Ett allt vanligare fenomen i dagens arbetsliv är att tjänsteproduktion organiseras efter modeller som i grunden är anpassade för varuproduktion. En av dessa organisationsmodeller är Lean, som har implementerats inom Försäkringskassan. Försäkringskassans byråkratiska organisation har därmed struktureras upp i ännu fler regler, rutiner och processer. Finns det något utrymme för lärande i en sådan organisation? Denna studie har som ambition att bidra till en ökad förståelse för hur lärande i det dagliga arbetet uppstår i en byråkratisk organisation där regler och rutiner är en del av jobbet. Syftet är att belysa personliga handläggares upplevelse av lärande i det dagliga arbetet. Utifrån syftet har följande frågeställningar formulerats; Hur upplever handläggare att styrande rutiner för arbetets utförande inverkar på deras lärande? Hur upplever handläggare att de lär sig av sina kollegor? I vilken utsträckning upplever handläggare att lärande sker över det egna teamets gränser? Studien bygger på en kvalitativ metodansats och åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts med handläggare på försäkringskassan. Det empiriska materialet har analyserats utifrån Wengers teori om Communities of Practice. Resultatet visar att regler och rutiner används för att fylla kunskapsluckor och därmed bidrar till lärande. Handläggare lär också i det dagliga arbetet genom social interaktion som bland annat uppstår vid informella diskussioner och formella möten. Interaktionen leder till ett erfarenhetsutbyte mellan kollegor. Genom att ta del av andra myndigheters eller individers erfarenheter och kompetens har handläggarna möjlighet att utveckla ett lärande över gränser. Dock skiljer sig handläggarnas uppfattningar när det kommer till kunskaps- och erfarenhetsutbyte med aktörer utanför Försäkringskassan. / An increasingly common phenomenon in today's working life is that the production of services is organized through production models that originally was created to organize the production of things. One of these organizational models is Lean, which has been implemented within the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. This bureaucratic organization has thus been structured into even more rules, procedures and processes. Is there any room for learning in such an organization? This study is an attempt to contribute to an understanding of how learning in daily work occurs in a regulated organization where rules and procedures are part of the job. The aim of the study is to investigate the social insurance officers personal experience of learning in the daily work. To answer the purpose of the study the following questions has been formulated; How do social insurance officers experience that common routine descriptions of work design influence their learning? How do social insurance officers experience that they learn from their colleagues? To what extent do social insurance officers experience learning over the boundaries of their own team? The study is based on a qualitative method using eight semi-structured interviews with social insurance officers at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. The empirical data has been analyzed from Wengers theory Communities of practice. The result shows that rules and procedures are used to fill knowledge gaps and thus contribute to learning. The social insurance officers also learn in daily work through social interaction by informal discussions and formal meetings. By studying other authorities or individuals' experiences, the social insurance officers can develop cross-border learning. However, the perceptions of the social insurance officers differ when it comes to knowledge and experience exchange with actors outside the Swedish Social Insurance Agency.

