Reflections on a degree initiative: the UK's Birmingham Royal Ballet dancers enter the University of Birmingham

This paper provides an opportunity to share experiences and perceptions of the first 5 years of a degree programme for professional dancers. A partnership developed in the mid-1990s between the UK's Birmingham Royal Ballet and the University of Birmingham, Westhill (now School of Education), to provide a part-time, post-experience, flexible study programme for full-time Company dancers. This is the first 'company customised' higher education programme to dovetail studies around rehearsal, performance and touring schedules. Methodology is based on a narrative by the author, informed by ongoing internal and external evaluations, in-depth interviews with dancers and Company managers, documentation and secondary sources. Outcomes indicate that the programme has made a positive difference to the Company, to the dancers and to the wider education and dance/arts world

A knowledge-based view of agenda-formation in the development of human resource information systems

Human resource information systems (HRIS) can potentially transform human resourcing tasks, but conflicts between HR and IS managers can hinder HRIS design and implementation projects. The ethnographic narrative in this article presents an HR and an IS project manager initially conflicting during the ‘agenda formation’ stage of an HRIS project in a transnational organization because they took different perspectives (as evidenced by their use of different heuristic and generative metaphors), thus constraining progress. However, from politically oriented public and private rhetorical activities, new knowledge emerged following an ‘epiphany of knowing’ experienced by the HR manager and progress was made. It is suggested that in managers' rhetorical activities both generative and heuristic metaphors can aid ‘relational knowing’, which is an important precursor to situated learning. However, care must be taken to recognize the political aspects of such processes and the potential hegemony of different knowledge disciplines in IS project development work