Involvement as a dilemma: between dialogue and discussion in team based organizations

"This article describes an ongoing action research project in a public administration department working towards a more flat structure characterized by value-based management, team organization, and involvement. The article presents involvement as a multidimensional dilemma and describes how employees experience and cope with traditional and modern dilemmas, and how the borderline between them seems to be blurred. It also includes the AR-dilemma unfolding in the relation between the participants and us as actions researchers. The dilemmas are discussed in relation to Human Resource Management. The history of involvement is reflected as a historical transformation of participative democracy into participative management characterized by strategic communication." (author's abstract

Participation as Enactment of Power in Dialogic Organisational Action Research. Reflections on Conflicting Interests and Actionability

"The article focuses on participation as enactment of power in dialogic, organisational action research. The article has a dual purpose: It shows how participation is enacted as power in processes between participating managers, employees and action researchers with different or conflicting interests. It discusses if and eventually how it is possible to handle participatory processes when participation is conceptualised as enactment of power. This is done by reflecting critically on two examples from a dialogic, action research project carried out in two Danish, private organisations in 2008 and 2009. The overall perspective is to bring participation as enactment of power into the centre of dialogic, organisational action research processes and into action research that understands itself as participatory. The article argues in favour of understanding participation as enactment of power in a project work between different partners (employees, managers, and action researchers) with different interests. This argument is based on a definition of participation as co-determination of goals and means. Moreover, the article argues that combining reflexive and contextualised analyses from 1rst and 2nd person approaches with broader 3rd person action research perspectives might make dialogic, organisational action research projects more actionable. Theoretically, participatory processes aim at empowerment. The article shows that co-producing knowledge in dialogic, organisational action research implies ongoing reflections on tensions in the action research concept of ‘co-‘. In practice, these processes unfold in a field of tensions between empowerment and constraint." (author's abstract

Employee Driven Innovation in Team (EDIT) – Innovative Potential, Dialogue, and Dissensus

"The article deals with employee driven innovation in regular teams from a critical, pragmatic action research perspective, referring to theories on innovation, dialogue, workplace learning, and organizational communication. It is based on an action research project “Innovation and involvement through strengthening dialogue in team based organizations” funded by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. 18 teams from one public and two private organizations participated in the project. The article defines the concept of employee driven innovation (EDI) in relation to theories on innovation, workplace learning and action research, and presents EDI as a fairly new field of research. EDI is conceptualized as a participatory endeavour differing from a mainstream understanding of innovation as surplus value for the organization. The article focuses on incremental, organizational process innovations co-created across conflicting workplace interests in and between teams. The article argues that it is meaningful to assert that every employee has an innovative potential, no matter of what educational background or sector and that sometimes, this innovative potential might be facilitated through Dialogic Helicopter Team Meetings (DHTM) with a dissensus approach. During the action research process, it became important to organize a special kind of DHTMs as a supplement to ordinary team action meetings close to day-to-day operations, but separated in time and space. They focus on how to improve existing organizational routines and work practice in order to produce value for the organization, better work flow, and improved work life quality. These meetings are discussed in relation to similar organizational constructs within Scandinavian action research. The action research process made it clear that it is not enough to set up DHTMs if they are going to facilitate EDIT. They must be characterized by a dissensus approach, combining dissensus organizing and dissensus sensibility. Dissensus organizing means that team conversations must be organized in ways where silent or unspoken, critical voices speak up. This can be done by using, e.g., pro and con groups or a bystander. This demands, too, that team members, managers, and action researchers develop dissensus sensibility to open up for more voices, for indirect criticism, and for more democracy in the decision process trying to balance dialogues in multidimensional tensions between consensus and dissensus. The article grounds the complexities of this process in thick presentations of DHTMs in Team Product Support, Danfoss Solar Inverters and Team Children, Citizen Service, the Municipality of Silkeborg, Denmark. It demonstrates how these meetings created different organizational process innovations, and how theoretical concepts like DHTM, dissensus organizing and dissensus sensibility were developed from practice." (author's abstract

Indledning

2007 er udnævnt til “Det europæiske år for lige muligheder for alle” af EU. Året skal blandt andet øge den europæiske befolknings bevidsthed om retten til ligestilling og ikkeforskelsbehandling samt om problematikken om mangeartet forskelsbehandling. I de officielle dokumenter om året hedder det bl.a., at “[d]et europæiske år vil fokusere på det budskab, at alle er berettigede til ligebehandling uanset køn, race eller etnisk oprindelse, religion eller tro, handicap, alder eller seksuel orientering”, og at “[d]et europæiske år […], navnlig ved at fremhæve fordelene ved mangfoldighed, [vil] fokusere på, at alle uanset køn, race eller etnisk oprindelse, religion eller tro, handicap, alder eller seksuel orientering kan bidrage positivt til samfundet som helhed.” (Citat: EUROPA-PARLAMENTETS OG RÅDETS AFGØRELSE Nr. 771/2006/EF af 17. maj 2006 om det europæiske år for lige muligheder for alle 2007) – mod et retfærdigt samfund, s. 3.

Introduction: Language use in and about the net drama series SKAM

On January 30 2018, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Denmark, hosted a symposium entitled “Sproget i og omkring SKAM” (“The language in and around SKAM”). After the symposium, we issued a call on behalf of the journal Scandinavian Studies in Language, and two articles were published as a result, namely Jennifer Duggan and Anne Dahl’s article Fan translations of SKAM: Challenging Anglo linguistic and popular cultural hegemony in a transnational fandomand Elisabeth Muth Andersen and Søren Vigild Poulsen’s contribution Viewing, listening and reading along: Linguistic and multimodal constructions of viewer participation in the net series SKAM

Pyramidal Atoms: Berylliumlike Hollow States

Based on the idea that four excited electrons arrange themselves around the nucleus in the corners of a pyramid in order to minimize their mutual repulsion, we present an analytical model of quadruply excited states. The model shows excellent comparison with ab initio results and provides a clear physical picture of the intrinsic motion of the four electrons. The model is used to predict configuration-mixing fractions and spectra of these highly correlated states.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure