Toward an Actor-Network approach for investigating education and learning within a corporate university: a world of heterogeneous assemblages

Education and learning in organizations are dynamic in nature and conventionally considered to depend on sociality. Nevertheless, the development of technologies has provoked impassable impacts. The theoretical proposal of knowledge as a collective activity (knowing) drives to the concept of situated learning. However, material artifacts tend to be ignored. Conversely, this research recognizes the importance of considering the organization as a heterogeneous assemblage of social, material and practices. This suggests a methodological shift to question the canonical analysis of the organization and learning theories. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) surfaces the materiality of practices, creating a foundational for regarding objects as legitimate actors. Assuming that it is no longer possible to separate sociality from materiality, this study pioneers adult learning settings

The antecedents of e-learning adoption within Italian corporate universities: A comparative case study

The implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in business education appears to be influenced by a number of organizational issues, such as culture and technological sophistication. However, extant research has had very little to say about the antecedents that shape the adoption and diffusion of ICT across companies. In order to shed light on the phenomenon under investigation, this paper presents a comparative case study between five Italian companies that have instituted a corporate university. By distinguishing companies in typical cases and deviant cases with regard to the extensive use of e-learning technologies, our findings provide some useful insights about the antecedents that make companies more or less prone to employ the new frontiers of technology in their CUs

Bose-Einstein condensates in 1D optical lattices: compressibility, Bloch bands and elementary excitations

We discuss the Bloch-state solutions of the stationary Gross-Pitaevskii equation and of the Bogoliubov equations for a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of a one-dimensional optical lattice. The results for the compressibility, effective mass and velocity of sound are analysed as a function of the lattice depth and of the strength of the two-body interaction. The band structure of the spectrum of elementary excitations is compared with the one exhibited by the stationary solutions (``Bloch bands''). Moreover, the numerical calculations are compared with the analytic predictions of the tight binding approximation. We also discuss the role of quantum fluctuations and show that the condensate exhibits 3D, 2D or 1D features depending on the lattice depth and on the number of particles occupying each potential well. We finally show how, using a local density approximation, our results can be applied to study the behaviour of the gas in the presence of harmonic trapping.Comment: version published in EPJ

Managing the Actantial Model for Organizational Research

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can be considered as an approach or assemblage of material-semiotic tools, definitions, and methods of investigation, that treat every phenomenon as a continuously generated effect of webs of relations between humans and non-human artifacts. As a material-semiotic approach, researchers can use ANT for describing the enactment of agglomerations of heterogeneous material and discursive artifacts, namely, actor-networks. Semiotic is one of its first sources of inspiration, together with structuralism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology. In ANT, a semiotic definition is used: an actant is the source of action. When studying both humanity and materiality, effects and genres might be different, but not the work of attributing, imputing, distributing actions, competences, performances and relations. Actions and trials define stability, continuity and isotopies of actors, which are not seen as to be static, but dynamic. Texts and discourses are recognized to be powerful to define contexts, their authors and readers. Networks are the products of organizing activities, where organizing represents the construction of connections between organizational actors. ANT extends semiotics and represents a method to deconstruct record and describe the generative path of narration against any a priori discoun

Flessibilità, coerenza, integrazione: tre leve per una leadership efficace a supporto dello smart working

I numerosi contributi scritti in tema di smart working hanno posto nuovamente al centro del dibattito il tema della leadership come guida per il cambiamento. Con particolare riguardo al ruolo che essa svolge nella creazione di un ecosistema organizzativo che favorisca il pieno sviluppo dello smart working in azienda, il presente lavoro ne ripercorre le caratteristiche peculiari e le leve di azione managerial

Narratives in organizational research: the contribution of Greimas' structural semiotics

The present work aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of antecedents, key features and modes of application of generative semiotics in organizational research. A central tenet in the Greimasian approach is focusing on narrative structures in order to account for the attribution of sense and production of meaning. Unveiling the underline structures of texts and discourses requires a rigorous theoretical and empirical apparatus of knowledge about structural semiotics. With this in mind, we address the conceptual foundations of Greimas’ theory into the field of general narratology to argue its application as both a research methodology and an interpretative framework to delve into the complexity of organizational phenomena. To that end, this study provides researchers with a comprehensive knowledge that may help them to apply Greimasian semiotics when studying organizations. By providing a first systematization of concepts and notions around the use of structural semiotics for managerial research, this work strongly encourages a broader dissemination of generative semiotics in organizational studies for a number of theoretical and methodological opportunities. In this way, it expands chances for organizational theory and research practice

