Network
NW 32. Organizational Education
Title
Learning Communities and Shared Futures in Organizational Education
Abstract
With our call, Network 32 invites scholars from organizational education and related disciplines to engage with the theme “Learning Communities and Shared Futures in Organizational Education”.
Papers and symposia might address questions such as:
How do learning communities, learning networks and other collective arrangements use instruments of imagination to create shared futures?
In which spaces, places and in-between spaces does learning about futures take place in and between organizations?
When and how do fictional expectations become credible and institutionalized?
How do organizations enable and structure the contestation over imagined futures?
What does engaging with open, uncertain futures do to organizations and its members?
They might refer to:
Theories of organizational learning, learning communities, imagination, and shared futures
Relevant Research Methodologies
Empirical Cases
Conceptual Debates and Contributions
The Call
As stated in our research memorandum, for Network 32, the organizational dimension of learning is core: learning refers to learning in, of and between organizations (Göhlich et al 2016; 2018). Beyond learning in a narrow sense, this includes other educational processes – such as formation (Bildung), socialization and professionalization – through which organizations and their members shape one another. Our special call 2027 asks for the connections between learning communities and organizational as well as societal imagined futures.
In organizational education, learning communities are understood as organizationally shared spaces shaped by governance arrangements, institutional norms, artefacts, and futuring practices. This perspective highlights the pedagogical‑organizational processes through which learning communities emerge, stabilize, and transform within and across organizational settings.
Lave and Wenger (1991) highlighted that any learning is situated and often takes place in collective settings. In today´s polycrisis, individual learning and development of competences might come to its limits, so the perspective on communities becomes more relevant. The same holds for futures: they are rarely imagined alone, but generated, tested and contested collectively — and learning communities are among the places where this happens.
In which ways is learning conceptualized, organized and justified in education? The sociology of justifications (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006) offers a methodological approach for reconstructing the patterns of legitimation involved and the rationalities applied in programmatics and semantics of individual and collective learning. Arguments and claims used might refer to personality or community, to human development or wealth creation, to growth or degrowth.
Such justifications are tied to imaginaries and narratives that point towards alternative organizational and societal futures. While instituted imaginaries refer to already established norms, concepts, institutions, instituting imaginaries would connect to the radical newness of imagination (Castoriadis 1975/1987) and the fresh potential, which would not prolong the past, but open up into alternative futures. Jasanoff and Kim (2013) here talk about sociotechnical imaginaries.
Connecting to debates on world-making, from practice-oriented perspectives, organizing can be understood as future-making, too. In this sense, we need to analyze the many ways, in which organizational actors produce and enact the yet-to-come (Wenzel et al 2025: 2427). Organizations can be understood as engines of imagination (Beckert 2021), producing and relating to futures on the way. Futures may remain talk decouples from action (Brunsson, 1989), or they may mobilize collective movement-like dynamics in organizing.
Organizational ways and modes of relating to the future connect to experimental practice, too. Methodical approaches like innovation labs, dialogical spaces, and co-creative strategies are strategies of intentional organizational learning and organized practices of futuring, which can be organized in many different modes (Thompsson & Byrne 2022). Such pedagogical intentions might create inter-spaces for multistakeholder connectivity, for collective meaning making, or for collectively shifting onto-epistemic positionings. Such questions are at the heart of organizational education research perspectives (Göhlich et al 2016; Weber 2005). Learning communities can provide spaces for collective inquiry into concrete problems and experiences across professional and organizational boundaries. Shared futures may emerge through working with differences, tensions, and conflicts, without requiring consensus on a desired endpoint. We invite contributions exploring how such inquiry is organized and facilitated, how it connects imagination with experimentation in everyday practice, and under what conditions it opens possibilities for learning and organizational change.
Contributions might address, for example:
justification patterns and narratives of innovation and futuring, such as digitalization, shifting governance arrangements or democratization;
cognitive, emotional and embodied modalities of learning and futuring, including human and more-than-human relations;
networks, institutional structures and hybrid forms of cooperation;
relations between informal, non-formal and formal learning arrangements;
connectivity, exclusions, and the nexus of power and knowledge;
practices of futuring within rationalities of optimization, datafication and learnification;
the role of artefacts, measures, metrics, platforms and large-scale assessments.
We welcome contributions from diverse theoretical traditions (e.g., practice theory, pragmatism, systems theory, critical, feminist and postcolonial perspectives, theories of Bildung) and on a broad range of organizations — schools, universities, public and welfare organizations, companies, civil society organizations and networks.
ECER 2027 Network 32 particularly welcomes contributions that focus on the complex relationships between individual, community-based and organizational aspects of learning and that examine their role — supportive, ambivalent or obstructive in democratic and sustainable futures.
Contact Person(s)
Susanne Maria Weber, susanne.maria.weber(at)uni-marburg.de
References
Augustine, G.; Soderstrom, S.; Milner, D.; Weber, K. (2019): Constructing a Distant Future. Imaginaries in geoingeneering. Academy of Management Journal. 62 (6), 1930 – 1960, doi.org.
Beckert, J. (2021): The Firm as an Engine of Imagination. Organizational prospection and the making of economic futures. In: Organization Theory. 2 (2)
Belfield, A., & Petrescu, D. (2025). Co-design, neighbourhood sharing, and commoning through urban living labs. CoDesign, 21(2), 171-194.
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006): On Justification. Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press.
Brunsson, Nils (1989): The organization of Hyprocrisy. Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Hoboken. Wiley.
Castoriadis, C. (1975 / 1987): The Imaginary Institution of Society. MIT Press.
Lave, Jean; Wenger Etienne (1991): Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
Göhlich, M., Novotný, P., Revsbaek, L., Schröer, A., Weber, S. M., & Yi, B. J. (2018). Research memorandum organizational education. Studia paedagogica, 23(2), 205-215.
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.H. (eds). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and theFabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991): Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, N. A., & Byrne, O. (2022): Imagining Futures. Theorizing the practical knowledge of future-making. In: Organization Studies, 43 (2), p. 247-268. doi.org.
Weber, S.M. (2005): Rituale der Transformation. Pädagogisches Wissen am Markt. Springer VS.
Wenger, E. (1998): Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press.
Wenzel, M.; Cabantous, L; Koch, J. (2025): Future Making: Towards a Practice Perspective. In: Journal of Management Studies, 62 (6), p. 2426-2451.