The field of higher professional educational in the Netherlands is undergoing drastic structural changes. Organizational-wide mergers are commonplace and are often followed by development of new curricula. Furthermore, this is often accompanied by the implementation of a completely new educational concept as well. These structural changes in the educational system require that teachers adapt their current teaching practices, along with working on gaining new competences associated with working in a changing organization. This paper presents a short background of communities of practice in higher education, followed by a report on the first impressions from an experiment in which a bottom-up style of change management has been implemented through the use of a community of practice. A community of practice (CoP) is a powerful knowledge management tool that brings people from a similar domain together in order to solve complex problems, deal with a changing organization and build knowledge around a specific practice. Inholland decided to implement a CoP for the international faculty in order for the members to better cope with the major curricula and didactic changes currently being implemented there. Concepts such as change, organizational sense making and teacher professionalization
This paper proposes a framework for designing human resource development interventions that facilitate change in professional organizations through promoting learning at the individual and group level. The framework proposed is based on a theory of organizational learning developed by Etienne Wenger (Wenger, 1998) that proposes learning takes place in the context of communities of practice. Communities of practices (CoPs) are groups of professionals that come together in order to build knowledge and practice in their specific field (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). At first glance CoPs might appear to be like other, more traditional groups found in organizations, but this is misleading (Bood & Coenders, 2004; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). The major differences between traditional groups and CoPs are that the latter are self-organizing and self-governing (Dekkers et al., 2005; Saint-Onge & Wallace, 2003). In the private sector, CoPs are recognized as an exceptional human resource development (HRD) method for organizations wishing to stimulate learning, promote innovation and facilitate change processes among its employees (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). In this paper I lay the theoretical groundwork for developing CoPs generally, using the case of higher educational organizations as an example where they could be initiated. In order to design these interventions, I propose a model that employs a multi-disciplinary, theoretical approach that bridges the context of the public and private sectors. Furthermore, I report on some preliminary observations of two communities of practice; one that formed during a HRD project specifically centered on communities of practice, and one that was formed as a result of an organization-wide initiative to stimulate employee empowerment during a merger.
Due to the existing pressure for a more rational use of the water, many public managers and industries have to re-think/adapt their processes towards a more circular approach. Such pressure is even more critical in the Rio Doce region, Minas Gerais, due to the large environmental accident occurred in 2015. Cenibra (pulp mill) is an example of such industries due to the fact that it is situated in the river basin and that it has a water demanding process. The current proposal is meant as an academic and engineering study to propose possible solutions to decrease the total water consumption of the mill and, thus, decrease the total stress on the Rio Doce basin. The work will be divided in three working packages, namely: (i) evaluation (modelling) of the mill process and water balance (ii) application and operation of a pilot scale wastewater treatment plant (iii) analysis of the impacts caused by the improvement of the process. The second work package will also be conducted (in parallel) with a lab scale setup in The Netherlands to allow fast adjustments and broaden evaluation of the setup/process performance. The actions will focus on reducing the mill total water consumption in 20%.
MKB-bedrijven op het gebied van architectuur, gebiedsontwikkeling, ontwerp, digital design en technologie-ontwikkeling zien een nieuwe ‘markt’ ontstaan in de toenemende interesse voor de stedelijke commons. Dat zijn lokale gemeenschappen waarin mensen resources zoals energie, mobiliteit of woonruimte met elkaar delen en beheren, op een duurzame en pro-sociale manier. MKB-bedrijven zien kansen om in co-creatie met deze leefgemeenschappen nieuwe diensten en producten te ontwikkelen waarmee bewoners hun hulpbronnen gemeenschappelijk kunnen managen. MKB-bedrijven zien de ontwikkeling van stedelijke commons daarnaast als mogelijke oplossing voor urgente maatschappelijke vraagstukken en missies op het gebied van inclusieve woningbouw, duurzaamheid en de energietransitie. Voor het goed functioneren van de commons is een heldere articulatie en implementatie van hun onderliggende (maatschappelijke) waarden essentieel. Dit vraagt van MKB-bedrijven een zoektocht naar nieuwe manieren van gebieds- en technologie-ontwikkeling in samenwerking met bewoners. Een specifiek probleem daarbij betreft het vertalen van de commons-waarden naar een technologisch systeem dat het gezamenlijk beheer van hulpbronnen mogelijk maakt. Hiervoor wordt veel verwacht van digitale platformen en distributed ledgers technologies zoals de blockchain. Dit zijn databases die precies bijhouden wie wat bijdraagt en gebruikt. Ze koppelen zo’n boekhouding ook aan rechten, plichten en reputaties van de deelnemers. Bij de inrichting van zo’n systeem moeten ontwerpers steeds keuzes maken en rekening houden met spanningen tussen bijvoorbeeld privacy en transparantie, of individuele en collectieve belangen. In dit ontwerpproces stuiten MKBs op een kennishiaat. Hoe kunnen de onderliggende (maatschappelijke) waarden van commons-gemeenschappen 1) worden gearticuleerd en 2) vertaald naar een ontwerp voor de organisatie van een stedelijke commons met behulp van digitale platformen? Dit onderzoek verkent deze vragen in een fieldlab in Amersfoort, op twee ‘transfersites’ in Amsterdam en Birmingham, en met community of practice partners. Samen met hen worden een set design-principes en richtlijnen ontwikkeld voor het ontwerp van DLTs voor de stedelijke commons.
