Learning in doing: the social anthropology of innovation in a large UK organisation

In the face of increasingly dynamic market environments, firms are being urged to develop learning and innovation capabilities if they wish to secure competitive advantage and long-term growth. A bank of work written from numerous theoretical perspectives has converged on the view that knowledge underpins the formation of such capabilities. While much of this literature emphasises the importance of cognitive knowledge, a new approach grounded in techniques from social anthropology suggests that learning is a non-cognitive practice, drawing on embodied exploration, everyday sociality, and a communitarian infrastructure of human and non-human actants. This thesis aims to consolidate the current literature on 'possessed' knowledge by clarifying the relationship between cognition and learning, and to advance understanding of innovation practices within firms by examining the role of non-cognitive mechanisms in the development of organisational capabilities. Drawing on a nine-month period of ethnographic research, this thesis describes the on-the-ground processes of learning and innovation within the marketing department of a large UK organisation. This evidence is used to investigate critically the theoretical claims regarding the role of both cognitive and non-cognitive forms of knowledge. Based on the empirical findings, three interrelated arguments are proposed: the design and governance of strategic learning devices involve non-cognitive practices; informal mechanisms of learning underpin the formation of new capabilities; and communitarian theories of learning overemphasise the social construction of knowledge, while neglecting the agency of the materiality of context

Teacher Attitude and Curricular Change: The Journey of Three Elementary Teachers

This qualitative* study focuses on the influence of three elementary teachers\u27 attitudes on a mathematics curricular change. The study takes place in a small school district in southeastern New York. A collection of data was facilitated by observations, interviews, and journal entries for a period of nine months. The analysis of the data resulted in six themes: (a) The three participants saw the rationale for the curricular change as suspect; (b) they also saw selected components of the new program as problematic; (c) two of the pai\u27ticipants felt that as they became more involved in the new mathematics curriculum their roles as teachers became more student- centered, whereas the third participant remained teacher oriented throughout; (d) the participants were apprehensive when trying to implement a curriculum based upon an unfamiliar philosophy (constructivism); (e) two of the participants became more committed to the curricular change as their students experienced more success, whereas the third participant was affected, but to a lesser degree; and (f) two of the participants felt their attitudes and teaching behaviors had improved considerably, while one participant remained ambivalent. Several educational implications grew from this study. First, teachers are more apt to be influenced by experiencing the innovative pedagogy than by the passive, traditional lecture and reading approach to curriculum change. Confronting and challenging teachers* attitudes must be an integral part of teacher development. Also, teachers may regress and return to their original teaching practices if they do not feel successful. Most significantly, teacher change is important, but poorly understood. Based on the findings of this study and research by others such as Zollman and Mason (1992), Thompson (1992), and Raymond (1995) that suggests that there is an important relationship between teachers\u27 attitudes and teachers\u27 behaviors, the following recommendations are made: Offer an ongoing inservice program available to everyone which is based upon the principles of the curriculum to be implemented, develop an evaluation plan that incorporates a support group to help teachers understand where they are in the change process, and lastly, encourage future research

