in construction management in a more comprehensive way.

The results suggest that team managers should improve the SIs between team members and provide guidance to team members about the correct attitude on work so that the level of interpersonal trust can be enhanced, thereby knowledge sharing is encouraged.

The personal construct theory developed in clinical psychology is applied to study the mediation role of trust for knowledge sharing in the construction industry. The interdisciplinary research offers a theoretical framework to reveal the cognitive process of knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue, positioning the articles in relation to the current “turn to practice” within organisation and management studies.

The paper introduces a schematic classification of ways of putting practice at the centre of the concern of social scientists depending on the interest of the researcher and his/her position with regard to the object of the research.

The paper finds that turning to practice does not necessarily, or simply, equate with becoming more engaged, or with making social science relevant, or with moving social science closer to the practical concerns of separate practitioners. It is argued that the effort should be concentrated on developing a type of theory that helps practitioners articulate what they already do, and therefore somehow know. The model for this way of theorising would therefore be not physics or astronomy but rather grammar – a discipline that although just as old, has been based traditionally on a very different relationship between knower and known.

The paper argues that when conceived after a grammatical model, “theory” may become a resource to be used in action and for action to produce emancipatory awareness and trigger change through critical reflection.

The papers in this special issue constitute an initial contribution in this direction as they indicate different ways in which theory, when developed “with” and “amid” and not “for” or even “about” practitioners, may become a powerful trigger of change and transformation.