...like or what OL means. Furthermore there seems little agreement on the relationship between individual learning and collective learning in organisations and how one translates into the other. This paper initially provides a cursory glimpse at the current literature on the LO in the context of learning and OL and in particular the theoretical tensions and dilemmas existing between these concepts. Management theorists have under-utilised the insights and practices from other disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and anthropology. As Burrell (1994) argues: Sooner or later organisation studies must enter an area where philosophy and social science meet. Organisation studies must also enter intellectual theory where the well-established French and German traditions of social theory meet. The author Deb Stewart is a Lecturer in the School of Management, Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Keywords Learning organization, Organizational learning, Organizational change, Metaphor, Narratives Abstract Examines the theoretical and practical development of the concept of the learning organisation (LO). Some theorists...
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...10 Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology Deborah Biggerstaff Warwick Medical School University of Warwick, Coventry UK 1. Introduction In the scientific community, and particularly in psychology and health, there has been an active and ongoing debate on the relative merits of adopting either quantitative or qualitative methods, especially when researching into human behaviour (Bowling, 2009; Oakley, 2000; Smith, 1995a, 1995b; Smith, 1998). In part, this debate formed a component of the development in the 1970s of our thinking about science. Andrew Pickering has described this movement as the “sociology of scientific knowledge” (SSK), where our scientific understanding, developing scientific ‘products’ and ‘know-how’, became identified as forming components in a wider engagement with society’s environmental and social context (Pickering, 1992, pp. 1). Since that time, the debate has continued so that today there is an increasing acceptance of the use of qualitative methods in the social sciences (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Morse, 1994; Punch, 2011; Robson, 2011) and health sciences (Bowling, 2009; Greenhalgh & Hurwitz, 1998; Murphy & Dingwall, 1998). The utility of qualitative methods has also been recognised in psychology. As Nollaig Frost (2011) observes, authors such as Carla Willig and Wendy Stainton Rogers consider qualitative psychology is much more accepted today and that it has moved from “the margins to the mainstream in psychology in the UK.” (Willig & Stainton...
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...organization is a consciously coordinated social entity with distinct boundaries which functions to achieve goals. It has an activity system linked to the external environment (it does not exist alone). An organization consists of people, things, knowledge and technologies. Modernists’ assumption of reality is objectivism and view organizations are real entities which exist in the objective world. Organizations are viewed as real entities driven by rationality to achieve efficiency and organizational objectives/goals. When organizations are well-managed, they are systems of decision and action driven by norms of rationality, efficiency and effectiveness for stated purposes. Similar to modernists, critical theorists’ ontology is also objectivism, and organizations are real entities which exist in the objective world. However, critical theorists view organizations as objects used by capitalists for the exploitation and alienation of workers and the environment. Symbolic interpretivists believe that reality is subjective, and only exists if we give meaning to it. As such, organizations are socially constructed realities which are constructed and reconstructed by their members through symbolically mediated interaction. Without its members giving meaning to it, an organization does not exist. Postmodernists suggest that reality is constructed through language and discourse. Organizations are ‘imagined’ entities whereby power and social arrangements are reinforced through language...
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...Qualitative Research Defining and Designing 1 8 T he qualitative research methods introduced in this book are often employed to answer the whys and hows of human behavior, opinion, and experience— information that is difficult to obtain through more quantitatively-oriented methods of data collection. Researchers and practitioners in fields as diverse as anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, sociology, and marketing regularly use qualitative methods to address questions about people’s ways of organizing, relating to, and interacting with the world. Despite the interdisciplinary recognition of the value of “qualitative research” (or perhaps because of it), qualitative research is not a unified field of theory and practice. On the contrary, a plethora of viewpoints, sometimes diametrically opposed to one another, exist on the subject. Scholars regularly debate about what qualitative research is, how and why it should be conducted, how it should be analyzed, and in what form it should be presented. In fact, fundamental and often heated disagreements about philosophical assumptions and the nature of data exist among qualitative researchers. We don’t pretend to be able to solve any of these controversies. Nor do we suggest one approach or viewpoint is superior to another in the grand scheme of things. How one approaches qualitative research, and research in general, depends on a variety of personal, professional, political, and contextual factors. Ultimately, there...
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...The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly responsible for the development of the novel. The second is that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. [note 1] I want to propose instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [note 2] My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic. [note 3] The constitutive coexistence of these two impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental: their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and gender as the novel's defining concern is also to recover the dynamism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender difference. ...
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...as a nonhierarchical interconnectedness that structures our contemporary world and means of communication. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, argue that the Internet is an exemplar of the rhizome: a nonhierarchical, noncentered network—a democratic network with “an indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes [that] communicate with no central point of control.”2 Our journey begins with early modernism, and if early modernism had a theme, it was oneness. This focus on oneness or unity, on the whole rather than on individual parts, What is at stake in settling this dispute? Being. And, knowledge and power in that being. More specifically, this paper explores how a theory of social ontology has evolved to theories of social ontologies, how the modernist notion of global understanding of individuals working toward a common (rationalized and objectively knowable) goal became pluralistic postmodern theories embracing the idea of local networks. Furthermore, what this summary journey of theoretical evolution allows for is a consideration of why understandings of a world comprising emergent networks need be of concern to composition instructors and their practical activities in the classroom: networks produce knowledge. 1. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 30. 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Postmodernization, or the Informatization of...
