Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface

This paper synthesizes recent insights from geography, science and technology studies and related disciplines concerning organizations and organizational learning at the science-policy interface. The paper argues that organizations do not exist and evolve in isolation, but are co-produced through networked connections to other spaces, bodies and practices. Furthermore, organizations should not be studied as stable entities, but are constantly in-the-making. This co-productionist perspective on organizations and organizing has implications for how geographers theorize, study and intervene in organizations at the science-policy interface with respect to encouraging learning and change and in the roles we adopt within and around such organizations

Newness Against the Grain: Democratic emergence in organisational and professional practice

What is the nature of democratic innovation in a performative culture? The purpose of this chapter is to help answer this question by giving conceptual substance to the notion of democratic emergence as a specific kind of innovation in the context of contemporary governance trends. It is argued that the performative governance which is the product of these trends is not invulnerable to challenge because of deficiencies in the capacity of managerialism and performative governance to improve services, and the creative spaces for agency and initiative created by the valuing of entrepreneurialism and innovation. The chapter draws on existing conceptual work on democratic approaches to school organisation and innovation, relevant literature on entrepreneurialism, and offers a brief insight into an example of democratic innovation in practice

The effect of knowledge management and organisational learning on individual competencies

Knowledge management (KM) is known for its positive impact on the strategy of organisations, but little is known and understood about the significance of competency and learning and its important effects on knowledge management in public and private organisations in different sectors of the economy in Kuwait. The problem is that many organisations deal with KM or new information or emerging information as a challenge of KM itself rather than a way of incorporating new knowledge into the organisation through the development of individual competencies, and hence developing both KM and individual competency. Based on interview data from Kuwaiti organisations, this paper argues that it is better to implement KM and maximize organizational learning in order to create more competent individuals based on the spiral of knowledge creation model or the theory of knowledge creation. The significant contribution this paper makes is that individual competencies have a reciprocal relationship with KM; the determining factors of individual competencies training, education, personal characteristics and culture affect KM success and are themselves affected by KM strategies. Some implications for managing organisational knowledge, organisational learning and development of individual competency are considered

Theorising path dependence : how does history come to matter in organisations, and what can we do about it?

This paper examines the concept of path dependence in organisational theory, attempting to utilise insights from a number of academic disciplines to improve our understanding of it. It examines the claims of the resource-based view of business, perhaps the organisational approach most commonly linked with path dependence, and reassesses them in the light of the framework presented here. It concludes by considering the role of history in organisations, the mechanisms through which it manifests itself in the present, and what we can do to break free from path dependence

The Learning Organisation and National Systems of Competence Building and Innovation

This paper is based on a hypothesis that we have entered a specific phase of economic development, which we refer to as the 'learning economy', where knowledge and learning have become more important than in any earlier historical period. In this new context the learning capability of firms located in the domestic economy becomes a major concern for national governments and, at the same time, the national infrastructure supporting knowledge creation, diffusion and use becomes a concern for management and employees. To get the two to match and support each other becomes a prerequisite for economic success for firms as well as for the national economy. One of the main objectives of this paper is to demonstrate that societal institutions, which may exist at the national or regional levels, shape the types of organisational learning predominating at the level of the firm. The paper develops the concept of a 'national system of competence building and innovation' by linking national specificities in the formation of skills and labour market dynamics to the micro-level processes of knowledge creation and learning within and between firms. It uses the examples of Japan, Denmark and the high-technology clusters in the US and UK to illustrate the logic of institutionalised variation in patterns of learning and innovation. The paper argues that tacit knowledge, which is difficult to create and transfer in the absence of social interaction and labour mobility, constitutes a most important source of learning and sustainable competitive advantage. Learning builds on trust and social capital. Institutions that are able to imbue these elements into firms and markets encourage interactive learning and are more likely to produce strong innovative capabilities.learning organisations; learning economy; knowledge creation; national innovation systems; institutions; tacit knowledge, competence building

The Babbage principle after evolutionary economics

In this paper we analyse the cognitive roots of the division of labour and relate it to the reduction of tacitness in the organisation and technology of a firm. We study the interaction between efforts of knowledge codification and problems of control in production from an evolutionary and complex systems perspective. By applying our framework to the emergence of white-collar work in the late 19th century and the modern knowledge economy we assert that property rights and limits to codification of knowledge are important forces shaping the process of organisational and technological change.research and development ;

The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

Theorising path dependence: how does history come to matter in organisations, and what can we do about it?

This paper examines the concept of path dependence in organisational theory, attempting to utilise insights from a number of academic disciplines to improve our understanding of it. It examines the claims of the resource-based view of business, perhaps the organisational approach most commonly linked with path dependence, and reassesses them in the light of the framework presented here. It concludes by considering the role of history in organisations, the mechanisms through which it manifests itself in the present, and what we can do to break free from path dependence.

The cat's cradle network

In this paper we will argue that the representation of context in knowledge management is appropriately served by the representation of the knowledge networks in an historicised form. Characterising context as essentially extra to any particular knowledge representation, we argue that another dimension to these be modelled, rather than simply elaborating a form in its own terms. We present the formalism of the cat's cradle network, and show how it can be represented by an extension of the Pathfinder associative network that includes this temporal dimension, and allows evolutions of understandings to be traced. Grounding its semantics in communities of practice ensures utility and cohesiveness, which is lost when mere externalities of a representation are communicated in fully fledged forms. The scheme is general and subsumes other formalisms for knowledge representation. The cat's cradle network enables us to model such community-based social constructs as pattern languages, shared memory and patterns of trust and reliance, by placing their establishment in a structure that shows their essential temporality