Defining Leadership in Smart Working Contexts: A Concept Synthesis

This paper begins by considering the importance of leadership to pursue behavioral, cultural, technological, and ethical aspirations of smart working practices in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of leadership in smart working contexts. We adopt a literary approach to the concept synthesis method with which to critically analyze and conceptually map a wide set of related notions of leadership that are connected with the evolutive dynamics of smart working approaches. According to the scope conditions of the research, the role of leadership emerges with the purpose of changing behaviors, creating shared meanings, and integrating physical and technology-mediated interactions in smart working environments. With this in mind, the iterative integration of smart working and leadership literature has gradually begun to detect and classify the main characteristics of leadership in smart working contexts in terms of leadership antecedents, attributes, and outcomes. The interpretative synthesis results in an overarching conceptualization of “leading in smart working contexts” that depicts leadership as a naturally emerging phenomenon that combines agile logics and change management practices to align interests at different levels of the organization. These premises lead to the alleged “triple-win” configuration of smart working approaches. While encouraging in-depth discussion about the facilitative and performative function of leadership in smart working contexts, this study contributes to advancing knowledge on what “being a smart leader” actually means, and how to operatively apply this notion in smart working contexts. Together, the concept delineation and the operational definition of “smart leadership” offer important insights for both managerial action and future directions of research

Once upon a time…The role of woman’s body in gender narratives

This work proposes the use of Greimas’s actantial model to explore organizational discourses about gender. We are motivated by the strong evidence of a long-lasting narrative scheme, which constrains women to “non-actant” roles, and relegates female bodies to be “opponent” components of a pervasive male narrative. By using this fixed narrative, organizational discourses have perpetuated gender discrimination, leading women to perceiving their corporal selves at odds with their real or essential selves (Trethewey, 1999), to disciplining, controlling, normalizing, hiding, and neutralizing their own bodies (Børve, 2007; Haynes, 2008, 2011; Trethewey, 1999), even to dis-embodying themselves. When applying Greimas’s actantial model, a number of literature texts show some fixed components of the action, called actants. For many years women have been considered as victims of masculine norms in organizational discourses (Lewis, 2014). As victims, they have hardly ever been heroines, in terms of being subjects of narrations. On the contrary, women are often conceived as opposite other of the male and they are “absent in the capacity of subject” (Irigaray, 1985:132). In line with these considerations, they may be associated with non-actant roles of an intrinsically male narrative. According to Irigaray (1985), this lack of subjectivity has prevented women to create narratives, language, embodiment and representations of their own selves. Since bodies are receivers and not creators of social meanings, and they are understood and used through institutional practices and discourses (Butler, 1993), the female body becomes an opponent actant to be objected. In fact, women’ bodies are viewed excessively sexual “as they are revealed through pregnancy, menstruation, emotions and clothing” (Trethewey, 1999:426-445). This way of thinking reveals, on the one hand, that pregnancy and maternity make visible the existence of the body, its sexuality and carnality, as well as the maternal potentialities and the reproductive role of women; on the other hand, that the “abject” maternal body covers all women, also those who are not mothers (Fotaki, 2013; Kristeva, 1982). While non-pregnant bodies are perceived already stood out from the norm of male embodiment (Gatrell, 2010; Hausman, 2004), pregnant ones evoke suspicion, fear, leakage and revulsion (e.g., Longhurst, 2001), and pregnant women are considered less dependable, competent and committed to their jobs, and too much emotional, sympathetic, nurturing, and irrational (Gatrell, 2010). These arguments suggest that the absence of women as subjects in organizational histories and the opponent role of their body are closely related. Interestingly, men’ bodies are not opponent actant, because they are highly consistent with the masculine norms settled by recurring male subjects. In order to define themselves in their own terms, women need to occupy a subject role (Irigaray, 1993). This requires introducing different organizational discourses (Fotaki, 2013), that in our perspective means changing the existing narrative scheme. Such perspective paves the way for challenging inquires aimed at creating new discourses, symbols and representations where women, with their body, take action into the narrative

CSR and ICT: new insights from the shear zones perspective

In line with the recent tendencies of limited natural resources, demographic development, dematerialization and digitalization, this chapter underlines the necessity of deepening the role Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) challenges. In fact, due to the diffuse integration of ICT into most of people’s and firms’ daily activities, companies cannot neglect the role of ICT in shaping CSR strategies. Hence, ICT has the potential to support the three main aspects of sustainable development: people, profit and planet, which can be found in the so-called Triple Bottom Line approach (TBL). However, the role of ICTs in supporting the Shear Zones between the abovementioned lines, still counts a lack of contribution. Through a systematic analysis of the literature, the chapter affords insights for a further advance, compared to the extant literature, as the content analysis provides a description of how ICT support the sub-dimensions included in the three Shear Zones

Linking Neuroscience to Organizational Change: A Literature Review

In the age of extreme turbulence, the phenomenon of organizational change is of wider interest. Most of related interventions fail due to the inability of individuals in charge of adequately managing change, especially those aspects related to people and group resistance. At the same time, developments in organizational neuroscience (ON) provide a range of innovative possibilities to rethink actions and reactions to this phenomenon. Most of the extant studies, however, are more radically anchored to the scientific context in which they originated. As a consequence, the objective of this research is to investigate the role of neuroscience in business organization and in organizational change dynamics. Despite the high relevance of the topic, in fact, we outline a little amount of contributions in this field. Accordingly, our purpose is to critically systematize the field of ON in the context of organizational change, through a systematic literature review. In doing so, we highlight the importance of progress in research, by deriving three main related topics. Lastly, an emerging conceptual model will be presented