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1.
《Africa Education Review》2013,10(2):380-394
Abstract

This article looks at how the application of the concept of a ‘learning organisation’ can be used at a specific organisation in South Africa to change the work performance of its employees. We do this by exploring different theories, models and definitions of organisational learning, learning organisation, organisational knowledge and knowledge management in the field, and against this background examine the perceptions of employees at a South African Organisation. The article underpins this approach by uniquely balancing conceptual rigour with practical experiences of employees at this institution. The view is taken that organisations are living systems that have the capacity to renew themselves by continuously reflecting on their practices and thereby create new knowledge, share and leverage it. Knowledge acquisition and sharing is closely linked to the core values of the organisation in order to achieve business competitiveness, set goals, efficiency, and overall strategic success. The purpose of this article is to understand how an organisation's training department could use the concept of a learning organisation within the South African context to sustain change. To achieve this objective we (the researchers) used a qualitative research paradigm. A phenomenological design presented the research with opportunities to analyse, interpret, and describe the perceptions, feelings and experiences of the participants at the organisation. Eight semi-structured individual interviews provided data for the purposes of this research. The data was analysed to identify categories, themes and sub-themes. The five main themes discussed are organisational learning, organisational culture, organisational change, globalisation and knowledge management and these were linked to the theory of learning organisations and were based on the findings.  相似文献   

2.
This article sets out to argue that organisations can learn but that they cannot do so in their own right without infrastructural support. This article further examines the notion that individuals in organisations also require the cognitive participation of the organisation itself as a learning entity to learn. The close reliance and affiliation required between individuals and organisations to enable their learning from one another are discussed. In continuation of this, specific examples are provided through the industry sector of information systems development (ISD) projects to illustrate of how organisations can learn. Finally, the question of how one identifies organisational learning is analysed. Following on from the ISD and its use in the analogy of organisational learning, the article discusses an organisational empirical research project currently being undertaken by the authors, which utilises blogs. Though there are many potential organisational learning connotations associated with blogs, they could be perceived as a type of information system. The ongoing research being undertaken with the company using the blogs will attempt to identify indicators of learning at the individual, group and organisational levels. The significance of the issues explored in this article lies in the fact that it addresses an ISD approach to study how an organisation learns, and why this perspective is useful towards understanding the process of organisational learning. This article contributes to the organisational learning debate through an illustrative industry example of ISD projects. In doing so, we wish to argue that though individual learning can occur in ISD projects, the collective nature of projects primarily engenders the interpretive aspect of organisational learning. We further believe that it is the interactive nature of an ISD project that allows an organisation to learn in tandem with project members as exemplified through the stages of a project life cycle. We feel that this article contributes to the ISD and organisational learning literature in terms of linking both concepts together.  相似文献   

3.
This article brings together the fields of action learning and operations strategy. It presents a case of action learning focused on strategic operations improvement in the extended manufacturing enterprise. As the third article in the set of explorations in this journal within the fields of action learning, operations strategy and collaborative improvement, it steps inside an inter-organisational action learning programme and exploits an operations strategy perspective on the improvement process and outcome. Through distinguishing between puzzles and problems, the article extends the scope of the operations improvement cycle and illustrates how the action learning approach can accommodate and enable engagement with the issues in potentially insightful practical and theoretical ways.  相似文献   

4.
In this article, we report results of a survey of 1,397 teachers in 26 primary and 17 secondary schools in England as part of the Learning How to Learn project. We consider how school self-evaluation can be understood within an organisational learning frame. Factor analysis of teachers' responses helped us identify 4 dimensions of organisational learning approaches to school leadership and management. Comparisons were made between teachers' perceptions of school leadership and management practices and the values they placed on those practices. We discuss the usefulness of analysing values-practice gaps for furthering understanding of organisational learning approaches to school leadership and management. Analysis of gaps between teachers' values and practices reveals significant inconsistencies between perceptions of current practices and values across a broad spectrum of school leadership and management practices. Perceptions of practice were significantly behind the values that teachers place on each of the 4 dimensions of practice.  相似文献   

