Utilizing a realist evaluative research approach to investigate complex technology implementations: an e-learning lecture capture exemplar

Purpose - This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a theory-driven realist evaluative research approach to better understand complex technology implementations in organisations. Approach – An institution wide e-learning implementation of Lecture Capture (LC), within a UK University, was chosen and a realist evaluation framework was used, tailored for educational technology. The research was conducted over 4, increasingly focused, evaluation cycles combining engagement analytics, user interviews and theory to refine what works (or does not work), for whom, in which contexts and why. Findings - Despite explicit demand and corresponding investment, overall student engagement is lower than expected. Increased student use appears linked to particular staff attitudes and behaviours and not to specific disciplines or course content. The main benefits of LC are; providing reassurance to the majority, aiding revision and understanding for the many, and enabling catch-up for the few. Recommendations for future research are based on some unexpected outcomes uncovered, including; evolving detrimental student behaviours, policy development based on technological determinism and future learner-centred system development for next-generation LC technologies. Practical implications – The realist approach taken, and evaluation framework used, can be adopted (and adapted) for future evaluative research. Domain specific reference models, categorizing people and technology, supported analysis across multiple contexts. Originality/value – This study responds to a call for more theory-based research in the field of educational technology. We demonstrate that a theory-driven approach provides real and practical recommendations for institutions and allows for greater insight into the political, economic and social complexity of technology implementation

Democratic Multiplicity

Our structures of democratic governance are often characterized by 'dysfunctionality', 'hollowing out', and 'gridlock'. This volume proposes an approach grounded in five different modes of democratic praxis. In exploring various democratic traditions, it recognizes that addressing eco-social crises requires coordination and cooperation among them

From policy framework to practice real work : exploring knowledge mobilisation within a complex adaptive system

