Life, work and sustainable learning practices: a study on a small business network.
| Autor | Ipiranga, Ana Silvia Rocha |
| Cargo | Report |
Introduction
Small businesses, given their magnitude nationally, play a relevant role in the construction of Brazil's development. However, there are too many difficulties faced by this organizational contingent to insist on acting alone. They face new contemporary grouping tendencies in a cooperative and competitive pari passu manner around common goals, with an objective towards their enterprises' sustainability.
Cooperation and competition are experienced through actors' participation. Negotiation of common objectives between small businesses stimulates learning as the motivating factor behind the alternating forces of cooperation and competition in the organizational context of work life. To the extent that these practices are socialized between small businesses' actors, making them common in some cases, one perceives the emergence of a sustainability that leads a collective enterprise to stand out in the market.
These discussions highlight the perspective of organizational learning (OL) as a social phenomenon, emphasizing action as situated in a historical and cultural context. This characterizes the learning approach based on practices that occur in the workplace (Elkjaer & Wahlgren, 2005; Schatzki, 2001). This perspective emphasizes that learning emerges from a context of interactions (knowing), through different forms of participation, in a way that this knowledge is being continuously negotiated and reproduced in everyday work life (Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003).
Reckwitz (2002) has investigated the idea of knowledge based on the notion of tension going beyond dichotomies, treating knowing/knowledge as an inseparable dynamic. From the perspective, knowing precedes knowledge in both the logical and chronological aspects, since knowledge is considered an institutionalized interpretation of knowing, and is in essence is a precondition for learning to occur (Gherardi, 2001, 2006).
Antonacopoulou, Jarvis, Andersen, Elkjaer and Hoyrup (2005) deepened these discussions by proposing the question of how we can improve organizational sustainability through learning that occurs in the workplace as concomitant learning forms of working and living. The authors take into account current thinking about learning that occurs continuously throughout life, directing the discussion of workplace learning as a key element of learning that happens during life's journey. This perspective illuminates a new learning nuance of working and living in the complexity of organizational context.
The theoretical links between dimensions of learning practice that are situated in the interconnections between knowing, life and work journeys show the relevance of this research. They indicate a gap in literature not widely explored until now in understanding the meaning of a network of entrepreneurs' actions in the furniture sector, while sustainable learning practices are negotiated, circulated and reproduced in the day-to-day work life.
In order to engender discussion on these analytical perspectives, this study has the objective to describe the learning practices that occur in day-to-day work life, reflecting on the implications of this social process on small-business network sustainability. This study is guided by the following questions: What are learning practices and how do they occur in everyday work life? What are the implications of this learning for sustainability of the small business network under study?
The field of study chosen was the Association of Small Cabinet Maker Businesses of Fortaleza (AMFOR) due to its local recognition in the development of sustainable practices. The research in question is exploratory and descriptive, using a qualitative case study approach (Bauer & Gaskell, 2002). Data collection was done using semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, formulated from theoretical-based critical reading as well as notes taken during the participation by the researcher in three meetings held at AMFOR. Based on the idea of an interview as a relational situation (Spink, 1999), this concept was applied to nine entrepreneurs that have participated in
AMFOR since its founding. AMFOR's institutional documents were also compiled and analyzed, and asymmetrical observations were carried out. This allowed triangulation of collection techniques for the enrichment of interpretation. For this analysis and consistent with the theoretical and epistemological bases chosen to guide this study, the application of discursive practice procedures (Spink, 1999) was selected.
Seeking to systematize the obtained results, this paper was divided into six sections, the first of which is this introduction. In the second and the third sections, the theoretical bases guiding this research are presented. The fourth, fifth and sixth sections, respectively, lay out the methodology used to achieve the proposed objective, analysis and discussions, and, finally, the final considerations with study implications.
Learning Based on Practices and Work Experience as Learning
Research on learning in organizations as a topic dates back to the 1950s and reached its height in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, starting from research developed by Lave and Wenger (1991), Brown and Duguid (1991), Cook and Yanow (1993), there has been an area within Organizational Learning, which discusses forms of conceiving knowledge while having the competence to act. Studies published up to now have distanced themselves from the cognitivist group of studies, based on approaching the concept of knowledge guided by an epistemology of practice.
Schatzki (2002) illuminates the discussion of a site ontology or ontology of the social practices in which the social site is composed of a mesh (network) not only nexus of practices, but also materials arregements. The author emphasizes that it is the social site, where people coexist, is not a particular practice and / or a specific arrangement, but the interwoven mesh of different practices and arrangements that are interconnected and are articulated through to different human activities. It is this network that is what the author considers the order that organizes social life - it is the locus where social entities act, relate, position themselves in relation to each other and gain meaning and identity (Schatzki, 2002).
In this context, several authors have developed studies based on the concept of practice to understand different elements of everyday organizations. Between these studies is related to the theme of learning that have been analyzed from the point of view of practice (Gherardi, 2000; Nicolini et al., 2003). These studies characterized learning as a social phenomenon that is procedural, historical, culturally situated and mediated by artifacts and different forms of interaction (Easterby-Smith, Crossan, & Nicolini, 2000; Nicolini et al., 2003; Nicolini & Meznar, 1995).
These studies put into discussion that organizations are areas of practice. For example, Gherardi, (2006); Reckwitz (2002); Schatzki (2001, 2006) and Warde (2005), showed evidence that a theoretical, cohesive uniform body that can be called theory of practice does not exist; however certain characteristics indicate theories referring to practice.
In social theory, the perspective of the practice advocated by the Schatzki (2006) proposes a social ontology that does not privilege individuals, interactions, language, institutions and or structures as basic social phenomena. The social order, or human coexistence is conceived as something that unfolds in and from the meshes practices and or arrangements.
Based on the epistemology of practice different dichotomies are rejected, for example: mind/body, subject/object, structure/agency, objectivism/subjectivism, scientific knowledge/common sense (Schatzki, 2001). In addition, according to Hardt (1996), own denial of different dichotomies paves the way for creation and for practice. Schatzki (2001) points out that, in contemplating practices, researchers focused on activities, which enables the language being envisioned as discursive activity and not as structure, system or speech, while science is seen as an activity and not as a representation. According to Whittington (2006), these approaches direct their focus on the activities that happen in organizations' everyday lives as well as on the different processes that involve the action and production of people within the organization.
Schatzki (2006) also stressed that an organization, like any social phenomenon, is characterized as a set of practices consisting of arrangements of people, materials and artifacts. Furthermore, an organization consists of successive events that occur in a space-time context, and is the culmination of its constituents' actions.
Hence, from Schatzki (2001) and Reckwitz (2002), it can be noted that the theories that focus on practices are those which observe practices as a generic primary social unit, or as characterized by the creation of localized social practices, which is the smallest unit of social analysis.
Consistent with these discussions, Antonacopoulou (2008) claims that the authors who structure their approaches based on practice have searched for a definition for this term. The debate that involves the organizational-based learning practice approach has essentially been propagated from research developed by Silvia Gherardi. She refers to different theoretical approaches that hold learning and organizing ideas separately from practice (Gherardi, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009).
For Gherardi (2006), the practice concept is represented by a web of connections in action; a connectivity linking these actions while they spread and multiply. The practices are recognized as a means for evaluation, and yet they are altered intensively from the scenario in which are represented, are still recognizable from the set of activities performed. In this sense, the practices, although reproducing and...
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