Metodología

41| Page perspective re-draws attention to the differences between the cognitive discourses on learning and social discourses on learning (Gherardi, 2000). It is argued that learning takes place in the flow of experience in everyday practices, with or without our awareness of it (ibid). Gherardi (2000) further argues that participation in practice is not only a way to acquire knowledge in-action, but also a means of changing or perpetuating such knowledge to produce and reproduce society. This echoes Gherardi et al.’s view (1998) that every practice is dependent on the social processes through which it is sustained and perpetuated, and that learning takes place through the engagement in that practice.

Under the practice-based perspective, the notion of ‘practice’ is re- identified as ‘a system of activities in which knowing is not separate from doing’ (Gherardi, 2000). This conceptualisation emphasises three elements: practice as work–transformation of a given work process; practice as language (professional language and interaction within a given work process; practice as morality (politics and power of the different groups or social classes involved in a given work process) (ibid). Moreover, Gherardi (2000) stresses the view that practice has the capacity to articulate spatiality – the context that transforms identity, activity, and social relations (Brown and DuGuid 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991; Cook and Yanow 1993; Wenger 1998), as well as to connect knowing with doing. Gherardi (2001) further re-identifies ‘a practice’ as the boundary of a domain of knowing and doing, arguing

42| Page that learning is enacted within practice. In this respect, Gherardi’s notion of practice (2000) extends the understanding of the concept of ‘practice’ as well as its relationship to learning, following Lave and Wenger (1991), and Wenger (1998).

An important difference of the practice-based perspective from the community of practice–based perspective as reviewed in Section 2.4.2 rests on its tendency to avoid interpreting the notion of communities of practice with a sense of harmony. Rather, it supports Gherardi et al.’s (1998) proposition that communities of practice do not necessarily convey the sense of harmony or closeness which identify communities of practice themselves, but rather need to be perceived just as one form of organising (p. 278). While they stress the term ‘practice’ rather than the term ‘community’, Gherardi et al. (1998) use the notion of CoPs to refer to the intertwining relationship between knowledge, activity and social relations. Moreover, these authors introduce the concept of ‘situated curriculum’ to address the pattern of learning opportunities available to newcomers in their encounter with a specific community based on an ethnographic study in a construction site organisation. (Gherardi, Nicolini et al. 1998).

Gherardi and Nicolini (2000) contribute to the practice–based theorising on learning and knowing by studying how learning about safety emerges in three different communities of practice (engineers, site managers and prime contractors) internal to a medium-sized cooperative building firm.

43| Page The focus of their inquiry is on discourse on safety as a practice; in other words, as a way of ‘doing’. What they discover about the members of these different communities of practice, who meet for a period of time in order to analyse a problem or to prepare a project, is that they form a discursive community and activate a situated discursive practice - ‘a mode of ordering which produces a body of knowledge shared by the communities involved’ (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000:24). This enables them to compare different perspectives of their worlds. Through such discursive practice, these groups of people come to realise that they are, and will remain, isolated, different, non-communicating, and even conflictive. The main argument drawn from the above finding is that learning in a constellation of interconnected practices is brokering activity situated in a discursive practice which relates situated bodies of knowledge to the minimum extent necessary to ‘perform’ the community (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000).

On the one hand, the above three different approaches to OL studies (LPP-based theorising, CoPS-based theorising and practice-based theorising) have made a significant contribution to the OL literature from situated learning perspectives. This they have done by commonly drawing attention to the deeply imbedded connection between learning and social engagement. On the other hand, these approaches are also limited in their insights into the impact of the wider issues of organisations on learning patterns. They are also limited in their

44| Page depiction of the variety of such impacts between different organisation groups. This is because the above approaches tend to focus on a single occupational group sharing similar cultures and norms, examples of which are seen in Lave and Wenger (1991); Cook and Yanow (199l) and Gherardi et al, (1998), as highlighted by Hong and Fiona (2009). Meanwhile, some scholars remind us that neither learning nor organisational learning is necessarily a consistent and struggle-free process. This is particularly so when we take into account the issue of power (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Fox, 2000; Contu & Willmott, 2003; Raz & Fadlon, 2006). As other scholars have commented, the issue of power has not been sufficiently emphasised in the stream of OL literature mentioned above (Easterby-Smith, Snell et al. 1998; Blackler and McDonald 2000; Antonacopoulou 2006).

In the next section, the review of the literature focuses on bringing together the main concerns about the issue of power surrounding learning in the field of OL studies.