Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities [1 ed.] 9781443863070, 9781443853750

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Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities

Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities

Edited by

Joaquín Alegre, Ricardo Chiva, Anabel Fernández-Mesa and José Luis Ferreras-Méndez

Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities, Edited by Joaquín Alegre, Ricardo Chiva, Anabel Fernández-Mesa and José Luis Ferreras-Méndez This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Joaquín Alegre, Ricardo Chiva, Anabel Fernández-Mesa, José Luis Ferreras-Méndez and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5375-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5375-0

CONTENTS

Contributors ................................................................................................ ix Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Part 1: Organisational Learning Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Are Working Practices the Place Where Organisation Studies and Workplace Learning Cross? Silvia Gherardi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15 The Effect of Management’s Strategic Practices on Situated Learning and Change in Organisational Practices: The Case of Commercialisation of Academic Research Dagmara Weckowska Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Organic Structure and Organizational Learning Capability: An Empirical Study into Organisations Excelling in Human Resourse Management Francisco Fermín Mallén Broch, Ricardo Chiva Gómez, Jacob Guinot Reinders and Joaquín Alegre Vidal Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67 Managing Knowledge and Learning through Communities of Practice Tuija Lämsä Part 2: Knowledge Creation and Transfer Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 Lessons from the Land of Oz: An Empirical Case Study of a US Financial Services Firm amidst Transformational Change, Effort and Leaderships’ Role in Fostering Knowledge Creation Capability Margaret Gorman

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Contents

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 139 Territorial Innovation Dynamics: A Knowledge Based Perspective Rani J. Dang, Karine Roux, Christian Longhi, Damien Talbot and Catherine Thomas Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 175 Knowledge Transfer in a Geographically Dispersed Organization: The Role of an Integration Unit Anita E. Tobiassen and Pål-Vemund Vermedal Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 195 To Have and To Hoard: Reasons for Not Sharing Knowledge in Organisations Colin Otto and Bart van den Hooff Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 221 Coping with Information Overload: Reflections and Solutions Nabil Sultan Part 3: Absorptive Capacity and Ambidexterity Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 237 Entrepreneurs’ Knowledge as a Key Intangible Asset for New Ventures: Conceptualisations and Taxonomy of Indicators Alejandro Campos, Esther Hormiga, Maria D. Moreno-Luzón and Patricia Greene Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 265 Absorptive Capacity, Organisational Memory and New Product Success: The Role of Exploration Reviewed Hammady Ahmed Dine Rabeh, Daniel Jimenéz Jimenéz and Micaela Martínez Costa5 Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 291 When New Information meets Prior Knowledge: Some Suggestions for Rethinking the Concept of Absorptive Capacity Barbara Müller and Christian Garaus

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 311 Absorptive Capacity and Total Quality Management: An Analysis of the Existing Links José Luis Ferreras-Méndez, Francisco Balbastre and Anabel FernándezMesa Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 333 Ambidextrous Learning Architectures and the Role of HRM Systems Hubert Lackner, Wolfgang H. Güttel, Stefan Konlechner, Christian Garaus, Nina Katrin Hansen and Barbara Müller Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 357 Intellectual Capital and Human Resource Management to Achieve Ambidextrous Learning Susana Pasamar, Mirta Díaz and Ramón Valle

CONTRIBUTORS

Hammady Ahmed Dine Rabeh University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain Joaquín Alegre Vidal Department of Management “Juan José Renau Piqueras”, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Francisco Balbastre Department of Management “Juan José Renau Piqueras”, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Alejandro Campos University of Guadalajara, Mexico Ricardo Chiva Gómez Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain Rani J. Dang University Of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Cnrs - Gredeg, France, University of Gothenburg, Iie, Sweden Mirta Díaz Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain Anabel Fernández-Mesa CSIC (UPV- Universitat Politècnica de València) Department of Management “Juan José Renau Piqueras”, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain José Luis Ferreras-Méndez Department of Management “Juan José Renau Piqueras”, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Christian Garaus Institute of Human Resource and Change Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria Margaret Gorman Northeastern University, Boston, United States Patricia Greene Babson college, Wellesley, United States Silvia Gherardi Department of Sociology and Social Research, Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics. Trento. University of Trento, Italy

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Jacob Guinot Reinders

Contributors

Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain Wolfgang H. Güttel Institute of Human Resource and Change Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria Nina Katrin Hansen Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany Esther Hormiga University of barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Daniel Jimenéz Jimenéz University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain Stefan Konlechner Institute of Human Resource and Change Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria Hubert Lackner Institute of Human Resource and Change Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria Tuija Lämsä Oulu Business School, University of Oulu , Finlandia Christian Longhi University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Cnrs- Gredeg, France Francisco Fermín Mallén Broch Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain Micaela Martínez Costa University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain Maria D. Moreno-Luzón Department of Management “Juan José Renau Piqueras”, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Barbara Müller Institute of Human Resource and Change Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria Colin Otto Vu university amsterdam, faculty of economics and business administration, Kin research group, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Susana Pasamar Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain Karine Roux University of Metz, France Nabil Sultan Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, United Kingdom Damien Talbot University Of Bordeaux, Cnrs - Gretha,

Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities

Catherine Thomas Anita E. Tobiassen Ramón Valle Bart van den Hooff

Pål-Vemund Vermedal Dagmara Weckowska

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France University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Cnrs- Gredeg, France Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain Vu University Amsterdam, Faculty Of Economics And Business Administration, Kin Research Group, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Gjensidige Forsikring Asa, Norway SPRU – Science and Technology Policy Research Unit & Business and Management Department, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

INTRODUCTION

The International Conference on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities – OLKC – took place in Valencia in April 2012, hosted by the University of Valencia. The conference theme was “Shedding New Lights on Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities”, which invited exploration of new perspectives to analyse and understand organisational learning, knowledge and capabilities. A number of crucial competitive issues such as innovation, design, marketing or quality depend on the outcomes of organisational learning, knowledge and capabilities. The antecedents of organisational learning and knowledge, organisational learning processes, the evolution of organisational capabilities, the process of unlearning, and the implications for organisational change were all subjects calling for further research. Current hot topics such as ambidexterity, dynamic capabilities, adaptive and generative learning, mindfulness, or complexity theories offered new lenses through which to expand the scope of organisational and management learning, while the acclaimed Mediterranean light of Valencia provided a new context in which to move forward the organisational learning and knowledge field. One hundred and thirty interesting papers were presented at the conference in several parallel sessions on organisational learning, knowledge management, and capabilities. This book contains a selection of some of the best and most stimulating papers from the conference. Selecting the papers and organising the review process was a challenge requiring a great deal of work. However, 15 papers were finally selected: four on organisational learning, six on organisational knowledge, and five on capabilities. The four papers included in the first section, organisational learning, shed new light on this topic. Three of them take the organisational learning practice-based perspective to further understanding of the difference between prescribed work and real work (Silvia Gherardi), and to comprehend the social processes that underline effective changes in organisational practices (Dagmara Weckowska), proposing that

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Introduction

management’s strategic practices can shape the learning trajectories of organisational communities of practice. The third, by Tuija Lämsä, argues that knowledge should be examined at its source, that is, the activities of the individual and communities of practice; she examines the flow of knowledge within and among communities of practice, and analyses how individuals make use of and share knowledge. The final paper in this section, by Fermín Mallén-Broch, Ricardo Chiva-Gómez, Joaquín AlegreVidal and Jacob Guinot-Reinders, underscores the importance of organic structures. These authors analyse the positive effects of organic structures on organisational learning and organisational performance. The six papers in the second section deal with a range of topics related to knowledge within organisations. Margaret Gorman and Lyndsay Welsh Chamblin analyse how a company transforms itself, focusing on the way leaders foster knowledge creation capabilities. Change, innovation and knowledge are also explored by Rani J. Dang, Catherine Thomas, Christian Longhi and Karine Roux, in this case taking into account territorial dynamics. In a similar vein, Anita E. Tobiassen and Pål-Vemund Vermedal analyse how an integration unit may contribute to knowledge transfer between geographically dispersed units with extensive decision rights. Colin Otto and Bart van den Hooff focus on the factors affecting knowledge hoarding, rather than sharing, which provide deeper insights for managing the process of turning individual knowledge into collective knowledge. Similarly, information overload is described in the paper by Nabil Sultan, who explores the innovation phenomenon of cloud computing and Web 2.0 and specifically examines their impact on organisational knowledge. Finally, Alejandro Campos, Esther Hormiga, Maria D. Moreno-Luzón and Patricia Greene establish the state of the art of knowledge indicators in the field of entrepreneurship, particularly at the individual level, through a systematic literature review. This is a highly interesting attempt to bridge the gap between the knowledge research stream and the academic field of entrepreneurship. In the third section, five papers explore capabilities, three of them focusing on absorptive capacities, and two, on ambidexterity. Hammady Ahmed Dine Rabeh, Daniel Jimenéz Jimenéz and Micaela Martínez Costa present an analysis of the relationships between absorptive capacity and innovation, concluding, among other things, that there is no significant relationship between old knowledge and exploration of new alternatives,

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and that absorptive capacity is a determinant factor when companies seek external sourcing. Barbara Müller and Christian Garaus invite us to rethink the concept of absorptive capacity by linking it with organisational memory. José Luis Ferreras-Méndez, Francisco Balbastre and Anabel Fernández-Mesa take a similar line in relating absorptive capacity to total quality management. Hubert Lackner, Wolfgang H. Güttel, Stefan Konlechner, Christian Garaus, Nina Katrin Hansen and Barbara Müller present a dynamic model of ambidexterity, analysing the link between exploratory and exploitative learning processes. They explain how rising organisational complexity leads to an increase in causal ambiguity of learning. Finally, Susana Pasamar, Mirta Díaz and Ramón Valle provide an inspiring state of the art on the connections between the literatures on intellectual capital, human resource management and ambidextrous learning. On the basis of this literature review, the authors highlight some of the effects that intellectual capital and human resource management have on ambidextrous learning.