5.
This paper reviews the literature on workplace and transformational learning to explore how spirituality can be accessed to encourage individual growth through the development of critical awareness while providing a sense of direction in the workplace as part of organisational learning. In communities and societies where organisations may have replaced religious institutions as centres for adult learning, the workplace continues to respond to the universal need for community and support. These elements are related to spiritual values. Still, leaders of organisations need to consider values that underlie typical workplace activities and recognise how collective engagement and workplace interactions direct personal development and ground identity. Providing opportunities to reflect on meaning and direction at work supports a transformative approach to learning and leadership that promotes cooperative working conditions, conscious behaviour and informed citizenship through encouraging attitudes of critical awareness, praxis and collective engagement in workplace interaction.  相似文献   

6.
This paper contributes to an understanding of the processes by which organisational actors learn how to affect positive and sustainable social change in their local region through action learning, action research and appreciative inquiry. The paper is based on a critically reflective account of key findings from an ongoing action research project, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The project is an attempt to alleviate poverty in the Leeds City Region through the identification and spread of ‘good practice’ in large local organisations. The paper is based on insights into the tensions involved in accomplishing such modes of action research and action learning in this particular context, and how these findings can relate to similar research in other domains of inquiry, action and cross-organisational learning. Through this, the paper discusses the inherent challenges faced when attempting to use action research and action learning approaches to help large organisations to learn and develop as ethical and sustainable agents.  相似文献   

7.
The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research ‘in complex organisations’. Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an overview nor a recommendation of how action research is or should be done in complex organisations by different schools of action researchers around the world. The approach I will present has grown through practical experience accumulated over many years with doing action research in many different Norwegian organisations with organisational change and development as the specific objective. I will limit myself to an outline of this Norwegian context, and to how I and others have worked specifically with organisational learning both practically and theoretically within or in relation to a broad Norwegian or Scandinavian approach to action research and organisation development represented by many individuals.  相似文献   

8.
Action learning is often used as an element of leadership development programmes. The intention is to support classroom learning with an experiential thread which runs throughout the life of the programme. Action Learning Associates (ALA) has been working with an international organisation for three years to deliver the global ‘First Line Manager Programme’ (FLMP). The action learning facilitator training (ALFT) programme is designed to enable participants to run action learning sets in their operational companies across the world. Originally created in English – the official business language – the ALFT is now also delivered in French. The focus of the paper is to explore learning, challenges and opportunities created by scaling up the delivery of ALFT to a global target audience of approximately 700 people. To date ALA has trained over 165 internal action learning facilitators from different countries, languages, cultures and professional backgrounds. The value to the participants of being skilled to run their own action learning sets, within the context of the FLMP, is explored along with the opportunities for organisational development and learning.  相似文献   

9.
In this paper, I mill argue that contemporary debates about learning in the workplace fail to pay adequate attention to issues of gender and power in organisations. With reference to the feminist literature on the sociology of organisations, I will review some of the central ideas of the work of a few prominent adult educators on the topic of workplace learning. In this process, I will endeavour to highlight the uncritical way in which the discourse over workplace learning has developed within adult education circles. The relative absence of critical perspectives, and the embracing of dominant management thinking about organisational change, mean that this literature in fact fails to provide adult educators in organisations with an adequate framework for analysing and understanding the complex dynamics of their work, and threatens to further entrench structures and practices which discriminate against women.  相似文献   

10.
Innovation occupies a pivotal place in our understanding of knowledge-based economies, and this is raising questions about sources of innovation, how it originates, and the role played by employees, work practices and learning. This paper explores these issues through case study research into a new approach to providing healthcare for homeless people in England, and by bringing together conceptual insights from the employee-driven innovation literature, and more broadly from social and practice-based learning theory and organisational theory. Applying these perspectives to our case enables illumination of the innovation as a process – not an event – and as an ongoing set of organisational practices that transcend their origins. Through our analysis we argue that the notion of ‘a cause’ is helpful in elucidating the impetus and the commitment to making the innovation happen (and go on happening). Our findings are presented under three themes: ‘establishing a cause’, ‘organising for innovation’, and ‘innovative capability in practice’. Building on these, we have identified five key inter-related dimensions which help conceptualise the work and learning that it took to create and (re-)enact the innovation and that we suggest may have relevance for understanding and characterising other employee-led innovations in and perhaps beyond healthcare.  相似文献   