Simulated role-playing from crowdsourced data

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-178).Collective Artificial Intelligence (CAl) simulates human intelligence from data contributed by many humans, mined for inter-related patterns. This thesis applies CAI to social role-playing, introducing an end-to-end process for compositing recorded performances from thousands of humans, and simulating open-ended interaction from this data. The CAI process combines crowdsourcing, pattern discovery, and case-based planning. Content creation is crowdsourced by recording role-players online. Browser-based tools allow nonexperts to annotate data, organizing content into a hierarchical narrative structure. Patterns discovered from data power a novel system combining plan recognition with case-based planning. The combination of this process and structure produces a new medium, which exploits a massive corpus to realize characters who interact and converse with humans. This medium enables new experiences in videogames, and new classes of training simulations, therapeutic applications, and social robots. While advances in graphics support incredible freedom to interact physically in simulations, current approaches to development restrict simulated social interaction to hand-crafted branches that do not scale to the thousands of possible patterns of actions and utterances observed in actual human interaction. There is a tension between freedom and system comprehension due to two bottlenecks, making open-ended social interaction a challenge. First is the authorial effort entailed to cover all possible inputs. Second, like other cognitive processes, imagination is a bounded resource. Any individual author only has so much imagination. The convergence of advances in connectivity, storage, and processing power is bringing people together in ways never before possible, amplifying the imagination of individuals by harnessing the creativity and productivity of the crowd, revolutionizing how we create media, and what media we can create. By embracing data-driven approaches, and capitalizing on the creativity of the crowd, authoring bottlenecks can be overcome, taking a step toward realizing a medium that robustly supports player choice. Doing so requires rethinking both technology and division of labor in media production. As a proof of concept, a CAI system has been evaluated by recording over 10,000 performances in The Restaurant Game, automating an Al-controlled waitress who interacts in the world, and converses with a human via text or speech. Quantitative results demonstrate how CAI supports significantly more open-ended interaction with humans, while focus groups reveal factors for improving engagement.by Jeffrey David Orkin.Ph.D

Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction

Enhancing the successful delivery of service operations

The hard copy which contains published articles is available for consultation in the Brynmor Jones Library

Towards computer supported cooperative design

This thesis first reviews the literature about the nature of cooperative design activity and its technological support. It is noted that knowledge of how designers work together in real-world settings is less than complete. Moreover, after over a decade of developments in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the state-of-the-art in collaborative technology does not fully support such activities. Two substantial case studies are presented. The first draws upon fieldwork with designers at a large, distributed engineering design company, where a pilot study of collaborative technologies was carried out, focusing on the organisational context for such interventions and the reasons behind the qualified success of the experimental technology. In the light of the lack of use of synchronous tools in particular, a second case study was carried out. This was a complementary analysis of face-to-face co-working in a series of meetings held by a small design group. The results of both pieces of fieldwork are analysed in the context of existing studies of designers in both real-world and laboratory settings. This leads to the identification of a number of important characteristics of cooperative design, some newly identified, others confirming or extending the results of existing work. They include the identification of tension between traditional engineering design culture and the underlying assumptions of new technology; the intrinsic difficulties in sharing some types of design artefacts; and the way in which design entails an interweaving of individual and group activity, with consequences for resource exploitation, distributed cognition and workspace navigation in group sessions. The findings are integrated into an organising framework for cooperative design, with emphasis on the support of coworking designers distributed across multiple sites. Current technologies are reviewed against scenarios based on the framework and recommendations are made for further work

Influence of social capital on inter-firm knowledge transfer: a qualitative study of small and medium scale enterprises in Nigeria

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy.This thesis explores the influence of social capital on knowledge transfer among Nigerian Small Medium scale Enterprises’ (SME) managers. It aimed to address a number of important gaps recognized in the literature, particularly because there is limited research in this area as regards developing countries in disparity to developed countries. Specifically, the study attempts to shed light on how Nigerian SME managers perceive social capital, how social capital develops in Nigerian SMEs, how Nigerian SME managers transfer knowledge among each other and how social capital influences knowledge transfer within the context of Nigerian SMEs. Extant literature has focused more on how social capital influences knowledge transfer within the context of multinational corporations in developed economies with limited focus on SMEs and specifically, SME managers in developing ones. This study contributes to addressing this critical gap in literature by adopting an SME perspective to exploring how social capital influences knowledge transfer among Nigerian SME managers. A qualitative research method is adopted, involving semi-structured interviews of 26 Nigerian SME managers in Nigeria. Thematic analysis has been conducted using NVivo to identify relevant themes and subthemes in relation to the focus of the study. A conceptual framework was developed to illustrate how Nigerian SME managers develop social capital by leveraging on building synergy, attending business events, deliberately targeting proven knowledge sources, developing passionate personality, leveraging on shared values, volunteering and referrals. However, for SME managers to develop social capital, they must initiate interaction, position themselves to be seen and find ways to network. This conceptual framework not only highlights how Nigerian SME managers perceive social capital, it went further to highlight the different social capital triggers from the perspective of Nigerian SME managers. 5 Overall, this study reveals that weak ties can also access tacit knowledge transfer, if the knowledge seeker leverages on referrals which provide the privileges of strong ties. Moreover, this study found that tacit knowledge can be transferred in a large network with weak ties when the nature of the discussion is intense. This happens among SME managers in large WhatsApp groups, where SME managers barely know each other