In recent years there has been growing enthusiasm among researchers for the promotion of online learning communities designed to support professional learning in preservice teacher education. The primary purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the role of such an online community in supporting student teacher learning during the school placement in a Chinese Normal University, and hence to enrich the understanding of student teachers’ learning experiences in an online ecology. The study’s subjects included a cohort of 42 student teachers enrolled on a four-year preservice teacher education programme, along with two university supervisors at one of China’s teacher-training universities. Primary data were collected from six weeks of online threaded discussions and from semi-structured group interviews. Supplementary data were taken from an end-of-school-placement evaluation and web-tracking logs. Data analysis has been informed and illuminated by the theoretical proposition of communities of practice. The findings of the study indicate that the online learning community is a valuable resource for supporting student teachers both personally and professionally. Findings suggest that online communication not only helps student teachers tackle immediate teaching concerns and technical problems, but, more importantly, provides them with opportunities to reflect collectively, to co-construct new teaching ideas, and to gain professional discourse competence through articulating and negotiating their evolving thoughts on teaching as a profession. In this regard, student teachers are found to be more comfortable with online self-disclosure of their personal and professional encounters and critiquing each other than they are with face-to-face communication. The research also shows that university supervisors experience mixed feelings about the fact that student teachers are more able to take ownership of their learning and therefore become less dependent on supervisor guidance as time wears on. Furthermore, these findings provide evidence suggestive of a possibly reciprocal relationship between Chinese view of learning and the building of online learning communities. Based on the results of the study, I provide recommendations as to how the significance of the school placement can be reinforced in fostering distributed student teachers’ professional growth. The results also contribute to a better understanding of the key factors in the design and implementation of effective online learning communities within preservice teacher education in China. Finally, the analytical approach used in this study provides fresh methodological insight into an alternative means of analysing online postings. It thus contributes both to the theorisation of learning communities in the context of computer-mediated communication, and to the further development of concepts drawn from the communities of practice literature.

The labour market is currently experiencing a growing skills gap due to the digitalisation of society. The consequences of the skills gap are a scarcity of competent workers and upcoming challenges due to changed market demands. One solution to this is reskilling programs or bootcamps that in a short time frame reskill attendees to enable them to change their occupation. As reskilled individuals finalise the reskilling programs and change occupations questions rise of what parameters in the organisational environment that help them in their integration and competence development. This study has the purpose to investigate this issue by examining the research question: What is the role of the organisational environment when integrating a reskilled person into their new occupation to continue lifelong learning?. The results are given by a thematic analysis of qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews of respondents that have attended a reskilling bootcamp called the Software Development Academy. Moreover, a theoretical framework containing Communities of Practice is applied in the analysis to categorise the organisational environments. The findings highlight that the organisational environment has a significant role on the reskilled employee’s success in their new occupation. Organisational environments that have tendencies of communities of practice and a positive attitude towards interactions among co-workers have a positive effect on the reskilled employee. Finally, the study provides a list of managerial recommendations that can help the reskilled employee to succeed in their new workplace. / Arbetsmarknaden upplever för närvarande en kompetensklyfta som skapats på grund av digitaliseringen i samhället. Konsekvenserna som uppstår av denna kompetensklyfta är ökad brist på kompetenta arbetare samt kommande utmaningar på grund av förändrade marknadskrav. En lösning på detta är omutbildning med hjälp av program eller bootcamps som på kort tid omskolar deltagare för att göra det möjligt för dem att ändra sitt yrke. När nyutbildade individer slutför omskolningsprogrammen och ändrar sitt yrke uppstår frågor om vilka parametrar i organisationsmiljön som hjälper dem i deras integration och kompetensutveckling. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka detta ämne genom att svara på forskningsfrågan: Vilken roll har den organisatoriska miljön när man integrerar en omskolad person i sitt nya yrke för att möjliggöra livslångt lärande? Resultaten ges från en tematisk analys av kvalitativa data som samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med respondenter som har deltagit i ett omskolningsbootcamp som heter the Software Development Academy. Dessutom tillämpas ett teoretisk ramverk som innehåller Communities of Practice i analysen för att kategorisera de organisatoriska miljöerna. Resultaten framhäver att den organisatoriska miljön spelar en stor roll för den omskolade medarbetarens framgång i sitt nya yrke. Organisationsmiljöer som har tendenser av Communities of Practice och en positiv inställning till interaktioner mellan medarbetare har en positiv effekt på den omskolade medarbetaren. Slutligen presenterar studien en lista över ledningsrekommendationer som kan hjälpa den omarbetade medarbetaren att lyckas.

