Approaching organization and organizing as an educational phenomenon is part of a research agenda on organizational education anchored in education science. In a contribution to the debate on organizing as educational, this paper presents insights from Mary Parker Follett’s engaged theorizing on collective creativeness, to higlight organizational learning as generative on ‘the motor level’ of organizing (Follett, 1924) and of organizing for change and development. 

Reporting historical information not previously published regarding Follett’s method and her citizen and community engagement, offering a context of lived experience as background to her theorizing, O’Connor (2024) recently foregrounded how Follett teaches a method of using experience in developing one’s decision to meet and keep meeting grand challenges: “every situation brings an opportunity to enligthen and strenghen oneself”. This entails becoming, first, “experience-conscious that things of significance are going on in one’s life”. Then, “explor[ing] the significance of an experience and transfer it into action and character” (p. 3), realizing significance grows “through its relation to the purposes which are being simultaneously expressed by many others”. Doing so, one is continuously and integratively navigating that “’[t]here are always larger circumferences, larger settings, for one’s thoughts and acts.’” (quoting Follett, 1928 in O’Connor, 2024, p.3). 

Two ongoing research and development projects through which this paper's author carries first-person experience and responsibility, provide the empirical experience from which the paper theorize about Follett’s contribution to a generative theory of organizational learning. One case study (1), extending from November 2023 to January 2025, is a collaborative autoetnhography of citizen participation in new garbage recycling pratices (Beavan & Revsbæk, 2024; Revsbæk & Beavan, 2024) in a sustainability transformation implemented in  European societies following an EU directive from 2018 (EU Directive 852, 2018). To understand the self-educative process of citizen everyday engagement in large-scale, societal sustainability transformation, the travelling through early months of new garbage recycling implementation have been studied specifically in the city of Aarhus, Denmark (Beavan & Revsbæk, 2024). The small-scale study of the large-scale transformation enlists researchers-as-citizens to understand the psychic borderlands (Anzaldúa, 2012) of societal transformation as citizens engage to develop their participation in altered demands and practices. A second study (2), unfolding in participatory action research collaborations between university-based researchers and employee and management practitioners in a public sector welfare organization during 2021-2024 faced with high newcomer turnover (Persson & Revsbæk, 2024), develops employee onboading through an organizational learning of practice-experimenting and inventive inquiry collaborations. Its process experience is taken up and considered for theorizing in light of a documented success in lowered newcomer turnover in the partnership organization during the project period, and as a sister organization is contracting a similar collaborative and organizationally learning transformation in a future research collaboration with the university (2025-2027).

To elaborate Follett’s contribution to a generative theory of organizational learning, her understanding of 'the evolving situation' and actors’ relation in continued, engaged, responding action to meet the situation at hand and its dynamically evolving complexity is explained, as is her understanding of 'integrative behavior' and creative, progressive experimentation' (Follett, 1918; 1924; Metcalf & Urwick, 1940). To situate her contribution in organizational education research, the plausvalue of her theorizing to existing pragmatist scholarship on organizational learning, emphazing collective inquiry and altered practice participation (Brandi & Elkjaer, 2012; Elkjaer, 2003; Shields, 2003) is discussed and related to the research memorandum of organizational education (Göhlich, Novotný, Revsbæk, Schröer, Weber, & Yi, 2018).  

In its cross-study analysis, the paper develops a sensitivity regarding participant inquiry through the experiences of researcher being a citizen participant herself (Study 1) and a facilitator of the participant practice-based inquiry of others (Study 2). The two empirical case studies share common characteristics: Drawing on Follett’s practice-engaged pragmatism, they both have a developmental aim, which means researchers experiment in practice with whatever inventions, movements, approaches, and actions that appear helpful, needed, available and comprehensible in order to creatively and integratively progress the shared development towards a to-come practice and sociality. In both studies, the researchers navigate the situation at hand, constituted in its larger sphere of social, scientific, and societal context and movements, and manifested, affecting and performed in local, micro-interactions between specific people doing specific things together. Each of the case studies are presented through their ideosyncratic process discoveries invented in response and to meet the evolving, developmental situation at hand. The discoveries, ethnographically reported, are diffractively analyzed through Follett’s process theorizing to emerge the plusvalues of her theorizing for understanding the progressive and experimental generativity of an organizational learning impacting ‘the motor level’ (Follett, 1924) of transformation and change.

The paper presents key concepts in Follett’s theories to an audience of organizational education scholars for the advancement of understanding organizing for change as educational. Drawing on two empirical cases of participatory, change-oriented inquiry the paper, in addition, suggests less-explored arenas for organizational learning: citizen engagement in societal sustainability transformation and researcher-practitioner collaborations to develop organizational change.

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