Abstract
Sustainability transition projects (STPs) employ specialist knowledge and learning to lever changes for the communities with which they engage. Research into these forms of organizations often focuses on engagement practices and their relative success or failure to facilitate local transitions toward sustainability. What has attracted comparatively less attention, however, is how STPs develop their own sense of expertise in this role as a broker of Mode-2 knowledge or their own understanding about what it is that they are doing in facilitating community-scale changes. Privileging an emphasis on language-in-use research in organizational theory, this study analyzed the transcriptions of facilitated action research (AR) meetings of a case study STP by applying text mining methods in conjunction with a thematic analysis, the latter exploring insights gained across themes of governance, delivery, networks, challenges, and learning. The findings from these analyses are discussed with reference to how the case study STP staff group construes their work in the domain of sustainability and the generation and acquisition of relevant knowledge and learning in this specialized subsector of community development.
Highlights
The role and importance played by language in organizational culture has long been recognized, since the early 2000s they have attracted increasing research and theoretical development within the domains of organizational and management studies, as well as in evaluation research (e.g., Andriessen and van den Boom 2007; Hopson 2000; Tietze et al 2003)
While term frequency (TF) counts the number of terms, yielding a matrix of terms and the frequency with which they appear in the text, regardless of whether they are in all or only some of the source documents, the term frequency-inverse document frequency (Tf-Idf) weighting removes those words that are frequently found across all documents
As the study is interested in how sustainability transition project (STP) staff learn about and understand what they do when they are organizing projects to support the local area to engage in transitions toward sustainability, the present study was concerned with the exploration of potential themes
Summary
The role and importance played by language in organizational culture has long been recognized, since the early 2000s they have attracted increasing research and theoretical development within the domains of organizational and management studies, as well as in evaluation research (e.g., Andriessen and van den Boom 2007; Hopson 2000; Tietze et al 2003) Many of these studies have attended to the constitutive effects of language (von Krogh and Roos 1995a), especially in the construction, articulation, and maintenance of organizational culture (Krippendorff 2008) or how language informs organizational decision making (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011), as well as the conversational aspects of knowledge production and sharing within organizations (Stacey 2001). As a means through which to obtain insights into how team members of an organization perceive, understand, and act upon their sense-making activities, which was the
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