This thesis contends that communities of practice (CoPs) are an effective instrument for supporting collaborative activities in science-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that often have no formal strategy for knowledge acquisition and innovation. A review of the existing body of knowledge has indicated that this matter has not been the subject of thorough, in-depth research; and that this issue is important, given the relatively high level of efficacy that has been afforded to the role of CoPs in the innovation processes of large organizations. Indeed, the original communities of practice model had little to say about innovation per se; however, more recent theorizations have shown that CoPs can contribute to organizational innovation. This research makes a number of contributions to our understanding of CoPs as an enabler of knowledge acquisition and innovation: (i) theoretical: recontextualizing CoPs and demonstrating their applicability in science-based SMEs; (ii) methodological: extending the use of thematic template analysis; and (iii) applied: through the development of a contextualized framework for constructing CoPs in science-based SMEs. An exploratory case study of science-based SMEs was conducted using thematic template analysis. The study employed critical case sampling, a technique that focuses on selecting cases on the basis that they make a point dramatically or because, as in this instance, they are important in relation to the research questions In depth interviews were conducted with 25 individuals employed in technical (i.e. scientists and engineers) and commercial roles (i.e. operations, finance and purchasing). Although there was no evidence of managed CoPs, a range of emergent/informal and cultivated CoPs were leveraged for a variety of purposes, including facilitating knowledge acquisition, enhancing absorptive capacity, and improving the firm’s ability to generate innovative solutions. Apprentice-based CoPs emerged that supported individual learning, and both intra and inter-organizational CoPs emerged to support a range of radical and incremental innovation activities. Social capital was leveraged in CoPs, generating trust and reciprocity between SMEs and customer organizations, thus enhancing knowledge-sharing and innovative potential. Finally, this research confirms that CoPs are the privileged locus for knowledge acquisition and innovation in science-based SMEs.

The four IT service firms of this thesis set out to interact and collaborate between their offices in Sweden and in India, some more intensely and frequently than others. In the process of their internationalisation, these small service firms find ways, or go through a process of learning how to collaborate in an international setting. The qualitative exploration of the process of learning is inspired by ‘communities of practice’, and in this thesis the focus is on ways in which individuals of firms through social participation learn to collaborate across distance, and develop a common way of working together in an international setting. This includes making use of technological objects as well as individuals acting as brokers bridging distance, and it is played out in physical as well as social proximity. This thesis aims at continuing the vibrant discussion in economic geography where proximity is seen as more than ‘being there’ in a physical sense. In this discussion, the understanding of proximity is related to social aspects and can be seen as a metaphor of closeness. Hence, more emphasis is put on the role and experiences, including intention and sense of passion, of individuals. In this thesis, this experience of closeness is empirically explored through a longitudinal study in Sweden and in India. This includes trying to operationalise social proximity by exploring the experience of social proximity amongst the individuals of the case firms. More precisely, social proximity is conceptualised as individuals experiencing ‘shared social familiarity’. This thesis combines a discussion on proximities with literature on processes of learning. This is in order to present a more thorough understanding of how social proximity can develop over time and, furthermore, in what way social proximity matters for service firms working in an international setting. / Formas project: "Swedish Cities in 'the Spaces of Flows': National, European and Global Networks"

A variety of policies originating from Ontario’s Ministry of Education make it clear that education reform requires that teachers reflect on their practice. Despite this, there is little evidence of a common understanding of just what reflection would look like in teacher practice.This means that Initial Teacher Education programs face ambiguous challenges both in producing teachers who can reflect on practice in order to participate in school reform and in matching program goals regarding reflection to admissions requirements. This study investigated the understanding and evaluation of reflection in an Initial Teacher Education program through interviews with 15 instructors and field partners who had evaluated applicants’ written evidence of reflection. Differences among participants were evident in the understanding of reflection;however, the overriding theme of conscious attention to and engagement with experience as a vehicle for change was consistent with current literature. Differences in the evaluation of profiles were based on perceptions of how well applicants met the criterion of specificity, which was emphasized in the rubric; what role their judgement should take in evaluation decisions and the knowledge base on which those decisions were made. Participants described an organizational context in their Initial Teacher Education Program in which reflection was encouraged but not formalized or defined in any consistent way, and described opportunities for reflection that resembled informal communities of practice. They articulated some significant dilemmas in the fair evaluation of reflection that were similar to the challenges of school administrators evaluating the reflection required of teachers. The results of the study have implications for admissions policies as well as for creating a culture of reflection and inquiry in an Initial Teacher Education Program or school.

