NW 32: Charting the Way Forward: Organizational Education, Research, Potentials and Perspectives

Network
NW 32 Organizational Education

Title
Charting the Way Forward: Organizational Education, Research, Potentials and Perspectives

Abstract
The special call of organizational education broadly addresses the challenges of our time and the tensions that organizations are facing today, necessitate, affect, and are addressed by organizational education practice and research. Interested in the multiple ways that organizations ‘chart’ ways forward, the call explores the role of organizational education for a variety of organizational future-oriented practices, including, but not exclusive to, organizational strategy, intra- and entrepreneurship, managerial and collaborative foresight, intuition, judgment, experimentation, improvisation, design, organizing, partnering, and decision-making.

By this, the network will explore how organizations and organizing practices can be positioned to effectively address current and future challenges, encompassing both societal problems and individual well-being. As we navigate uncharted territories such as digitalization, emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, climate change, and tensions surrounding demography and democracy, organizational education invites scholars to discuss current and emerging landscapes. Within an intra- and interdisciplinary dialogue, we are interested in discussing existing and upcoming challenges, the future of organizations, shaping organizing practices, and transforming organizations to tackle these challenges effectively.

The Call
Our global societies, and organizations navigating, contributing, and co-developing with society, are challenged in socially, politically and scientifically contested terrains. The special call of organizational education addresses the tensions that organizations face from the growth of technologies, social acceleration, climate change, security and social-emotional complexities, demographic development, anti-democracy, etc., and asks how organizational education contribute to moving and charting ways forward.

Concerned with performative practices of organizing and socio-technical material assemblages beyond cognition, organizational education embraces ways of charting that emphasize not only mapping, but also acting, engaging, and co-creating, anchored in practice-based studying, new material, material-discursive, or networked approaches.

Charts, in general, outline information in a graphical, tabular, or diagrammatical way. They visualize intersections of revenues and cost in breakeven charts, measure economic relations in control charts, observe values and deviations in quality, quantity, etc.

Flipcharts allow us to visualize processes or to present reports, data, etc. Flow charts visualize diagrammatic relations and representations of a sequence of operations or equipment. Gantt charts show activity plans during specified periods. Organization charts represent the organization´s management structure, responsibilities, relationships, and hierarchies. Pie charts represent quantities and so on.

Charting is the core of organizing in modern times. It gives us a sense of visualization of planning and outlining our management strategies. Images, models, and plans of the future materialize visually the future as an organizational practice. As Knorr-Cetina (1999) refers to the term discourse, the visual discourse, she analyzes how the researchers’ gaze brings about not only epistemic patterns of seeing but orders of seeing – and orders of the gaze.

Charts and Charting, in this sense, can be analyzed as epistemic practice, a boundary object, and as visual, performative practices ‘that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1981, 74). From this perspective, organizing turns into a complex strategic situation, as a network of relationships between subjects, knowledge, practices, and things, which is not understood as repressive but as ‘productive’ (Foucault 1977, 39).

Such analytical perspectives of the performative turn connect to aesthetics and design, to powerful patterns of praxis, and fragile practices dealing with difference. Analyzing charting as the process of reality construction in organizing, we are e.g. interested in the positionings between pessimism, ambiguity, and hope, between assumptions of boundless potentials and substantial limitations, in bodily engagements.

‘Charting the way forward’ refers to the setting of future directions, to the role of strategy or strategic thinking and planning in organizations. It raises questions about the complex interrelationship between organizational strategy and organizational practice and the ways in which organizations attempt to influence their environment, including key stakeholders or public policy on their behalf. The theme encompasses research on strategy development, strategy as practice in different types of organizations (not exclusive to those in the educational sector), and research on the relationship between organizational strategy, policy change, and social transformation.

’Charting the way forward’ refers to transdisciplinary and participatory (research) strategies (Bergold and Thomas 2012), which may support voicing and organizational democracy-as-becoming. Design and arts-based research (Barone and Eisner 2012) among others may strengthen the relational in-betweenness and connect different epistemic fields.

Contact Person(s)
Susanne Maria Weber, susanne.maria.weber(at)uni-marburg.de

References
Barone, Tom; Elliot W. Eisner (2012). Arts Based Research. New York: Sage Publications.

Bergold, Jarg; Stefan Thomas (2012). Participatory Research Methods: A Methodological Approach in Motion. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung. 13.1. www.qualitative-research.net/index. php/fqs/article/view/1801/3334 [11.01.2016].

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Foucault, Michel (1981). Die Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Foucault, Michel (1977). Sexualität und Wahrheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Gagliardi, Pasquale (1990). Symbols and artifacts: views of the corporate landscape. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Hancock, Philip; Melissa Tyler, Melissa (2007). Un/doing Gender and the Aesthetics of Organizational Performance In Gender, Work & Organization. 14.6. 512–533.

Hatch, Mary Jo und Ann L. Cunliffe (2014). Organization theory. Modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives. 3^rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1999). Epistemic cultures. How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Linstead Stephen; Heather Höpfl (2000).The Aesthetics of Organization. Hrsg. London u.a: Sage, Publications.

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Taylor, Steven (2002). The Aesthetics of Organizations. In Organization Studies. 23.6. 981-983.