Search results

This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.

The intention of this paper is: first, to raise awareness in organizations of the ubiquitous nature of thinking in teams and informal groups; second, to provide the reader with conceptual tools for understanding the subtle dynamics of “team‐level” thinking; and third, to offer some practical suggestions to leaders and consultants on ways of actively working to increase the quality of collective thinking in work places.

The paper is largely theoretical and extends current theory about the utilization of knowledge and intelligence in teams and organizations.

The four core elements to effective collective thinking are proposed as: shared clarity of purpose; emotionally and psychologically mature functioning on the part of key players; the necessity for psychologically safe “thinking spaces”; and shared responsibility for building, maintaining and utilizing the thinking space. It is further proposed that many essential influences on collective thinking exist outside the usual limits of awareness – that is, they occur as unconscious processes – and so developing powerful collective thinking requires that attention be paid to symbolic, non‐rational and intuitive patterns in teams and organizations.

The paper provides theoretical and practical frameworks that enable members of organizations directly address factors influencing the quality of collective thinking in the systems in which they are involved.

The fresh contribution of this paper is largely that it integrates intuitive, subtle and unconscious dynamics with rational logical principles so as to create powerful new principles to enable leaders and consultants to enhance organizational effectiveness.

To convey the findings of an investigation into the relationship between poetry and business thinking, which began with the hypothesis that regular reading and analysis of poetry and its levels of meaning, subtle verbal and nonverbal contextual nuances, emotional content, and required associative thinking will help people deal with ambiguity, delay closure on decisions, and result in more systemic thinking and in better business decisions.

The research and workshops indicate that reading poetry can expand thinking space by enhancing associative thinking and access to preconceptual areas.

The findings are based on extensive interdisciplinary research and a small number of seminars and workshops. No formal studies have yet been conducted.

This provides a way to open thinking spaces that may be often unused by the business strategist, and that can lead to better decisions. By focusing on how executives can refine their thinking abilities to take them beyond the ordinary limits of cause‐and‐effect approaches, encourages the application of those radical judgments that can help differentiate one organization from another.

The authors believe they are the first to explore this relationship between reading poetry and business thinking.

This paper aims to establish a theoretic framework to provide a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects, their existence and their identification scheme while providing a connection between cyber-enabled spaces and cyberspace. It develops an avenue to quantify general philosophical and theoretical questions, precisely, inherently spatial basis that produces an unprecedented space–time continuum, in which cyber-enabled relations evolve.

Multidisciplinary theoretical approaches are needed to describe complex systems, which in this paper are integrated in a quest for the principles underlying the structural organization and dynamics of cyberspace. A theoretic framework is presented, and the spatial conception of cyber-enabled physical, social, information and thinking spaces and entities existence are provided.

With spatial objects and spatial properties, cyberspace is inherently spatial. Its basic constructs are founded on its spatial qualities and producing radical space–time compression, cyber-enabled spaces in which dynamic relations develop and thrive. The cyberspatial object operations are primarily built on foundations that depend on physical space and other spatial metaphors. Information space, basically missing in the literature, is an important part of cyberspace.

This work suggested a novel analytical approach to describing cyberspace from broader perspectives and fields. Due to the novelty and divergence of cyber concepts, an interdisciplinary study and methodology are needed. Thus, more research toward theoretical direction could help many of the practical implementations of concepts.

The research is of particular significance in cyberspatial mechanics to describe the dynamics and behavior of cyber physical systems. For example, object-based analysis functions like spatial query, node pattern analysis, cluster analysis, spatial similarity analysis and location modeling.

Complementing the existing literature and defining information space to the research sphere, a theoretical framework providing a fundamental understanding of cyberspatial objects and the general cyberspace foundation has been proposed, resulting in a formalized concept of existence, interactions and applications and services, with respect to philosophy, science and technology, respectively.

The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizational spacing. Through the concept of affective space, it highlights those elements that are ephemeral and elusive – like affect, aesthetics, atmosphere, intensity, moods – and proposes to explore affect as spatialized and space as affective.

Fluidity is proposed as a conceptual lens that sits at the conjunction of space and affect, highlighting both the movement in time and space, and the mutable relationships that the capacity of affecting and being affected weaves. It experiments with “writing differently” in affective ethnography, thus performing the space of representation of affective space.

The article enriches the alternative to a conceptualization of organizations as stable entities, considering organizing in its spatial fluidity and in being a fragmented, affective and dispersed phenomenon.

The article's writing is an example of intertextuality constructed through five praxiographic stories that illustrate the multiple fluidity of affective spacing in terms of temporal fluidity, fluidity of boundaries, of participation, of the object of practice, and atmospheric fluidity.

The purpose of this paper is to use spatial thinking (space-time) as a lens through which to examine the ways in which the socio-economic conditions and values of the post-Fordist academy work to diminish and even subsume the immaterial affective labour of librarians even as it serves to reproduce the academy.

The research question informing this paper asks, In what ways does spatial thinking help us to better understand the immaterial, invisible and gendered labour of academic librarians' public service work in the context of the post-Fordist university? This question is explored using a conceptual approach and a review of recent library information science (LIS) literature that situates the academic library in the post-Fordist knowledge economy.

The findings suggest that the feminized and gendered immaterial labour of public service work in academic libraries – a form of reproductive labour – remains invisible and undervalued in the post-Fordist university, and that academic libraries function as a procreative, feminized spaces.

Spatial thinking offers a corrective to the tendency in LIS to foreground time over space. It affords new insights into the spatial and temporal aspects of information work in the global neoliberal knowledge economy and suggests a new spatio-temporal imaginary of the post-Fordist academic library as a site of waged work.

The purpose of this paper is to report the impact of an online simulation that was designed to provide pre‐service teachers with experience in dealing with complex classroom situations associated with the teaching of literacy.

A developmental approach to the research was used. This is also known as “design research” “design experiment” or “formative research” and involved four phases: analysis of the practical problem; development of solutions within a theoretical framework; evaluation and testing of solutions; documentation and reflection to produce “design principles”.

Trials were conducted with five iterations of this software. The findings reveal that the online simulation provides pre‐service teachers with time to think critically about complex classroom situations which rely on the teacher's ability to respond to children's experiences, engage with them in meaningful dialogue and negotiation as well as utilise a range of indirect instructions such as questioning, modelling and prompting.

At this stage of the research the authors are confident that the design principles operationalised, combined with access to a large pool of authentic data, helped to design a simulation that contributed to the development of pre‐service teacher understanding of the complex work of teachers.

Reports the impact of an online classroom simulation.

The paper aims to study the effects of the combination of synchronous Web-based teaching with visually creative teaching on art students’ creativity. The twenty-first century is the society of information technology and knowledge-based economy. To cope with the information society, teaching methods would be changed. Traditional chalk and talk can no longer adapt to the changing society. In addition to passing down the tradition, new ideas should also be introduced. In the informational age, the internet becomes an essential living element and synchronous Web-based teaching breaks through the obstacle of space, provides instant and multiple communication channels and creates alternative creativity learning environment.

With experimental design, totally, 208 students in Fujian University of Technology, as the research objects, were led to a 15-week (3 hours per week for total 45 hours) experimental teaching. The study uses analysis of variance for discussing the effect of synchronous Web-based teaching on art students’ creativity and further understanding the effect of the combination of synchronous Web-based teaching with visually creative teaching on art students’ creativity.

The research results show significant effects of synchronous Web-based teaching on creativity, visually creative teaching on creativity and the combination of synchronous Web-based teaching with visually creative teaching on the promotion of creativity.

First, the sample size taken in this study was not large enough to fully reflect the results of the study. The survey sample didn’t cover all the major cities in China, which had a small coverage and couldn’t reflect the research situation of the whole country. Second, the evaluation criteria for artistic students’ creativity were too broad. More specific evaluation rules should be set and the creativity standards should be graded to better guide the implementation of art courses and the cultivation of students’ creativity.

The synchronous Web-based learning environment provides favorable individual thinking space to effectively reduce disturbance among classmates. Synchronous Web-based teaching shares sound, pictures and even films with each other to enrich the learning media. What is more, teachers would be more convenient and fast to deal with materials or handouts or rapidly updating materials and avoiding the loss of handouts.

This paper studied the effects of the combination of synchronous Web-based teaching with visually creative teaching on art students’ creativity, which was a meaningful and innovative topic. And this study can provide more enlightenment and reference for future education.

The purpose of this paper is to address the possible future evolution of innovation from a human-only initiative, to human–machine co-innovation, to autonomous machine innovation and to arrive at a conceptual mind model that outlines the role of innovation regimes and innovation agents.

This is a concept paper where a theoretical “thought experiment” is done, using future thinking principles and data that originate from the literature.

A conceptual mind model is developed to facilitate a better understanding of complexity at the edge of innovation where intelligent machines will emerge as innovators of the cyber world. It was found that innovation will gradually evolve from a human-only activity, to human–machine co-innovation, to incidences of autonomous machine innovation, based on the growth of machine intelligence and the adoption of human–machine partnership management models in future.

Very little information is available in the literature on intelligent machines doing innovation. The work is based on a theoretical approach that presents new concepts to be debated, but have not been tested in engineering and technology management practice, except for a conference presentation and academic discussion.

The current world view is that future “smartness” is only possible through the creative abilities that humans have, but as machines are entering the workplace and our daily lives, not only as static robots on a manufacturing line, but as intelligent systems with the potential to replace lawyers and accountants, doctors and teachers, companions and partners, their role in innovation in complex environments needs to be explored.

Human–machine interaction is often an emotional social issue of concern in terms of the replacement of human intelligence with machine intelligence. It should be asked whether humans will or should remain in control of innovation? Artificial intelligence (AI) may complement and even substitute human intelligence, but huge value is embedded in the new goods, services and innovations AI will enable, especially in manufacturing, where value embedded in the project becomes complex and dynamic.

The thinking presented in this paper is original and should lead to debate to question the way innovation systems will work in future and inspires thinking about AI and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an independent, solution‐focused evaluation of the Expert Internal Coach program, accredited at level 5 by the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) and delivered to managers at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust.

Explains the reasons for the program, the form it took and the results it has achieved.

Reveals that the program is designed to give participants a solid foundation in core coaching skills, to increase their knowledge and confidence so that they can create an internal team of coaches in the organization – one that can provide a confident, credible, ethical and professional service to support improved performance, change and leadership development.

Describes how the program gives participants a better appreciation of their personal style and the capacity to implement this immediately in the organization.

Highlights how employees' new skills are helping Croydon Health Services NHS Trust to provide a more individual service to patients.

Explains that the program has made a significant impact at individual level and the building blocks are in place to move towards provision of a more formalized internal‐coaching service at Croydon.