Collective Knowledge Creation Research Articles

Indigenous Peoples’ Phronetic Leadership: A Trailblazing Case Study of Bacut Man-Made Lake for Agri-Eco-Tourism, Apayao, Philippines

Indigenous Phronetic Leaders inspired and promoted immense developments in communities through collective organizational knowledge creation. The study aimed to identify the problem of farmers, determine how phronetic leadership was practiced by the key informant, and describe the present situation of Bacut, Santa Marcela, Apayao, Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), Philippines. Mr. Elorde P. Anniban, an indigenous phronetic leaders was the main participant and the protagonist. He is an indigenous respected elder or “pangat” who, despite being physically disabled, initiated reforms in Bacut. In-depth interviews and document reviews were applied in this management case study. Results revealed that the main problem of the farmers was low rice production because there was no water system to irrigate their farmlands. Without the knowledge of the key participant, he applied the socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) model and encouraged the mining of bright ideas of the people, engaged stakeholders and relentlessly sought government intervention to address the problem of farmers. Through the phronetic leadership of the key informant, the farmers, and the government leaders, an environment-friendly dam, fondly called the Bacut Lake was constructed irrigating farmlands and doubling and even tripling rice production addressing poverty in Santa Marcela, Apayao. In addition, indigenous peoples' phronetic leadership, the province of Apayao has now an astounding agri-eco-tourism site, a national park, rich in biodiversity, and several existing organizations are working together to boost the economy of the farmers and the province. On the other hand, Ifugao State University, a government higher education institution in the country, crystallized a phronetic leadership framework as an offshoot of the study.
 
 Received: 28 September 2023 / Accepted: 23 February 2024 / Published: 5 March 2024

Institutional context and agile team innovation: A sensemaking approach to collective knowledge creation

This study offers a phenomenological account of the institutional context's role in Agile teams' knowledge work. Drawing from 44 semi-structured interviews and naturalistic observations of Agile teams in the Telco sector, the study emphasizes sensemaking activities through which team members navigate daily situations, revealing internal mechanisms underlying knowledge management and sensemaking processes within Agile teams. The findings emphasize the value-driven character of knowledge creation and highlight distinctive modes of knowledge creation and utilization within teams. The study also uncovers the role of managers in leveraging high-level learning beyond project boundaries, illustrating the tension between teams' priorities and managers' suggested actions. Overall, we contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between Agile practices, team environment, and product innovation performance, offering valuable insights for organizations seeking to maximize innovation potential while implementing Agile methodologies.

South Asian Canadian Digital Archive:: Fostering Knowledge Diversity and Equity Through Multilingual Knowledge Infrastructures

Knowledge and its production is informed by the availability of and access to existing knowledge infrastructures. Historically, both the production of knowledge and knowledge infrastructures have been dominated and dictated by western1 schools of thoughts that elided, erased, neglected, and negated the existence of multiple epistemologies. This paper explores ways to understand the depth and breadth of global colonial legacies and epistemic coloniality—and locate the pathways out in the archives. Using South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (https://sacda.ca) as a case study, the paper questions ways to rethink, redefine, and refine the methodologies of traditional archives to enable spaces for open and inclusive scholarship. It further frames SACDA (1897 to present) as an open tool for building multilingual knowledge infrastructures and to bring the larger community into the process of collective knowledge mobilization, creation, and dissemination.

Who will work together? Factors influencing autonomic group formation in an open learning environment

ABSTRACT Different from the group formation approaches led by teachers, learners’ generative learning objectives and the independent choice of collaborative partners are important in the Internet learning environment. This study takes the cMOOC (connectivist massive open online course) 5.0 “Internet + education: dialogue between theory and practice” as a case course. Data on learners’ interactive behaviours, generative texts, and personal attributes were collected through the course platform and questionnaires. Social network analysis and natural language processing were adopted to build a variety of collaborator relationship networks, and the quadratic assignment procedure was used to reveal the impact of the social, topic and attribute relationships of learners before collaboration on the collaborative relationship. The results show that individuals with close social relations, similar topics, similar age and learning experiences before collaboration are more likely to establish collaborative relationships; among them, close social relations and close ages are the key driving factors affecting the choice of partners. In addition, topic similarity can further promote the establishment of collaborative relationships among individuals with close social relations. The findings will help community-based courses optimise partner recommendation strategies and promote collaborative problem-solving and collective knowledge creation.

