Briefly, about practice theory and organizing.
Reading about practice theory (or practice based studies) applied to organization studies. Nice overview of the path of practice based thinking by Silvia Gherardi, writing an Introduction to a special issue of Management Learning called “The Critical Power of the ‘Practice Lens’” Notable in this introduction is the critique of Wenger’s Communities of Practice (I’ve long admired Wenger’s concepts because of the way they dismantle traditional top down notions of learning (and managerial authority, if one is thinking in terms of organizational learning). Here, the author discusses recent work to reverse the terms in ‘communities of practice’ to ‘practices of a community.’ This reversal, Gherardi contends,...
Read MoreWriting As Method: A PhD Workshop
Writing as Method, a PhD workshop Wednesday, April 6 Aarhus University “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” Starting with the assumption that “research procedure constructs reality as much as it produces descriptions of it” (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997, p.9), this workshop focuses on writing as an essential and often obscured method of inquiry. Writing is most often conceptualized as a procedural activity of organizing and composing findings at the end of a research project. This oversimplifies the framing power of writing as it functions rhetorically within larger communities of readers. It also underestimates the extent to which writing is a performative method of analysis throughout the course of a project....
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