PART 1: ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING

CHAPTER ONE ARE WORKING PRACTICES THE PLACE WHERE ORGANISATION STUDIES AND WORKPLACE LEARNING CROSS? SILVIA GHERARDI* UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO

Introduction What do people do when they work? When they work is that all they do? How does work differ from non-work? The more traditional sociologists of work have preferred to consider it a macro social phenomenon – like employment – leaving micro analysis to other disciplines or to other sociological traditions. This is the “missing what” (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992: 203) that escapes traditional studies on work. And it is this perspective that has been resumed by the practice-based studies that continue the ethnomethodological tradition, and take up Barley and Kunda’s (2001) invitation to “bring work back in” (organisation studies). The study of situated working practices also responds to a need for better understanding of the difference between prescribed work and real work (Licoppe 2008) – a problem long present in European sociology of work. To understand this latter perspective, consider the phenomenological definition provided by Alfred Schütz (1962, p. 212), which treats work from another point of view: “Working, then, is action in the outer world, based upon a project and characterized by the intension to bring about the projected state of affairs by bodily movements”. This definition places *

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Silvia Gherardi, Department of Sociology and Social Research, Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics. Via Verdi 26, 38122 Trento. University of Trento, Italy. [e-mail:[email protected]].

Chapter One

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particular emphasis on work as an activity directed towards the world, which is intended to accomplish a project, and above all which involves the human body and sensible knowledge. From this perspective, working is a being-in-the-world tied to the accomplishment of a project through physical activities that are situated in time and space. Defining work as situated activity means focusing the sociological analysis of work on working practices as modes of action and knowledge emerging in situ from the dynamics of interactions (Gherardi 2006). This definition is rooted theoretically in social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism. What does the concept of practice bring to the study of work as situated activity? Why is knowledge in this case qualified as practice? Around these concepts the paradigm of situated action has developed, which subtends the study of knowledge comprised in practices and on which practice-based studies are grounded. Since the 1990s (together with other studies on distributed knowledge, cultural cognitive psychology, activity theory, workplace studies and situated learning), it has given rise to a new strand of social studies on work that fall under the heading of “practicebased studies” or “studies of knowing in practice”. At the basis of this renewed interest in work as a situated activity, two phenomena have contributed to redefining the nature of work, and have consequently challenged the analytical categories with which it is analysed: 1.

The increased knowledge content that characterizes work in “technologically dense” environments (Bruni 2005) makes working and knowing equivalent.

2.

The spread of information and communication technologies (computer, internet, cell phones, to mention only the most common), which has redesigned workplaces, as well as the very meaning of “workplace” as a spatial and temporal locus marked by the co-presence of different human actors in interaction (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010).

Emerging today is a perspective of study founded on working practices as an analytical and interpretative alternative to the traditional approach, because study of work as a knowledge-based activity is necessary to gain better understanding of technological practices where interaction takes place both in co-presence and at a distance, where the reliability of technological systems is vital, and where communication and responsibility

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are crucial for the support in real time of the capacity to think and act collectively and cooperatively. Practice-based studies can make a significant contribution to link the analysis of working, learning and organising, because they are able to: x contextualize organising within a circumscribed empirical context: a practice or a field of practices; x define them as a collective practical accomplishment that connects together bits and pieces of knowledge relevant to the on-going situation; x analyse the activities that contribute to the stabilization and performativity of organising. The following sections will develop a methodological framework for analysing practices as loci of knowing, working, and organising.

Three salient features of work practices To convey a preliminary idea of the theoretical and methodological framework in which working practices are analysed as knowing-inpractice, we may say that knowledge can be seen and analysed as an activity, rather than as an object (a body of knowledge), and that it can therefore also be studied as a situated activity. In other words, knowledge emerges from the context of its production and is anchored by (and in) material supports in that context. We may also say that knowing is both an individual and a collective activity; that it is an activity situated in working practices; and that, therefore, practical knowledge is contextual as opposed to being decontextualized and theoretical. A working practice is a collective activity undertaken in a particular place and at a particular time. It therefore assumes all the variability connected with the context that it is bounded by and makes it possible. It thus expresses a contextual rationality: that is, a form of action and practical reasoning applied to the work at hand, interactions with others, the setting, and all the resources present in it. The jobs of a nurse, a lawyer, or a motorcycle courier consist of a set of working practices that are constantly repeated and adapted to the mutable circumstances in which they are performed. It is this set of working practices that makes an occupation or a profession. Although these practices are constitutive of work and organising, how they are executed depends on the specific situation.

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Chapter One

Working practices can therefore be viewed as units of analysis of work. Partially already given and partially emergent, they are ways to order the work flow, to segment it into subsets of coherent and interdependent activities, and to codify it in recognizable, recognized, and socially sustained patterns. For instance, handovers from one shift to the next, meeting the quota, or preparing a patient for anaesthesia are practices which, in the respective work settings, communicate “what one is doing” to co-workers, and also have meaning for those who do not belong to the community of nurses, production workers, or doctors. As modes of ordering, work practices create encoded situations comprising programmes of action (in situation X, do Y, Z…), but they are not binding on how that action is to be performed. Handovers from one shift to the next take place in diverse locations and situations and with varying contents, yet they are always recognized as “handover practice”. A distinctive feature of work practices, therefore, is not their internal variability, but rather their repetition. A practice is such precisely because it is practised, habitual, taught and learned as an activity that constitutes the job and requires expertise. It differs from an emergency, that is, a situation in which the usual operational parameters are altered (for instance, a sudden shortage of personnel or an unexpected inflow of patients) or from an unforeseen event (a flood in an operating theatre). Practices contain elements of habit, but they are not habits; they contain elements of action, but they are not actions. If the building in which we are working catches fire, its evacuation is an action for us, but a practice for the fire brigade. The repetition (or recursiveness) distinctive of working practices is connected on the one hand with the development of skills and, on the other, with change as re-specification for the practice’s adaptation to contingencies or refinement. The two aspects are linked insofar as the constant reproduction of an activity generates, within the community of its practitioners, dynamics for the constant improvement (or disuse), adaptation, or change in a practice as a response to altered conditions. Knowing-how is refined by being practised, just as excellence in knowinghow is a symbolic element that motivates, rewards, and celebrates the doing and the community of practitioners. The third distinctive feature of practices (besides their nature as modes of ordering and their recursiveness) is their reproduction of society. Francis Bacon wrote in the seventeenth century that the persistence of society is just as problematic as its change. Four hundred years later, social scientists are still more interested in change than in persistence, in production more

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than reproduction. Yet a focus on practices entails the problem of society’s competent reproduction. Tied to the recursiveness of practices is their stabilization by repetition, and therefore the iteration of the relations among the elements that make up the practice. But what motivates the reproduction of the same relations? According to an evolutionist explanation, only the more efficient practices, those that work better than others, survive. But this explanation fails to consider all the elements tied to tradition or to the emotional and symbolic dimension. A neoinstitutional explanation does not deny that technical superiority is a reason for the diffusion and reproduction of practices, but it emphasizes the normative dimension and the process by which the community’s work practices and how they are practised become institutionalized. In the communities of nurses, production workers, doctors, or express delivery couriers, certain practices are considered “the correct way to do things” because they are sustained by a set of values and by a constant debate on the ethical and aesthetic dimension of the occupation or profession. The effects of this debate are apparent in the negotiated order, rules, deontological code, and the legislation. Agreement on practices does not necessarily mean their endorsement: indeed, almost all communities have conflicting schools of thought or visions of the world about which practice is more correct, more elegant, or more efficacious. This internal debate augments the dynamism of the practice amid its recursiveness. It is the endogenous dynamic of change in the practice while it is being practised.

Knowing and practising Having described the three salient features of work practices, I now want to stress how practices, as the unit of analysis of working, knowing and organising, can simultaneously be studied as: x Containers of activities and competences, situational domains in which collective abilities are created, transmitted, preserved or changed. The focus in this case is on the activities that take place in the context of a practice, and how a common orientation is maintained among the participants during the performance of such activities. x Processes, which follow a trajectory of becoming as they unfold over time, mobilize resources, and are pragmatically oriented. Emergent practices and cooperation in action are consequently the focus of the study. x Results of stabilization through anchorage in the material world and institutionalization as the infusion of values and their upholding by

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Chapter One

limitation (norms, laws, codes etc.). Studied in this case are the normative system and the prescriptive relay as the outcome of, and precondition for, constant repetition of the practice “for another first time”. A researcher, like anyone else, may want to know a certain practice, but this does not mean that s/he is able to practise it. Knowing a practice in order to be a practitioner or a professional is different. In this case, the person is said to know that practice when s/he is able to reproduce it and knows how to do so autonomously, having acquired the necessary competence. I want to emphasize the distinction between knowing a practice and knowing-in-practice in order to illustrate three different ways of conceiving the relationship between knowing and practicing. The literature refers to three types of relation between practices and practical knowledge (Gherardi, 2006): x A containment relation, in the sense that practical knowledge is exercised within situated practices. In this definition, practices are objective entities (in that they have been objectified) of which their practitioners already have knowledge (that is, they re-know them as practices), and which contain items of knowledge anchored in the material world and in the normative and aesthetic system that has culturally processed them x A reciprocal constitution relation, in the sense that knowing and practising are not two distinct and detached phenomena; on the contrary, they interact with each other and produce each other. x An equivalence relation: practising is knowing in practice, whether or not the subject is aware of it. Acting as a competent practitioner is synonymous with knowing how to connect successfully with the field of practices thus activated. The equivalence between knowing and practising is established when priority is denied to the knowledge that pre-exists its application, so that something already existing is not performed; rather, the action creates and expresses the knowledge formed in and through that same action. I adhere to the third position because it enables me to propose a more sophisticated theory of practices seen from the point of view of the community that practises and therefore engenders them, and of knowledge as created and recreated competence. More recently, practices have been termed “sites of knowing” (Nicolini 2010) in order to underline the nondistinction between knowing and practising.

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With this specification in mind, I am thus able to specify the underlying methodological framework more clearly.

A methodological framework A metaphor that aptly illustrates the way in which a practice emerges and is socially and materially sustained is that of climbing, as described by Hennion (2007:100-1): “What climbing shows is not that the geological rock is a social construction, but that it is a reservoir of differences that can be brought into being. The climber makes the rock as the rock makes the climber. The differences are indeed in the rock, and not in the ‘gaze’ that is brought to it. But these are not brought to bear without the activity of the climb which makes them present. There is co-formation. Differences emerge, multiply and are projected. The ‘object’ is not an immobile mass against which our goals are thrown. It is in itself a deployment, a response, an infinite reservoir of differences that can be apprehended and brought into being.”