The Universal Cognitive Grammar of Systems Mapping

It is well established that visualization is of paramount importance to individual and collective cognition, understanding, imagination, innovation, and knowledge creation. This paper explores the research, theory, and practice that helps us to define and explicate the processes of Systems Mapping. It provides three critical insights: (1) that "visualizing" is a proxy for numerous other functional operations such as: tactile or tangible manipulation and movement; object-orientation; social navigation; and, embodied learning; (2) that any definition of Systems Mapping that does not include an explication of the implicit cognitive structures is lacking; and, (3) that Systems Mapping, like Systems Thinking, must be derived from a universal cognitive grammar (UCG) that parallels physical structures in the universe. The paper concludes that a Rubric to Evaluate Systems Mapping Tools is needed to assess the necessary and sufficient features of any Systems mapping medium (i.e., internal thought, white or blackboarding, tactile manipulatives, software, group process, etc).

Enhancing Social Innovation through active methodologies in Higher Education

Social innovation is now part of the political agenda, funding programs, and economic development policies. The world is changing, and, among other factors, digital transformation is assuming a key driver in the paradigm shift. Challenges appear, and solutions are needed, especially in what concerns human wellbeing and innovative approaches. Higher education can have an important role in this ongoing process, as it can supply an open, transformative platform for collective knowledge creation through research, education, innovation, and culture. In fact, it can shape the future of a knowledge-driven society if it works closely with its stakeholders and tries to meet their needs. Implementing new educational methodologies where students can participate and have a more dynamic and active role can be an effective answer. Combing formal education with non-formal education seems to develop the needed 21st -century skills. This article aims to share some best practices already developed at the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, based in Portugal. It reflects students’ perceptions of their participation in nonformal projects during their formal education. Students seem to get more involved, more committed, and empowered, while they are learning by doing and contacting real cases in real conditions. The results seem to reinforce the notion that there is a strong relationship between learning, innovation, and social innovation. Students feel more holistically integrated into the world and with a lot of developed skills that will differentiate them in the future, in a more sustainable approach.

Building Trust Through Action Learning in An Uncertain Transorganizational Context

This research explored how action learning contributed to the development of trust in a temporary transorganizational system during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a world fragmented by digitalization, social upheaval, ethnocentric development policies, and global pandemics, trust among people, companies, and governments has eroded. The interdependencies within our society demand collaborative efforts that must not only address the challenges of fragmentation that makes task achievement difficult, but the uncertainty that comes with a lack of trust. This was the challenge for two universities on different continents and their stakeholders: to create a cross-cultural, temporary transorganizational (TS) system at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and deliver on the educational objectives of a master’s-level Organization Development (OD) practicum. The cyclical rhythms of action learning and trust building before and during the practicum contributed to its outcomes of collective knowledge creation and high performance in an uncertain time. Using theories of trust formation and action learning, the authors identified how action learning and trust cycles worked together in a TS system to foster collaboration.

Advancing Knowledge Creation in Collaborative R&D: Counterintuitive Dynamics of Individual Strategy

How can knowledge be efficiently exchanged in an inter-organizational R&D collaboration where people have to work towards shared goals and simultaneously safeguard individual interests? In this article we present the results of a longitudinal case study of an inter-organizational innovation team in which new knowledge was developed despite collaborative issues and individual strategic behaviors. Our analysis identified five interrelated practices at the individual level (interpreting, assessing, strategizing, expanding, and tolerating), that are enacted in the ‘trading zone’ (Galison, 1997) facilitating collaboration and knowledge exchange despite their different objectives, interests, and work practices. The study contributes to the trading zone and knowledge exchange literature by showing how highly strategic behavior of individuals can lead to collective knowledge creation. We thereby show how cognitive processes affect shared practices in the trading zone and how the trading zone practices affect the cognitive processes.

The Role of Interdisciplinarity in Bringing PBL to traditional Universities: Opportunities and Challenges on the Organizational, Team and Individual Level


 
 
 Problem-based learning (PBL) has emerged as a suitable approach to shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered educa-tion. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) experience obstacles stemming from lecturers’ and students’ reservations as well as organizational challenges. Following action research, the author reflects on her implementation of interdisciplinary PBL within one exemplar case study to explore opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinarity in the transition toward a PBL curriculum in a traditional HEI. At the organizational level, interdisciplinarity facilitates collective knowledge creation about PBL by providing interdisciplinary learning spaces and in-house training. At the team level, lecturers as well as students can collectively learn about PBL. At the individual level, interdisciplinary student-to-student and lecturer-to-lecturer learning can enhance personal knowledge about PBL. Monodisciplinary structures, discipline-based differences in teaching and knowledge traditions, as well as individual prejudices are sources of challenges associated with interdisciplinarity in organizational learning.
 