Rationale: Successful implementation of evidence-based innovations has been identified as offering the best outcomes for service users, communities, and organisations. A widening understanding of structures, processes and resources essential to the successful adoption of innovative practices has informed the development of implementation frameworks that seek to bring research users and providers closer together. Despite these efforts, best available research knowledge is still difficult to translate into innovations in practice at scale, requiring the investment and co-ordination of resources across interconnected social structures that can be resistant to change. However, some changes do take hold and lead to new practices becoming integrated into organisational routines. Mobilising individual and collective knowledge have been identified as a key factor in delivering organisational changes. Research in this area has highlighted the role of complex, context dependent and power-laden organizational structures in relation to the spread and use of knowledge while the role of the individual as the agent of change within these organisational structures has received less attention. This study adds empirically to the conceptual and theoretical literature by focusing on the individual as the agent of change and the role of knowledge as a catalyst for the implementation of changes in practice. Drawing on literature on the creation, sharing and use of knowledge and employing the principles of complexity theory to construe the context as a series of complex adaptive systems, the study seeks to gain an understanding of how a Government policy framework transforms into individuals creating, sharing and actioning knowledge to secure changes in practice. Study Context: This study considered how the ambitions of a Scottish Government Policy, Ready to Act (R2A) were implemented within the organisational setting of an NHS Scotland health board. The participants in the study were a group of Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) which included physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech & language therapists, podiatrists and dieticians along with their leaders and representatives from the Scottish Government who had been instrumental in setting the overall direction of service redesign. The R2A policy aimed to break down professional silos to create a more integrated service delivery that focused on early intervention and prevention approaches. The overarching research aim was addressed in this context through the following research questions: What are the underlying mechanisms that enabled individuals to create, share and action knowledge to reconfigure services towards early intervention-prevention service delivery within this context? What underlying mechanisms facilitate and maintain the momentum and direction of change across diverse and dynamic agents within the system? Study Design: The qualitative longitudinal study adopted a realist approach to consider what works for whom and in what context in relation to implementing practice change in line with policy ambitions. Participants’ understandings of the change process and their attributions for successful changes were explored over a 17-month period. Context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) theory configurations were constructed and refined through three tranches of focus groups (4) , interviews (23), observations (50 hours) and documentary analysis (16 documents) to provide a robust explanation of how knowledge drawn from a learning activity was mobilised across a complex adaptive system of health and social care. Theoretical Framings Employing concepts from complexity theory and knowledge mobilisation literature, the health and social care context is construed as a complex adaptive system (CAS), where interconnected entities adapt and self-organise in response to stimulus or feedback from their environment. Considering outcomes as an emergent quality of the system rather than a product of command and control, enabled the unpredictable and uncontrollable aspects of the context to be viewed as potential assets to the knowledge mobilisation process. Main Findings: The study considered two workstreams of AHPs who were collaboratively designing changes in practice which aligned with the ambitions of the R2A policy. The groups had different starting points in relation to their workstream tasks. These different starting points, and the resources and histories of the participants had continuing impacts on how the individuals within each workstream group responded to knowledge presented within the learning activity and to the policy ambition of a move to a proactive approach to service provision. Employing a complexity theory lens provided a useful analytical frame for surfacing and explaining differences in the nature and pace of change across contexts. Key constructs from complexity theory (self-organisation, feedback loops, emergence and interconnectivity) provided a useful way of explaining differences across the system and brought attention to elements of the change process which were unforeseen, forgotten or hidden in plain view. The study also identified distributed leadership and the cultivation of an allocentric disposition, where individuals were willing to engage with the knowledge from other groups and individuals, as necessary antecedents of knowledge mobilization. The importance of feedback loops in maintaining the trajectory and momentum of change across the system and over time was another important finding. Feedback loops were observed manifesting as epistemic artefacts which were created, refined and often replaced by individuals and groups as the system adapted and evolved. The longitudinal nature of the study revealed incremental changes which were important, but which were largely unacknowledged by the measures of change adopted by local management and the Scottish Government. Theoretical Contribution: The study revealed how the attributes of complex systems were harnessed to mobilise knowledge and deliver desired outcomes. Drawing together the literature on epistemic artefacts and the attributes of complex adaptive systems, this study provides a greater understanding of the role of artefacts within feedback loops in the sharing and application of knowledge. The nature of feedback loops has not been explored fully in previous studies. This study sheds light on how linguistic, social, and physical artefacts are created and employed within the process of knowledge mobilisation to support sustainable changes in practice. Empirical Contribution: This research provides a rich, detailed account of knowledge mobilisation in AHPs, an under-researched group of key actors within health care. It provides much needed longitudinal empirical evidence to a field which has received predominantly theoretical attention and provides an inter-group observation of knowledge mobilisation within a complex adaptive system. Practical Contribution: Employing realist methodology provided an ontologically deep exploration of the factors impacting on individuals and collectives as they sought to create, share, and implement their knowledge to deliver changes in practice. The realist methodology also provided a reflexive space for participants to review and unpack their experiences and set these within the context of how events emerged across the wider system over time. The refined CMO theories resonated with the experience of stakeholders from a wider national context who identified with the complexity-informed explanations of outcome variation across the system. The refined CMO configurations provide practical guidance on how key factors of complex adaptive system were harnessed to support the development and spread of innovation. Implications of the study The findings from the study suggest that where knowledge is a catalyst for changes in practice, the scale-up and spread of change across a complex adaptive system is facilitated through micro-processes of feedback. These feedback loops are highly sensitive to context. Understanding how feedback loops evolve and influence the trajectory of change within specific contexts offers an opportunity to harness the feedback loop to create virtuous cycles of change, moving the CAS in the desired trajectory of change. Understanding how vicious cycles of undesirable change or status quo are being sustained through feedback loops offers formative opportunities to dampen the influence of these feedback loops. The findings also suggest distributed and hierarchical approaches to leadership are both required within complex organisations. Although command and control structure are necessary to ensure the organisation is stable enough to function effectively, a distributed model of leadership is necessary to foster engagement and innovation. These different forms of leadership were not in competition but could be construed as operating as further feedback loops which influenced the direction of change. Creating change across this complex system relied on the mobilisation of knowledge between engaged agents. This occurred within this study through respectful and empowering relationships which were based on a model of distributed leadership and an allocentric disposition. These factors took time to become established. Individuals and groups working to mobilise knowledge were supported when anticipated timeframes for projects and activities were extended to facilitate change processes, particularly in context where individuals and groups had no history of working together. This study sought to provide a coherent explanation of the events experienced by practitioners and leaders as they addressed the shared ambitions of a government policy. The findings suggest that feedback loops which emerge from a deep understanding of how relationships are formed, managed and sustained across a system, provide key knowledge that can be mobilised to promotes the scale up and spread of innovation across a complex system."This study was supported through the Scottish Improvement Science and Collaborating Centre (SISCC) and The Health Foundation. It forms part of a portfolio of work on Knowledge into Action at Scale (KiAAS)." -- Fundin

