Current Practices in Workplace and Organizational Learning: Revisiting the Classics and Advancing Knowledge

The central assumption that guides this book is that research and practice about learning at the workplace has recently lost its critical edge. This book explores what has happened to workplace learning and organizational learning and studies what has replaced it. In addition, the book discusses to what extend there are reasons to revitalize it.

Today, themes such as ‘innovation’, ‘co-creation’ and ‘knowledge sharing’ seem to have become preferred and referred to as theoretical fields as well as fields of practice. In several chapters of this book it is argued that the critical power of learning could be regained by starting a new discussion of how these new fields of practice can be substantiated by topics such as learning arrangements, learning mechanisms, and learning strategies.  Hence, the aim of this book is to both advance and recapture our knowledge of learning in today’s increasingly complex world of work and organizing.

The contributions inthis work do so by revisiting classic research on workplace and organizational learning and discussing how insights from this body of literature evokes new meaning. It sets the stage for new agendas and rethinks current practices that are entangled in activities such as innovation, co-creation, knowledge sharing or other currently widespread fields of practice.

Bente Elkjaer holds a chair within learning theory at Danish School of Education, Aarhus University (Campus Emdrup). In her research, she has a special focus upon learning organizations. Bente Elkjaer researches the crossroads between educational and organizational research, and is engaged in how organizations and people can share knowledge through the organizing of work and management, as well as through learning. Bente Elkjaer’s main theoretical source of inspiration is American pragmatism, following the works of the philosopher and educational thinker, John Dewey. She is currently interested in how pragmatism may be understood in light of the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences. Bente Elkjær has spent a total of one year at two different American universities, the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1998. This was made possible through first the American Scholarship, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)and later a FUHU-Fulbright fellowship.

 

Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen is a certified psychologist, specialist and supervisor in work- and organizational psychology. He holds an associate professorship at Aarhus University, School of Education. He has recently published in journals like Sociology of Health and Illness, Studies in Continuing Education, and Journal of Workplace Learning. He has edited a number of books. Niels Christian recently received research funding from The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and The Independent Research Fund, Denmark. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Amsterdam University and Lancaster University. His research centers on implications in healthcare of arrangements aiming to streamline patient care and professional work by way of advanced technology. He is particularly interested in the practical effects of initiatives aiming to intensify patients' responsibility for their own care such as telecare,care robotics and self-monitoring. He finds inspiration in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

 

Maja Lotz is currently an advisor within the field of organizational learning and sustainability. She is a former associate professor of organizational learning at Aarhus University. She received a PhD in organizational sociology from Copenhagen Business School, has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University and an Assistant Professorship at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School. She investigates the day-to-day interactions that facilitate knowledge collaboration, learning and innovation in collaborative organizational settings. Her work has been published in Organization Studies, International Journal of Lifelong Education, and by Oxford Press, among others. She has also co-edited a book about employee driven innovation published by Macmillan Publishers Ltd. She has lead and participated in several research projects (national as well as international) focused on the effects of new organizational forms on the capability to learn, innovate and co-create.