Making leadership as practice development visible: Learning from Activity Theory

Across the globe, organisations are facing significant challenges and operating in increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments. In the context of such complexity, effective leadership is ever more important. Recently, a body of work known as ‘Leadership as practice’ and leadership as practice development has been developed as a useful way of thinking about leadership that is shared across organisational members as opposed to being inherent in the traits of individual leaders. At present methodological approaches for capturing and exploring leadership as practice remain in their infancy. This article contributes to leadership learning by arguing that we can learn a great deal about how leadership unfolds and is developed in practice by utilising a theoretical framework called Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Data from two leadership workshops are drawn upon to demonstrate the value of Cultural Historical Activity Theory for making visible the specificities of leadership that emerge collectively and collaboratively in practice. The article concludes with a critical discussion of what we can learn from the Cultural Historical Activity Theory approach and how this can be applied to the study of leadership, leadership learning and leadership development.

Making the invisible visible: a place for utilizing activity theory within in situ simulation to drive healthcare organizational development?

BACKGROUND

The healthcare needs of our societies are continual changing and evolving. In order to meet these needs, healthcare provision has to be dynamic and reactive to provide the highest standards of safe care. Therefore, there is a continual need to generate new evidence and implement it within healthcare contexts. In recent times, in situ simulation has proven to have been an important educational modality to accelerate individuals' and teams' skills and adaptability to deliver care in local contexts. However, due to the increasing complexity of healthcare, including in community settings, an expanded theoretical informed view of in situ simulation is needed as a form of education that can drive organizational as well as individual learning.

MAIN BODY

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) provides us with analytical tools to recognize and analyse complex health care systems. Making visible the key elements of an in situ simulation process and their interconnections, CHAT facilitates development of a system-level view of needs of change.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we theorize how CHAT could help guide in situ simulation processes-to generate greater insights beyond the specific simulation context and bring about meaningful transformation of an organizational activity.

Distributed ‘Knowing in Practice' Enabled by Knowledge Management Systems

Many companies set up operations offshore and complete projects by ‘worksharing' where responsibilities are split between geographically dispersed offices. This article looks at how knowledge management systems facilitate practices essential for collaborative, distributed work. A qualitative case study is conducted at a large multinational engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company that has successfully implemented a knowledge management system. The study uses the framework of ‘knowing in practice' to the context of worksharing. This article contributes to the practice by providing specific suggestions that can be implemented from a social technical perspective to facilitate worksharing. Specifically, suggesting technological factors, and efforts needed by users and managers, in facilitating worksharing. This article contributes to research by applying the lens of ‘knowing in practice' to the context of worksharing.

Virtualisation of an administrative work environment in higher education

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand how higher education institutions (HEIs) in developing countries can migrate their physical administrative work environment to a virtual platform to improve information management.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper employs an interpretive case study approach and a combined lens of activity and agency theories to understand how a developing country HEI attempted to improve its information management by migrating from a physical to a virtual administrative work environment.

Findings

The findings show how contradictions caused by role conflicts, administrative staff’s fear of elimination and external consultants’ limited understanding of administrative rules and procedures can hamper work environment virtualisation. Such challenges should be resolved in order to achieve a successful virtual work environment that supports timely and accurate information management.

Research limitations/implications

The study is limited by its single case perspective in one developing country. However, future studies can compare the experiences of HEIs from developed and developing countries in order to account for contextual differences.

Practical implications

The study provides practitioners with insight into how to address conflicts between employees (as potential users) and external consultants during virtual system development and implementation. In particular, role conflict, fear of eliminating some administrative staff and consultants’ limited understanding of administrative work procedures should be resolved for successful work environment virtualisation.

Originality/value

The study is the first attempt to offer rich insight into the challenges associated with administrative work environment virtualisation for improved information management in HEIs, through the principal-agent relationship.

The Design and Evaluation of a Leadership Programme for Experienced Chief Executives from the Public Sector

The article describes an action learning programme designed to ‘renew and refresh’ long-serving chief executives in the English National Health Service who were facing considerable performance pressures. An activity theoretical approach was used to help participants stand back from the imperatives of the moment and reflect on the dilemmas of their situations in new ways. Evaluation data suggest that the mix of events included in the programme created a powerful learning experience for most participants. Other theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory are used to explain this outcome. It is suggested that, at times of ongoing change and frustration, programmes such as the one described here can help participants develop a resilient approach to conflicts and tensions and may stimulate commitment and resolve.