Virtuous or Vicious Cycle? Inscribing Diverse Professional Values in Lecture Capture Systems

This paper examines the way in which the introduction and use of a new information system affects and is affected by the values of a diverse professional workforce. It uses the example of lecture capture systems in a university. Its contribution is to combine two concepts taken from actor-network theory, namely accumulation and inscription, and combine them with an integrated framework of diversity management. A model is developed of accumulation cycles which involve multiple interacting actants, including the broader environment, management commitment to diversity, work group characteristics, individual practices and the affordances of technology. Using this model, alternative future inscriptions can be identified – an optimal one, which enhances professional values, as a result of a virtuous accumulation cycle, or a sub-optimal one, as a result of a vicious cycle. It identifies diversity management as an important influence on the way in which professional values are enhanced, modified or destroyed

Invisibility and labour in the human sciences

There are powerful social, political, and epistemological reasons for concealing (or revealing) certain people and practices in the course of scientific research and publication. The human sciences—including biology and biomedicine as well as anthropology, linguistics, and social science—depend upon people with diverse values and expertise, who have varied motivations and degrees of political agency. Research encounters are often orchestrated by actors behind the scenes—tissue donors, survey respondents, student subjects, translators, activists, ethics review boards, civic or religious institutions, lawyers, nurses, and archivists. Their contributions move in and out of the shadows as scientific knowledge is made, with important consequences for the authority and authenticity of research findings. Through a collection of case studies, this volume encourages methodological reflection on whether and how historians of science and STS scholars might recover contributions to the human sciences. Ultimately the volume asks how our professional, institutional, geographical and political circumstances condition whom we claim to speak of and for

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces

Abstract In the final months of 2010, a new global cycle of protests and social movements emerged that, as the following text willargue, has forced us to critically interrogate and transform the accepted ways in which theorists and researchers perceive the relation between aesthetics and politics, performativity and critical practice, modernity and its presupposed mimetic dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. These protest movements will be examined as various instances of the general category that we can call “the Occupy form.” The following research beginswith an overview of the cycle of struggles and protest that were born out of the global revolutions in 1968. After having provided the salient features of this moment of recent political history, this text moves on to considerations of the performative turn in both the arts as well as in politics, thereby allowing for a broader critique of Modernity and for a conceptualization of what one could call as altermodernities. — a category, which obliges the theorist-researcher to reconceive of the very notion of performativity in the process. The research also defines performative event and its aesthetics in contrast to other existing literature such as social performance theory, and it goes on to argue for an aesthetics whose function is to create the conditions for alternative subjectifications. As performative politics works on the social relations to envision and enact a future society in the present, the transformations in dominant spatio-temporality – a constituent part of relationality – as well as bodies – in-between which the social relationality emerges – will be examined. The processes and mechanisms of constructing and imagining collective bodies at the national level, and how performative politics disrupts such processes of homogenization will be also an important part of evaluating the impacts and effects of occupy movements as well as how these performative movements re-appropriated time and space; creating spatio-temporalities different from the established colonial and authoritarian linear progress-centered ones reproduced by the nation-state apparatuses, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa. It will be also argued that a paradigm of imitation and mimesis will come short of explaining the communication and dissemination of protests movement from Cairo to New York, from Istanbul to Madrid, thus proposing the idea of performative contagion as a model to rethink this communication. Although this research makes use of case studies, archived material, and author led interviews with artist-activists, all of which are related to the main subject of this thesis the occupy form of protests and its predecessors largely remains a theoretical endeavor to use performance and theatre studies in the socio-political field,drawing its insights from the tradition of the philosophers of immanence and the thinkers of community in 20th century

