Managing Processes of Organisational Change through Linking Diverse Communities of Practice

Author(s):

Peter McDonnell(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

01. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 01 B, Organisational and School Learning

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-18

13:15-14:45

Room:

ESI 1 - Aula 22

Chair:

Maria A. Flores

Contribution

Background

This paper is a progress report of an ongoing action enquiry, as part of my Masters programme of study. The aim is to offer explanations for how and why I am hoping to contribute to and support the work of practitioners in education and health care by helping them share and improve their practice-based skills and knowledge through networking; and to link diverse communities of practice for mutual support in managing processes of organisational improvement. The research therefore operates at two levels: (1) supporting practitioners in managing their own processes of change while (2) learning myself how to manage processes of managing change in collaboration with the people I am supporting.

Research questions

The research questions are, ‘How can I help practitioners appreciate that they can and should contribute to organisational and professional development? How can I help them link with one another to share stories of good practice and re-legitimise their professional status?’

My context is that I work in a small international educational consultancy and publishing business. My background is in healthcare management, and my interest is in supporting healthcare and education practitioners to learn from one another in order to benefit their own work.

Many of the professionals I work with are experiencing unprecedented, often externally imposed change, exacerbated by the effects of the international economic downturn. Because strong links frequently exist between political policy and the education and health sectors (Ball 2007; Pollock 2005), governments often seize opportunities for savings within the sectors through promoting potentially divisive discourses and practices. These currently include:

· international market-driven policies that orient education and health care towards privatisation and managerialist practices (Ball 2007; Player and Leys 2011) and often position providers and clients as separate entities;

· theorising management practices as hierarchical and top down (Storey et al 2010), contrary to calls for greater practitioner involvement in organisational change (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Senge 1990);

· theory and practice are maintained as separate fields of discourse, contrary to a view that they should be complementary aspects of the same practice (Allmark, 1995).

Objectives

My research focuses on how I can encourage practitioners to critically interrogate these discourses and practices and develop new ones, through linking practitioners in different professions to share and adapt others’ ideas to their own circumstances. I encourage the development of communities of practice (Wenger 1999) and the linking of diverse communities of practice. This may encourage practitioners to appreciate how they can play an activist role in the way their professions operate.

Method

Methods / methodology My research is in two action-reflection cycles: Cycle 1 I have gathered data from email questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, supplemented by telephone conversations, from small groups of practitioner-colleagues about their self-perceptions of their professional identities, and how this influences their perceived capacity for responding to the imposition of the externally-driven privatisation and marketisation of health and education. Cycle 2 I am now developing ways to link the selected groups of practitioners through electronic forums and face-to-face meetings so they can share good practice and learn from one another about exercising their agency in processes of organisational change. These activities are monitored and documented through audio and videotaping, and through maintaining minutes and other records. All data are analysed, and evidence is generated in relation to demonstrating how our collective values of participation, good service delivery and democratic practice come to transform into the criteria by which we judge the quality of our practices and our research (McNiff 2010). Thus we also form a meta-community of a practice of activist educational enquiry.

Expected Outcomes

I hope to show how I enable practitioners in diverse professional settings to form their own communities of practice and to link with other communities for inter-professional organisational learning. An initial step is to enhance my own understanding of the role of practitioners both within their professions and in their organisational context, and encourage them to reflect on the rightness of their self-identifications. The second step is to encourage practitioners’ to appreciate their capacity for developing their profession. This can be done for example where a practitioner studies their work and offers their own theory of practice to contribute to a growing knowledge base of practitioners’ practice-based theories. I hope I can help practitioners develop new views of themselves as contributing professionals so they can take their rightful place in the development of their professions (Senge 1990). A key significance of this research is the emergence of our meta-community of practice as a site for theorising processes of inter-professional practices for improving intra- and inter-organisational processes of change.

References

Allmark, P. (1995) A classical view of the theory-practice gap in nursing, in Journal of Advanced Nursing, 22(1): 18–23. Ball, S. (2007) Education Plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education (2nd edition). Abingdon, Routledge. McNiff, J. (2010) Action Research for Professional Development. Poole, September Books. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Player, S. and Leys, C. (2011) The Plot against the NHS. London, The Merlin Press. Pollock, A. (2005) NHS Plc: The Privatization of our Health Care. London, Verso. Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York, Basic Books. Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. New York, Doubleday. Storey, J., Bulivant, J. and Corbett-Nolan, A. (2010) Governing the New NHS: Issues and Tensions in Health Service Management. Abingdon, Routledge. Tempest, M. (2006) The Future of the NHS. St Albans, XPL Publishing. Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Author Information

Peter McDonnell (presenting / submitting)

York St John University, United Kingdom

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.