 

洞口治夫著『MBAのナレッジ・マネジメント―集合知創造の現場としての社会人大学院―』文眞堂、2018年2月

洞口治夫著『MBAのナレッジ・マネジメント―集合知創造の現場としての社会人大学院―』文眞堂、2018年2月

A Knowledge Appropriation Model to Connect Scaffolded Learning and Knowledge Maturation in Workplace Learning Settings

When organizations create new knowledge and work practices as a reaction to challenges they face, they often have difficulty to adopt these new practices “on the ground”. One of the reasons is that in these cases, individual informal learning and collective knowledge creation are often insufficiently connected. In this paper, we investigate knowledge practices that explain how new knowledge generated in the process of creating and adapting new practices is applied in work situations. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews in five networks of organizations focusing on knowledge sharing in the German construction industry. Through a qualitative content analysis, we first identified five patterns of situations where individual and collective knowledge interact to implement new work practices. We detail these patterns with four knowledge maturation practices that explain how individuals contribute to collective knowledge development, and three scaffolding practices that explain how individual learning processes are facilitated through help seeking and guiding. Four practices of knowledge appropriation explain how knowledge is adapted and validated in concrete work situations. We combine scaffolding, maturation and appropriation practices into a model of knowledge appropriation that extends workplace learning research by offering a distinctive perspective on the practices that shape the interaction between knowledge creation and individual learning.

Mirror Method as an Approach for Critical Evaluation in Social Work

In this article, the Mirror method is studied as an approach to critical evaluation. The method offers a research approach to social work practice that is in line with the ideology, mission, and purposes of critical evaluation. The strengths of the approach include a dialogical process, an empowering effect, an understanding towards a client's situation as a whole, collective knowledge creation, and integration into daily social work. The potential of the Mirror method to facilitate critical thinking, enable changes towards equality, challenge oppression, and empower marginalized and silenced groups should be explored in the evaluation process.

Project interface choice and knowledge creation: Evidence of international science cooperation in Taiwan

To heed the recent calls for more inquiries into the endogenous nature of governance decisions, this study aims to develop a comparative perspective on the performance implication of the project interface design in the context of international scientific cooperation. Using Heckman's two-stage model in a sample of 217 international scientific cooperation projects sponsored by the Taiwanese government, this study shows that project performance characterized by the collective knowledge creation is explained more by team competence and inter-team social capital than by the project interface choice per se. Furthermore, the knowledge co-creation performance is impaired in the presence of project interface misfit, either over- or under-guarding the knowledge exchange in science cooperation. The findings not only yield implications for managing international cooperation in scientific research but offer comparability and equivalency with the organization-level studies characterized by knowledge exchange/creation and governance difficulties.

Investigating the productive uses of uncertainty in knowledge co‐creation practices

ABSTRACTThis poster presents results from an ongoing exploratory research study, which uses a participant observation methodology to investigate the productive uses of uncertainty in fostering knowledge emergence. Recent research suggests that introducing uncertainty can be a productive resource to facilitate the emergence of knowledge in co‐creation practices. While recognizing productive traits to uncertainty is not new in information science, how uncertainty can be deliberately introduced, as a productive resource, remains generally unnoticed. This study extends previous research in this area by further detailing the use of uncertainty and by constituting a foray into investigating information practices in collective knowledge creation environments. Findings suggest that introducing uncertainty aims at inducing a state of unknowability to erode certainty, disrupt entrained thinking and processual constraints, and decompartmentalize disciplinary boundaries that inhibit knowledge emergence. The experiences of relational engagement, joint advantage and mutual transformation arose as conditions conducive to using uncertainty for knowledge emergence.

Characterizing Elementary-School Students’ Epistemology of Science: Science as Collective Theory-Building Process

Building on Carey and Smith’s work on epistemology of science, this study characterized elementary students’ scientific epistemology from the role-of-idea and theory-building perspective. The participants included 102 elementary students in Hong Kong. Open-ended questions and coding schemes were developed to examine and characterize their epistemic understanding of science. Four key dimensions were identified: role of idea, theory-fact understanding, theory revision and creation, and social process of scientific progress. The general pattern showed that students’ views of scientific inquiry ranged from seeing it as a mechanical process involving concrete materials and sets of scientific skills, to viewing it as an idea-driven process comprising collective theory-building and knowledge creation. The analysis showed that these students generally had a limited understanding of the role-of-idea and theory-building in science. Quantitative analysis indicated that this conceptualized epistemology of science was an important predictor of students’ academic performance in science. Implications for science education and future research are discussed.

