Knowledge Acquisition Using Group Support Systems

This paper reports on a project in which a group support system (GSS) equipped with a causal mapping facility was used to acquire knowledge from experts in seven European cities in order to understand the systemicity of risks which cities may face. The practical constraints demanded that participants’ experience and wisdom about the city risk environment was collected in a short period of time: three 1-day workshops. The acquisition of knowledge posed a number of important epistemological challenges which are explored in our discussion. The GSS was faced with the need to (1) facilitate sharing of knowledge with others, (2) manage the complexity of expert knowledge, (3) acknowledge the time demands on experts, (4) manage and merge multiple perspectives, and (5) acknowledge the subjectivity of knowledge in this domain. By discussing how the GSS process attended directly to these epistemological issues and to methodological considerations that linked to these issues, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the application of GSS for knowledge acquisition, particularly in comparison with other possible methods

Communities of Practice in Landscapes of Practice

The original formulation of communities of practice primarily focused on describing how learning, meaning, and identity within a community can translate into a sustained practice. Wenger-Trayner et al. elaborated the concept of landscapes of practice to describe how different communities of practice may interact, and belong to broader landscapes of practice, rather than rely exclusively on their own local situated practices. In this conceptual article, we apply the perspective of landscapes of practice to organizations. The first part of our argument is descriptive, and is aimed at developing a model of landscapes of practice in organizations. With regard to this model, we propose that practices can be seen as multilevel, including local situated practices, generic practices, and cultural fields. This, in turn, helps to clarify and organize a number of central concepts within the practice literature. The second part of our argument is prescriptive, as we suggest that landscapes of practice call for triple-legitimization of situated learning, meaning that legitimization is not only needed at the level of community and organization, but also by attending to the dynamically changing epistemic texture of the landscapes

Exploring GSS negotiation – the use of a GSS log

Group Decision Support Systems (GSS) have been used extensively to support groups in working together in organizations. This paper focuses on the particular type of GSS, called Group Explorer, which during the course of facilitated sessions generates data logs in the form of Excel spreadsheets. Data logs can be of high interest to researchers and GSS facilitators because they may possibly contain rich and valuable data such as about the detailed time of entry and the authorship of all contributions, or the results of voting activities conducted by participants. However, data logs may at first look complicated and difficult to read and follow. Thus the purpose of this paper is to provide a number of instructions and explanations for anyone interested in making good use of data logs, and to popularize similar analysis as a good opportunity to bet-ter understand the outcomes of GSS sessions

Understanding Communities of Practice:Taking Stock and Moving Forward

This paper provides a comprehensive, integrative conceptual review of work on communities of practice (CoPs), defined broadly as groups of people bound together by a common activity, shared expertise, a passion for a joint enterprise, and a desire to learn or improve their practice. We identify three divergent views on the intended purposes and expected effects of CoPs: as mechanisms for fostering learning and knowledge-sharing, as sources of innovation, and as mechanisms to defend interests and perpetuate control over expertise domains. We use these different lenses to make sense of the ways CoPs are conceptualized and to review scholarly work on this topic. We argue that current debate on the future of work and new methodological developments are challenging the received wisdom on CoPs and offer research opportunities and new conceptual combinations. We argue also that the interaction between the lenses and between CoP theory and adjacent literatures might result in new theory and conceptualizations

Gamifying situated learning in organisations

Gamification is an emerging area in research and practice that has sparked considerable interest in management studies. The attention to gamification is amplified by the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies and augmented reality which touches on how people work and learn socially. Consequently, gamified tools’ affordances affect situated learning in working environments through their implications on human relations in practice. However, the dynamics between gamification and situated learning have not been considered in the literature. Thus, drawing on the synthesis of gamification and situated learning literatures, we offer a model of gamifying situated learning in organisations. Thereby, our discussion explains the role of gamified affordances and their socio-material characteristics, which blend with situated learning as people indwell on such tools in their work. Moreover, gamified tools can afford the technological support of community-building and networking in organisations. Such gamified communities and networks, in turn, can be seen to existing within a gamified altered reality as part of which the physical distance and proximity of situated learning activities become inevitably bridged and joined together

Trans-organizational learning across healthcare organizations

The aim of this paper is to clarify both the role and the nature of Communities of Practice (CoPs) in developing organizational learning across formal organizational boundaries. We demonstrate that, drawing on theory and practice, it is misleading to claim that CoPs may cross organizational boundaries. Instead, we assert that members of productive CoPs have to actively work on opening up paths for participation for practitioners from other organizations in order to maintain a lively practice and an energetic community. For this reason we introduce the concept of trans-organizational learning to account for learning happening across landscapes of practice comprising of various professional communities which practitioners need to be aware of in order to carry on with their everyday jobs. The conceptualization of trans-organizational learning highlights a difficult managerial dilemma of retaining absolute control versus allowing employees the ‘discretionary space’ to learn regularly from and with practitioners from other firms, and this can lead to both positive and negative unintended consequences. Nonetheless, with respect to the idea of landscapes of practice, we argue that promoting trans-organizational learning is likely to be more promising for the long-term prosperity of an organization

Making space for garbage cans : how emergent groups organize social media spaces to orchestrate widescale helping in a crisis

During the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens self-organized at an unprecedented scale to support vulnerable people in neighbourhoods, towns and cities. Drawing on an in-depth study of an online volunteering group that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic and helped thousands of people in a city in the United Kingdom, we unpack how citizens co-construct social media spaces to orchestrate helping activity during a crisis. Conceptualizing a novel synthesis of classical garbage can theory and virtual space, we reveal how emergent groups use ‘spatial partitioning’ and ‘spatial mapping’ to create a multi-layered spatial architecture that distributes decision-making and invites impromptu choice occasions: spontaneous matchmaking, proximal chance connects and speculative attraction. Our insights extend the study of emergent organizing and decision-making in crises. Furthermore, we advance a new line of theorizing which exploits garbage can theory, beyond its existing application in classical decision sciences, to posit a spatial view of organizing that paves the way for its novel applications in organization studies