Research
Management and practice based learning
Most of my research and writing to date has been in the field of management learning, particularly exploring practice based, or processual approaches to learning and practice innovation. I have developed and researched two radical concepts within the field of management education: Provocative Theory and a Scholarship of Practice. In current work, I am challenging some commonly held assumptions about reflective learning by centring the activity of judgment and quality of practical wisdom.
Talk and conversation as organizing
Working from a relational, social constructionist perspective, my research centres on processual, or performative approaches to organizing. In a recent book chapter, I coined the term "conversational travel" so as to draw researchers' and managers' attention to the way in which we create organization in moment by moment ways of relating (such as conversation). So far I have used this to explore relational leadership, and current projects are addressing methods by which we can examine conversations 'as phenomena' and the conversational practices that help some organizational participants to 'lead' at certain moments
PhD supervision has included:
- a narrative study of career planning in South Africa
- an ethnography of silence and voice in a multi-team project.
- conversational processes in meetings
- leadership within conversations
Current DBA projects being supervised include;
- managing strategy building conversations across organizational boundaries,
- evaluating the contribution of ideas from Complex Adaptive Systems to the implementation of an organization change project,
- Seeking practices to improve the working of Relational Contracting large construction projects in Zimbabwe and Malawi
- evaluating the potential of action learning to support the development of 'organizational memory' in small and medium sized firms.