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...A2 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE What follows should act as reminders. For full revision you need to do more than rely on these notes. Use your course notes, essays and text books. 1. Key Words: Religious language is cognitive if it is thought of as conveying knowledge of what is really there. Religious language is non-cognitive it is thought as conveying feelings or expressing desires or guiding ways of behaving. Religious language is realist if it is thought of as conveying testable facts that actually pertain in reality. Religious language is non-realist it is thought of as conveying guiding ideals but with no basis in factual reality. Religious language offers a correspondence theory of truth if it is thought of as being able to point to the reality that it is trying to convey. Religious language offers a coherence theory of truth if it is thought of as conveying making sense within a network of other beliefs which people hold to be true. 2. What Religious Language is: Religious language is an outlet for emotion in special times of life. Religious language is the language of worship. It is performative, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, and it is prescriptive (law making – i.e. honour your father and mother). However, none these uses of religious language is our focus. Our focus is how religious language might make truth claims about the reality of God and whether it can succeed in doing this. Philosophers...
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...JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION A Publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration Instructions to Authors (Revised February 2013) All correspondence and submissions should be directed to: JSE Managing Editor, EricksonEditorial@gmail.com, 151 Petaluma Blvd. So., #227, Petaluma CA 94952 USA, (1) 415/435-1604, fax (1) 707/559-5030 Please submit all manuscripts at http://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/login (please note that “www” is NOT used in this address). This website provides directions for author registration and online submission of manuscripts. Full Author Instructions are posted on the Society for Scientific Exploration’s website at http://www.scientificexploration.org/documents/instructions_for_authors.pdf for submission of items for publication in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (including “Writing the Empirical Journal Article.” Before you submit a paper, please familiarize yourself with the Journal by reading JSE articles. (Back issues can be browsed in electronic form with SSE membership login at http://journalofscientificexploration.org, click on Archive link; issues before 2008 are freely accessible at http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/articles.html) Electronic files of text, tables, and figures at resolution of a minimum of 300 dpi (TIF or PDF preferred) will be required for online submission. You will also need to attest to a statement online that the article has not been previously published and is not...
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...Organizational communication 1 Organizational communication Organizational communication is a subfield of the larger discipline of communication studies. Organizational communication, as a field, is the consideration, analysis, and criticism of the role of communication in organizational contexts. History of Organizational Communication The field traces its lineage through business information, business communication, and early mass communication studies published in the 1930s through the 1950s. Until then, organizational communication as a discipline consisted of a few professors within speech departments who had a particular interest in speaking and writing in business settings. The current field is well established with its own theories and empirical concerns distinct from other communication subfields and other approaches to organizations. Several seminal publications stand out as works broadening the scope and recognizing the importance of communication in the organizing process, and in using the term "organizational communication". Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote in 1947 about "organization communications systems", saying communication is "absolutely essential to organizations".[1] W. Charles Redding played a prominent role in the establishment of organizational communication as a discipline. In the 1950s, organizational communication focused largely on the role of communication in improving organizational life and organizational output. In the 1980s, the field...
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...A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a work they consider important. For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation. If a critic is working with post-colonial theories, s/he might consider the same story but look at how characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, and even America) treat characters from, say, Africa or the Caribbean. Hopefully, after reading through and working with the resources in this area of the OWL, literary theory will become a little easier to understand and use. Disclaimer Please note that the schools of literary criticism and their explanations included here are by no means the only ways of distinguishing these separate areas of theory. Indeed, many critics use tools from two or more schools in their work. Some would define differently or greatly expand the (very) general statements given here. Our explanations are meant only as starting places for your own investigation into literary theory. We encourage you to use the list of scholars and works provided for each school to further your understanding of these theories...
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...Table of Contents Table of Contents 1 Theory Building in Counselling Psychology 2 The Impulse Toward Eclecticism 4 My Bohartian History 6 Adlerian Psychotherapy as Structured Eclecticism 10 My Adlerian Roots 11 Beyond Adler: Robertsonian Meme Therapy 13 The Nature of Self 13 The Potential for Using Memes in Counselling 15 A Use of Meme Theory in Counselling a Suicidal Youth 17 Holistic, Dynamic and Integrative: Looking Forward in Our Profession 21 Summarizing the Foundational Principles of My Practice 21 Revisiting Holism 23 Future directions 25 Footnotes 27 Theory Building in Counselling Psychology An early text lamented, “A good theory is clear, comprehensive, explicit, parsimonious, and useful. We appear to have a paucity of good theories in psychology” (Stefflre & Matheny, 1968). Lent attempted to reduce this paucity by formulating his own theory: Wellness is intended to capture the notion of health as a dynamic state or process rather than a static endpoint; psychosocial wellness acknowledges the importance of both intrapersonal and interpersonal functioning. The multiple aspects of wellness would include a) self-perceived (domain and/or global) satisfaction (hedonic well-being), b) domain/role satisfactoriness, c) presence of prosocial versus antisocial behavior, and d) low levels of psychologistical distress or symptoms (e.g. anxiety, depression, disordered thinking). (Lent, 2004) This attempt at theory building...