Organizational Learning and Organizational Knowledge

Organizational learning and organizational knowledge have seen important growth in both the academic and business worlds. However, both approaches face various problems, the most striking of which is their theoretical confusion and diversity. This is due to the great number of authors and publications on the theoretical concepts, which originate in different fields, and are dealt with from different perspectives. Despite their implicit links, the two areas of literature retain a relative distance. This article sets out to improve the situation by linking the two perspectives with the aim of providing an integrative approach. Furthermore, the analysis outlines some common unresolved issues in these debates: the epistemological and ontological principles that underpin our understanding of learning, knowledge, and the relationship between them, as well as the relationship between individual and organizational learning and knowing.

Captured by the Discourse? The Socially Constitutive Power of New Higher Education Discourse in the UK

This paper addresses the extent to which academic staff are ‘captured’ by the discourse associated with the ‘new higher education’ (NHE) in the UK and identifies the factors which condition their ability to displace, negotiate, reconstruct and create alternative discourses. In addressing this task, the paper draws on data from a five-year ethnographic study of an English university, NewU, a single document from NewU published after that study, a comparative study of ‘new’ academics in England and Canada, and spontaneous textual data produced at a conference on higher education. The paper concludes that the dialogical nature of universities means that the impact of NHE discourse on organizational practices is mitigated as it is read and reacted to in varied ways: that academics are not fundamentally ‘captured’ by this discursive form. However, caution is advised in extending this argument too far.

Some Proposals for Strengthening Organizational Activity Theory

This paper seeks to highlight a perceived ‘drift’ of organizational activity theory: from an original concern with the social mediation of human consciousness through intersubjective interaction, to a focus on networked relations between organizational communities through intercollective interaction. It is argued that such a drift threatens the explanatory power of Vygotsky’s original formulation, which offers an explanation for the social conditioning of meaning, but which nonetheless acknowledges its location within individual human beings, not groups. In an attempt to address this perceived situation and to contribute to the further development of organizational activity theory, the paper draws upon two ideas from the Russian semiologist Bakhtin, incorporating these within a proposed framework for the application of activity theory within organizational settings that remains consistent with Vygotsky’s original ideas.

What Links the Chain: An Essay on Organizational Remembering as Practice

In this essay, we review, critique, and reconceptualize organization theory’s understanding of organizational memory. We find that organization theorists have underestimated the historicity of memory, its associative character, and social-psychological constitution. The critical impetus of the literature review translates in the body of the paper into an alternative perspective that posits organizational remembering as a collective, historically and culturally situated practice rather than as an object of cognition. Remembering is considered crucial to maintaining a sense of continuity and shared identity in organizations by actively constructing meaning. Our conceptualization of remembering focuses on the ‘softer’ qualities of the process such as culture, tradition, the person, emotion, and forgetting that traditionally were neglected or oversimplified in organization studies. Finally, we explore how a critical approach to the study of organizational remembering gives voice to socially contested issues such as power, morality, and reflexivity.

Strategy Practice and Strategy Process: Family Differences and the Sociological Eye

This Essai argues for the distinctive position of Strategy-as-Practice research outside the immediate family of Strategy Process. Strategy-as-Practice's fascination with the phenomenon of strategy itself takes it beyond traditional Process perspectives. Relying on the `sociological eye', Strategy-as-Practice treats strategy like any other practice in society, capable of being studied from many different angles. Under the four themes of praxis, practices, practitioners and the profession of strategy as an institutional field, the Essai demonstrates the potential range of research topics, performance notions and methodologies within Strategy-as-Practice. It concludes by proposing five implications of the sociological eye for the conduct of Strategy-as-Practice research, highlighting particularly social connections and relationships, embeddedness, irony, problematized notions of performance and a respect for continuity.

Towards a pedagogy for patient and public involvement in medical education

CONTEXT

This paper presents a critique of current knowledge on the engagement of patients and the public, referred to here as patient and public involvement (PPI), and calls for the development of robust and theoretically informed strategies across the continuum of medical education.

