Immigrant academic mothers negotiating ideal worker and mother norms during the COVID-19 pandemic: Duoethnography as a co-mentoring tool for transformative learning

How are immigrant academic mothers negotiating the confounding terrains of work and family during the pandemic? How can they support each other in learning how to resist the prevalent notions of ideal working and mothering amidst the demanding schedule of working remotely and parenting? This study addresses these questions through sharing a narrative of how two immigrant mothers in academia challenged and began the journey of transforming their gendered work and family identities. Building on personal essays and 6 weeks of extensive journaling that reflected our positionalities and experiences of motherhood, work-life, and intersections between work and home during the pandemic, we offer a fine-grained understanding of how we helped each other as co-mentors to identify moments of our lived experiences as triggers for transformative learning. In doing so, we realized how duoethnography could be more than just a research methodology in helping us co-construct a relational space to empathize and challenge each other's perspectives about our roles as mothers and professors and the gendered nature of social forces shaping those roles.

Advancing book clubs as non-formal learning to facilitate critical public pedagogy in organizations

Book clubs are a well-known form of social engagement and are beneficial for those who take part, yet book clubs are not fully realized within management as a site for learning. This is unfortunate because book clubs that read fiction can foster social processes and help employees in search of more critical and emancipatory forms of learning. We theoretically synthesize the literature to advance current thinking with regard to book clubs as critical public pedagogy in organizations. We begin by introducing book clubs as non-formal adult learning. Then, book clubs that employ fiction as a cultural artifact are presented as a way for members to build relationships, learn together, and to engage in cultural change work. Next, the traditional notions of book clubs are made pedagogically complex through the lens of critical public pedagogy. Finally, we offer two implications: (1) as public pedagogy, book clubs can act as an alternative to traditional learning structures in organizations; and (2) book clubs, when valued as public pedagogy, can be fostered by those in management learning and HRD for consciousness raising and challenging existing mental models in their organizations.

Do mistakes acceptance foster innovation? Polish and US cross-country study of tacit knowledge sharing in IT

Purpose

This study aims to understand and compare how the mechanism of innovative processes in the information technology (IT) industry – the most innovative industry worldwide – is shaped in Poland and the USA in terms of tacit knowledge awareness and sharing driven by a culture of knowledge and learning, composed of a learning climate and mistake acceptance.

Design/methodology/approach

Study samples were drawn from the IT industry in Poland (n = 350) and the USA (n = 370) and analyzed using the structural equation modeling method.

Findings

True learning derives from mistake acceptance. As a result of a risk-taking attitude and critical thinking, the IT industry in the USA is consistently innovation-oriented. Specifically, external innovations are highly correlated with internal innovations. Moreover, a knowledge culture supports a learning culture via a learning climate. A learning climate is an important facilitator for learning from mistakes.

Originality/value

This study revealed that a high level of mistake acceptance stimulates a risk-taking attitude that offers a high level of tacit knowledge awareness as a result of critical thinking, but critical thinking without readiness to take a risk is useless for tacit knowledge capturing.