Session Information
32 ONLINE 28 B, Cross-National Perspectives of Organizational Education
Paper Session
MeetingID: 964 8626 6060 Code: Wff9mj
Contribution
At the risk of being simplistic, universities as organisations have three key areas of business: the creation of knowledge, the teaching/sharing of knowledge and the generation of revenue to enable them to function effectively. It has been argued (Levin &Greenwood, 2011; Giroux & Giroux, 2004) that the central management of universities increasingly focus on the generation of revenue to ensure financial sustainability, that the creation of new knowledge, and in particular its external funding and its publication in top level journals, and teaching, particularly of fee-paying international students, are valued at central management level as means of enhancing prestige and ensuring financial security. At the level of the teaching staff, while generation of revenue is recognised as a prerequisite for their continued employment, there is arguably more attention given to the quality of knowledge sharing and to the specific content of knowledge generation (Cannella & Lincoln, 2011; Greenwood, 2020). In pre-Covid times the regular physical presence of staff as well as forums such as academic boards, faculty meetings and staff bars and common rooms allowed some degree of dialogue between central organisational expectations and individuals’ professional visions and initiatives. The dialogue may not have been based on equal respect but it afforded opportunity for parties to learn about each other’s perspectives and operations and opportunity for the university as a multi-layered organisation to incrementally learn how to better utilise its resources and survive/thrive in the academic marketplace. The impact of Covid lockdowns and preference for on-line operation has significantly reduced dialogue both with and across departments and sectors.
The presntaion builds on the work I presented at ECER last year (Greenwood &Al Amin, 2021). Last year I reported the organisational learning that developed within a division of a New Zealand university through arranging and conducting a series of tailor-made specialised short courses for teachers and students of various overseas universities and educational organisations. Two of these courses took place before the event of Covid and the third took place in early 2021 on-line, but was planned before Covid was recognised as a longer trms reality. All of the courses had three separate organisations (my university, the client organisation and an intermediary agent) involved in their planning and operation. All the organisations were located in very different socio-political, linguistic and cultural contexts. I drew on the metaphor of a rollercoaster ride because of the often unpredictable and sometimes messy provocations that occurred and the uncomfortable changes required in planning and in mental attitude in order to deliver programmes that make sense (to some significant degree) to both teachers and participants.
As Covid has established itself as the ‘new normal’ such courses have no longer been considered a possibility by the formal structures within my university. Nevertheless, the need for cross-national collaboration has remained. Academics in other universities also suffer from isolation and restricted opportunities for field action.
This presentation examines the role that networking is taking in bridging the space that has evolved. It reports on three cases where the personal network between individuals who work within educational organisations afforded opportunities for dialogue, inquiry, and knowledge sharing and knowledge development. It explores the learning that occurs and considers to what degree, if any, the wider organisations are involved in the learning although they may benefit from that learning.
The presentation aligns with the Networks call for papers that address the impact of global realties on experiences of organisational educational research.
Method
This is a qualitative case study. It draws, in the first instance, on a phenomenological approach (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009; van Manem, 2014) in that it focuses on reporting the understandings of the participants about their lived experiences. It then critically considers those understandings against network theories (Watts & Strogatz, 1998; Latour 2005) and frameworks for organisational learning, such has those developed by Lave and Wenger, Weick, Argyris and Schön, and Senge. The collaboration in three on-line projects is investigated. On project involves members of an organisation in Czechia, another in Philippines and a third in Bangladesh. The data comes from my reflective observations and those of the collaborators in each project, as well as from analysis of practical outcomes. Written accounts and open-ended interviews are drawn on. The initial analysis of data follows the precepts of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009). It then further analyses the themes that emerge against concepts of effective organisational learning developed by Weick (1995) and Senge (2006) respectively.
Expected Outcomes
As the opportunities for wider organisational engagement in cross-national development courses have closed down in my university because of Covid, the need and motivation for more personalised networks has grown. The networks I report function independently, to varying extents, of the educational organisations to which the individuals belong but they do draw strongly on specific academic expertise within the organisations and on the academic standing of the organisations. It can be argued that the wider organisations benefit from the work done by these personalised networks. It can also be argued that in the time of Covid such networks necessarily take over some of the functions that would previously have been implemented by more central systems within the organisations. It is perhaps noteworthy that in the three projects I report knowledge sharing and knowledge creation were key elements of the collaborations and that, if it occurred at all, generation of revenue was a minor factor. The question remains whether these networks will continue to have a quasi-organisational role in the long terms.It also remains to be seen what , if anything, the wider organisations will learn form the operation of these networks.
References
Argyris,C. and Schön, D. Organizational Learning: Theory, method and practice.(New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995 Cannella, G. and Lincoln, Y. (2011). Ethics, research regulations and critical social science. In N. Denzin, N. and Y. Lincoln (Eds). The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.). Sage. Giroux, H. and Giroux, S. (2004). Take back higher education. New York: Palgrave Greenwood J. (2019) Operational trust: Reflection from navigating control and trust in a cross-cultural professional development project. Educational Philosophy and Theory 51(1): 107-116. Greenwood, J. (2020). Understanding the Experiences of International Doctoral Students: Charting a troubled geography of doctoral supervision. In E. Creely, J.. Southcott, K. Carabott & D. Lyons (Eds.). Phenomenological Inquiry in Education: Greenwood, J. and AlAmin, Md, (2021). Fractured Dialogues, Different Lifeworlds, & Rollercoaster Learning: A Case Study Of Organisational Learning in a Cross-National/ Cross-Cultural Context. Paper presentation at ECER 2021. Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991, Situating learning in communities of practice. Perspectives on socially shared cognition, 2, 63-82.) Levin, M. and Greenwood, D. (2011). Revitalizing universities by reinventing the social sciences. In N. Denzin, N. and Y. Lincoln (Eds). The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.). Sage. Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Broadway Business Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: theory, method and research, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Watts, D. and Strogatz, S. (1998). Collective Dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393, 440 (2) Weick, K. (1995). Sense-making in organizations. Newbury Park: Sage.
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