Hennion thus illustrates the relationship of co-formation between sociomateriality and identity, but he only alludes to the fact that the same relationship exists between the doing – climbing – and the knowing: that is, knowing how to read the rock, seeing the handholds that become such only at the moment when the climber sees them and makes them handholds for his/her next move. This knowing how to read the context as a “reservoir of differences”, knowing how to identify the handholds for the next action, knowing what the next action will be (Garfinkel’s “what next”, 1996), and possessing the vocabulary to talk competently about climbing, are things that are collectively learned, transmitted, and transformed during practice and as an effect of it. We may imagine what can constitute a handhold for the development of practical knowledge by assembling an ideal toolbox that enables a practice to be described while it is being practised. Work, therefore, is a knowinghow in a situation, a knowing how “to work together” that weaves relations among people, objects, languages, technologies, institutions, and rules. All these “handholds” are found in the field of action. They are partly given, partly to be found, and partly lacking, and they must be assembled into a meaningful network that holds them together and directs them towards a pragmatic goal. This image recalls the activity of bricolage more than that of rational planning. We have in fact used concepts like articulation work, relational work, arbitrage, knotworking, and alignment to convey the idea that the resources for action (material, interactive, communicative or normative) must be activated and interrelated in order to

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Chapter One

maintain a shared orientation. Before illustrating what these handholds and resources are, we introduce a metaphor for the relation between resources and practices by quoting a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan from Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, (1993, 83): Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

Having talked about the arch, we may now consider the stones. In our case, the stones represent the handholds discovered as the practice unfolds and is skilfully activated to become a resource for accomplishment of an activity. I want to focus on specific handholds: the body – and with it sensible knowledge – technology, discursive practices, rules, and institutions. The body has received particular attention precisely because it has been taken for granted – if not systematically erased – by the classic sociology of work and organisations, which refers to a generic labour force without corporality or gender. The feminist critique has fiercely attacked this position. It claims that the labour force consists of men and women who bring their differences to work; it denounces the normative model of work as constructed on the male worker and as sustaining a normative model of masculinity; but above all it maintains that knowledge cannot be produced without starting from the body, and that different bodies have different experiences (and therefore constructions) of the world. We know through our bodies, and what lies outside us is first mediated by the body and its sensations. Sensible (aesthetic) knowledge is what is learned through the five senses and the aesthetic judgement passed on it. It is largely tacit, but social, knowledge. In many workplaces, it is the senses and the collective refinement of the sensory abilities that measure performance, just as they symbolize the competence expressed as “having an eye, nose or ear” for something, or having a light touch. Contrary to the Cartesian separation between mind and body, the study of practices valorises the intimate connection between mind and body and the knowledge incorporated in bodily schemes, physical abilities, and the collective development of a “professional vision” made up of experience and its codification. Experience is not individual and unique; rather, it is a process that is both individual and collective. This conception of experience has been put forward by Teresa de Lauretis (1984, 159) as:

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“The process by which subjectivity is constructed. Through that process one place oneself or is placed in social reality, and so perceives and comprehends as subjective those relations – material, economic, and interpersonal – which are in fact social and historical. The process is continuous and daily renewed. For each person, therefore, subjectivity is on-going construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world. On the contrary, it is the effect of that interaction – which I call experience; and thus is produced not by external ideas, values, or material causes, but by one’s personal, subjective, engagement in the practices, discourses and institutions that lend value, meaning, value, and affect to the events of the world.”

This process is also collective. It is identity work and the sharing of experience in practices. It is the doing-in-situation which produces a collective identity and consolidates the practical knowledge transmitted to the novice (through co-piloting and scaffolding), through stories that “do community”, and through the rules that incorporate an experience and make it available after the event. When learning from experience is considered, it should be borne in mind that experiences leave traces of knowledge that become embedded and available beyond the individual occurrence. Objects embody past experiences. Script is the simplest technology with which to fix the past and update it to the present. The memory does not rely solely on the mental abilities; rather, humans utilize objects to remind them of things. One of the most important contributions of the practice-based approach is that it directs attention to the socio-material domain. The material world lives with us, around us, and through us. It is neither inert nor passive. When we say that the material world interpellates us, we refer to our interactions with objects: a notice tells us what we must or must not do; a machine alarm tells us that we must not touch it; a flashing light tells us that something is wrong and that the machine needs fixing; and so on. Tools anchor activities because they enable us to do things that we otherwise would not be able to do; technologies are extensions (prostheses) of our bodily abilities, and they increasingly incorporate knowledge and intelligence. Technologically dense work settings demonstrate that knowing-how is distributed between humans and nonhumans, and that the knowledge specific to humans consists primarily in the ability to align and stabilize the socio-technical system within an ecology of constant connectivity. Working practices are then anchored in language in the form of technical vocabulary, classification systems, and language-in-use. When we say that talking is working we imply that discursive practices are means of

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Chapter One

communication and interaction but also specific technologies. Institutional conversations, for example, perform a “transformation” through speech. Service work is accomplished through talk-in-situation. Practical knowledge therefore also consists in communicative competence: that is, knowing how to use language appropriately in specific contexts of interaction. Finally, the analysis of working practices as knowing-how in situation requires consideration of two further handholds: rules and institutions, which concern normation. These are resources with which to produce the negotiated order and learn how to move in the interstitial space of ordinary prescription, exploiting the incompleteness of rules, and therefore opportunities between prescription and negotiation. Hence, empirical study of organising as knowing-in-practice requires analysis of how, in working practices, resources are collectively activated and aligned with competence. This activity is not extemporaneous; on the contrary, what makes practices “plastic” – that is, relatively stable and mutable – is the activity that stabilizes the conditions for them. The activation of resources accompanies their anchoring in the material world, in language, and in the institutional, normative and aesthetic dimensions. Knowing-in-practice can therefore be analysed as it is manifest in the linguistic and cultural systems, and the technological and normative infrastructure, located in time and space, and as it is socially constructed and constantly developed.

Conclusion We may conclude that while people work, they perform activities of different kinds; they produce and reproduce society in its work relations, and they affirm an individual and collective work identity. We may also say that there is work that is necessary for a person to be able to work. The workplace is an active context and not a mere container of activities: it helps us remember; it allows us to do some things and not others (for example, something that might put our safety at risk); it solicits our action with visual or auditory signals; it furnishes programmes that help us diagnose possible breakdowns and suggest how we should intervene. The practice-based approach extends the original idea of work as interaction to encompass the contemporary entanglement of knowing, working and organising within a physical environment and according to varying situations. The aim of the approach and its research methodology

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is to understand how work environments, equipped with artefacts and objects, may significantly facilitate the performance of tasks by those who work in those settings.

References Barley, S., Kunda, G. (2001), Bringing Work Back In, in Organization Science, n. 1, pp. 76-95. Bruni, A. (2005) Shadowing Software and Clinical Records: On the Ethnography of Non-Humans. Organization, 12(3), 357–378. Calvino, I. (1993), Le città invisibili, Milano, Mondadori. de Lauretis, T. (1984), Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, London, McMillan. Garfinkel, H. (1996) Ethnomethodology’s Program. Social Psychology Quarterly, 59(1): 5-21. Garfinkel, H., Wieder, D. (1992), Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically alternate Technologies of Social Analysis, in Text in Context: Studies in Ethnomethodology, G. Watson, R.M. Seiler (eds), Newbury Park, Sage, pp. 175-206. Gherardi, S. (2006), Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning, Oxford, Blackwell. Hennion, A. (2007) Those Things that Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 1(1): 97-114. Licoppe, C. (2008), Dans le carré de l’activité: perspectives internationales sur le travail et l’activité, Sociologie du Travail 50(3), pp. 287-302. Llewellyn, N., Hindmarsh, J. (2010) Work and Organisation in Real Time: An Introduction. In N: Llewellyn, and J. Hindmarsh, (eds) Organization, Interaction and Practice: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicolini, D. (2011) Practice as the Site of Knowing. Insights from the Field of Telemedicine. Organization Science, 22: 602-620 Schütz, A. (1962), Collected Papers. The Hague: Nijhoff.

CHAPTER TWO THE EFFECT OF MANAGEMENT’S STRATEGIC PRACTICES ON SITUATED LEARNING AND CHANGE IN ORGANISATIONAL PRACTICES: THE CASE OF COMMERCIALISATION OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH DAGMARA WECKOWSKA* SPRU – SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY RESEARCH UNIT & BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

Abstract This chapter takes a practice-based perspective on organisational learning and change and sheds light on the social processes that underlie effective changes in organisational practices. In particular, it investigates why and how practices of organisational communities of practice are transformed. I propose that management’s strategic practices can shape the learning trajectories of organisational communities of practice in order to stimulate transformations in the practices that are in line with the strategic goals. Thus the paper argues that situated learning not only drives emergent changes but also enables deliberate change, planned by organisational strategists. I propose a conceptual framework that synthesises insights from studies of situated change, studies of situated learning and studies of strategizing in order to address this proposition. The case studies of four Knowledge Transfer Offices in UK universities have shown that three strategic practices were commonly adopted to shape situated learning in *

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jubilee Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9SL, United Kingdom [email: [email protected]].

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the communities of practice and transformations of practices. Differences in transformative power of these three strategic practices are discussed. Keywords: practice-based learning, situated learning, community of practice, strategizing, practice change

Introduction Learning has the power to transform individuals’ behaviours. However, when collective learning is scrutinised the relationship between learning and change is less than straightforward. It is thus unsurprising that previous discussion on the relationship between situated learning in communities of practice and change in community’s practices have been inconclusive. As communities of practice facilitate knowledge sharing and knowledge creation they have the potential to advance changes (Wesley and Buysse, 2001; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Brown and Duguid, 1998; Carlile, 2002). However, at the same time communities of practice develop a particular understanding of competent action and a set of routines and actions. Thus they may perpetuate practices over time or even resist changes (Mittendorff et al., 2006). The aim of this paper is to shed light on why transformations in practices of organisational communities of practice occur. In particular, it is proposed that managerial actions and decisions can shape learning trajectories and subsequently stimulate changes in individual and collective activities within communities of practice. This research investigated the practice of commercialising academic research in British universities. Commercialisation of academic research is managed by staff in Knowledge Transfer Offices, which have proliferated in the last two decades. The development of commercialisation practice in universities was promoted and subsidised by the UK government and many universities have taken steps to systematically manage exploitation of academic research. Knowledge Transfer Offices have to constantly adjust their practices to cope with internal challenges (e.g., budget cuts in universities) and opportunities and also to respond to ever-changing external environments. This empirical context is thus suitable for testing the proposition that changes in practices of organisational communities of practice are instigated and shaped by managerial actions. Case studies of four university Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs) provide empirical evidence that illustrates the relationships between (1) strategizing of KTO senior managers, (2) situated learning of KTO commercialisation staff and (3) change in commercialisation practices.

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The next section reviews existing studies shedding light on the relationship between situated learning and evolution of organisational practices and suggests why transformations of a community’s practice are not well addressed in the literature. Section 3 goes back to the seminal work of Wenger to identify how managerial actions and decisions can shape learning trajectories and subsequently, changes in individual and collective activities. Section 4 reports the methods and section 5 presents the analysis of four case studies. The findings suggest three strategic practices that enable management to shape situated learning in communities of practice and transformations in their practices. Section 6 discusses the differences in transformative power of each strategic practice.

Situated learning and change in practices The concept of situated learning implies that people learn in a specific cultural and historical context and in a web of social relations in which they are embedded. Learning is therefore seen as “an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice” (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 31) and people are thought to learn in practice by doing and by interacting with others. The literature on situated learning particularly emphasises learning through participation in communities of practice and in networks of practice (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Wenger, 1998). Wenger (1998) and Brown and Duguid (1998; 2001; 1991) played a crucial role in promoting the concepts of “learning in practice” and “communities of practice” in business, management and organisational studies, showing that “learning is an inseparable and integral part of all organisational practices”. (Gherardi, 1999: 113). Previous studies have linked the concept of communities of practice to organisational learning and workplace learning (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Brown and Duguid, 1998; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000; Yanow, 2000; Handley et al., 2006; Mittendorff et al., 2006) in order to shed light on the importance of social dynamics for professionals’ learning and for sharing and creating knowledge in organisations. Organisational learning and knowledge creation are two of the drivers of organisational change (Clegg et al., 2005). Thus the concepts of situated learning and communities of practice could shed some light on how and why organisational changes unfold. For example, the situated learning theory and the concept of communities of practice could help examine the impact of changing social relations on initiation of bottom-up changes and enactment of top-down planned changes. A number of studies of situated

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organisational change are based on the assumption that change is a continuous process and therefore every performance of an activity in a particular work context is an occasion for change (Feldman, 2000; Orlikowski, 1996; Orlikowski, 2002; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). However, these studies have alluded to, but have not explicitly used, the community of practice framework. Some previous studies argued that communities of practice can advance business innovation (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 2000; Wenger and Snyder, 2000; Justensen, 2004; Manville, 2004; Lundkvist, 2004). Nonetheless, in general research on the relationship between situated learning and evolving practices remains scarce. Fox pointed out that “community of practice theory tells us nothing about how, in practice, members of a community change their practices and innovate” (Fox, 2000: 860), while Fenwick lamented the “weak analysis of innovation offered by community of practice conceptions” (Fenwick, 2008: 235). Arguably the analysis of innovation and change of a community’s practice is difficult because of the main epistemological assumption of the communities of practice framework; namely, that learning occurs through participation, through mutual engagement with more knowledgeable members of the community (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). This assumption hinders explorations of changes in community’s practices in two ways. Firstly, it entails focusing on the impact of socio-historical context on learning and pays limited attention to the possibility that individuals can bring new ideas into communities and can have experiences outside a particular organisational community of practice. In other words, the prevailing focus on social structure over individual agency makes it difficult to explain how changes in communities occur. Secondly, this epistemological assumption entails rejection of the possibility that individuals can reflect on their practices and experiences. This assumption helped to differentiate situated learning from the cognitive theories of learning which prevailed in the 1980s. However, 20 years later it seems to be more limiting than productive, in particular when change in a community’s practices is examined. Similar points were raised by Elkjaer (2009; 2003) in her discussion of social learning theories. Arguably the process of learning through mutual engagement with more knowledgeable, incumbent members of the community can account for the passing of knowledge to new generations of a community’s members and reproduction of practice over time, but it is less helpful in understanding how practices of communities are transformed over time.

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Wenger (1998: 138) argued that practice can change when one or more members who “have had experiences that currently fall outside the regime of competence of a community to which they belong”, “attempt to change the community’s regime so that it includes their experiences”. Wenger (1998) argued that new members of a community can bring experiences that trigger collective learning and transform a community’s current work practices. However, a member of a particular community can also have new experiences while being a member of that community. People learn through interactions with members of their networks of practice (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Delemarle and Laredo, 2008) and through interactions with members of other communities (Bechky, 2003; Scarbrough and Swan, 2008) and thus the interaction within networks of practices and across communities are potential sources of new experiences that could trigger changes in understanding of competence, and subsequently transformation, of practice. The early work of Wenger explicitly mentions the role of experience in transformations of practice as well as reflective activities of individuals. This probably results from the fact that pragmatism influenced development of social learning theory (Elkjaer, 2009). However, the ideas have not been embraced by studies approached from a social learning perspective. While I do not question the main epistemological assumption of situated learning, I argue that it has to be broadened out in order to explore the transformations in practices of organisational communities of practice. One needs to assume that individuals learn in communities of practices, but also that interactions within wider social circles can be a source of new knowledge and new experiences. Moreover, one needs to assume that individuals are able to reflect on their interactions with members of other communities of practice, and through reflection develop understanding of implications that the new experience has on the practices of the community to which they belong. Reconciliation of socio-cultural and cognitive theories of learning has been advocated by others who were interested in how new knowledge is created in communities of practices (Marshall, 2008; Billett, 1996). Moreover, Elkjaer (2003; 2009) suggested that pragmatism, which assumes that thinking-based and practice-based learning coexist, is the learning theory for the future. In summary, I argue that in order to explain transformations in a community’s practice, one needs to explore how members of a community gain new experiences. It is assumed that new experiences are made through interactions within communities, within networks of practice and across communities of practice as well as through reflection. This research thus takes pragmatism as the epistemological principle underpinning the analysis of learning.

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In an organisational context, the opportunities to interact with networks of practice and other communities and with objects will be partially dependent on one’s job design and the organisational procedures that are under managerial control. Management can also hire new staff who may bring new experiences into organisational communities of practice. Managerial practices and decisions can shape learning trajectories of members of organisational communities of practice (Macpherson and Clark, 2009) and either enable or constrain opportunities to make new experiences. The next section will explicate the process of situated learning in order to identify how managerial actions affect situated learning and transformations in practice.

The managerial impact on learning trajectories According to Duguid (2008), learning in communities of practice involves “deploying through practice the resources – cognitive, material and social” (Duguid, 2008). I propose that the strategic practices of organisational managers can shape learning trajectories of communities of practice when they alter the cognitive, material and social resources available to the community’s members. The concept of strategic practices, or strategizing, emerged from studies taking a practice-based view on organisational strategies (Johnson et al., 2003; Pye and Pettigrew, 2006: and other articles in the respective special issues). This view blurs the boundaries between strategizing and organising by placing the emphasis on the everyday practices involved in strategic reorganisation. Strategizing and organising are thought to be carried out through these strategic practices. Examples of strategic practices include: controlling practices, communicating practices (Whittington et al., 2006), direction-setting practices, monitoring practices and resource allocation practices (Jarzabkowski, 2003). Any of these and/or other managerial practices is believed to be able to change the cognitive, material and social resources available to the community’s members and therefore shape the learning trajectories of communities of practice. It is worth noting that studies into strategizing and organising are typically based on cognitive theories of learning (Jarzabkowski, 2003; Whittington et al., 2006), which stress that the role of managers is to provide information and knowledge that is then processed by employees. By contrast, the situated learning theory is a social theory of learning and it suggests that the role of managers is to change the patterns of participation and interactions through which learning occurs. These differences stem from different epistemological assumptions of cognitive and social

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learning theories. As I have argued for reconciliation of these approaches and have accepted pragmatism as an epistemological principle, my approach allows these two different but not contradictory managerial roles to coexist. The next paragraph explains how this is possible. Wenger argued that “practices evolve as shared histories of learning” (1998: 86) and suggested that learning of communities of practice consists of three processes: evolving mutual engagement, evolving understanding of the community’s enterprise and evolving the community’s repertoire of practice. People evolve in existing relations and develop new ones; they negotiate how activities should be performed and they modify the resources (repertoire) available to them to guide their work activities by creating or adjusting tools, routines, procedures, concepts, or stories. Managers can arguably affect the evolution of practice by shaping the learning trajectories of communities of practice, which could be done by shaping any of the three processes. First, managers may influence the process of evolving mutual engagement by, for example, allocating resources for hiring a new staff member or subcontracting some work, and in this way create opportunities for community members to develop new relations (i.e., evolve mutual engagement). James (2007) showed that managerial strategies generate on-going changes within employment relations, which have the eơect of recon¿guring and rede¿ning the identities of the community of practice members. I argue that changing relations can also be a source of experiences that will initiate transformations of practice. Second, managers may intervene in the evolving repertoire of practice by, for example, changing control and monitoring practices that will stimulate certain changes in the procedures, tools, routines and other elements of the repertoire of practice. Alternatively, managers can change the elements of the repertoire and impose them on communities. Previous studies have shown that objects and tools can indeed be designed to encourage speci¿c understanding of how to do things and circumscribe a set of actions (Nicolini et al., 2003; Macpherson and Clark, 2009). Thirdly, managerial practices such as, for example, direction setting can shape the process of evolving understanding of the community’s enterprise. This is not to say that all changes suggested by management alter the competence regime of organisational communities. Nonetheless, the communities have to respond to new directions and negotiate how actions should be carried out under new circumstances. In summary, it is proposed that some changes in the practices of communities of practice will be instigated and shaped by managerial practices (i.e., strategizing), which affect the community’s learning

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trajectory. In order to test this proposition, the conceptual framework underpinning this research synthesises insights from studies of situated change, studies of situated learning and studies of strategizing. As shown in figure 1, the conceptual framework consists of three main concepts – situated learning in a community of practice, evolving practice of the community and managerial practice of strategizing. The relationship between strategizing and situated learning underpinning transformation in practice is at the centre of the analysis. Figure 1. Conceptual framework

Source: The author.

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This study will address the concern raised by Roberts (2006) about the lack of understanding of how learning in communities is shaped by organisational context, and the concerns of Fox (2000) and Fenwick (2008) about limited understanding of how transformations in a community’s practices come about.

Method Case study selection The conceptual framework presented above guided the analysis of change in commercialisation practice between 2005 and 2010 in four Knowledge Transfer Offices in UK universities. Four case studies were conducted. Ideally, a number of cases where change in commercialisation practices occurred would have been selected. However, the information about KTO practices was not available prior to the fieldwork. It is assumed that evolving commercialisation practices should be related to changes in commercialisation performance (number of internal invention disclosures and licensing deals) and therefore the changes in commercialisation performance were used as an imperfect approximation of changes in commercialisation practice. Data from the “Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction” survey was used to calculate the average annual growth rates in the number of disclosures and licenses in the period 2002-2009. Two selected KTOs (cases A and B) improved on both measures in the given period whereas the opposite was true for the other two selected KTOs (cases C and D). Changes in commercialisation practice are expected in all cases, but the role of learning and strategizing could be different.

