Abstract
This case study about agency enhancement at work in a business organization is based on narrative inquiry. After a staff development project lasting 2½ years, the employees produced digital stories concerning their meaningful moments at work. Through social interactional narrative analysis, multimodal transcription, and text analysis, we examined how agency was enhanced according the narratives. Agency enhancement involved the incoherency between present cognitive models, attitudes, and practices of work compared with inner or outer expectations. Employees used lifelong experiences in their digital stories, which provided a rich source of data, including the visuals and transcripts, offering a unique vantage point for narrative analysis. These digital stories revealed the sociocultural, transformative, and situational modalities of agency enhancement as well as the relationship between epistemic selves and sociocultural bindings in the reforming of agency.
Highlights
Organizations are constantly seeking new tools to develop their employees’ expertise
The social sciences have a rich literature on theorizations of agency, but more empirical research, on professional agency, is needed while exercising of agency and the transformation of work practices have a crucial role in learning at work (Eteläpelto et al, 2014; Hökkä, 2012; Vähäsantanen, 2013)
This study identified three modalities in workers’ agency enhancement: agency under sociocultural structures, transformative agency connected to employees’ values, and situational agency enhancement in everyday work practices
Summary
Organizations are constantly seeking new tools to develop their employees’ expertise. Agency has been used as a tool to analyze change in professional and organizational practices and challenges (Eteläpelto et al, 2013; Goller & Paloniemi, 2017). In context of continuous change at work, individuals and organizations are constantly seeking directions for their agency. Agency is a driver and a prerequisite of work-related learning; it is an activity and an outcome of learning and is strongly related to individuals’ identities, goals, interests, and beliefs, which have developed through their personal life history (Billett, 2008; Goller, 2017). In the working life context, individual agency can be limited when professional agency appears in a multidisciplinary, networking, and team-based setting. We analyze the employees’ sense of agency, as well as agency enhancement, in their digital stories
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