The rise and change of the competence strategy: reflections on twenty-five years of skills policies in the EU

The principal aim of this article is to provide a historical overview of 25 years of competence policy in the European Union, highlighting connections between past and current initiatives and outlining possible scenarios for the decade to come. The article presents the social investment turn in social policy as the critical political background against which the emergence of a competence strategy in European Union education policy should be analysed and understood. The competence strategy, it is argued, finds its roots in a renewed attention at the European Union level for harmonising educational outputs and labour market demands. While trying to produce a schematic history of the emergence and change of the competence strategy, the article does not seek to offer strict definitions of competence itself; instead, it conveys the nebulous and context-dependent nature of the concept

The Move to Online Teaching: A Head of Department’s Perspective

Integrating online teaching strategies within universities is now well established, but there is little on how HE teachers experience this shift. One strand of literature suggests that university senior management teams often assume academic staff lack motivation to participate and resist change. This case study, from a Head of Department’s perspective, challenges that view. Focusing on academics who chose to move to the Open University, an online and distance learning provider, it argues that teaching online requires different skills and presents a fundamental challenge to teacher identity. It concludes that there is a need to both understand the academics’ perspective and acknowledge that there is motivation within the academic community; and support, at all institutional levels, is critical for academics making this transition

The Go-Betweens: Backstage Collaboration Among Community Managers in an Inter-organisational Enterprise Social Network

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have made inroads into many workplaces demonstrating their usefulness for enabling collaboration, information sharing and new forms of knowledge work. Yet, at the same time many organisations have fallen short of reaping such benefits since ESN, as malleable technologies, require a form of bottom-up sense-making for appropriate use cases and work practices to form and emerge. This runs counter to established, usually top-down implementation techniques. As a result, a new role has been established in many organisations to look after ESN implementation, that of the community manager. As a middle management role, community managers face challenges of mediating between management expectations and worker wants and needs, in addition to looking after the emerging ESN community. In this paper we study an inter-organisational ESN platform that offers a place for community managers from different organisations to engage in collaborative work to come to grips with their role and devise strategies for successful ESN adoption and use in their respective organisations. By employing Ervin Goffman’s theatre lens, we come to understand this ESN as a backstage channel that allows community managers to ‘share secrets’ and foster ‘collegiality’ as a way to cope with the demands of their role. We provide practical implications for stakeholders involved in malleable technology implementation and outline future research directions