Data collection and analysis The information about (1) strategizing of senior KTO managers, (2) situated learning of commercialisation staff, and (3) change in commercialisation practice was collected in interviews with key organisational actors in each KTO. Twenty interviews were conducted between Dec 2010 and Feb 2011. The information from the interviews was supplemented with data from internal documents and university websites. Learning in communities of practice is a difficult concept to operationalize. Some researchers argue that it is more productive to focus on routines, practices or networks of practices in order to understand the social relations that form the basis of situated learning rather than on

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“identities” and “participation in communities” (Macpherson and Clark, 2009; Roberts, 2006). In agreement with this argument, I analysed the structure of work activities and work relations in order to identify the relations that are crucial for situated learning. Members of the commercialisation staff were also asked about the relations that provide second opinions, advice and help in solving work-related problems. In line with Gherardi (2000) and Carlile (2002), practice is defined as a system of observable activities that are related to a particular organisational function, and in which knowing and doing are inseparable. This study focuses on commercialisation practice comprising the following activities: scoping for commercialisable intellectual property (IP) coming out of academic research, assessment of intellectual property in terms of patentability and commercial viability, marketing of the university’s intellectual property, negotiation of license contracts, postlicense administration, and formation of spin-out companies. Transformations of practice may involve change in practice, expansion of practice and/or contraction of practice. Change in practice entails a change in the way some activities are performed. The expansion of practice entails undertaking new activities, whereas contraction of practice entails discontinuity of some activities. All interviews were transcribed. Data analysis was supported by the NVivo software. I first analysed whether commercialisation staff learned through participation in communities of practice. Transformations in commercialisation practice were then identified and how each change came about was explored.

Results This section presents the findings from four case studies. There were many examples of transformation in commercialisation practices in cases A and B and only a few in cases C and D. In cases A and B, learning in communities of practice drives emergent changes but also enables the introduction of planned strategic changes in practices. In cases C and D, learning in communities of practice was predominantly related to emergent changes. However, it is not the purpose of this study to compare the intensity of transformations in practice or to compare emergent and planned changes. Instead I focus on identifying mechanisms through which organisational strategists instigate learning in communities of practice and changes in practice.

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Case A KTO A is an internal unit within the university structure that was established in the late 1990s. The university is located in the south-east of England and belongs to the 1994 Group of research intensive universities. Commercialisation practice. The commercialisation of academic research is currently carried out by three staff members (2 FTE) – IP manager, junior IP manager and licensing manager – who are part of the Academic Legal Services. They have not been proactively seeking invention disclosures since the number of staff in the KTO was reduced in 2009. The three staff members work together to assess the value of intellectual property resulting from academic research. The IP managers then focus on management of intellectual property rights and preparation of legal contracts such as non-disclosure agreements, licence agreements or equity agreements. The licensing manager is responsible for identifying funds for developing inventions, identifying licensees and negotiations with potential licenses. Their marketing activities are limited to preparation of non-confidential materials for potential licensees. They also rarely engage in company formation activities as this commercialisation route is often not the most suitable for the kind of inventions coming out of the university.

Figure 2. Community of practice in KTO A

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Situated learning. The commercialisation staff learns through interactions within the community of practice. The analysis of work activities and knowledge sharing patterns among commercialisation staff indicated that the three members and the head of legal services form a community of practice. As a group they display the four main characteristics of a community of practice identified by Wenger (1998): mutual engagement in practice, negotiation of joint work activities, shared repertoire of practice and shared history of learning. Figure 2 illustrates this community of practice. Impact of strategising on learning trajectories and commercialisation practice. The KTO director and the senior university managers engaged in formulating a “new vision” which aimed to set new directions for the KTO. The “new vision” was underpinned by the assumption that “universities are about creating knowledge and companies are about exploiting knowledge” (KTO director) and therefore collaboration between academics and industry is the most appropriate approach to exploit/commercialise academic research. The KTO director engaged with the commercialisation staff, that is with the members of the community of practice. He argued that licensing is not about IP sales, but about building long-term collaborative partnership. In this way he aimed to alter the prevailing understanding of licensing in this community. The interactions of the KTO director triggered learning in the community of practice. The members of the communities discussed what the “new vision” meant for their work activities (negotiation of joint enterprise) and developed new understanding of competent licensing. They have subsequently changed their marketing and licensing routines (change in repertoire of practice). They stopped relying on recommendations from academics about suitable licensees and started to be more proactive in market research. They started identifying and approaching a number of potential licensees, rather than just one, in order to find “a partner, not a buyer” (licensing manager). Their approach to license negotiations has also changed. Their focus now is less on maximising financial gains from licensing for the university and more on building a partnership with a licensee. In summary, the KTO manager’s direction-setting practice shaped the evolving understanding of practice and evolution of the repertoire of practice and instigated changes in the existing marketing and licensing routines. It is worth pointing out that the KTO director had extensive experience in commercialising research and thus could understand the dominant competence regime of the community and undermine some elements of its repertoire. He was also able to translate the goals of senior university managers (e.g., reduce

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costs of commercialisation) into goals that are closer to commercialisation practice (e.g., use licenses to build partnerships with commercial partners).

Case B The KTO is a wholly-owned subsidiary company of research intensive university. The university is a member of the Russell Group and is located in Scotland. The university has had a unit dedicated to research commercialisation for more than 40 years. Commercialisation practice. Commercialisation of academic research is undertaken by more than 20 individuals working in four different teams. The business development team (10 FTEs) is responsible for proactive scoping for commercialisable IP. They liaise with different schools and have close relationships with the academics. They also file IPR applications (with the help of external patent agents) and identify funds for further development of inventions. They conduct the due diligence and compile the justification for filing a patent. The decision on IPR filing is taken by a committee, comprising senior KTO and university managers and external experts. Licensees may be identified either by business development staff or by licensing staff (three FTEs). Proactive and targeted marketing is undertaken by business development and licensing managers whereas other marketing activities, such as online marketing or editing of marketing materials, are done by a marketing manager. License terms are negotiated by the licensing staff. The support for spin-out formation is provided by staff in the company formation and incubation team (four FTEs). The legal team (six FTEs) supports business development staff (e.g., support with preparation of non-disclosure agreements) and licensing staff (e.g., support with preparation of licensing agreements or shareholder agreements). Situated learning. The analysis of work activities and knowledge sharing patterns among commercialisation staff revealed two overlapping communities of practice. Some business development managers, the marketing manager, licensing managers, and the senior commercialisation manager form a community of practice. This COP emerged around IP assessment and IP development practices (IPAD COP). Licensing managers and the senior commercialisation manager participate in two communities – one around IP assessment and development practices and one around licensing practice (LIC COP) of which some legal staff are also members. This means that the licensing managers learn not only from business development managers, the marketing manager and the senior

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commercialisation manager, but also from their legal colleagues. The available data does not allow us to conclude whether there is third community around company formation practice, but clearly the company formation managers were not part of the other two communities. Figure 3 illustrates these communities of practice. Figure 3. Communities of practice in KTO B

Impact of strategising on learning trajectories and commercialisation practice. The strategic goal of KTO B was to generate more income from industry and other sources. The KTO director and the team leaders were trying to increase “strategic engagement with industry” and “to push more outward-facing, proactive marketing and business development activity”. Here strategising was carried out mainly by the KTO director and team leaders within the KTO. We identified one example of how strategy influenced situated learning, which subsequently led to changes in commercialisation practice. The team leaders were engaged both in strategising and in everyday commercialisation practice and thus could act as translators. For example, the strategic direction set up by the KTO senior management was translated by the senior commercialisation manager who argued that in order to achieve the strategic goal, marketing activities needed to focus more on demonstrating the commercial value of IP. This stimulated learning within the IPAD community of practice. The COP members

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discussed how marketing should be approached. There were two conflicting views. The business development managers argued that marketing material can be scientific and technical because if the reader cannot understand technical language then s/he could not be considered as a potential customer. The senior commercialisation manager and marketing manager took the opposite view, arguing that marketing materials must demonstrate value in a way that is understandable to everyone, since presumptions cannot be made about who the customer may be. Through such negotiations over how to carry out marketing they developed new understanding of what information should be included in marketing leaflets and how it should be presented. Since then marketing leaflets – an element of the repertoire of practice – have become value statements, and technical information is provided in follow-up packs, when appropriate. Activities involved in preparing marketing leaflets have been changed. This is an example of how strategising shapes situated learning and transformation in practice. In this case team leaders were engaged in strategising and at the same time were members of the community of practice; they translated strategic goals into practice and initiated learning processes within the community that eventually transformed the practice. This is another example of how direction-setting activities shaped evolving understanding of practice and evolving the repertoire of practice, which underpin transformations of practice.

Case C This case concerns a KTO in a teaching-orientated university, which is an internal unit within the university structure. A unit responsible for exploiting the university’s research outputs was formed in the late 1990s. Commercialisation practice. Commercialisation activities are carried out by the business development manager, the senior administrator and two law academics who have been temporarily seconded to the KTO to support development of the legal framework for commercialisation activities. The business development manager proactively scopes for commercialisable research outcomes, assesses IP with the help of the KTO director and liaises with external patent agents to secure protection of the intellectual property. The business development manager, the senior administrator and the law secondees work together on formation of spinouts and start-up companies. They devised a process of “mock board meetings” which allows the academics to develop their business plan. To date, licensing and IP marketing practices have not been developed in this KTO.

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Figure 4. Community of practice in KTO C

Situated learning. Two internal commercialisation staff – the business development manager and the senior administrator – learn from one another and learn together how to improve their activities and develop new activities. Since the two law secondees joined the KTO, a community has started to emerge around commercialisation practice. The joint engagement in company formation is the main source of coherence for the emerging community. The analysis of work activities and knowledge sharing patterns among commercialisation staff revealed an established community around business engagement practice, the dominant activity of the KTO to date. Figure 4 illustrates the emerging and the established communities of practice. Impact of strategising on learning trajectories and commercialisation practice. Since 2006, the KTO director has developed a calculated approach to commercialisation activities as part of the HEIF1 4 strategy. The KTO director set out to develop internal capability to commercialise academic research, as until then commercialisation had been handled through the Marcia Spinner programme funded by the regional development agency. Since 2007, the KTO director has hired the business 1

Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) is allocated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. All universities submit their HEIF strategies before allocations are made.