Much of literature is predicated upon the assumption that learning occurring inside the workplace is related to developing expertise associated with the tasks for which the individual is employed and has a background in. This research investigates those individuals who acquire expertise in other disciplines and how the application of that additional expertise changes and enhances the individual and the organisation. By combining perspectives across the disciplinary boundaries and developing multidisciplinary expertise, these individuals demonstrate better methods of achieving business objectives, leading to faster, more imaginative solutions, more frequently, and with significantly less effort. The literature review commenced with defining “multidisciplinary” before addressing communities that cluster around disciplines such as professional societies and Communities of Practice, Aspects of organisational, team and “learning by participation” (Ashton, 2004) literature were also considered. The study took an inductive approach using an ethnographical perspective to data collection and analysis to achieve its aim of determining the existence of multidisciplined individuals and how they acquire additional disciplines. The study used interviewing as its primary method yielding both qualitative and quantitative data from a cross sectional sample set inside a medium sized oil and gas consultancy offering technical and management advice. The disciplines inside the case organisation were mapped to ascertain boundaries where the richest learning opportunities lie. Measuring learning across the disciplines confirmed the existence of multidisciplined individuals with evidence pointing towards the integrated multidisciplined team being the ideal learning environment. The study was able to use Threshold Concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003) to demonstrate the multidisciplinary individual development process. Moreover, having examined the social interaction learning processes the potential negative impacts of Communities of Practice in encouraging this type of multidiscipline approach was highlighted. The study concluded that developing multidisciplined individuals was worthwhile but required organisations to be willing to provide the appropriate platform for such learning by more adventurous individuals who held the appropriate underlying abilities required by the additional discipline (s).

This thesis represents the first ever study of Sri Lanka’s leading genre of contemporary popular song covering a period of over twelve years, and how its artists and principal audience interpolate ‘global’ and ‘local’ (linguistic and musical) elements in their invention and negotiation of the genre. The central objective is to articulate the collective linguistic identity of the genre’s artists and principal audience. They are shown to constitute a community of over 5.5 million youth and young adults of Sinhala ethnicity, more than a quarter of the country’s population. Notably, this is also the first ever study of macrosocietal linguistic identity in a musical context involving an interdisciplinary linguistic and musical-structure based approach. Underlying the central objective the thesis addresses broader questions about whether our perception of and response to language/language-mixing in music differs from our perception of and response to language mixing (language) in non-musical (i.e. conversational) contexts and if so, how such differences might be explained in terms of linguistic and/or musico-linguistic structure. The genre explored is termed ‘Post 1998 Leading Sri Lankan Popular Song’ (98+LSLPS): 1998 marks the symbolic year in which the first songs of the genre emerged and became hugely popular in Sri Lanka. At present, it includes around 300 songs. A community of practice model (Wenger 1998) is used to describe the three-way relationship between the artists, audience and songs. The song data analysed are in audio format. Musically, the songs are heterogeneous involving blends of styles, ranging from indigenous Sri Lankan folk tunes to hip hop rhythms to western classical melodies. These are delivered through four presentational techniques among which rap and singing are dominant. It is English and Sinhala mixed language lyrics which distinguish the songs as a genre. Not surprisingly, there is evidence that the community regard the songs as ‘mixed’: however, they are also found to regard the songs as simultaneously ‘not-mixed’. The portrait corresponds to the community’s identification of the songs as simultaneously homogeneous Sinhala and Sinhala-Sri Lankan systems on the one hand and heterogeneous multicultural systems on the other. Exploring the salience of this portrait at the level of the songs’ lyric organisation constitutes the major part of the thesis and is a crucial forerunner to articulating the collective linguistic identity of the community, which is based on interpreting the findings. Accordingly, I advance a novel musico-linguistic analytical framework based on the notion of the musical rhythm derived ‘line’ for analysing the songs. The framework is also a response to the fact that the song lyrics are in audio format rather than being assigned a predetermined structure by transcription. The analyses demonstrate that the songs’ lyric structure is entirely congruent with the portrait assigned to the songs by their community. Interpreted in relation to the community’s collective linguistic identity, it is described as representing a form of overarching monolingualism, deriving from active multilingualism in music. Drawing on the relationship between Sinhala ethnicity and the Sinhala language and the fact that the community members are of Sinhala ethnicity, the study concludes by suggesting that this linguistic profile may be indicative of the community’s definition of the ‘Sinhala’ language in this musical domain. Overall, the study establishes that musical structure governs the organisation of language/language mixing in music and that this is reflected in how communities perceive language/language mixing in music.

