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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.

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.

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.

The purpose of the article is to aid the reader in understanding the knowledge claims in different forms of action research and to see what kind of “turn to practice” is required in research on organising, organisational learning, and management.

A conceptual framework extracted from the philosophy of Aristotle is presented for understanding the knowledge claims of action research in relation to other approaches.

Some form of action research should be pursued, but action research is a label covering many different approaches suggesting different ways of relating knowledge and action.

In order to provide valid, practicable knowledge both action research and mainstream research need to reconfigure and sort things better. The call is for doing more organizational research as “praxis research” as part of late modern, socially distributed knowledge production modes.

The required reconfiguration of organizational research also requires systematic organizational learning in work organizations.

Providing a conceptual framework that is able to grasp the different knowledge forms operating under socially distributed “mode 2” conditions, and to point out required implications for both research and practice, is new.

The purpose of this paper is to question the idea of “passing a test” within activist ethnography. Activist ethnography is an ethnographic engagement with social movement organizations as anti-authoritarian, anarchist, feminist and/or anti-racist collectives. It is based on the personal situating of the researcher within the field to avoid a replication of colonialist research dynamics. Addressing these concerns, we explore activist ethnography through feminist standpoint epistemologies and decolonial perspectives.

This paper draws on our two activist ethnographies conducted as PhD research in two distinct European cities with two different starting points. While Léa entered the field through her PhD research, Claire partly withdrew and re-entered as academic.

Even when activist researchers share the political positioning of the social movement they want to study, they still experience tests regarding their research methodology. As activists, they are accountable to their movement and experience – as most other activist – a constant threat of exclusion. In addition, activist networks are fractured along political lines, the test is therefore ongoing.

Our contribution is threefold. First, the understanding of tests within activist ethnography helps decolonizing ethnography. Being both the knower and the known, activist ethnographers reflect on the colonial and heterosexist history of ethnography which offers potentials to use ethnography in non-exploitative ways. Second, we conceive of activist ethnography as a prefigurative methodology, i.e. as an embedded activist practice, that should therefore answer to the same tests as any other practice of prefigurative movements: it should aim to enact here and now the type of society the movement reaches for. Finally, we argue that activist ethnography relies on and contribute to developing consciousness about the researcher’s political subjectivity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the knowledge work discourse has been transformed from a celebration of those who create knowledge to one of leaden prescription to purposively separate the knowledge from the knower.

The approach takes the form of genealogical discourse analysis of the dominant and alternative knowledge work discourses.

From its earliest conceptions, knowledge work as a discourse was conceived as creating a new class of worker who was highly educated, motivated and financially aspirational. Through alignment with significant discourses from such fields of knowledge as economics, the law and technology, knowledge has become an organisational asset, to be secured by technology and protected by law even from those who created it. Discursive transformation shows that knowledge work and those who perform it – the knowledge workers – have become marginalised in the discourses until they have virtually disappeared altogether.

As a conceptual paper, the analysis does not address an empirical research frame. However, the paper illustrates how power is implicated in all aspects of the knowledge work discourse.

The paper identifies how power relations are implicit in organisational discourses of knowledge work. Knowledge is seen to be central to studies of organisations, economics and globalisation, yet human beings as creators of knowledge have been marginalised in the knowledge discourses.