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development manager and the senior administrator, who devote part of their time to commercialisation activities. The KTO director also arranged purchase of tools such as My IP and PRINCE, which evolved the way in which commercialisation staff keep records of commercialisation projects. This strategic allocation of resources enabled internal commercialisation practice to develop. The KTO director also wanted to create a legal framework for commercialisation activities. The low volume of commercialisation projects did not justify creating a new post for a legal expert and thus the KTO director arranged secondments of two law academics. They became a major source of learning for the business development manager and others. The law secondees and the business development manager have been working together on developing IP policy for the university. They engage in numerous discussions on the content of the IP policy document in order to ensure that the policy is suitable for that particular university. They have also jointly developed a suite of templates, such as a nondisclosure agreement, a license agreement or a shareholding agreement, which will become part of the repertoire of commercialisation practice. This example shows another way in which managers can shape learning trajectories and the evolution of practice. In this case the KTO director acted as a broker and connected internal staff with external expertise. In other words, the KTO director shaped the evolution of mutual engagement of the commercialisation staff to ensure that commercialisation practice evolves in the desired direction.

Case D This case study concerns a KTO in a research-oriented university that is a member of the Russell Group and is located in the West Midlands. The first unit dedicated to liaising with industry was set up in 1985. The KTO currently has a hybrid model, in which an internal department and a wholly-owned subsidiary company coexist. Commercialisation. The KTO has a staff of about seven people who regularly engage in commercialisation of academic research. IP is identified by Knowledge Transfer Managers who are in fact based in academic schools and are not part of the KTO. Two IP managers receive disclosures of inventions and, together with the licensing manager, are responsible for their assessment. The IP managers also manage IPR applications and renewals. The IP managers, together with the licensing manager, assess the commercial viability of inventions. Proactive and

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targeted marketing is performed by the licensing manager whereas other marketing activities, such as online marketing or preparation of marketing materials, are undertaken by two marketing managers. The support for company formation and management of the spin-out portfolio is carried out by the recently hired spin-out manager. The licensing manager is responsible for negotiating license deals, whereas IP managers prepare the legal contracts. The post license administration of royalties is carried out by the license administrator. Situated learning. The analysis of work activities and knowledge sharing patterns among commercialisation staff at the beginning of 2011 indicated that two IP managers, the licensing manager, and the licensing administrator form a community of practice. The recently hired spin-out manager is becoming a full member of this community. There is also another community around business development practice. Interestingly, the marketing managers are not part of the COPs. Instead they learn from colleagues in the university’s communication department. Figure 5 illustrates the communities in the KTO. Figure 5. Communities of practice in KTO D

Impact of strategising on learning trajectories and commercialisation practice. One of the goals of the KTO senior management team was to improve the performance of the spin-out portfolio. A new post was created for the spin-out manager in May 2010. The new spin-out manager brought in expertise in creating and managing high quality spin-outs which he

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developed while working in some of the best performing KTOs in the UK. The new spin-out manager engaged with the licensing manager and the IP manager who were previously responsible for company formation. They worked together on a few spin-out projects that had started before his arrival. The new spin-out manager learned from the IP managers and the licensing manager about commercialisation practice in this KTO. At the same time the KTO director charged the spin-out manager with improving spin-out formation practice. This explicit change agenda legitimised the new employee to introduce changes. The discussions about company formation practice took place as the new spin-out manager started developing a new procedure for spin-out formation (a new element of the repertoire). He has also changed the approach to recruiting the commercial management team for spin-outs and has been working on developing a fund for technology maturation and company formation. The new procedure is now part of the repertoire of practice, and the new fund will also become part of it. The arrival of the spin-out manager therefore triggered the process of situated learning in the community of practice and transformation of company formation practice. The new spin-out manager has also brought in experience which could potentially transform the way IP is assessed in this community. However, he was not invited to join IP assessment activities and to date, his experience has not transformed IP assessment practices. This example shows another way in which managers can shape the learning trajectory and transformation of practice. In this case the KTO management allocated resources to bring a new person into the KTO, thereby shaping mutual engagement within the community around commercialisation practice. The job design of incumbent staff changed as they were relieved of company formation duties and the new employee was legitimised by the management to introduce changes in company formation practice.

Discussion and conclusions The findings indicate that the development of practice in organisational communities of practice can be influenced by managers and aligned with organisational strategy. This indicates that situated learning in communities of practice not only drives emergent changes (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Wenger, 1998), but also enables deliberate changes to be enacted, planned by organisational strategists. The study finds that organisational strategists can shape situated learning in a community of practice by influencing any of the three processes comprising situated learning. The examples presented by Wenger (1998)

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suggested that changing mutual engagement is followed by evolving understanding of enterprise and change in the repertoire. The findings, however, show that any one of the processes can initiate situated learning and transformation of a community’s practice. Table 1 presents three strategic practices and shows which process of situated learning was shaped by each strategic practice. The managers in the KTOs studied tended to influence only one of the three processes comprising situated learning in order to induce desired changes in practice. This may have been sufficient, as there was no resistance from the members of the communities of practice to the changes suggested by the management. However, in cases where communities oppose change, management may need to influence all three processes in order to align the learning trajectories with their strategic objectives. Table 1. Strategic practices shaping learning trajectories Situated learning in communities of practice Strategic practices

Resource allocation – hiring

Evolving mutual engagement

Evolving understanding of joint enterprise

俵

Resources allocation – buying new tools

俵

Direction setting Brokering

Evolving repertoire of practice

俵 俵

The study has identified three strategic practices through which organisational managers shaped the learning trajectories in communities of practice and the subsequent transformations of practices. Table 2 juxtaposes strategic practices and transformations in a community’s practice in order to show that strategic practices have different

The Effect of Management’s Strategic Practices

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transformative power. It was found that managers’ resource allocation practices can lead to expansion of a community’s activities. As shown in case study D, resource allocation practice, specifically hiring new staff, can also lead to changes in communities’ existing activities, but only when new staff members are legitimised to introduce changes and job designs of incumbent community members are appropriately adjusted. Furthermore, expansion of a community’s activities can be stimulated by brokering practice. However, it is conceivable that brokering practice could also lead to changes in existing activities. Transformation of practice involving change in activities seems to be best achieved when direction-setting practices are used to shape learning trajectories in communities of practice. These results seem to suggest that different strategic practices may be appropriate at different stages of a community’s development. Direction-setting practices seem to be appropriate when managers want to transform practice in mature communities with well-established ways of doing things. On the other hand, resource allocation and brokering practices can stimulate expansion of activities, which could be taking place both in emerging and mature communities of practice. Table 2. Managerial strategic practices shaping transformations in a community’s practice Transformations in commercialisation practice Strategic practices

Change in activities

Expansion of activities

Resource allocation – hiring

‫ݱ‬

‫ݱ‬

Resources allocation – buying new tools Direction setting Brokering

‫ݱ‬ ‫ݱ‬ ‫ݱ‬

The case studies presented in this paper echo the findings of James (2007) and Macpherson and Clark (2009) who found that organisational managers can shape learning trajectories in communities of practice. My findings extend these previous studies in two ways. Firstly, I explain how different strategic practices affect the processes comprising situated learning. This broadens our understanding of how managers can shape learning

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trajectories. Secondly, I show that through their shaping of learning trajectories, managers instigate transformations in a community’s practices, which are aligned with the organisational strategic goals. This suggests that learning in communities of practice is important for enactment of top-down planned changes in organisations. The study suggests that practice-based theorising enables reconciliation of two dominating views of organisational change; namely, bottom-up emergent change and top-down planned change. In summary, the study extends our understanding of how organisational context shapes situated learning, which was highlighted as insufficiently addressed in the literature (Roberts, 2006). It also contributes to the discussion on how and why communities of practice transform their practices (Fox, 2000). The case studies have shown that direction setting, brokering and resource allocation practices can shape learning trajectories. This, however, does not mean that the list of strategic practices is comprehensive. For example, controlling practices and communicating practices (Whittington et al., 2006) or monitoring practices (Jarzabkowski, 2003) also have the potential to shape learning trajectories. Future studies will hopefully shed light on this issue. In conclusion, the study has shown that management’s strategic practices, or organising, can shape the learning trajectories of organisational communities of practice in order to stimulate transformations in the practices that are in line with its strategic goals. Thus, situated learning not only drives emergent changes but also enables deliberate change to be enacted, planned by organisational strategists. Last, but not least, the study has illustrated that broadening epistemological assumptions of social learning theory is a fruitful avenue for exploring changes in organisational practices.

References Bechky BA. (2003) Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production Floor. Organization Science 14: 312-330. Billett S. (1996) Situated learning: bridging sociocultural and cognitive theorising. Learning and Instruction 6: 263-280. Brown JS and Duguid P. (1991) Organizational learning and Communities of Practice: Towards Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation. Organization Science 2: 40-57.

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Brown JS and Duguid P. (1998) Organizing Knowledge. California Management Review 40: 90-111. Brown JS and Duguid P. (2001) Knowledge and organization: A socialpractice perspective. Organization Science 12: 198-213. Carlile PR. (2002) A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science 13: 442-455. Clegg SR, Kornberger M and Rhodes C. (2005) Learning/Becoming/ Organizing. Organization 12: 147-167. Delemarle A and Laredo P. (2008) Breakthrough Innovation and the Shaping of New Markets: The Role of Communities of Practice. In: Amin A and Roberts J (eds) Community, Economic Creativity, and Organisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duguid P. (2008) Community of Practice then and now. In: Amin A and Roberts J (eds) Community, Economic Creativity, and Organisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elkjaer B. (2003) Social Learning Theory: Learning as Partccipation in Social Processes. In: Easterby-Smith M and Lyles MA (eds) The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management. Oxford UK; Malden USA, Carlton Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 38-53. —. (2009) Pragmatism - A learning theory for the future. In: Illeris K (ed) Contemporary theories of learning: learning theorists ... in their own words. New York USA: Routeledge, 74-89. Feldman MS. (2000) Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change. Organization Science 11: 611-629. Fenwick T. (2008) Understanding Relations of Individual-Collective Learning in Work: A Review of Research. Management Learning 39: 227-243. Fox S. (2000) Communities Of Practice, Foucault And Actor-Network Theory Journal of Management Studies 37: 853-867. Gherardi S. (1999) Learning as Problem-driven or Learning in the Face of Mystery? Organization Studies (Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG.) 20: 101-123. —. (2000) Practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organizations. Organization 7: 211-223. Gherardi S and Nicolini D. (2000) The Organizational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice. Journal of Management Inquiry 9: 7-18. Handley K, Sturdy A, Fincham R, et al. (2006) Within and Beyond Communities of Practice: Making Sense of Learning Through