In leaving the more traditional territories of the concert performance for broader societal contexts, professional musicians increasingly devise music in closer collaboration with their audience rather than present it on a stage. Although the interest for such forms of devising co-creative musicking within the (elderly) health care sector is growing, the work can be considered relatively new. In terms of research, multiple studies have sought to understand the impact of such work on musicians and participants, however little is known about what underpins the musicians’ actions in these settings. With this study, I sought to address this gap by investigating professional musicians’ emerging practices when devising co-creative musicking with elderly people. Three broad concepts were used as a theoretical background to the study: Theory of Practice, co-creative musicking, and Praxialism. Firstly, I used Theory of Practice to help understand the nature of emerging practices in a wider context of change in the field of music and habitus of musicians and participants. Theory of Practice enabled me to consider a practice as “a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion, and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Secondly, I drew the knowledge from co-creative musicking, which is a concept I gathered from two existing concepts: co-creation and musicking. Musicking (Small, 1998), which considers music as something we do (including any mode of engagement with music), provided a holistic and inclusive way of looking at participation in music-making. The co-creation paradigm encompasses a view on enterprise that consists of bringing together parties to jointly create an outcome that is meaningful to all (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2014). The concept served as a lens to specify the jointness of the musicking and challenge issues of power in the engagement of participants in the creative-productive process. Thirdly, Praxialism considers musicking as an activity that encompasses “musical doers, musical doing, something done and contexts in which the former take place” (Elliott, 1995). Praxialism sets out a vision on music that goes beyond the musical work and includes the meanings and values of those involved (Silverman, Davis & Elliott, 2014). The concept allowed me to examine the work and emerging relationships as a result of devising co-creative musicking from an ethical perspective. Given the subject’s relative newness and rather unexplored status, I examined existing work empirically through an ethnographic approach (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Four cases were selected where data was gathered through episodic interviewing (Flick, 2009) and participant observation. Elements of a constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) were used for performing an abductive analysis. The analysis included initial coding, focused coding, the use of sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1969 in Hammersley, 2013) and memoing. I wrote a thick description (Geertz, 1973) for each case portraying the work from my personal experience. The descriptions are included in the dissertation as one separate chapter and foreshadow the exposition of the analysis in a next chapter. In-depth study of the creative-productive processes of the cases showed the involvement of multiple co-creative elements, such as a dialogical interaction between musicians and audience. However, participants’ contributions were often adopted implicitly, through the musicians interpreting behaviour and situations. This created a particular power dynamic and challenges as to what extent the negotiation can be considered co-creative. The implicitness of ‘making use’ of another person’s behaviour with the other not (always) being aware of this also triggered an ethical perspective, especially because some of the cases involved participants that were vulnerable. The imbalance in power made me examine the relationship that emerges between musicians and participants. As a result of a closer contact in the co-creative negotiation, I witnessed a contact of a highly personal, sometimes intimate, nature. I recognized elements of two types of connections. One type could be called ‘humanistic’, as a friendship in which there is reciprocal care and interest for the other. The other could be seen as ‘functional’, which means that the relationship is used as a resource for providing input for the creative musicking process. From this angle, I have compared the relationship with that of a relationship of an artist with a muse. After having examined the co-creative and relational sides of the interaction in the four cases, I tuned in to the musicians’ contribution to these processes and relationships. I discovered that their devising in practice consisted of a continuous double balancing act on two axes: one axis considers the other and oneself as its two ends. Another axis concerns the preparedness and unpredictability at its ends. Situated at the intersection of the two axes are the musicians’ intentionality, which is fed by their intentions, values and ethics. The implicitness of the co-creation, the two-sided relationship, the potential vulnerability of participants, and the musicians’ freedom in navigating and negotiation, together, make the devising of co-creative musicking with elderly people an activity that involves ethical challenges that are centred around a tension between prioritizing doing good for the other, associated with a eudaimonic intention, and prioritizing values of the musical art form, resembling a musicianist intention. The results therefore call for a musicianship that involves acting reflectively from an ethical perspective. Doctoral study by Karolien Dons
