Working outside the comfort of competence in a corrections centre: toward collective competence

Abstract

Contrary to popular myth, modern prison environments are often workplaces that embrace change and reform. When an innovative model for offender rehabilitation at a corrections centre requires staff to work differently as an inter-professional care team, new ways of learning to work in the overlaps emerge. Using a qualitative case study approach to investigate daily work and crucial incidents that act as change triggers, we discuss how this group experience has challenged individual and group work roles and changed organizational work practices. Our findings suggest a useful nexus of theories of workplace learning with theories of organizational change and development. The emergent quality of human interactions supports the concept of collective competence (Boreham 2004, 2007) rather than the comfort of individual competence. Enhanced understandings of collective learning as relationally-constructed and actively improvised with others argue for a new vocabulary of competence in which more interdisciplinary research can add further insights.