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Participation, Identity and Practice. Journal of Management Studies 43: 641-653. James N. (2007) The learning trajectories of ‘old-timers’ Academic identities and communities of practice in higher education. In: Hughes J, Jewson N and Unwin L (eds) Communities of Practice Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge. Jarzabkowski P. (2003) Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change. Journal of Management Studies 40: 23-55. Johnson G, Melin L and Whittington R. (2003) Micro Strategy and Strategizing: Towards an Activity-Based View. Journal of Management Studies 40: 3-22. Justensen S. (2004) Innoversity in Communities of Practice. In: Hildreth P and Kimble C (eds) Knowledge Networks: Innovation Through Communities of Practice. London: Idea Group Publishing Lave J and Wenger E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University Press. Lundkvist A. (2004) User networks as sources of innovation. In: Hildreth P and Kimble C (eds) Knowledge networks: Innovation through communities of practice. York, UK: Idea Group Publishing., 106–124. Macpherson A and Clark B. (2009) Islands of Practice: Conflict and a Lack of 'Community' in Situated Learning. Management Learning 40: 551-568. Manville B. (2004) Building customer communities of practice for business value: Success factors profiled from SABA software and other case studies. In: Hildreth P and Kimble C (eds) Knowledge networks: Innovation through communities of practice. York, UK: Idea Group Publishing., 106–124. Marshall N. (2008) Cognitive and Practice-based Theories of Organizational Knowledge and Learning: Incompatible or Complementary? Management Learning 39: 413-435. Mittendorff K, Geijsel F, Hoeve A, et al. (2006) Communities of practice as stimulating forces for collective learning. Journal of Workplace Learning 18: 298-312. Nicolini D, Gherardi S and Yanow D. (2003) Introduction: Towards a Practice-Based View of Knowing and Learning in Organization. In: Nicolini D, Gherardi S and Yanow D (eds) Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based View. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe., 3–29. Orlikowski WJ. (1996) Improvising Organizational Transformation Over Time: A Situated Change Perspective. Information Systems Research 7: 63-92.

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Orlikowski WJ. (2002) Knowing in Practice: Enacting a Collective Capability in Distributed Organizing. Organization Science 13: 249273. Pye A and Pettigrew A. (2006) Strategizing and Organizing: Change as a Political Learning Process, Enabled by Leadership. Long Range Planning 39: 583-590. Roberts J. (2006) Limits to Communities of Practice. Journal of Management Studies 43: 623-639. Scarbrough H and Swan J. (2008) Project Work as a Locus of Learning: The Journey Through Practice. In: Amin A and Roberts J (eds) Community, Economic Creativity and Organization. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas H and Chia R. (2002) On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science 13: 567-582. Wenger E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity Cambridge University Press. —. (2000) Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization 7: 225-246. Wenger EC and Snyder WM. (2000) Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier. Harvard Business Review 78: 139-145. Wesley PW and Buysse V. (2001) Communities of Practice: Expanding Professional Roles to Promote Reflection and Shared Inquiry. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education 21: 114-123. Whittington R, Molloy E, Mayer M, et al. (2006) Practices of Strategising/Organising: Broadening Strategy Work and Skills. Long Range Planning 39: 615-629. Yanow D. (2000) Seeing organizational learning: A 'cultural' view. Organization 7: 247-268.

CHAPTER THREE ORGANIC STRUCTURE AND ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING CAPABILITY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY INTO ORGANISATIONS EXCELLING IN HUMAN RESOURSE MANAGEMENT* FRANCISCO FERMÍN MALLÉN-BROCH** DEPT. OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND MARKETING, UNIVERSITAT JAUME I

RICARDO CHIVA DEPT. OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND MARKETING, UNIVERSITAT JAUME I

JOAQUÍN ALEGRE DEPT. OF MANAGEMENT “JUAN JOSÉ RENAU PIQUERAS”, UNIVERITAT DE VALENCIA

AND JACOB GUINOT-REINDERS DEPT. OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND MARKETING, UNIVERSITAT JAUME I

*

Acknowledgments: The authors thank the University Jaume I (Ref. P11B200813) and the Spanish Innovation Ministry (Ref. ECO2011-26780) for their financial support for this research. Jacob Guinot acknowledges the Universitat Jaume I for a predoctoral fellowship. ** Corresponding author. Fermín Mallén, Universitat Jaume I, Dpto. de Administración de Empresas and Marketing, Avda. Vicent Sos Baynat, s/n, 12006 Castellón (España). e-mail: [email protected], Tel: ++34 964 728534, ++34 964 728586, Fax: ++34 963 728629

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Abstract Organisational learning capability is a key element in organisational performance. This issue spurs interest to discover how to generate environments with high organisational learning capability. In this paper we analyse the relationship between organisational learning capability and organisational structure. A total of 251 firms with demonstrated excellence in human resource management took part in the study. Results suggest that the degree of organicity of the structure promotes organisational learning capability. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this relationship and suggest various lines for future research. Keywords: organisational learning capability, organic organisational structure.

Introduction Learning capability is understood to be a key factor for organisational performance and for the potential to innovate and grow (Jerez-Gómez et al., 2005). This capability has been positively associated with several variables such as job satisfaction (Chiva and Alegre, 2008) or innovation (Alegre and Chiva, 2008), among others. In most cases these are dependent variables, in other words, effects or consequences of organisational learning capability. However, one of the most pertinent issues for organisations is how to generate environments that have a high organisational learning capability. In their study relating organisational learning to organisational performance and innovation, Pérez López et al. (2005: 239) suggested that future research might usefully explore the influence on organisational learning of variables like organisational structure, leadership, human resource management or corporate strategy. The present paper focuses on organisational structure. Organisational learning capability (Dibella et al., 1996; Goh and Richards, 1997; Hult and Ferrell, 1997; Yeung et al., 1999; Jerez-Gómez et al., 2005; Chiva et al., 2007; Chiva and Alegre, 2009) is defined as the organisational and managerial characteristics or factors that facilitate the process of organisational learning, or that allow an organisation to learn (Dibella et al., 1996; Goh and Richards, 1997; Hult and Ferrell, 1997). Recently, Chiva et al. (2007) and Chiva and Alegre (2009) proposed a new, integrative conceptualization of organisational learning capability, together with a measurement scale, following a thorough analysis of all

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theoretical perspectives and literatures involved in the facilitating factors of organisational learning. They identified five facilitating factors of organisational learning, namely: experimentation, risk acceptance, interaction with the environment, dialogue, and participation in decision making. The organic organisational structure concept was first developed by Burns and Stalker (1961); in contrast to the mechanistic organisational structure, the organic organisational structure is decentralized, flexible, and participative, with few hierarchical levels. Some studies have linked organic organisations directly with innovation (e.g., Aiken and Hage, 1971; Hull and Hage, 1982); however, despite its probable link with organisational learning capability (Fiol and Lyles, 1985; Hurley and Hull, 1998), empirical research on this relationship is scant. In the present study we analyse the relationship between the degree of organicity of the structure and organisational learning capability. To our knowledge, and despite its theoretical importance, no previous empirical research has explored the relationship between these variables. To this end we carried out an empirical study of the Spanish firms that were most highly evaluated by their workers, or that had an excellent human resource management record. This study population, comprising 402 firms, was obtained by combining databases or lists of firms that regard people as a key element in the organisation and are considered by their workers as good firms to work for, or organisational environments in which human resources management is given high priority. Below, we present a brief review of the literature on organic organisational structure and organisational learning capability. This is followed by a theoretical review of the relationships between the constructs used in our research, and an explanation of the methodology. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results, together with their theoretical and practical implications, research limitations, and proposals for future research.

Literature review and hypothesis Organic organisational structure At the beginning of the sixties, Burns and Stalker (1961) published The Management of Innovation, in which they suggested that organisational systems could be classified into two types: the mechanistic structure and

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the organic structure. Although they did not favour one over the other as an ideal model, they noted that the organic model performs better in coping with changes and, therefore, is more closely linked to the generation of innovations. This work showed mechanistic organisations as having a high degree of specialization and division of labour, a large number of rules, a centralized decision-making process, and, amongst other issues, a more hierarchical and rigid command structure based on legitimate authority. In contrast, organic organisations are characterized by scant division of labour, low degree of formalization, few rules, significant lateral communication, and decentralized decision making. The scant division of labour is associated with the low number of hierarchical levels in the organisation, typical of organic organisations (Burns and Stalker, 1961; Walton, 1985). The number of hierarchical levels refers to the number of steps in the pyramid of authority, which determines the length of the chain of command (Cuervo, 2008: 176). According to DuBrin (2009), a flat organisational structure is one that has relatively few hierarchical levels, and as a result is less bureaucratic. A low number of hierarchical levels therefore gives organisations a flat structure. In addition, communication plays a central role in organic structures. Ramezan (2011) finds that in organic organisations interaction is promoted among employees, and face-to-face communication is encouraged between people from different hierarchical levels. Similarly, Nahm et al. (2003) report that communication – both horizontal and vertical – takes place quickly, simply and frequently in organic organisations. Covin and Slevin (1989) support this view by stating that open communication occurs in organic structures, which have channels of communication on financial and operational aspects that circulate fairly freely throughout the organisation. According to the literature, hierarchical levels act as a barrier to communication between levels (Damanpour, 1991; Hull and Hage, 1982) and, as mentioned above, organic structures have few hierarchical levels. A further characteristic of organic organisations is their high level of horizontal integration (Davenport and Nohria, 1994; Gerwin and Kolodny, 1992). This implies that jobs are not highly specialized, since workers are frequently trained in different tasks to give them a better understanding of the firm’s processes and enable them to respond to clients’ changing needs (MacDuffie, 1995; Vonderembse et al., 1997) and perform any of the tasks

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in the process in which they are involved (Ramezan, 2011). This integration can be achieved by removing barriers between departments (Ramezan, 2011), suggesting that organic organisations avoid rigid departmentalization. On the other hand, decentralization of power and control implies that managers motivate their workers to participate proactively in the management of the organisation, thus promoting a culture of openness and trust (Ramezan, 2011). Firms operating in uncertain environments should delegate decisions so that workers can adjust to changing situations and provide value for their consumers (Doll and Vonderembse, 1991). An organic structure should decentralize decision making as widely as possible (Daft, 1995; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Zammuto and O’Connor, 1992), from which we can deduce that worker autonomy is a major feature in organisations with organic structures. Similarly, Covin and Slevin (1989) find that organic structures typically allow experts to take decisions in specific situations, even if this means stepping over the formal line of authority.