This study discusses the experiences of international students studying in English-medium business programmes in three countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Taiwan. The purpose of this comparative study is to investigate how the students’ identity is constituted in the multicultural business classroom and on the multi-cultural campus, the role in this of cultural components of the curriculum in international business programmes, the ways in which the wider student experience operates in such multi-cultural settings and the implications of each of these facets for teachers and institutional managers. Inter-/cross-cultural competence is held to be a vital skill that business graduates should be equipped with in order to be capable of working in an increasingly diverse global village, and it is believed that such competence can be developed through frequent communication and negotiation with people from other cultures. Sojourners in this study attempted to negotiate new identities in the multicultural learning environment in the alien context in ways that were strongly influenced by individuals’ biographical and life experiences. There were several influential factors in these sojourners’ processes of learning and transition, including: interpersonal and intrapersonal factors; motivations for studying abroad; the nature of the learning environment they encountered; and the settings in which these interactions took place. Holliday’s (1994) “small cultures” theory and Wegner’s (1998) “communities of practice” are concepts used to help explain sojourners’ experiences in terms of where and with whom they interacted, and how this influenced their perception of the learning experience in the international contexts. The three institutes were selected through the purposive sampling method, with pre-set criteria such as the percentage of courses taught in participants’ second or foreign language(s) and the percentage of international students in the student population of the university. The sample of twenty-two student participants was obtained by using opportunistic sampling and snowball sampling methods. The qualitative data set comprised 18 individual interviews, 3 group interviews and 40 diary entries. Data analysis took the form of typological analysis (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993) by dividing the overall data set into categories or groups based on predetermined typologies. One of the main findings of this study is that international students experienced high levels of isolation and marginalisation, which affected their academic confidence and social involvement. The universities concerned were aggressively recruiting international students and making efforts to internationalise curricula, yet the academic and social support on offer was perceived as narrow and very marginalised.

This thesis investigates the importance of the work community and its social organisation and the role it has for the participants' ability to learn and to form a professional identity as pedagogical leaders. Furthermore, the thesis wants to investigate if it matters to the directors’ learning how the principal (municipality or private company) organises for learning. The empirical material for the study comes mainly from semi-structured interviews with participants in the directors’ programme and close colleagues. An expression for the working community in a workplace is a community of practice. Learning and social interaction are about negotiation of meaning, making sense in everyday life. All four interviewed participants have contexts with features of communities of practice. In a few cases, it is clear that the context is about educational leadership, in a practice that is designed in collaboration with colleagues. Although there are significant differences in both the scope and the structure of supporting structures between the two investigated private contexts, it becomes clear that their structure leads to learning. The lack of structure in municipal schools leaves their directors with little access to guidance for their learning and identity development.