Learning from working across boundaries

The Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (RWSS) Sector is managed by the National Centre for Environmental Health and Water Supply (commonly known as Nam Saat) under the Ministry of Health. Nam Saat prepared and launched the Lao PDR RWSS Sector Strategy in November 1997. Since then, Nam Saat has designed a number of RWSS sub-components for a variety of multi-sectoral projects supported by different external support agencies*. The RWSS Components of these multi-sectoral projects are now either completed or in the process of implementation. This paper briefly highlights the learning from these RWSS Projects on aspects related to working across boundaries

Leading change as a professional: working across boundaries

This paper outlines an initiative, namely a leadership symposium, which developed from a chance meeting of like-minded academics, who were trying to achieve similar outcomes with their student groups; namely, to include the scholarly activity of disseminating graduates\u27 action-oriented projects. One group of graduates were from a mix of healthcare professions, the other group were teachers. Both were leading change projects across their professions. One group was guided by action research and the other by action learning. This paper outlines the graduates’ experiences of their challenges, opportunities and learning from leading these change initiatives. Arising from the symposium exchanges, the authors focus on the unique opportunity of the event as a distinctive space for exchange of learning across professions. Findings from qualitative data collected for the symposium is supported by situated learning and existing literature

Working Across Boundaries: Current and Future Perspectives on Global Virtual Teams

Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) are a commonplace in contemporary organizations, and an already established topic of research in international management. While we have a good understanding of advantages and challenges associated with this ubiquitous form of work groups, this special issue aims to contribute to theory development by focusing on key drivers that influence the success of GVTs, along with ways for mitigating their challenges. We briefly review current knowledge on GVTs and propose a structuring framework that can help with both organizing what we know about GVTs, and with guiding the conversation on where the research on this topic might focus next. We then introduce four special issue articles that illustrate avenues for generating new empirical evidence towards uncovering key characteristics and dynamics underlying GVTs complexities, providing useful insights for both theory development and managerial practice

Working Across Boundaries: Barriers, Enablers, Tensions and Puzzles

The notion of working across boundaries continues to receive attention from scholars and practitioners of public policy, administration and management. In recent times, much emphasis has been placed on notions of inter-organisational, inter-jurisdictional and inter-sectoral working and a range of terms have emerged to capture this phenomenon: horizontal coordination, joined-up government, collaboration, whole-ofgovernment, holistic government, collaborative governance and so on. However, there is a core element that binds these various manifestations – the notion that we must traverse boundaries to achieve goals

Working across boundaries: Interdisciplinary and multi-method research

The second NCRM Summer School will be held at the University of Southampton,11-14th September 2006. This year’s summer school will focus on the challenges of conducting collaborative research across disciplinary and methodological boundaries

Working Across Boundaries in Preventing Violent Extremism: Towards a typology for collaborative arrangements in PVE policy

Preventing violent extremism has become a concern for policy makers at all levels from municipal governments to international organisations. A common feature of policy at all levels is the call for collaboration between different sectors, professionals, organisations and communities. While collaboration features so centrally in PVE policy, currently there is no overarching framework through which the many instances of collaboration can be analysed or compared. This paper offers a typology of collaborative arrangements in PVE policy derived from a multilevel policy analysis. This typology creates a foundation for further research into the effectiveness and limitations of different collaborative arrangements in the context of PVE

The university third space phenomenon: investigating perceptions of professional staff working across boundaries in an Australian university and its Singapore campus