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...artifacts, values and assumption that emerge from the interaction of organizational members Open social system operating a dynamic environment. CRITERIA to identify something as culture: 1. Deeply felt or held 2. Commonly intelligible 1. Accessible to a cultural group Organization = Ordered and purposeful interaction among people. Purposeful, because its members produce (supero-rdinative) goal-directed activities. Organizational communication is a continuous process through which organizational members create, maintain and change the organization. (it includes business communication) N.B. All organizational members take place in it; messages are produced to create a shared meaning of messages, but it is not always achieved. Those messages vary in form according to various factors (power distances, roles, goal, method, non-verbal), and to be fully understood have to be considered in their contexts Culture: "the collective programming if the mind that DISTINGUISHES the members of one group tor category of people from another" (Hofstede 2001) Is both a process and a product; is confining (imitates groups) and facilitating (gives us a way to better understand what is happening) Cultural Symbol = physical indicators of organizational life (Rafaeli & Worline 2000) ARTIFACTS: visible/tangible, are also part of them norms, standards, customs and social convention. Norms: pattern of behaviors or communication, indicating what people should do in a specific...
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...The History of Information Technology March 2010 Draft version to appear in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 45, 2011 Thomas Haigh thaigh@computer.org University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Thomas Haigh The History of Information Technology – ARIST Draft 2 In many scholarly fields the new entrant must work carefully to discover a gap in the existing literature. When writing a doctoral dissertation on the novels of Nabokov or the plays of Sophocles, clearing intellectual space for new construction can be as difficult as finding space to erect a new building in central London. A search ensues for an untapped archive, an unrecognized nuance, or a theoretical framework able to demolish a sufficiently large body of existing work. The history of information technology is not such a field. From the viewpoint of historians it is more like Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century (Cronon, 1991). Building space is plentiful. Natural resources are plentiful. Capital, infrastructure, and manpower are not. Boosters argue for its “natural advantages” and promise that one day a mighty settlement will rise there. Speculative development is proceeding rapidly and unevenly. But right now the settlers seem a little eccentric and the humble structures they have erected lack the scale and elegance of those in better developed regions. Development is uneven and streets fail to connect. The native inhabitants have their ideas about how things should be done, which sometimes...
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...1816–1817 date of first publication · January 1, 1818 publisher · Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones narrator · The primary narrator is Robert Walton, who, in his letters, quotes Victor Frankenstein’s first-person narrative at length; Victor, in turn, quotes the monster’s first-person narrative; in addition, the lesser characters Elizabeth Lavenza and Alphonse Frankenstein narrate parts of the story through their letters to Victor. climax · The murder of Elizabeth Lavenza on the night of her wedding to Victor Frankenstein in Chapter 23 protagonist · Victor Frankenstein antagonist · Frankenstein’s monster setting (time) · Eighteenth century setting (place) · Geneva; the Swiss Alps; Ingolstadt; England and Scotland; the northern ice point of view · The point of view shifts with the narration, from Robert Walton to Victor Frankenstein to Frankenstein’s monster, then back to Walton, with a few digressions in the form of letters from Elizabeth Lavenza and Alphonse Frankenstein. falling action · After the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza, when Victor Frankenstein chases the monster to the northern ice, is rescued by Robert Walton, narrates his story, and dies tense · Past foreshadowing · Ubiquitous—throughout his narrative, Victor uses words such as “fate” and “omen” to hint at the tragedy that has befallen him; additionally, he occasionally pauses in his recounting to collect himself in the face of frightening memories. tone · Gothic, Romantic, emotional, tragic...
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...SECRET LANGUAGE of • HOW LEADERS INSPIRE ACTION THROUGH NARRATIVE The LEADERSHIP STEPHEN DENNING John Wiley & Sons, Inc. More Praise for The Secret Language of Leadership “Out of the morass of strategies leaders are given to transform organizations, Denning plucks a powerful one—storytelling— and shows how and why it works.” —Dorothy Leonard, William J. Abernathy Professor of Business, Emerita, Harvard Business School, and author, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom “The Secret Language of Leadership shows why narrative intelligence is central to transformational leadership and how to harness its power.” —Carol Pearson, director, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, and coauthor, The Hero and the Outlaw “The Secret Language of Leadership is not only the best analysis I have seen of how and why leaders succeed or fail, it’s highly readable, as well as downright practical. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in engaging a company with big ideas who understands that leaders live and die by the quality of what they say.” —Richard Stone, story analytics master, i.d.e.a.s “A primary role of leaders is to create and maintain meaning for their organizations. Denning clearly demonstrates that meaningmaking comes from stories well told.” —Thomas Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor of I.T. and Management, Babson College, and author, The Attention Economy “Steve...
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