METHODS

The study draws on a range of relevant literatures and presents PPI as a response process in relation to patient-centred learning agendas. Through reference to original research it discusses three key priorities for medical educators developing early PPI pedagogies, including: (i) the integration of evidence on PPI relevant to medical education, via a unifying corpus of literature; (ii) conceptual clarity through shared definitions of PPI in medical education, and (iii) an academically rigorous approach to managing complexity in the evaluation of PPI initiatives.

RESULTS

As a response to these challenges, the authors demonstrate how activity modelling may be used as an analytical heuristic to provide an understanding of a number of PPI systems that may interact within complex and dynamic educational contexts.

CONCLUSION

The authors highlight the need for a range of patient voices to be evident within such work, from its generation through to dissemination, in order that patients and the public are partners and not merely objects of this endeavour. To this end, this paper has been discussed with and reviewed by our own patient and public research partners throughout the writing process.

Developing creativity in practice: Explorations with world-renowned chefs

Relatively little practice-based research explores situated learning beyond the level of basic skill development. This article seeks to expand our understanding by focusing on the situated development of high-level creativity in the practice of haute cuisine and the role of the master–apprentice relationship in this development. Much has been written on what creativity is and where it happens, but little is known about how it is developed. By using an insider to investigate highly creative practitioners, namely, world-renowned chefs, this research provides the necessary contextual understanding for studying and explaining the development of high-level creativity in this field.

The role of informal networks in creating knowledge among health-care managers: a prospective case study

Background

Health and well-being services, in common with many public services, cannot be delivered by a single organisation and require co-ordination across several organisations in a locality. There is some evidence, mostly from other sectors, that middle managers play pivotal roles in this co-ordination by developing networks of relationships with colleagues in other organisations. These networks of relationships, established over time, provide contexts in which managers can, collectively, create the knowledge needed to address the challenges they encounter. Relatively little is known, however, about how these knowledge-creation processes work in a health-care context.

Aim

This study focuses on how health and well-being managers collectively create knowledge. Our objectives were to develop a better understanding of the way that knowledge is created within and between health-care organisations, across different managerial levels, and of the role played by informal networks in those processes.

Methods

The study was undertaken in health and well-being services in three sites in northern England, employing a case study design. The field methods used were landscape mapping, structured data collection for network analysis and latent position cluster analysis, and semi-structured interviews for narrative analysis. Our network modelling approach used the concepts of latent position network models and latent position cluster models. We used these models to identify clusters of people within networks, and people who acted as bridgers between clusters. We then interviewed middle managers who – on the evidence of our cluster models – occupied similar positions in our graphs. The latter were used to produce practice-based narratives of knowledge creation.

Results

Our narrative results showed that middle managers were synthesisers, in three different senses. First, they draw on different types of information, from a range of sources – quantitative routine data about populations and services, reports on progress against contractual targets, research evidence, and intelligence from colleagues in other localities. Second, they are able to link national policies and local priorities, and reconcile them with local operational realities. They are not always successful, but can integrate the different approaches and working practices of NHS, local authority, private and voluntary organisations. Third, they are able to link ideas, negotiation and action. We found that the network results were most usefully represented asclusters, explaining relationships between actors. Actors within clusters had common attributes, and as a result we were able to interpret the broad purpose of each of the clusters in the graphs for each site. The most useful number of clusters was three or four for both network types, and for both sampling periods, at each of the three sites. The clusters at all three sites had a mix of organisations represented within them. There was a mix of seniorities of managers in all clusters. Relationships were simultaneously formal and informal: formal contracts were managed in a context of ongoing conversations and negotiations. Relationships were simultaneously stable and fluid, with stable ‘cores’ of managers but memberships that varied substantially between two periods of data collection.

Conclusions

Our theory about knowledge creation was broadly supported. Managers of health and well-being services develop and maintain knowledge collectively. Their collective efforts are typically manifested either in projects requiring multiorganisational inputs or in taking ideas from genesis to the delivery of a new service. The cluster modelling suggests that networks of managers are able to maintain relationships, and hence conserve technical and prudential knowledge, over months and years. Priorities for future work include establishing the value of latent cluster modelling in understanding the work of groups and teams in other health and social care settings, and studying knowledge creation in the context of the interorganisational co-ordination of services.

