What lies beneath? The role of informal and hidden networks in the management of crises

Crisis management research traditionally focuses on the role of formal communication networks in the escalation and management of organisational crises. Here, we consider instead informal and unobservable networks. The paper explores how hidden informal exchanges can impact upon organisational decision-making and performance, particularly around inter-agency working, as knowledge distributed across organisations and shared between organisations is often shared through informal means and not captured effectively through the formal decision-making processes. Early warnings and weak signals about potential risks and crises are therefore often missed. We consider the implications of these dynamics in terms of crisis avoidance and crisis management

Informal in formal:discourses of informal learning in the national core curriculum for Finnish general upper secondary education

Abstract. This thesis explores the discourses of informal learning in the advanced syllabus of English in the national core curriculum for Finnish general upper secondary education. The objective is to analyse how the possibilities of the surrounding society to acquire language skills in different situations is reflected in the contents and practices of formal education in general upper secondary schools. Two experts involved in the curriculum design were interviewed for the purpose of this thesis. In addition to the interviews, the renewed national core curriculum (2019) was analysed. The analysis employs the theoretical background and terminology of mediated discourse analysis and nexus analysis. The findings are reflected on previous research, and the theoretical background of the Finnish core curriculum design, namely, sociocultural and ecological approaches to learning. Based on previous research and the interviews it can be stated that the increase in informal learning has strengthened the language proficiency of students. However, the interviews also reveal that language proficiency has polarised: the differences in language skills have grown, due to the differences in how the students use or expose themselves to English in their spare time. The research material suggests individual learning paths as a key solution to consider the students’ differing skill levels. The effect of the strengthening of language skills can also be detected in assessment, as the expected level of proficiency in English is higher than that of other foreign languages with an equivalent advanced syllabus. Informal learning has also brought phenomena challenging foreign language education: for instance, as the extracurricular use of English quite often takes place in informal situations, the acquired language is often fairly colloquial. Thus, learning how to apply an appropriate register has been a focus area in curriculum design. The findings suggest that the effect of informal learning can be detected in the core curriculum and curriculum design in many ways. Furthermore, it is suggested that the new language profile should be carefully developed when implementing the core curriculum. The language profile was seen as a plausible solution for many of the challenges facing foreign language education.Tiivistelmä. Opinnäytetyö käsittelee informaaliin oppimiseen kytkeytyviä diskursseja lukion opetussuunnitelman perusteissa englannin kielen A-oppimäärässä. Tarkoituksena on syventyä siihen, miten ympäröivän maailman mahdollisuudet hankkia kielitaitoa erilaisissa tilanteissa heijastuu koulutussisältöihin lukiossa. Opinnäytetyötä varten haastateltiin kahta asiantuntijaa, jotka olivat mukana vieraiden kielten opetussuunnitelmatyössä. Haastattelujen lisäksi työssä on analysoitu vuonna 2019 hyväksyttyjä lukion opetussuunnitelman perusteita, jotka astuvat voimaan syksyllä 2021. Analyysissa on hyödynnetty välitteisen diskurssianalyysin ja neksusanalyysin teoreettista taustaa sekä käsitteistöä. Löydöksiä peilataan aiempaan tutkimukseen sekä siihen teoreettiseen taustaan, johon opetussuunnitelmatyö nojaa, erityisesti sosiokulttuuriseen ja ekologiseen oppimiskäsitykseen. Aiempaan tutkimukseen ja haastatteluaineistoon nojaten voidaan todeta informaalin oppimisen lisääntymisen vahvistaneen opiskelijoiden kielitaitoa. Toisaalta haastatteluissa kävi ilmi, että kielitaito on myös eriytynyt: erot taidoissa ovat kasvaneet, kun vapaa-ajallaan opiskelijat käyttävät tai altistuvat englannille eri laajuudessa. Tutkimusmateriaalin perusteella yksilölliset opintopolut nähdään keskeisenä ratkaisuna huomioida opiskelijoiden erilaiset lähtökohdat. Taitotason vahvistumisen vaikutus on havaittavissa myös arvioinnissa, sillä A-englannin tavoitetaso on korkeammalla kuin vastaavan laajuisten muiden vieraiden kielten tavoitetaso. Informaali oppiminen on luonut myös haasteellisia ilmiöitä: kun vapaa-ajan kielenkäyttö tapahtuu useimmiten vapaamuotoisissa tilanteissa on opittu kielikin pääsääntöisesti vapaamuotoista. Opetussuunnitelmatyössä onkin kiinnitetty huomiota tilanteeseen sopivan rekisterin hallitsemisen oppimiseen. Johtopäätöksenä esitetään, että informaalin oppimisen vaikutus on havaittavissa opetussuunnitelmassa ja opetussuunnitelmatyössä monin eri tavoin. Lisäksi ehdotetaan, että opetussuunnitelman perusteiden jalkauttamisessa tulee kiinnittää erityistä huomiota uuden kieliprofiilin kehittämiseen ja hyödyntämiseen. Kieliprofiili nousi haastatteluissa esiin ratkaisuna useaan kieltenopiskeluun liitettävään haasteeseen

