Category: Lancaster PhD

Culture as Organizational Learning

I have always struggled to understand the concept of organizational learning. After all, how can an insentient thing be said to learn? This is particularly ironic, as I often refer to myself as working in the area of adult and organizational learning.

Quite a timely piece, but I just read and have been discussing an article by Scott D. N. Cook and Dvora Yanow (1993), Culture and Organizational Learning.  In it, they focus on the learning that occurs within organizations as a facet of organizational cultural:

We hold that learning can indeed be done by organizations, that this phenomenon is neither conceptually nor empirically the same as either learning by individuals or individual learning within organizations; and that to understand organizational learning as learning by organizations, theorists and practitioners need to see organizations not primarily as cognitive entities but as cultural ones (pg. 374).

They go on to define organizational learning as:

the acquiring, sustaining, or changing of intersubjective meanings through the artifactual [sic] vehicles of their expression and transmission and the collective actions of the group (pg. 384).

Never thought about it in this perspective.

Research Ideas Redux; Feedback, Anybody?

I am gathering ideas for my next research paper that I have to write in the next month and a half for my doctoral program, and have come up with these ideas after trying to flesh out the initial ones I discussed.

These are the four ideas I am floating; I hope to have something narrowed down by the end of the week so I can start to work on the design. As a recurring theme in my work, these are all within the area of autoethnographic methodology / writing or processing one’s experience in autobiographic / life history methods:

  1. Interview some people who engage in autoethnographic research (cf. Ellis) to see what role, if any, communities of practice play in their lives in this research.
  2. Engaging in narrative inquiry (cf. Clandinin and Connelly) to explore how people engaged in autoethnographic research engage in publicly defining or frame their own identities (cf. Goffman? Bedford and Snow?).
  3. Explore how these researchers navigate their own professional identities through using this contested methodology.
  4. Try to understand if autoethnographic inquiry led to any transformative learning (cf. Mezirow), or if perhaps a transformative experience led to autoethnography (Freire?).

Lightbulb

Any thoughts are most appreciated.

Dilbert, Tacit Knowledge, and Bridging Epistemologies

As I am finally getting back to my doctoral work and reflections after dropping everything this past weekend to attend to an article rewrite (that was finally submitted and accepted–hurray!), I am not playing catch up with my studies and processing my learning and thinking.

Last week, when I commented on the article Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing, I mentioned how I liked the model for Knowledge and Knowing. With further reflection on this, I recalled a favorite Dilbert comic:

dilbert-quantifier

I think about this image in that, for me, it is all about trying to quantify the tacit knowledge. Formerly working in the area of knowledge management, I know how tough (nearly impossible) it can be, especially given issues of organizational power and positionality.

Thinking more about this, I wonder if tacit knowledge is just another way of thinking about qualitative knowledge?

Feedback: First Doctoral Paper

I just received my provisional feedback on my first doctoral assignment at Lancaster University. My traditional research paper (completed in 5 weeks: research design and all!) was entitled Educational Explorations of Autoethnographic Inquiry: A Case Study of the Goals and Experiences of Three Educators, and in it I interviewed three individuals who are involved in higher education and who engage in autoethnographic inquiry.

What I particularly liked about the paper’s feedback was what my tutor targeted toward my final section, Personal Learnings, where I described my experience and processed what I learned  using the same autoethnographic methodology I previously studied in my interviewees. I really appreciated the statement that it was “quite unlike anything I’ve read before.”

I like this original research . . .

Pragmatism as an Episode of Constructivism

I am chatting with some colleagues right now, and explaining what I meant when earlier this week I referred to pragmatism as an episode of constructivism.

Pragmatism is a worldview or philosophy that is concerned with the application of what works in this or that context. If pragmatism is a paradigm that Creswell, in his Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, has separated out from the others (like positivism or critical theory), then it occurred to me that pragmatism is doing something based completely on the context. In other words, it is constructing a method or approach to an issue as needed. This sounds surprisingly like constructivism, just reconstructed in time as needed and when needed.

Thus, pragmatism is an episode of constructivism.