Funding

The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

Institutional Continuity and the Dutch Construction Industry Fiddle

The article deals with the question of how institutional continuity is realized. It presents an analysis of the continuation of the institution of pre-consultation in the Dutch construction industry over a period of nine years, after this was declared illegal as a consequence of European Union regulations. The analysis utilizes a structuration-based practice approach to institutionalization. The findings suggest that institutional continuity is a matter of a social mechanism which emerges as a consequence of the particular way in which practices are enacted, and which has the effect of repairing and/or concealing contradiction so that change is not initiated.

Making sense of mediated learning: Cases from small firms

This article explores how artefacts invoke practices that encourage, support and sustain trajectories of collective learning. Analysis is drawn from three longitudinal case studies of small firms. Illustrations are offered of how learning activities are mediated by symbolic and material artefacts that are present in day-to-day work activities. Artefacts are shown to have a mediating effect on discourse, identity formation, learning routines, politics and conflict, and to create space and time for reflection and learning. The theoretical contribution lies in the explication of the pliable and multifaceted role that artefacts play in supporting learning processes. We also argue for a nuanced understanding of how artefacts might be used to shape learning trajectories. Our conclusions indicate that understanding the role of artefacts can enable more effective policy making and facilitate the development of support mechanisms for small firms. The perspectives we offer also have implications for learning in larger organizations.

Practice? It’s a Matter of Taste!

This article aims to enhance our understanding of how practice is socially sustained, learnt and constantly refined by arguing that practice is much more than a set of activities—it involves, beside instrumental and ethical judgements, taste and appraisal. Taste is a sense of what is aesthetically fitting within a community of practitioners—a preference for ‘the way we do things together’. Taste is based on subjective attachment to the object of practice and is learnt and taught as part of becoming a practitioner; it is performed as a collective, situated activity within a practice. The elaboration of taste and the refining of practice within a community involves taste-making, which is based on ‘sensible knowledge’ and the continual negotiation of aesthetic categories. The article examines how in a variety of practices, taste-making occurs through three processes: sharing a vocabulary for appraisal; crafting identities within epistemic communities; and refining performances.

Collective Development in Open-Source Communities: An Activity Theoretical Perspective on Successful Online Collaboration

Online collaboration is often organized without strong predetermined rules or central authority, which is why coordination and ways of organizing cooperation become crucial elements of collaboration. This article investigates how online projects can overcome problems of dispersed work, solve inherent contradictions and utilize tensions in the activity system to develop collaborative artefacts and practices. Empirical evidence is based on a detailed observation of a successful open-source project — the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Our findings show that successful collaboration is based on coat-tailing systems. Coat-tailing means to inextricably bind together individual action and collective activity through careful design of complexes of technological, mental and cultural artefacts.

Dynamics of Multiple Memories

In this article, the author reflects on how a study on “organizational memory” in the context of software development firms in India brought forth a number of issues associated with choices in research. He proposes the conceptualization of organizational memory in heterogeneous, multiple kinds of ways, emphasizing its plurality and explores how this can be done along varied dimensions. He also demonstrates how these findings in turn influenced the ensuing doctoral work, including the framework chosen and the methodology adopted.

Conflicting Identities and Power Between Communities of Practice: The Case of IT Outsourcing

Previous studies of communities of practice had often emphasized the ease with which members are able to participate in the collective learning process through joint practices within a particular community. However, nothing much has been done to reveal the difficulties and problems of learning between different communities due to different and sometimes conflicting identities and power inequalities. This article reports a failed experience of a tertiary institution to outsource its information technology (IT) department. By highlighting the social conflicts experienced by the in-house IT technicians in coordinating with the outsourcing staff, we argue that the received unitary, managerialist viewpoints of communities of practice somehow neglect the broader social context and micro-political factors of learning. This neglect underestimates the critical challenges of resolving the social tensions caused by multiple identities and embedded power differentials across different communities of practice.

What can management theories offer evidence-based practice? A comparative analysis of measurement tools for organisational context

BACKGROUND

Given the current emphasis on networks as vehicles for innovation and change in health service delivery, the ability to conceptualize and measure organisational enablers for the social construction of knowledge merits attention. This study aimed to develop a composite tool to measure the organisational context for evidence-based practice (EBP) in healthcare.