The Role of a Learning Approach in Building an Interorganizational Network Aiming for Collaborative Innovation

Collaboration has become a common way for organizational actors to engage in problem solving and innovation. Yet shifting from strategic interactions (driven by reduction of transaction costs) to transformational interaction (driven by collaborative transorganizational development) appears to be difficult to achieve in practice in a network setting. This article argues that such a shift can be enhanced by adopting an action learning approach, which entails working on real-life problems without clear solutions and collectively working to resolve them. Based on an action learning research process, this article therefore explores ways to support collective knowledge creation within an interorganizational network setting. It provides rich illustrations of how the interactions in the network changed through the process, and the participants moved from a space of territorial protection to a space for collaborative exploration. From this case, the article outlines a model for learning in interorganizational networks and discusses related challenges.

Creating and implementing local health and wellbeing policy: networks, interactions and collective knowledge creation amongst public sector managers

Background In the UK managers from multiple organisations are commonly tasked with collectively devising and implementing local health and wellbeing policies as a way of addressing increasing demand for healthcare. This requires them to create knowledge together but relatively little is known about how this occurs. This paper reports the results of research into how managers collectively create knowledge in order to address local health and wellbeing challenges. Methods We undertook a case study in three sites in England. Using statistical network modelling we identified clusters of actors and interviewed managers from heterogeneous clusters about their collective activities. We used interview and documentary data to construct accounts of collective knowledge creation. Findings Managers simultaneously work across stable bureaucratic networks and temporary taskforces in order to create and implement local health and wellbeing policy. They collectively create knowledge by enacting networks of relationships which enable them to share and build on routines and discourses and to reach out for new evidence, perspectives and skills. When creating knowledge, managers’ ability to draw on and harmonise alternative programmes of action and their willingness to collectively negotiate is more important than their managerial status or position. Conclusions Managers should be encouraged to examine and discuss their alternative programmes of action and to see these as a catalyst for rather than barrier to collectively creating and implementing local health and wellbeing policies, and should be supported and valued for their ability to harmonise conflicting programmes of action.

Horizontal participatory action research: Refugee solidarity in the border zone

This paper outlines a refugee solidarity action in the territory of the border zone on the West Balkan route to Central Europe. Methodologically it develops a horizontal approach to participatory action research. In an attempt to engage in research and action created in a non‐hierarchical collaboration with non‐academic co‐researchers, horizontal participatory action research renounces forcing the research process into a lockstep curriculum. It replaces power relations between researchers and participants with collective and relational knowledge creation and includes multiple modalities of reflection. Taking action, researchers are empowered to project the possibility of achieving social transformation through their practice of solidarity with migratory movements across borders. These movements contain moments of autonomy in regards to any attempt to control and regulate them. Solidarity in the terms of the horizontal participatory action research is thus conceived as action and reflection that is affirmative of the autonomy of migration.

(The Problem of Differential Absorption Capacity in the Processes of Joint Knowledge Production in Alliances)

In interfirm strategic alliances that pursue their objectives in complex technological environment, the discrepancy in partners’ absorptive capacity (that is, their ability to discern, digest, recombine and practically apply novel knowledge, ideas and know-how coming from external sources) can seriously hamper the processes of mutual learning and collective knowledge creation. Therefore, partners should learn how to bridge these differences, simultaneously protecting intellectual property rights and valuable knowledge belonging to each participant in strategic collaborative projects.

Knowledge Creation Across Worldviews: How Metaphors Impact and Orient Group Creativity

Metaphors are central in organization theory for they help the creation of knowledge by altering concepts or generating new ones. Yet, despite their importance, little is known about how metaphors are used in processes of knowledge creation across worldviews. In such contexts, participants maintain their specialization, work separately, and resort to interpretable devices like metaphors to create together. With a longitudinal study of a multidisciplinary scientific project aimed at repairing broken spinal cord tissues, we show how metaphors facilitate collective knowledge creation. We contribute to the theory of knowledge creation across worldviews by showing the consequences of the diverse creative outcomes of metaphors on the orientation and stability of the collective work. Moreover, we propose how to control and predict the creative outcomes of metaphors by modifying the knowledge bases that are engaged in the creative process. We contribute to the theory on cycles of knowledge creation by showing that a metaphor can extend knowledge both horizontally and vertically, and by specifying the relationships between the knowledge created and the elements that simultaneously populate the creative cycles.