11.
This study proposed using the elaborated learning and knowledge building model (LKB model) derived from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge management model for supporting cross-organisational teacher development in the temporarily extended organisations composed of universities and schools. It investigated the main LKB model components in the context of teachers’ professional development; the kind of technological barriers to be overcome in order to implement such a model; and what the application scenarios of an LKB model are. Four groups of stakeholders, altogether 10 persons, were interviewed for the study. Data were analysed using a qualitative framework analysis method. The main findings of the study exposed the following difficulties in applying an LKB model for extended organisations for teacher development: teachers’ sense of identity, technical issues and organisational barriers. Several scenarios were proposed for the use of technology to facilitate the LKB model in the teacher development context using the e-portfolio and social learning resources repository.  相似文献   

12.
A sociocultural analysis of organisational learning   总被引:2,自引:0,他引:2  
The concept of organisational learning has been widely debated and frequently contested by educationalists, but the specific processes and actions which constitute this form of learning have received relatively little research attention. This paper reports a three‐year empirical investigation into organisational learning in a large industrial complex, with the aim of clarifying the practices of organisational learning and interpreting them within sociocultural learning theory. A sociocultural model is proposed which identifies dialogue as the fundamental process by which organisations learn, and relational practices as the social structure which embeds the dialogue and makes it sustainable in a potentially conflictual environment. Three relational practices are analysed in detail: opening space for the creation of shared meaning, reconstituting power relationships and providing cultural tools to mediate learning. A pedagogy of organisational learning is defined in terms of participation in these practices, either as the carrier of a practice or as the facilitator of participation by others. The theoretical requirement that adult learning must be autonomous is reconciled with the concept of collective learning in pursuit of organisational goals by rejecting the notion of an individually‐contained self in favour of a relational concept of the self, in which autonomy is achieved by building relationships with others.  相似文献   

13.
The paper examines the benefits claimed for action learning at individual, organisational and inter-organisational levels. It goes on to identify both generic difficulties in evaluating development programmes and action learning specifically. The distinction between formative and summative evaluation is considered and a summative evaluation framework is outlined, based on recent reviews of evaluations of development programmes, while recognising that establishing clear causal links remains problematic.  相似文献   

14.
This article examines changes in curriculum policy in secondary education in England. It is concerned with recent curriculum policy and reform, and the proliferation of non-government actors in curriculum policy creation. It examines the emergence of a loose alliance of third sector organisations and their involvement in a series of alternative ‘curriculum experiments’. The third sector curriculum policy network revolves around a policy vision of decentralisation constituted by public–private partnership, media-friendliness, social enterprise and an ‘open source’ or network-based organisational logic. It assembles a policy ideal of ‘centrifugal schooling’ which links together ideas about ‘networked governance’ with ‘flexible’ learning and ‘entrepreneurial’ curricula. The article traces and discusses some of the inter-organisational relations, materials and discourses of the third sector network of alternative curriculum policy developments, and provides a case study of a prototypical third sector curriculum programme. It examines the organisational relations and practices by which the project was produced and the conditions leading to its failure.  相似文献   

15.
Many organisations hire students from cooperative education (co-op) programmes. These organisations are interested in students’ performance, particularly in their extra-role performance. Previous studies show that socialisation processes play an important part in establishing adjustment and performance. It may also be the case that students’ approach to learning (their motivations, attitudes and strategies) influences the socialisation process, and consequently adjustment and performance. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of co-op students’ lifelong learning characteristics on two organisational socialisation outcomes (role understanding and social acceptance) and three types of extra-role performance (proactive, adaptive and prosocial). Data were collected from a cross-sectional survey of undergraduates (n = 1698) enrolled in co-op who had just completed a work term in a new role. Regression analyses showed that lifelong learning characteristics influenced both forms of adjustment, and all three forms of performance. Further mediation analyses showed that both forms of adjustment partially mediated the relationships between lifelong learning and all three forms of performance. These results suggest that co-op students’ lifelong learning characteristics play an important role during organisational socialisation and subsequent extra-role performance. Implications for future research and for practice are discussed.  相似文献   

