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- Volume 8, Issue, 2003
Concepts and Transformation - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2003
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2003
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The world social forum and the agenda of grassroots education
Author(s): Danilo B. Streckpp.: 117–132 (16)More LessIt is the dream that liberates. From everything: from the world, from others,from us. It is necessary to believe in the dream. And to save it always. In orderto save ourselves. In order to leave the radiant face of our joy in the lastwilderness, and in the last shadow, where other lives will come later and askthe things that we today are asking ourselves. (Cecília Meireles)...perhaps the correct idea is that the future is just an immense void, that thefuture is but the time with which the eternal present feeds itself. If the futureis void, thought Tertuliano Máximo Afonso, then there is nothing that hemay call Sunday, its fortuitous existence depends on my existence, and if I diedat this moment, a part of the future or of the possible futures would becancelled forever. (José Saramago)This article looks at the Third World Social Forum from the perspective of Grassroots Education. Initially it deals with the objectives and the dynamics of the Forum and then identifies themes for reformulating the agenda for Grassroots Education. The first point refers to the necessity and possibility for Grassroots Education to redefine itself as a global project. The second deals with the plurality of inputs and the subsequent epistemological and methodological challenges. Finally, I identify some emerging and recurrent themes based on the 1,286 workshops offered during the Forum.
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An alternative “worldization” in the face of an excluding and predatory globalization
Author(s): María Eugenia Sánchez, Manuel Rodríguez, Mónica Gendreau and Oscar Sotopp.: 133–142 (10)More LessThis paper is a critical account of the effects generated by the current process of globalization from a Latin American perspective. Two sociologists and two rural development experts discuss the fragmentation of production and the concentration of power produced by such process, the role that the National States are playing, the culture of abundance and misery globalization that globalization has originated. The authors propose some alternatives to the current process, summarized by the term “world-for-all” or “worldization”. They claim that the university has an important role to play in fostering those alternatives.
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Immanent learning
Author(s): Robin Holtpp.: 143–162 (20)More LessThe article critically investigates how conversations contribute to learning in organizations. Using the production technology lean thinking as a conceptual case study, the article investigates how, when learning is organized as a codification of aims and their cybernetic pursuit (such as achieving substantive goals; challenging these goals; or questioning the values lying behind these goals), there is a tendency to categorize activities whose meaning in use often remains opaque, tacit, and contested. The idea that meaning is found in use complicates organizational learning because, by implication, the conversion from tacit to explicit knowledge is far from complete and exploitable. The article discusses how knowledge emerges from the practiced and novel orientations of an agent enacting cognitive understandings in specific contexts. In doing so, it argues that from a learning perspective, organizational strategy should be as aware of how agents move within and between their understandings as it is of the desired outcomes of their actions. Using a Wittgensteinian analogy, this often unacknowledged aspect of learning concerns the recognition and use of sign-posts in language games, as distinct from any mimic-inducing instruction that one sign post (or set of sign-posts) should be followed in preference to any other. The concept ‘immanent learning’ is used to convey this grammatical aptitude as it is enacted in conversations. The implication is that where ‘theories’ of organizational learning look to reconcile the tension between the denotive power of organizational structures and the creative power of employees by instituting climates of ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ opinion, immanent learning dissolves this tension by articulating which are the requisite attitudes for the concept of learning to be meaningfully used.
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Knowledge management with a human face: The university as a community of practice
Author(s): Richard Ennalspp.: 163–178 (16)More LessRichard Ennals reflects on experience of action research in organisations, and presents an agenda for the years ahead in working life research. He draws on experience of research and research management in artificial intelligence, work organisation and occupational health, and an international network of current projects. He presents alternative business and organisational models, taking account of the failure of conventional approaches to the knowledge society, and identifying new paradigms for research and practice. He presents the university as a community of practice, a building block for the knowledge society.
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Sources of innovation and competitiveness: National programmes supporting the development of work organisation
Author(s): Peter Brödner and Erich Latniakpp.: 179–211 (33)More LessThere are (and have been) many efforts to support the development of new forms of work organisation in Europe, most of them being project-driven either as enterprises’ own initiatives or funded by public sources. Dissemination is making rather slow progress, though, despite proven economic benefits. Moreover, national programmes supporting work organisation activities are unevenly distributed among EU member states. While Finland, Denmark or Germany, for example, provide more than one national programme with efforts to promote work organisation in different areas, the majority of EU member states — namely Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain — seemingly have no national activities of this kind, although there might be some regional or project-based efforts with public funding like ADAPT or EQUAL. Comparing new national initiatives with earlier programme activities, it seems that efforts have been cut back. In the final section, a number of recommendations for further initiatives are derived that focus on implementation and dissemination issues.
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