50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility – Conflict & Reconciliation

This open access book identifies various forms of heritage destruction and analyses their causes. It proposes strategies for avoiding and solving conflicts, based on integrating heritage into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It reflects on the identity-building role of heritage, on multidimensional conflicts and the destruction of heritage, and considers conflict-solving strategies and future perspectives. Furthermore, it engages theoretically and practically with the concepts of responsibility, reconciliation and sustainability, relating mainly to four Sustainable Development Goals, i.e. SDGs 4 (education), 11 (e.g. World Heritage), 13 (climate action) and 17 (partnerships for the goals). More than 160 countries have inscribed properties on the UNESCO World Heritage list since the World Heritage Convention came into force. Improvements in the implementation of the Convention, such as the Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List, have occurred, but other conflicts have not been solved. The book advocates for a balanced distribution of properties and more effective strategies to represent the global diversity of cultural and natural heritage. Furthermore it highlights the importance of heritage in identity building

Sympathy for Strangers: Picturesque Aesthetics and the Politics of Feeling in the American Gilded Age

The middle class in both Britain and America has always been a precarious position, its vague economic perimeters and financial vulnerability making it uniquely reliant on cultural and aesthetic values to define its boundaries. In mid- to late-nineteenth century America, the ability to see aesthetically to perceive any object as beautiful or interesting became a definitive feature for a class emerging between increasingly extreme wealth and poverty. The eighteenth-century British tradition of picturesque aesthetics, which prized the rough and the natural, made aesthetic taste a means by which the nascent middle class could define its social position. In America, works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman imported picturesque modes of perception and infused them with moral, spiritual, and political significance: to apprehend roughness or dereliction as beautiful became a virtuous act, fundamental to the creation of their radically new nation. The Transcendentalists made the picturesque a means of unification with otherness, a process which allowed moral sentiments to become a primary site of personal agency, and thus to serve as intervention in social problems. Frequent economic crises, mass immigration, and rapid urbanization during the Gilded Age created an urban middle class for whom aestheticizing roughness could foster a cosmopolitan identity; members of the bourgeoisie needed an antidote to their sense of the contingency and unreality of middle-class life, as well as a structure for understanding their obligations toward structurally distanced others. Sketches about the picturesque qualities of urban ghettos, ranging from touristic journalism to reform literature, educated genteel Americans on aesthetic and affective responses to class and ethnic difference. Writers responding to this tradition such as H.C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, Hutchins Hapgood, and especially William Dean Howells use the picturesque to probe their own interest and that of their class in rough people and places. The self-directed irony of their work depicts and interrogates the position of genteel viewers whose sympathy with poorer people is effected primarily through aesthetic products or cross-class spectatorship. These writers forge an important link to contemporary liberal culture, which upholds the social value of moral sentiment but consistently projects an ambivalent and ironic relation to it

Fassbinder's Germany: history, identity, subject

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the most prominent and important authors of post-war European cinema. Thomas Elsaesser is the first to write a thoroughly analytical study of his work. He stresses the importance of a closer understanding of Fassbinder's career through a re-reading of his films as textual entities. Approaching the work from different thematic and analytical perspectives, Elsaesser offers both an overview and a number of detailed readings of crucial films, while also providing a European context for Fassbinder's own coming to terms with fascism