Team Learning, Development, and Adaptation

[Excerpt] Our purpose is to explore conceptually these themes centered on team learning, development, and adaptation. We note at the onset that this chapter is not a comprehensive review of the literature. Indeed, solid conceptual and empirical work on these themes are sparse relative to the vast amount of work on team effectiveness more generally, and therefore a thematic set of topics that are ripe for conceptual development and integration. We draw on an ongoing stream of theory development and research in these areas to integrate and sculpt a distinct perspective on team learning, development, and adaptation

Socio-cultural design and interactive governance

The aim here is to address the questions corresponding to the emergence and the evolution of groups, of communities within a population of heterogeneous agents so as to describe the overcoding processes (as manipulation of the codes themselves, translation procedures) which characterize the creative behaviours that can be attributed to agents in the framework of complex mediations issuing from an interdisciplinary approach relevant to negotiation through the identification of the heuristics that they use. At this level the notions of cognitive or cultural shortcut and strategic shortcut as well that of the autonomy turn out to be particularly of interest since while taking into account the socio-cultural context to design the complex relations built inside the population, they enable us to set the foundations relative to the mechanisms that characterize the procedures of interactive governance in regard to the criteria of sustainability.cognitive, cultural and strategic shortcuts, complexity, heuristics, proximity, interactive governance, sustainability

Language: The missing selection pressure

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything even remotely similar to language. What I propose here is to reverse the picture. On closer examination, language resembles a losing strategy. Competing for providing other individuals with information, sometimes striving to be heard, makes apparently no sense within a Darwinian framework. At face value, language as we can observe it should never have existed or should have been counter-selected. In other words, the selection pressure that led to language is still missing. The solution I propose consists in regarding language as a social signaling device that developed in a context of generalized insecurity that is unique to our species. By talking, individuals advertise their alertness and their ability to get informed. This hypothesis is shown to be compatible with many characteristics of language that otherwise are left unexplained.Comment: 34 pages, 3 figure

A framework for Thinking about Distributed Cognition

As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. We argue that both relevant concepts, distribution and cognition, must be understood as continuous. As it is used in the context of distributed cognition, the concept of distribution is essentially fuzzy, and we will link it to the notion of emergence of system-level properties. The concept of cognition must also be seen as fuzzy, but for different a reason: due its origin as an anthropocentric concept, no one has a clear handle on its meaning in a distributed setting. As the proposed framework forms a space, we then explore its geography and (re)visit famous landmarks

Europe and the emergence of modernity. The entanglement of two reference cultures

This article offers a theory of the notion ‘reference culture’ by taking as major examples modernity and Europe. Both constitute reference cultures and while different are closely related. A certain entanglement took place between the emergence of modernity and the formation of European culture whereby the latter came to be one of the main carriers of modernity. However, they need to be separated in that Europe, while being the first major expression of modernity, is not the only embodiment of modernity. Modernity can be termed a first-order reference culture and Europe a second-order one. While there have been many second-order reference cultures, the European one was an influential and powerful one, but it was also a temporary one. This article sets out the main features that define the specificity of Europe. Against accounts that emphasize a master narrative or an underlying cultural unity to Europe, it is argued that crucial to the making of Europe was the formation of modes of communication that enabled common practices to develop across a range of different cultures. In this way, it is argued, Europe consolidated as a consequence less of endogenous factors than exogenous ones. Important, too, was the mobile nature of European culture which facilitated translation into other cultures and which was also receptive to modernity. The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of other varieties of modernity and the global decline of the European mode

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work - (a) omittance of an individual's strive for achieving cognitive coherence, (b) limited integration of important contextual factors - by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence, (ii) the components of social conformity - peer-pressure and social rank - are influential at different aggregation levels.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind