I'm a full time customer services manager for ACT, Inc. in Iowa, and a
part-time Ph.D. student in the Communication Studies program at the
University of Iowa. My academic focus on organizational communication
intersects my professional interest in workplace communication and
learning.
This dual membership -- as a workplace professional, and as an
academic -- led me to the Learning-Org website. At this point my
experience with the concept and theory is very limited. I've recently
read Karl Weick's "Organizational Learning: Affirming an oxymoron" in
Clegg, Hanty and Nord's _Handbook of Organization Studies_ by
Sage. I was intrigued by Weick's analysis of what he views as an
inherent tension in the concept of "organizational learning" (learning
and organizing are antithetical processes: organizing tends to
streamline information/knowledge; learning wants to expand
information/knowledge). Apologies to Dr Weick for any mistransmission
of his thinking in this gloss.
I'm presently engaged in a comparison of workplace and academic
perspectives toward training/teaching organizational communication and
want to know more -- which is what led me to this website, and to this
self-introduction. Right now, I'm about to start reading and learning.
I hope that my professional experience and communication theory
perspective will allow me to add something to future discussion.
My own research thus far has focused on the communication of
organizational identity in relation to membering and persuasion. I
have conducted ethnographic interviews studying the dilemmas of
blended relationships (coworker/friend) in the workplace, and two
ethnographic studies examining the communication of work group
and organizational membership. I also collaborated in s study about
loyalty published in _JSPR_. I bring a dialogic perspective to my
research, as described by the late Russian literary philosopher
Mikhail Bakhtin, so the format of this dialogue is especially
interesting to me.
My initial questions are as follows:
How does an organization perform/transform itself as a "learning"
organization?
How does organizational learning get communicated?
What enables and constrains it?
What does this group think of the idea that there is an inherent
tension within the concept of organizational learning that must be
negotiated in practice?