Public perception and social network analysis for coastal risk management in Maresme Sud (Barcelona, Catalonia)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11852-014-0341-0Understanding the governance system, stakeholder relationships and perceptions of coastal landscape risk is essential to improving the sustainability of coastal environments. Our main objective was to analyse social networks for the Maresme Sud coastal area in Catalonia and examine public perceptions of risk in order to shed light on how the current governance system could be improved to promote more adaptive coastal landscape risk management. Our methodology was based on semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders and a social network analysis, which provided context-based information on stakeholder interactions and power relationships and the transfer and diffusion of different types of knowledge. In Maresme Sud, the strong presence of public bodies makes the integration of more adaptive and innovative discourses in coastal management practices more difficult. The role of supra-local stakeholders, currently poorly represented in the network, should be enhanced. Coastal partnerships could also act as bridging organizations to facilitate learning, cooperation and knowledge exchange among stakeholders.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Hospitality, Culture and Regeneration: Urban decay, entrepreneurship and the "ruin" bars of Budapest

This paper considers the relationships between hospitality, culture and urban regeneration through an examination of rom (ruin) venues, which operate in dilapidated buildings in Budapest, Hungary. The paper reviews previous work on culture and urban regeneration in order to locate the role of hospitality within emerging debates. It subsequently interrogates the evolution of the rom phenomenon and demonstrates how, in this context, hospitality thrives because of social and physical decay in urban locations, how operators and entrepreneurs exploit conflicts among various actors involved in regeneration, and how hospitality may be mobilised purposefully in the regeneration process. The paper demonstrates how networked entrepreneurship maintains these operations and how various forms of cultural production are entangled and mobilised in the venues’ hospitality propositions

Constructing Meanings by Designing Worlds: Digital Games as Participatory Platforms for Interest-Driven Learning and Creativity

This study emerges from the observation of an increasing divide between generations: a lack of a shared ground that carries profound social, cultural, and educational implications. In particular, the broadening differences between academic and “grassroots” approaches to learning and creativity are transforming formal and informal enterprises into seemingly incommunicable realms. This clash between different (and distant) practices, inside and outside of school, is inhibiting the construction of a common language between teachers and students, and, more broadly, between generations, thus hindering the development of any educational discourse. In this study I inquired into an online participatory space in order to advance our understanding on how its participants, driven by their interest for gaming and game design, discursively constructed learning and creativity. In particular, I looked into a community dedicated to designing, sharing, and critiquing digital game levels (i.e. “mini-games”) created with LittleBigPlanet (a digital game and creative tool for the PlayStation 3 game console) and discussed in the “Forum” section of the LittleBigPlanet Central website (www.lbpcentral.com). In this qualitative study I applied a hybrid intertextual methodology based on discourse analysis, studio critique, and design process analysis to analyze discursive texts (threads/posts in the discussion forum), interactive artifacts (user-generated game levels), and constructive practices (deigning, sharing, and critiquing game levels). The findings of this study show that participants socially construct and negotiate learning and creativity by enacting specific discursive functions that entail the use of humor and specialist language and the negotiation of effort and self-appreciation. By engaging in multimodal and intertextual practices in an attentive and competent community, users create a safe social space that fosters reciprocal trust, togetherness, participation, planning, and reflectivity. By furthering our understanding of a situated interest world, this research advances our knowledge on informal participatory spaces in which learning and creativity emerge as intertwined phenomena that develop through social-constructive endeavors that spur from people’s interests and passions

Tapping into the ‘standing-reserve’: a comparative analysis of workers’ training programmes in Kolkata and Toronto

This paper examines employment-related training programmes offered by state funded agencies and multinational corporations in Toronto (Canada) and Kolkata (India). In recent years both cities have witnessed a rise in the service sector industries aligned with global regimes of flexible work and the consequent reinvention of a worker subject that is no longer disciplined according to the needs of industrial production. A worker must now be self-regulated, competitive, flexible, with an ability to convey an urbane, English-speaking deportment within the workplace. Training of employees, especially soft skill training becomes crucial in this connection as a form of technology for achieving this end. Based on Martin Heidegger’s conceptualisation of ‘standing-reserve’, we suggest that what training programmes do in the context of neoliberal capitalist production is the creation of an essential quality of human-ness that has to be harnessed, its potentialities tapped and amplified through training. We further suggest that such programmes often remain heavily influenced by race/class/gender hierarchies as well as stereotypical assumptions of desirable/undesirable bodies, forms of socialisation and modes of habitation that often are naturalised in the course of training

Mobile media practices of young people in «safely digital», «enthusiastically digital», and «postdigital» schools