The University third space is often presented as a powerful driver and an increasingly widespread phenomenon of shifting job roles and identities of both professional and academic staff in the contemporary global university environment (Birds, 2015; Graham, 2013); Whitchurch, 2008/2015). It is defined as new and emerging, or re-invented forms of university activities that transcend traditional academic and professional portfolio binaries, as well as professional identities, creating new work engagements between academic and professional staff (Whitchurch, 2012, 2015). The advancement of globalisation leads to convergences of higher education policies and workplace practices (Gopinathan, 2001; Gopinathan & Lee, 2011; Green, 1997, 1999; Mok & Lee, 2003); to renegotiation of spaces occupied by university staff in the course of their professional engagements, and to redefined boundaries within universities and across multiple national and international professional, geographical and sectoral domains (Henkel, 2010). Third space may be viewed as a potential way of reinventing academic and professional staff professional engagement. It may be used as a meta-discourse to interpret universities’ local responses to globalisation. Australia’s location in the Asia-Pacific region, with its close political, economic and trade connections with countries of Southeast and East Asian countries, including Singapore – the “region of exceptional economic dynamism” (Marginson, 2013, p. 87) – has far-reaching implications on the way higher education systems and processes in these countries are operationalised and how education services are delivered. This systemic convergence and the increasing connection between tertiary institutions has a flow-on effect on how university staff, academic and professional, operate and collaborate within their own organisations, across professional and geographical borders, and how their roles and professional identities blend and integrate. The international presence of an Australian university affords a unique research opportunity to explore how university professional staff navigate these simultaneously challenging and propitious new professional spaces in a cross-cultural and cross-national context. A qualitative multiple case study (Patton, 2015; Simons, 2009; Stake, 2006) will explore the emerging phenomenon of the university third space from the perspective of professional staff working in Australian and Singaporean campuses of an Australian university. The impact of national culture and its dimensions (collectivism/individualism (Triandis, 1993, 1995) and the Confucian dynamism (Hofstede & Bond, 1988) in particular), will be examined to understand professional staff predispositions towards working across professional and geographic boundaries (Cohen & Mankin, 2002; Mankin, Cohen, & Fitzgerald, 2004; Mankin & Cohen, 2004). The new understanding of the university collaborative engagement will be created through building the university third space narratives. These will be analysed using contemporary frameworks of professional staff identities and a typology of third space (Graham, 2013; Whitchurch, 2012). The narratives will provide recommendations to build university professional staff expertise and resilience in their evolving roles within the emerging university third space

The learning process model for intercultural partnerships

This paper addresses the issue of how learning can support intercultural effectiveness and is one of the outputs of the eChina-UK Programme. In this paper I synthesise theory and evidence from a number of fields in order to propose a practical model of learning that can be applied to intercultural collaborations. The aim is not to replace existing theories and models of learning but to draw on them in order to present a simple description that might be of value to those planning and managing international partnerships. Although much of what is said here relates specifically to intercultural collaboration I believe that many of the observations remain true of cross-sectoral partnership (which is, anyway, often intercultural as well) and of inter-professional learning too: indeed, there might be an argument for asserting principles of learning that contribute to effectiveness in working across boundaries in any long-term collaboration. The paper is divided into an Introduction and four further sections. Section 2 reviews the various streams of literature which have informed the current study and presents an argument for the particular approach to learning promoted in this paper on the basis of established and complementary research in a number of different disciplines. Section 3 contains a description of the learning model for intercultural collaboration which has been developed as part of our current research at the University of Warwick. The practical application of this model, and the implications for policy in cultural collaboration, are discussed briefly in Section 4. The final section summarises the work and looks forward to further research and development around the issue of learning in intercultural collaboration

It came in little waves : Feminist Imagery in Chantal Akerman\u27s Je, Tu, Il, Elle +

Chantal Akerman writes, “she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.”[1] This thesis addresses the films of Chantal Akerman from a theoretical feminist film perspective. There are many lenses through which Akerman’s rich body of work can be viewed, and I would argue that she herself never intended for it to be understood in just one way. I wish to situate Akerman’s films, in particular her 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1h 30m), within a discourse of other feminist film theorists and makers that were further rooted in the women\u27s movement of the 1960s. Using this framework, I will argue that Akerman not only addressed the calls of these feminist scholars, but also exceeded their breadth, by drawing attention to, and working across, boundaries, in addition to dismantling patriarchal narrative conventions. [1] Chantal Akerman “On D’Est.” In Bordering Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est,” ed. Kathy Kalbreich and Bruce Jenkins. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1995)