Organisational learning capability The concept of organisational learning capability (Dibella et al., 1996; Goh and Richards, 1997; Hult and Ferrel, 1997; Jerez-Gómez et al., 2005) seems to stress the importance of the facilitating factors for organisational learning or the organisational propensity to learn. Goh and Richards (1997:577) define it as the organisational and managerial characteristics or factors that facilitate the organisational learning process or allow an organisation to learn. Recently, Chiva et al. (2007) and Chiva and Alegre (2009) proposed an integrative conceptualization of organisational learning capability. As a result, Chiva et al. (2007) identified five facilitating factors of organisational learning, namely: experimentation, risk acceptance, interaction with the environment, dialogue, and participation in decision making. Experimentation is defined as the degree to which new ideas and suggestions are attended to and dealt with sympathetically (Chiva et al., 2007). Nevis et al. (1995) consider that experimentation involves trying out new ideas, being curious about how things work, or carrying out changes in work processes.

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Risk taking is understood as the tolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty, and errors. Accepting or taking risks involves the possibility of mistakes and failures occurring. Interaction with the external environment is defined as the scopes of relationships with the external environment. The external environment of an organisation is defined as factors that are beyond the organisation’s direct control of influence, among others. Dialogue is defined as a sustained collective inquiry into the processes, assumptions and certainties that make up everyday experience (Isaacs, 1993:25). Participative decision making refers to the level of influence employees have in the decision-making process (Cotton et al., 1988).

Organic organisational structure and organisational learning capability Chen and Huang (2007) analyse the relationship between organisational structure and knowledge management, a concept that is closely linked to organisational learning (Chiva and Alegre, 2005). The results of their study suggest that a less formal and more decentralized organisational structure (organic structure) positively affects knowledge management. Similarly, Zheng et al. (2010) show that decentralized organisational structures affect knowledge management positively. In addition, studies such as Ramezan (2011) associate intellectual capital, closely linked to knowledge and learning, with organic structure. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that in order to learn, experiment, dialogue, take risks, or participate, a certain way of working is required in which responsibility and power are shared; jobs and tasks are varied, flexible and not highly defined; and the organisational structure is egalitarian and flat with no strict hierarchy, in other words an organic structure. This leads us to our research hypothesis: Research hypothesis: The organic organisation is positively related to organisational learning capability.

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Research methodology Data collection In order to test the hypothesis, we designed a questionnaire addressed to the Spanish firms that enjoyed the most positive evaluations from their own workers. The sample frame, a total of 402 firms, is made up of databases or lists of firms that regard people as a key element in the organisation and are considered by their workers as good firms to work for, or organisational environments in which human resources management is given high priority: (1) Empresas Top para Trabajar (top firms to work for) and Top Employers ranked by the CRF Institute, (2) firms identified by the Great Place to Work Institute, (3) the mercoPersonas ranking, (4) the list of the best firms to work for, published by the magazine Actualidad Económica in August 2010, and (5) a list of cooperatives belonging to the CEPES (Confederación Empresarial Española de la Economía Social or Spanish Business Confederation for the Social Economy). The field work was carried out between October and December, 2010. A questionnaire was sent to managers, preferably responsible for human resources, with at least two years’ experience in the firm. Prior to the fieldwork, the questionnaire was subject to a pre-test to ensure all items were fully comprehensible. We sought the cooperation of academics with a research interest in human resources, and human resources managers from a range of firms and sectors in the provinces of Castellón and Valencia, to carry out this task. The questionnaire comprised 20 items, measured on a five-point Likert scale reflecting the degree of agreement or disagreement with the item. All the indicators used were expressed positively, such that higher scores represented a greater degree of agreement with each statement. The questionnaire was completed through telephone interviews; a total of 251 valid questionnaires were obtained, giving a sample that represented 62.44% of our sample frame. The response rate is highly satisfactory, since according to Camelo et al. (2004: 940) and Valle et al. (2000: 287), industry cooperation in Spanish university research is scant. Moreover, according to Malhotra (2007: 198), the expected response rate from telephone interviews lies between 40% and 60%. Similarly, the number of responses (251) can also be considered satisfactory, since it falls above the minimum threshold of 100 subjects to

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apply structural equations methodology and to test the psychometric properties of measurement scales (Spector, 1992; Williams et al., 2004).

Measurement Instruments Organic organisational structure Various authors have put forward the idea of a mechanistic-organic structure continuum, determined to a large extent by the type of work the organisation undertakes (Hull and Hage, 1982; Cuervo, 2008; Ramezan, 2011). Lam (2004: 7) takes this idea a one step further by stating that a combination of the two types of structure can be found in some organisations. On this question, there is consensus in the literature on the classification of a structure as organic or mechanistic according to its high or low levels of complexity, formalization, and centralization. Hence, an organic structure typically has low levels of formalization, complexity, and centralization; in contrast a mechanistic structure has high levels of formalization, complexity, and centralization, which result in the levels of efficiency this structure has traditionally been credited with (Jennings and Seaman, 1994). Various studies have used structural dimensions to analyse organisational structure (e.g., Miller and Dröge, 1986; Vickery et al., 1999), although few have devised scales to measure the degree level of organicity in organisations (Khandwalla, 1977; Covin and Slevin, 1989; Hull and Covin, 2010). While it is preferable to use existing scales, previously validated in the literature, we opted to develop a new scale with a limited number of items for a variety of reasons: First, as mentioned above, the literature offers few examples of scales that measure the level of organicity of the structure; most studies tend to evaluate dimensions of the structure. Likewise, the available studies, such as that of Covin and Slevin (1989) and, more recently, Hull and Covin (2010), use a methodology that is not easily applied through telephone interviews. These authors propose a unidimensional scale to measure the degree of organicity by means of pairs of statements that the interviewee places on a scale of 1 to 7, according to which statement from each pair he or she most agrees with.

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Second, according to Meijaard et al. (2005) telephone interviews must be short and easy to understand. Grande and Abascal (1994) recommend that telephone questionnaires should ideally be completed in less than ten minutes. The literature does provide examples of measurement scales for the various structural dimensions, but as Meijaard et al. (2005) point out, they contain an excessive number of items for a telephone interview. For example, Pugh et al. (1968) used 55 items to measure only formalization; Dewar et al. (1980) used 9 items to measure centralization; Morrison and Roth (1993) used 10 items to measure centralization, 8 to measure specialization and a further 6 to measure formalization. Bearing in mind that our questionnaire was administered over the telephone, such a high number of items could have reduced the response rate, since telephone interviews should be kept brief. Table 1: Measurement of the degree of organicity of the structure adopted in this study Item

Organic structure level

Literature

Our organisation has an egalitarian culture (nonhierarchical) Our organisation has a flat structure (few hierarchical levels)

High

Burns and Stalker (1961); Walton (1985)

High

Our organisation avoids rigid departmentalization Our employees are given autonomy

High

There is open communication throughout the organisation

High

Jobs are not highly specialized

High

Burns and Stalker (1961); Ramezan (2011); Walton (1985) Burns and Stalker (1961); Ramezan (2011) Burns and Stalker (1961); Daft (1995); Lawrence and Lorsch (1967); Zammuto and O’Connor (1992) Burns and Stalker (1961); Nahm et al. (2003); Covin and Slevin (1989) Burns and Stalker (1961); Davenport and Nohria (1994); Gerwin and Kolodny (1992)

Source: The authors.

High

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Therefore, following Meijaard et al.’s (2005) criterion, rather than taking a limited number of specific items from other studies, which would have made our study incomplete, we opted to review the literature and use a smaller number of items for the telephone interviews (table 1).

Organisational learning capability Table 2: Items comprising the organisation learning capability scale Dimension

Items

Experimentation

1. People here receive support and encouragement when presenting new ideas. 2. Initiative often receives a favourable response here, so people feel encouraged to generate new ideas. 3. People are encouraged to take risks in this organisation. 4. People here often venture into unknown territory. 5. It is part of the work of all staff to collect, bring back, and report information about what is going on outside the company. 6. There are systems and procedures for receiving, collating and sharing information from outside the company. 7. People are encouraged to interact with the environment: competitors, customers, technological institutes, universities, suppliers etc. 8. Employees are encouraged to communicate. 9. There is a free and open communication within my work group. 10. Managers facilitate communication. 11. Cross-functional teamwork is a common practice here. 12. Managers in this organisation frequently involve employees in important decisions. Policies are significantly influenced by the view of employees. 13. People feel involved in main company decisions.

Risk taking

Interaction with the external environment

Dialogue

Participative decision making

Source: Chiva et al. (2007:232).

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This scale was based on the work of Chiva et al. (2007) and Chiva and Alegre (2009), who measured organisational learning capability as a multidimensional construct that drew together proposals from the social perspective (e.g., Brown and Duguid, 1991; Weick and Westley, 1996), the individual perspective (e.g., Hedberg, 1981; Popper and Lipshitz, 2000) and the learning organisation (e.g., Ulrich et al., 1993; Pedler et al., 1991). The final scale consisted of five dimensions and 14 items (table 2).

Analysis The empirical validation of the model was performed using structural equations. Structural equation models have been used in numerous academic studies to support the theory (Hair et al., 1999). We used a statistical software package EQS 6.1. (Bentler, 1995), for our analyses, employing robust estimation methods to prevent errors due to non-normality of data distribution. All the chi-square values presented in the paper therefore correspond to the statistical goodness-of-fit tests devised by Satorra and Bentler (1994).

Results Psychometric properties of the measurement scales The psychometric properties of the measurement scales were evaluated by following accepted practices in the literature (Anderson and Gerbing, 1988), namely, by studying their dimensionality, reliability, and content, convergent and discriminant validity (Tippins and Sohi, 2003). We performed a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the unidimensionality of the organic structure scale (see results in table 3). The values obtained for the CFI and the BBNFI were above the recommended values of 0.90, indicating a good fit of the models and confirming the unidimensionality of the scale. In the case of the organisational learning capability construct, following Chiva and Alegre (2009) we checked the fit of the second-order factor model to support the proposed multidimensionality of this concept, with excellent results (tables 4 and 5): the Satorra-Bentler chi-square statistic had a value of 0.1184, and was therefore not significant at the 0.05 level, suggesting that the null hypothesis of the perfect fit of the model cannot be rejected. In addition, the value of the RMSEA was clearly below 0.05. The incremental fit measures used, the BBNFI and BBNNFI, were comfortably over the

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recommended limit of 0.90, while the CFI had a value of 0.987, very close to unity. Finally, the normalized chi-square value was slightly above 1, also demonstrating the excellent fit of the model. Table 3: Unidimensionality of the measurement scale of organic structure Construct Organic structure

Unidimensionality S-B Ȥ2 d.f Ȥ2/d.f. 34.5817 9 3.84

pvalue