Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice

Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

Science in action

Project management is widely seen as delivering undertakings on time, on budget, and on scope. This conceptualization fails, however, to address the front end and its management. Addressing the front end moves the discipline to a second, more strategic level. This article proposes a third level of conceptualization: the institutional level, where management is focused on creating the conditions to support and foster projects, both in its parent organization and its external environment. Management here is done for and on the project rather than in or to it. We show that management at this level offers an enlarged research agenda and improvement in performance.

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Managing the institutional context for projects

Large, global, cross-sectoral, multi-phased civil infrastructure projects tend to be one-off projects for which transactions have no strong ‘shadow of the future’, but where elements of relational contracting are still ubiquitous. Such projects evolve through discrete phases—financial and technical feasibility, conceptual design, detailed design, construction, operations and renovation/replacement—each phase of which can be viewed as a discrete transaction during which key participants and stakeholders rotate in and out of the project. This discontinuity of participation across phases in the project's lifecycle creates a heretofore neglected contractual hazard of ‘displaced agency’. Similar governance challenges arising from displaced agency are found in long-lived aerospace and defence programmes, large-scale software initiatives and other sectors. We review, integrate, extend and apply economic, legal, sociological and psychological governance perspectives on relational contracts to address the extreme ...

Toward a unified theory of project governance: economic, sociological and psychological supports for relational contracting

This chapter opens with a story of two students whose interpreting experience has been scaffolded through a series of situated learning activities. The authors describe the theoretical grounding of situated learning, including principles of learning transfer, cognitive apprenticeships, authentic learning activities, and communities of practice. They then trace the development of situated learning across a variety of disciplines and argue that this approach is especially well suited for interpreter education. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the four cornerstones of situated learning.

What Is Situated Learning

Innovating the Practice of Normative Control in Project Management Contractual Relations

Purpose



– The purpose of this paper is to explore organizational induction as socially situated learning processes. It presents an empirical study of inductees going through an induction program in a medium sized bank and discusses their induction as a dual process of becoming a practitioner and constructing practice.




Design/methodology/approach



– The research performed is qualitative: ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews are used, and analysed through an interpretative methodology.




Findings



– The paper suggests that the divide between the teaching curricula in the induction course and the learning curricula in real life banking contribute to the inductees' ability and desire to engage in the construction of customer service officer practice; the divide itself legitimizes differences in particularities of the practice, and enhances the inductees' ability to enact, accomplish, and construct practice actively.




Research limitations/implications



– The paper suggests induction should be viewed as opportunities for organizational learning as much as the training of newcomers to adhere to organizational standards.




Originality/value



– The paper presents a novel empirical case exploring socially situated learning. Looking at the confluence of authoring and performative acts allows us to expose the agentic dimension of practices; thus emphasising the construction involved in any practising.

Becoming DragonBankers: Constructing practice through processes of socially situated learning

We argue that practical endeavours towards mobilising and recreating knowledge is an integral part of value increasing activities, and expose how this dependency can be utilised in ameliorating practice. This bridging of knowledge and value creation constitutes organisational activities as knowing. The paper exposes the efforts of Telenor, a large telecom firm, to create an enduring agenda for non-financial issues in management. We expose the development process and initial use of their new Integrated Management Business Model. This involves identifying financial and non-financial drivers of future performance within and across several business units, as well as negotiating on appropriate indicators of both status and change. The paper pays special attention to the iterative approach to development in order to highlight a shift from an attempt to enable knowledge in autonomous processes secluded from everyday activities, towards an understanding of knowledge and knowing as intrinsic to the value creating activities performed. By entering the issue of intangibles through the knowing activity perspective, it was evident that the purpose of the management system was not to determine the status of intangibles in the corporation, it was to improve it.

Knowing Activity: Corporate Bridging of Knowledge and Value Creation

In this study we focus on coaching in the context of small and medium enterprises in the creative industries. We draw on data collected from five business coaching organizations over numerous coaching encounters with their clients. Using detailed conversational data drawn from these coaching encounters we analyze the ways in which business coaches practice 'active listening' and 'reflective questioning' in order to reduce the uncertainties they and their clients face when working together. We show that they do so through the strategy of positioning 'performance' as central to their practice. Successful performances depend on the ability to convince clients that one's performance is what it represents itself as being, a performance that is brought off by detailed everyday language work, mimicking the client's language back on to the client. As such, coaches demonstrate themselves to be skilled analysts of everyday life and listening.

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Uncertainty Reduction through Everyday Performative Language Work

The paper is based on an activity based and relational conception of knowledge. We expose Activity Based Knowledge Management through two empirical cases from Norwegian Professional Service Firms. The cases illustrate two Knowledge Management initiatives aiming at enabling prioritised and ongoing activities within the organisations: The development and use of two ICT support systems. The design and content of the systems are based in the activities they are intended to enable. We define Knowing actions as the as a skilful joint venture of acting agents, and expose how these actions can be enabled. Actions and activities are always performed within a context and in given circumstances, and we expose how the need of enabling the collective working patterns can be evaluated by these concepts. By the empirical exploration we show that Activity Based Knowledge Management enables Knowing Action and Knowing Activities through intrinsic motivation, mutual enabling, and distributed responsibility.

Kjersti Bjørkeng

Papers

Innovating the Practice of Normative Control in Project Management Contractual Relations

Becoming DragonBankers: Constructing practice through processes of socially situated learning

Knowing Activity: Corporate Bridging of Knowledge and Value Creation

Uncertainty Reduction through Everyday Performative Language Work

Knowing Action Activity Based Management of Knowledge