Communities of domination? Reconceptualising organisational learning and power (original) (raw)
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Presentation to Organization Development Network Conference, 2009
In this article I provide an approach to communities or practice (C-o-Ps), as learning communities in which we engage in joint actions of knowing to add value to our lives and organizations. The central project of a C-o-P is the sharing or management of knowledge. Lave and Wenger, the originators of the concept (1991), did not include an analysis of power relations, and in fact stated that such an analysis was needed. In my PhD research with Taos Institute faculty, I placed this need front and center, and discovered that professionals trained in group human relations such as laboratory learning, fared well during periods of social drama and group conflict in C-o-Ps. This article also centers critical relational (social) constructionism, which proposes that we create and develop our organizational realities through joint actions of language in localized settings. This line of thought can be considered in the stream of what is now being referred to as the New OD.
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Communities of practice (CoPs) represent a broad range of work situations characterized by shared knowledge and situated knowledge use. Although CoPs have been studied rather extensively, discussions of control in CoPs are rarer. This is peculiar because CoPs are characterized by a common tension in contemporary work: on the one hand, CoPs are expected to autonomously “think together,” but on the other they are expected to be responsive to various managerial control attempts. We interrogate this tension in an ethnographic study of engineering work, where we found that in response to management control the engineering communities engaged in constructive disobedience – that is, subversion and displacement of rules and orders to construct a dynamic of control where work can be executed autonomously. By associating constructive disobedience with control in CoPs, our study contributes with insight into and theorization of how management control is dealt with and how control operates in w...
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