METHODS

A structured search of the major healthcare and management databases for measurement tools from four domains: research utilisation (RU), research activity (RA), knowledge management (KM), and organisational learning (OL). Included studies were reports of the development or use of measurement tools that included organisational factors. Tools were appraised for face and content validity, plus development and testing methods. Measurement tool items were extracted, merged across the four domains, and categorised within a constructed framework describing the absorptive and receptive capacities of organisations.

RESULTS

Thirty measurement tools were identified and appraised. Eighteen tools from the four domains were selected for item extraction and analysis. The constructed framework consists of seven categories relating to three core organisational attributes of vision, leadership, and a learning culture, and four stages of knowledge need, acquisition of new knowledge, knowledge sharing, and knowledge use. Measurement tools from RA or RU domains had more items relating to the categories of leadership, and acquisition of new knowledge; while tools from KM or learning organisation domains had more items relating to vision, learning culture, knowledge need, and knowledge sharing. There was equal emphasis on knowledge use in the different domains.

CONCLUSION

If the translation of evidence into knowledge is viewed as socially mediated, tools to measure the organisational context of EBP in healthcare could be enhanced by consideration of related concepts from the organisational and management sciences. Comparison of measurement tools across domains suggests that there is scope within EBP for supplementing the current emphasis on human and technical resources to support information uptake and use by individuals. Consideration of measurement tools from the fields of KM and OL shows more content related to social mechanisms to facilitate knowledge recognition, translation, and transfer between individuals and groups.

The Situatedness of Work Practices and Organizational Culture: Implications for Information Systems Innovation Uptake

This paper addresses work practices and organizational culture as situated actions and the implications for information systems innovation uptake. It reports research being conducted in Tanzania that brings an ethnographic research approach to understanding relations between local health care practices and health information systems development, by asking how health workers’ practices and everyday actions are influenced by the context of their specific situation. The research is being conducted in the context of a globally distributed open source software project to introduce and enhance health information systems in developing countries. Drawing on cultural historical activity theory, the study highlights the need for understanding each information system user's and each organization's specific and detailed work processes, and how situational and organizational factors may come together with the health information systems innovation processes in meeting the challenges discussed. In order to establish fully the potential of activity theory to innovation processes, situatedness of work practices focusing on the organization context is emphasized.

Older persons' experiences of whole systems: the impact of health and social care organizational structures

AIMS

An in-depth case study of whole systems working.

BACKGROUND

This paper reports on the second part of a two-part study exploring whole systems working. Part 1 of the study focused on an in-depth review of the literature pertaining to continuity of care and service integration. The second part, reported here, focused on an in-depth case study of one whole system. Evaluation Informed by the findings of part 1 of the study, data collection methods included in-depth interviews, real-time tracking of 18 older people, focus groups and consensus conferencing. Different data sets were analysed individually and synthesized using matrices derived from the literature review findings.

KEY ISSUE

Key themes from data synthesis include: (1) access to the most appropriate services; (2) service fragmentation; (3) continuity of care; and (4) routinized care.

CONCLUSIONS

The four themes of the case study reflect the need to address issues of demarcation of professional responsibilities, complicated channels of communication, information flows, assessment and reassessment in whole systems working.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

The impact of disempowering relationships on actual continuity of care and perceptions of quality among service users and providers. Lessons need to be learnt from specialist services and applied to service delivery in general.

Object-mediated Learning and Strategic Renewal in a Mature Organization

Knowledge transformation between practice-based communities is reported through a 2-year longitudinal case study. The company, PresMed, was transformed from a moribund and divided organization to one where different practice-based communities engaged in collective learning. However, the transformation involved conflict, politics and power to overcome the influence of localized and embedded knowledge. The nature of practice-based learning means investment in past activities and different organizational communities create tensions. It is suggested that mediating artefacts, or boundary objects, provide an opportunity to develop new shared conceptions of activity and new modes of action. However, at the heart of this transformation, communication, politics and power are central to pragmatic engagement in new practices. Thus, it is the social activities and the political will and skill to influence, cajole and institutionalize systemic changes and not the artefacts or objects per se that are at the heart of knowledge transformation.