Inquiring Organizations and Tacit Knowledge

Churchman’s five Inquiring Systems are considered in the light of Polanyi’s distinction between Tacit Knowing and Practical Thinking. It is suggested that the five Inquiring Systems are distinct and crucial elements of the Learning Organization that can be divided into two perspectives: the modes of Tacit Knowing and the levels of Practical Thinking. Tacit Knowing critically contributes to the sustainable growth of an organization through its connection with (1) intuition (2) holism, and (3) ethics

Ethical decision-making regarding infant viability: A discussion

© The Author(s) 2016. Background: There are no universally agreed rules of healthcare ethics. Ethical decisions and standards tend to be linked to professional codes of practice when dealing with complex issues. Objectives: This paper aims to explore the ethical complexities on who should decide to give infants born on the borderline of viability lifesaving treatment, parents or the healthcare professionals. Method: The paper is a discussion using the principles of ethics, professional codes of practice from the UK, Nursing Midwifery Council and UK legal case law and statute. Healthcare professionals' experiences that influence parental decision are also considered. Findings & Discussion: There are considerable barriers to an effective discussion taking place in an environment where clinical decisions have to be made quickly once the baby is born. This is compounded by the need and respect for parental autonomy and the difficulties they face when making a best interest's decision knowing that this could cause more harm than good for their infant child and balancing any decision they make with quality of life. Conclusion: On deciding whether to give lifesaving treatment born at the borderline of viability, it should be a joint decision between the parents and the neonatal team

Explorations in knowing: thinking psychosocially about legitimacy

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.In this paper, we look at what engaging with psychoanalysis, through psychosocial accounts of subjectivity, has contributed to our struggles for legitimacy and security within our ways of knowing. The psychosocial, with its insistence on the unconscious and the irrational, features as both a source of security and of insecurity. We use three examples drawn from our own empirical research to explore the entanglement of the researcher with the researched and how this can offer a re-imagined sense of legitimacy for our work. In elaborating our argument, we discuss our experiences of 'being captured' by data and participants, and of negotiating the ethics of analysing participants' accounts. © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Pedagogy, Culture & Society

From Rationality To Relationality: Teacher-Student Relationship As Unknowing

This dissertation reimagines the teacher-student relationship through a philosophical approach that draws on Laozi, Karen Barad, Deleuze & Guattari, and Emmanuel Levinas. The teacher-student relationship is normally considered a relationship of the knower (teacher) and the unknower (student) based on the modern western tradition of episteme. This dissertation interrogates the modern binary of the teacher/student, subject/object relationship by bringing ontology and ethics into educational discourse. The problematic practices of modern schooling include the reduction of teaching to knowledge transmission, and the rigid dichotomy of a subject/object relation between teacher and student. Following a Taoist Way of philosophical thinking, this work re-imagines the teacher-student relationship by shifting the understanding of “knowing,” “being” and “child” from a modern perspective to an “ethico-onto-epistemological” perspective. Re-thinking the modern concept of knowing into the entanglement of knowing, being, and ethics does not mean we depreciate the value of knowing; rather we adhere to a fundamental break in a privileging of the discursive and a thinking of knowledge as the sole domain of epistemology. Laozi’s philosophy of “wu-wei”, Barad’s concepts of “intra-actions,” “ethico-onto-epistemology,” Deleuze & Guattari’s concepts of “rhizome” and “becoming,” and Levinas’ ethics of the “Other” propose a “pedagogy of unknowing”, where both teachers and students partake in an intra-active process of “becoming.” Based on the pedagogy of unknowing, I argue that it is not knowledge or the knowledge of the Other that is important, rather, our orientation to the Other’s unknowability as a starting point for learning from the Other. Ultimately, in responding to the rational dualism and the crisis of representation in language and theories, the last chapter turns to silence as the end/beginning of the conversation