Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Collaborative Crop Research Program

For over 30 years, The McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP) has explored solutions for sustainable local food systems through agricultural research. The program grew out of the Foundation's Plant Biology Program, which was founded in 1983, and reflects the Foundation's long-time commitment to place-based grantmaking and learning from those working on the ground. In 2014, the Foundation engaged The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) to develop a historic overview of the CCRP to capture its origins and evolution over the last 30 years. To develop this narrative, TPI interviewed past and current Board members, staff, consultants and grantees who had been involved at various stages in the lifespan of the program, and reviewed existing documents, reports and meeting notes.The report that follows is to serve as part of the "institutional memory" of The McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program. Its heavy reliance on individual recollections may detract from its precision, but such reflections bring to life the program's three decades of commitment, collaboration, and adaptation in an effort to contribute to a world where all have access to nutritious food that is sustainably produced by local people. While not an evaluative document, key moments of influence and impacts are noted along the way

A Relational View of Individual Participation in Online Communities of Practice: An Integrative Literature Review

This paper reviews prior research on individual participation in online CoPs. In particular, the paper examines how the concept of CoPs has been applied in IS and what theories have been applied to study knowledge sharing behaviours in online CoPs. Given inconsistent empirical findings derived from prior IS studies, the paper drew on literature on relationship marketing to re-conceptualize participation in a CoP as a contractual relationship between a member and the online community that evolves through a number of transitions. A conceptual framework was then developed to revisit prior empirical findings in relation to key antecedents and outcomes of individuals’ knowledge sharing in online environments. Review results suggest that there is a need to examine how individual, online CoPs and contextual factors may jointly affect individual participation in online CoPs through different intermediate processes and how an online member-community relationship may be formed and/or developed by different relational mediators

Communities of Practice in the Public-Private-Partnership Sector for Neglected Diseases Drug Development: the Importance of Mindset Mapping

This research article explores the mindsets of Public-Private Partnerships and Clinical Trials Organizations (CTOs) and the potential conflicts when working on drug discovery and development in the Third World global infectious diseases sector. A Communities-of-Practice (CoP) approach has been adopted to more fully explore the underlying values, attitudes and practices of these two future partners. This exploratory study suggests that future collaboration will be dependent on the two communities understanding and interpretation of each others‟ sustainability drug development drivers. The authors present secondary research findings that suggest the positive contribution that cognitive mapping of a community‟s sense-making can have in understanding the community‟s likely engagement in any future joint enterprise. Proposed future research will explore the underlying sustainability drivers that may both push and pull CTOs to engage in future global infectious diseases discovery and development projects. The article concludes by discussing the implications for future sustainable drug development projects involving PPPs and potential new strategic partners

“Everything Will Be Fine”: A Study on the Relationship between Employees’ Perception of Sustainable HRM Practices and Positive Organizational Behavior during COVID19

Sustainable human resource management practices represent one of the main organizational strategy to survive and to prosper within the fast-moving current scenario. According to this view, sustainability is strictly linked to the consideration of the unique and distinctive value that each human resource means for organizations. The recent COVID19 pandemic is having a serious impact on organizations and on their employees, it is profoundly changing the working modalities, mainly introducing smart working practices that were showed to have significant consequences on workers’ wellbeing. This study aims to investigate employees’ perception of sustainable HRM in the frame of the COVID19 emergency, exploring if and to what extent perceptions of involvement and organizational support together with individual coping strategies associated with organizational change could influence positive organizational behaviors, namely organizational engagement and extra-role behavior. The research involved 549 participants who completed a self-report online questionnaire encompassing psycho-social measures of the abovementioned variables. Results confirmed the important role played by sustainable HRM practices both for the capitalization of human resources and of organizational performance in a time of great uncertainty and global crisis. Implications for theory and HRM practice development were also discussed

Into the Fray: Novice Teachers Tackle Standards-Based Mathematics

This article tracks twenty-one graduates of a refom-based mathematics teacher education program for two years as they begin teaching mathematics in public elementary schools in New York City. Using surveys, classroom observations, and interviews, it examines the extent to which these beginning teachers were able to implement standards-based mathematics instruction in their classes. Results of the study were mixed. The novice teachers generally demonstrated an adequate understanding of the underlying mathematics principles and strong intentions of teaching mathematics for understanding.They were generally able to engage children in learning, and most performed at the “beginning stages of effective instruction” in their first year. However, they still struggled to engage students in higher order thinking and knowledge construction. ln their second year their abilities improved, but they were still hampered by local factors such as insufficient in-service support, the restrictions of high-stakes testing, and the overall school climate

EVIDENCE INFORMED STRATEGY TO IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING ENGAGEMENT

The ability of an organization to effectively learn and apply knowledge not only equates with highly agile performance, it is increasingly important to surviving in a knowledge based economy. Organizational learning has been widely popularized in recent decades, however defining, coordinating, and maximizing this collective learning capability within organizations remains challenging. In part this difficulty may lie in conflicted views about the purposes of learning and who it benefits, varied ways in which learning or leading it can happen, and most importantly in employee’s different motivations to engage in learning at all. This plan examines organizational learning engagement and targets changes and a solution to necessarily improve this active, immersive participation in learning. Changes required within the organization being examined include a need to balance a performance goal and managerial control emphasis over OL with a more explorative, employee centric, collaborative, learning growth strategy. Using team and authentic leadership in concert with Kotter’s model and emergent change principles, this improvement plan forwards a community of practice engagement solution and means to implement, monitor and evaluate it. Informally led communities of practice embody engaged organizational learning, accomplished through socialized relational exchange, knowledge sharing, and the disseminated production-use of knowledge artifacts. This proposed solution aims to integrate into existing bureaucratic structure of the organization and provide synergistic benefit to managerial practices already supporting organizational learning. The community of practice solution is presented as a small increment change helping lay foundations for more ambitious visions of a strongly supported learning culture emphasizing high engagement at the organization

Increasing Support and Collective Teacher Efficacy of Part-Time English-Language Instructors in a Japanese University

This organizational improvement plan (OIP) seeks to enhance the support and collective teacher efficacy of part-time English-language instructors in the Department of English Language and Culture (DELC) at Kei University (KU) (pseudonyms), a private university in the Kansai region of Japan. Currently, part-time and foreign part-time English-language instructors teach most of the compulsory English courses in the DELC at KU, but they receive limited institutional support and guidance, which negatively affects their ability to teach effectively and their students\u27 learning outcomes. This OIP examines the lack of support and collective teacher efficacy of part-time instructors as a problem of practice (PoP) that exists both within the organizational context of KU and the broader contextual forces of internationalization, economic globalization, and national and organizational cultures that shape the teaching and learning of English in Japanese universities. This OIP is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of social cognitive theory, the capabilities approach, and an eclectic leadership approach based on the principles of servant leadership. Drawing from the author\u27s experience as a committed part-time instructor, this OIP proposes an integrated change plan that underscores the connection between the well-being, support, and collective efficacy of instructors, addresses the PoP, and serves the needs of the broader community of students, faculty, and staff at KU. The change plan described in this OIP should be beneficial to educational leaders in Japanese universities who aspire to foster support and collective teacher efficacy among their faculty