16.
This article examines the promotion of lifelong learning (LLL) in Singapore through a new national initiative known as the SkillsFuture movement. It is argued that the attainment of LLL is confronted with three key challenges, the first being the sociocultural preference for academic rather than vocational education in Singapore. Secondly, there is an absence of a strong local culture that underscores the habits of mind needed for LLL. The final challenge is the dominant ideology of pragmatism that potentially conflicts with the goal of the SkillsFuture movement for individuals to enjoy learning and pursue their passion. The article further recommends a reconceptualisation of the notion of LLL in Singapore by supplementing the skills growth model with the individual development and social learning models. The Singapore example illustrates the difficulties and prospects of advocating LLL due to historical and socialcultural conditions and practices.  相似文献   

17.
With the increasing challenges facing professional engineers working in more complex, global and interdisciplinary contexts, different approaches to understanding how engineers practice and learn are necessary. This paper draws on recent research in the social sciences from the field of workplace learning, to suggest that a practice-theory perspective on engineers' professional learning is fruitful. It shifts the focus from the attributes of the individual learner (knowledge, skills and attitudes) to the attributes of the practice (interactions, materiality, opportunities and challenges). Learning is thus more than the technical acquisition and transfer of knowledge, but a complex bundle of activities, that is, social, material, embodied and emerging. The paper is illustrated with examples from a research study of the learning of experienced engineers in the construction industry to demonstrate common practices – site walks and design review meetings – in which learning takes place.  相似文献   

18.
Issues in action learning: a critical realist interpretation   总被引:1,自引:1,他引:0  
The purpose of this paper is to argue that the perspective of ‘critical realism’ has considerable potential for moving forward the theory and practice of action learning. The paper addresses three questions: (1) Does action learning emphasise the individual or the collective? (2) Can action learning be thought of as critical, but should it also be the subject of criticism? (3) What gets carried forward from action learning by way of learning? Critical realism is argued to be illuminative of these issues; this involves dealing with ontological questions – what is there out there to learn about – as well as epistemological ones – how can this be learned about. It also involves seeing the world as an open system with emergent properties rather than the predictable machine of the positivist approach and the ‘nothing but a sea of meaning’ of the extreme social constructionist approach. The conclusions are that: (1) Yes, it can, and should, focus on both. Individual and organisational foci (one form of the individual-collective question) for action learning are compatible and reconcilable, though often with difficulty. (2) Yes to critical approach of and from action learning, which is its true intent. Suggestions are made on how to do this in an ultimately constructive way. (3) There are several answers to this, the ability to learn, ‘mechanisms’ that can but may not necessarily work in future situations, depending on circumstance and ‘state of play’ information.  相似文献   

19.
The paper examines the concept of negative capability as a human capacity for containment and contrasts it with well-valued positive capability as expressed through performativity in organisations and society. It identifies the problem of dispersal – the complex ways we behave in order to avoid the emotional challenges of living with uncertainty. The action learning set is considered as a ‘container’ – a holding and enabling framework which temporarily holds the set member’s uncertainty until they can manage it for themselves. Finally, it is suggested that learning arises from working at the edges between knowing (positive capability/performativity) and not-knowing (negative capability) because it offers the possibility of exposure to truth ‘in the moment’ or insight. It involves living with uncertainty, yet still ultimately acting in the world.  相似文献   

20.
ABSTRACT

For international organisations in the global education policy field, legitimacy is based in large part on the supposed techno-rational basis of these organisations and their ability to credibly produce knowledge and policy expertise. However, as the present article demonstrates, there are clearly a range of macro–micro organisational dynamics driving the production of knowledge and the policy ideas that are advanced. By revealing the way that a particular policy emerged and was promoted within the World Bank, this article seeks to expose the way that policy innovation is produced by the iterative interplay of agentic activity and particular organisational circumstances – and how this process is used to maintain and extend the influence of international organisations and the individuals who represent them. By drawing on Stewart Clegg’s ‘circuits of power’ approach, we seek to theorise the internal dynamics of international organisations, and, in so doing, to move beyond the dominant coercive and normative perspectives.  相似文献   

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