120 research outputs found
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Safety by design: dialogues between designers and builders using virtual reality
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.Designers can contribute to enhancing the safety of construction work by considering how their decisions impact on both the physical environment in which construction workers operate and the means and methods they use. To do so, however, designers require knowledge about safety hazards on site and the opportunity to examine their designs early in projects. Through a set of studies virtual reality tools were used to examine the potential for collaborative dialogue between designers and builders to provide a forum for learning and proactive change of a design to make a project safer to build. In the tests, participants viewed proposed designs using virtual reality to examine various alternative design and construction scenarios. The study shows that consultation and dialogue with an experienced construction professional are highly beneficial for designers to appreciate the implications of designs on safety, and that designers are more willing to adapt design details than to change aesthetic aspects of their designs
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Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology : a sociomaterial study of computer game development
Digital technology, with its distinctive characteristics that result from the fundamental process of digitalization that underpins it, is seen as fundamentally altering processes of creativity. However, we currently have limited understanding of creativity in relation to the development of digital technology. Computer game development, with its combination of esthetic, affective and cultural use features and highly sophisticated digital technologies, is a valuable setting for investigating these issues. In this paper, we explore how computer games are shaped through the interplay between the creative intentions of developers and the digital technologies involved in their production and playing. Drawing on in-depth studies conducted at three leading computer game development studios and a leading producer of the software system used in game development, this paper shows how the game developers' creative ideas for imagined novel game-playing experiences relate to a) the development of relevant digital technologies, and b) the emergence of new game development practices. The article goes on to propose a view of creativity as an on-going flow that, following an initial ‘creative impulse’, ripples through the sociomaterial entanglements of a particular setting, reconfiguring them in the process and spreading out in time and space in often unexpected ways
Visiting the iron cage: Bureaucracy and the contemporary workplace
Bureaucracy as an organizational form has always been a controversial issue and placed at the very heart of most discussions within organizational theory. One side of this prolonged discussion praises this administrative form as the ‘rational’ way to run an organization. It provides needed guidance and clarifies responsibilities, which enables employees to become more efficient. However, the opposition claims that in a non-linear world, where industrial organizations are forced to confront the challenging task of sensing and responding to unpredictable, novel situations of highly competitive markets, such an organizational form stifles creativity, fosters de-motivation and causes pressure on employees. Dealing with a bureaucratic form of organization and its consequences begs for a context. It would be appropriate to quit ‘taking sides’ and develop a sound analysis of this phenomenon under the conditions of today’s global workplace environment. This chapter intends to delineate the conditions under which bureaucracy has emerged and the way it has been interpreted since its inception and develop a sound and appropriate analytical approach to its functioning given the prevailing conditions of the contemporary workplace.Publisher's VersionAuthor Post Prin
Understanding Interorganizational Learning Based on Social Spaces and Learning Episodes
Different organizational settings have been gaining ground in the world economy, resulting in a proliferation of
different forms of strategic alliances that translate into a growth in the number of organizations that have started
to deal with interorganizational relationships with different actors. These circumstances reinforce Crossan, Lane,
White and Djurfeldt (1995) and Crossan, Mauer and White (2011) in exploring what authors refer to as the
fourth, interorganizational, level of learning. These authors, amongst others, suggest that the process of
interorganizational learning (IOL) warrants investigation, as its scope of analysis needs widening and deepening.
Therefore, this theoretical essay is an attempt to understand IOL as a dynamic process found in
interorganizational cooperative relationships that can take place in different structured and unstructured social
spaces and that can generate learning episodes. According to this view, IOL is understood as part of an
organizational learning continuum and is analyzed within the framework of practical rationality in an approach
that is less cognitive and more social-behavioral
The sensorium at work: the sensory phenomenology of the working body
The sociology of the body and the sociology of work and occupations have both neglected to some extent the study of the ‘working body’ in paid employment, particularly with regard to empirical research into the sensory aspects of working practices. This gap is perhaps surprising given how strongly the sensory dimension features in much of working life. This article is very much a first step in calling for a more phenomenological, embodied and ‘fleshy’ perspective on the body in employment, and examines some of the theoretical and conceptual resources available to researchers wishing to focus on the lived working-body experiences of the sensorium. We also consider some possible representational forms for a more evocative, phenomenologically-inspired portrayal of sensory, lived-working-body experiences, and offer suggestions for future avenues of research
Collaborating for Innovation: the socialised management of knowledge
Although the importance of diverse knowledge is widely recognised for open innovation, there may be a gap in our understanding of the social processes that shape how collaborators engage in knowledge exchange. This social gap may be significant because of the powerful, but largely unexplained, role attributed to trust as a social artefact. Moreover, we see trust as a process and that different types of trust are involved in the collaborative process. Thus, this paper uses a qualitative methodology to capture the experiences of innovation collaborators. As explanation of the dynamic interplays of knowledge and trust, we offer a description of phases in the process. Our analysis finds that the relationship moves from transactional to social. The early phases are characterised by technical knowledge, but the later and mature phases are identified with knowledge of the person and by personal trust. The success of innovation is a result of relationships with augmented trust. We found that a fabric of trust is woven from the weft of professional knowledge and the warp of personal knowledge to support innovation. We propose that this developing of relationships might be conceived as becoming more open in the sense of sharing with one another. If so, we seem to have described and offered a social dimension of open innovation
How Can We Define Mastery? Reflections on Learning, Embodiment and Professional Identity
Towards an articulation of the material and visual turn in organization studies
International audienceContemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic andproduct design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identityand organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifyingand reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating theemergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, weprovide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, wefurther explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation tonovelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discusssome of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose fororganizational research
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