Development of Authoring and Agency in Early Childhood Through Play

The recent national focus on universal early childhood education programs has drawn attention to the challenges of organizing learning contexts and practices in which children can thrive as learners and community members. Preparing children for school and improving the quality of early childhood education face limits, however, when the role of play is dismissed or reduced to merely instrumental activity. Framed in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, Bakhtin’s dialogic approach, and Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance, I reframe play as a process of authoring that fuels children’s passion for being agentive actors in the world and their own lives. This approach addresses how children are positioning themselves in trying out different play roles in the world they themselves co-create with others. This process entails the initiation of intentions, agency, and the negotiation of differences, all cumulating in a stance children take in co-authoring their lives and their worlds. This qualitative study was conducted in a naturalistic setting where dimensions of interaction, authoring processes, and positionality were observed and analyzed through an ethnographic lens focused on authoring themes. Data included naturalistic observations, field notes and video-recordings with 14 children ages 3 to 5 engaging in extended episodes of free-play time over a twelve-week period. Four themes emerged from the qualitative analysis of the data: (1) initiating/setting intention in which children began a play scenario and showed the desire and intention to pursue a play role; (2) negotiating/making decision in which children constructed boundaries and negotiated their stance and space with others, that is, how children began to differentiate self-other relationships; (3) acknowledging/showing attention in which children established a standpoint and position collaboratively yet from an individually unique stance; (4) claiming/exercising authority in which children showed an active dialogic understanding of a shared goal, and exercised authority by claiming a space or position. The patterns of interaction among these four themes reveal the complex journey children take in the process of authoring their identity. This study suggests that play creates the space of authoring in which children can exercise agency in co-creating their world and themselves, where they can re-experience and negotiate their possible selves within possible worlds in relation to others. This research contributes to both theoretical and educational re-conceptualizations of play as an important developmental portal through which children develop agency

Organizational knowledge in the making : history, breakdowns and narratives

The present study looks at the dynamics whereby organisational knowledge comes into existence and is eventually crystallised into stable structures of signification through processes of utilisation and institutionalisation. Recent years have seen an astounding explosion of writing about organisational knowledge. In different versions, organisational theorists have been paying increasing attention to the idea of the firm as a body of knowledge, stressing in turn the ability of firms to create, manage and transfer knowledge as a critical success factor. However, the current debate on the topic has highlighted the difficulty of documenting empirically the process of creation, accumulation and maintenance of knowledge in organisations. This, of course, begs the question: how is it possible to relate an empirical study to the theoretical debate on knowledge in organisations? More specifically, how does a particular knowledge system emerge and become stabilised? How does it evolve over time? In this study, we argue that the lack of attention to knowledge as an empirical phenomenon can be traced back to the assumptions underlying the mainstream knowledge-based theories of the firm, which emphasise the instrumental, functional character of knowledge in organisations. In contrast to the functionalist view of knowledge, we contend that mainstream assumptions need to be combined with those perspectives focusing on the social construction of knowledge and highlighting its contentious, provisional nature. Given the problems identified at both theoretical and methodological levels, the present study proposes a framework for studying knowledge as an empirical phenomenon based on three methodological lenses, which are echoed in the title of this work: history, breakdowns and narratives. The three lenses have to be seen as bringing into focus the tacit features of knowledge and organisation. The empirical core of the research is evidenced by three in-depth case studies conducted at Fiat Auto Italy. The findings of the study provide the backbone for constructing a theoretical model of knowledge in organisations. The model links the content, process, and context of knowledge-related phenomena in a coherent classificatory system. More generally, the empirical research highlights the systemic, institutionalised, and multi-faceted nature of knowledge in organisations