Wie gehen Schulen gegenwärtig mit mobilen Medien um? Ausgehend von ethnografisch orientierter Feldforschung an Deutschen Auslandsschulen, arbeitet der Beitrag drei Muster schulischer Praktiken im Umgang mit der Smartphone-Nutzung von Jugendlichen heraus: «geschützt-digitale», «enthusiastisch-digitale» und «post-digitale» Praktiken. Anhand von Feldforschungsvignetten aus drei Schulen beschreibt der Beitrag die jeweiligen Muster anschaulich, um nachvollziehbar zu zeigen, wie unterschiedlich Schülerinnen und Schüler durch die Praktiken kontrolliert, geregelt oder befähigt werden, ihre Welt im Bildungskontext zu gestalten. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die beschriebenen Praktiken gleichzeitig existieren. Sie setzen unterschiedliche (nicht bessere oder schlechtere) institutionelle Prioritäten und unterschiedliche (nicht bessere oder schlechtere) Verständnisse der Mediennutzung von Jugendlichen um. Der Beitrag macht die Spannungen sichtbar, die entstehen, wenn Schulen die Nutzung mobiler Medien von Kindern und Jugendlichen kontrollieren wollen und argumentiert, dass jedes Muster schulischer Praktiken sich selbst untergräbt. Der Beitrag endet mit einer Reflexion der Implikationen der Studienergebnisse für zukünftige Forschung und schulische Praktiken: Die zunehmende Nutzung mobiler Medien in der Schule ist nicht zwingend als Ausdruck von «Fortschritt», «Verbesserung» oder «Modernisierung» zu sehen, sondern wird vielmehr durch die unterschiedlichen Verständnisse von Schule und jungen Menschen hervorgebracht.How do schools today engage with mobile media? Drawing on ethnographically oriented research at German Schools Abroad, this paper teases out three sets of practices regarding young people’s mobile media use: «safe», «enthusiastic», and «postdigital». Presenting vignettes from three schools to illustrate each set of practices, the paper demonstrates how students are differently controlled, guided, and given space to shape their worlds through the practices. The paper highlights that these practices exist simultaneously. They enact different (not better or worse) institutional priorities and different (not better or worse) understandings of young people’s mobile use. The paper also highlights the tensions when schools aim to control young people’s mobile use, arguing that each set of practices undermines itself. It ends by reflecting on the implications for future research and practice if we see increased mobile media use in schools not, as often assumed, as a mark of «progress», «improvement» or «modernity», but instead as emerging from different understandings of school and young people

MANNA FROM HEAVEN: THE EXUBERANCE OF FOOD AS A TOPIC FOR RESEARCH IN MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION

Organizations have, in the past, often been discussed as if they were Cartesian mentalities, planning agendas, learning from doing, processing information, reducing equivocality, mimicking and copying, floating disembodiedly apart from the actors who work in these organizations. We are offered representations of organizations as organically grounded metaphors that minimize the biological facticity of employees: namely, their need for food. While the inputs to organizations conceived as if they were quasi-systems are well explored, and the emotional and ‘irrational’ side of organizations is increasingly explored, the necessity of inputs to the biological systems that staff them is not. Nonetheless, despite the lack of explicit scholarly attention to food at work, its importance guarantees its hidden presence in the organizational literature, often in the context of more “serious” themes. We identify four approaches to the relationship between food, work and organization. For dessert, we propose a research menu that aims to uncover several possibilities for making the role of food in organizational life more explicit.

Exploring grade 11 learner routines on function from a commognitive perspective

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015This study explores the mathematical discourse of Grade 11 learners on the topic function through their routines. From a commognitive perspective, it describes routines in terms of exploration and ritual. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 18 pairs of learners, from six South African secondary schools, capturing a landscape of public schooling, where poor performance in Mathematics predominates. The questions pursued became: why does poor performance persist and what might a commognitive lens bring into view? With the discursive turn in education research, commognition provides an alternate view of learning mathematics. With the emphasis on participation and not on constraints from inherited mental ability, the study explored the nature of learner discourse on the object, function. Function was chosen as it holds significant time and weight in the secondary school curriculum. Examining learners’ mathematical routines with the object was a way to look at their discourse development: what were the signifiers related to the object and what these made possible for learners to realise. Within learners’ routines, I was able to characterise these realisations, which were described and categorised. This enabled a description of learner thinking over three signifiers of function in school Mathematics: the algebraic expression, table and graph. In each school, Grade 11 learners were separated into three groups according to the levels at which they were performing, from summative scores of grade 11 assessments, so as to enable a description of discourse related to performance. Interviews were conducted in pairs, and designed to provoke discussion on aspects of function and its signifiers between learners in each pair. This communication between learners and with the interviewer provided data for description and analysis of rituals and explorations. Zooming in and out again on these routines made a characterisation of the discourse of failure possible, which is seldom done. It became apparent early in the study that learners talked of the object function, without a formal mathematical narrative, a definition in other words, of the object. The object was thus vested in its signifiers. The absence of an individualised formal narrative of the object impacts directly what is made possible for learners to realise, hence to learn. The study makes the following contributions: first, it describes learners’ discursive routines as they work with the object function. Second, it characterises the discourse of learners at different levels of performance. Third, it starts exploration of commognition as an alternate means to look at poor performance. The strengths and limitations of the theory as it pertains to this study, are discussed later in the concluding chapter. Keywords commognition, discourse, communication, participation, routines, exploration, ritual, learners, learning, narratives, endorsed narratives, visual mediators