Recently, network theory has been used to analyze the formal syntactic and semantic properties of written texts to explain the development of language (Solé et al. 2005). While foundational, this approach neglects the social and cultural pressures affecting language in interaction, a central focus of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1974, Goffman 1981, Gumperz 1982, Goodwin 2006). The influential work of M.M. Bakhtin (1981) frames speech as an emergent social process inflected by shifting patterns of negotiated meanings. As Hill (1986) observed "the enormous impact of Bakhtin's work, already felt with earthquake strength in literary studies...[is] now beginning to appear with equal force in the anthropology of language" (1986: 89).The aim of this research is to test the conjecture that by expanding the frame of language network analysis to include the social context of speech, the emergent properties of heteroglossia predicted by Bakhtin will be clarified. This analysis builds on prior research on language in interaction, drawing from sociolinguistic analysis (Sacks et al. 1974, Atkinson & Heritage 1984), word frequency (Nelson et al. 1998, Mendoza-Denton 2003), and network analysis (Bearman & Stovel 2000, de Nooy et al. 2005, Solé et al. 2005, Mehler 2010).According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia emerges as speakers "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention" (1981:428). This multi-sited doctoral research investigates the speech of butchers through participant observation, work place interactions and interviews, with a focus on references to blood. Some of the semantic features that become affixed to blood are due to historical and popular culture understandings of this signifier, while other salient features derive from subject positionality and community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). This work provides a snapshot of all of these processes at work in the speech of an occupational community of American butchers. The results of this analysis show that including the social context has significant effects on the conceptualization of both semantic and social networks, in comparison with networks derived exclusively from written texts.

Every corner of the globe has been touched by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and local communities have responded in different ways. There is widespread agreement in the international community that by learning from each locality's response we will be able to improve our education, prevention, and treatment efforts. United Nations agencies can play an important role in facilitating the sharing of information and innovative practices for local authorities. The CITY-AIDS Americas program of CIFAL Atlanta is a UN initiative that promotes exchanges of ideas and practices among HIV experts in the western hemisphere. The program is based on the principles of participatory and action learning, and knowledge management. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the program's effectiveness in facilitating communication between HIV experts and the acquisition of resources following participation in the program. Data was collected through an online questionnaire completed by CITY-AIDS 2006 program participants. Secondary data such as HIV prevalence rates and census data were also used in this study. The results of this study show that certain city and participant characteristics are associated with increased program effectiveness and resource allocation. Based on these findings, recommendations will be made to CIFAL Atlanta.

The current state of organizational environmental management is inadequate to face the risks posed by the natural environment such as resource scarcities resulting from natural, social and/or economic processes such as increases in extreme weather events, natural resources-based conflicts, regulatory restrictions, or trading commodities fluctuations. These changes to the organizational environment call for adaptation so that we may maintain our ability to produce and function sustainably. Organizations need to adopt practices and processes that consider the natural environment. The adoption of environmental management practices and processes has, however, met barriers. Faced with initiatives that promise considerable financial and environmental benefits, research has reported resistance to buy-in. I suggest that perception barriers, imbedded in language, have a role to play in this lack of change. I propose that individual’s mental model of the organization filters information for decision-making based on language. I suggest that the linguistic repertoire of communities of practice is used to filter information relevant to organizational decision-making. A quantitative study showed that differences in community of practice linguistic repertoires are found between the environmental and business communities. In addition, varying levels of familiarity with the repertoire of a community of practice were explored to determine whether community membership is reflected in the linguistic repertoires of individuals. The results suggested that the familiarity of graduate students with the linguistic repertoire of the community of practice they were studying was more akin to membership in a community of interest than a community of practice. In addition, the results suggested that environmental and business communities held opposing sets of relevant linguistic repertoires, providing grounds for communication barriers. Finally, in addition to exploring language’s potential as a barrier and opportunity for change, the in individual’s mental models ability to change was explored. Through case study observations, I showed that a change in the individual’s mental model of the organization could result from participation in an eco-efficiency program. The participants, high-level decision-makers in the organizations, introduced the natural environment as a new aspect to their future decision-making process following participation. Contributions to management and social theory are also discussed. / À mon frère Pascal Perron, il aurait été si fier. - To my brother Pascal Perron, he would have been so proud.

Working on teams with professionals from other fields is often challenging. Researchers from the fields of Management and Writing Studies have frequently emphasized the tension and conflict experienced in such inter-professional, or cross-functional, teams. Whether studying engineering project teams, groups of medical professionals, or business teams, researchers have found that inter-professional work is often complicated by misunderstanding and miscommunication due to problems associated with inter-group professional identity. This interdisciplinary research draws from the fields of Management and Writing Studies in the exploration of a modern, inter-professional proposal writing team working at a commercial enterprise. A modified version of Grounded Theory, coupled with Rhetorical Genre Studies analysis, serves as a methodological framework for the study. The analytical framework is provided by the combination of Rhetorical Genre Studies, a model of successful team interactions, borrowed from Management Studies, and an expanded version of Wenger’s conceptualization of multiple communities of practice (CoPs). The research reveals the complexity of inter-professional team work. Professional identity of the team’s member is also presented as more complicated than previously anticipated. The study indicates that the team has been heavily influenced by a former, or an antecedent, CoP to which some of the team members belong. The genre and leadership preferences of the antecedent CoP are shown to moderate much of the predicted tension and conflict in the work of the team. The interdisciplinary study reveals the effects of antecedent CoPs and professional identity of the team members on the inter-professional team dynamics. Both researchers and practitioners may benefit from the findings of the study and a broader interdisciplinary approach used to investigate and interpret the dynamics of inter-professional teams.

Establishing online communities of practice is an important part of the knowledge translation process in the modern healthcare system, but these online communities are new entity that is inherently different from traditional communities of practice that are dependent on existing social structures. The objective of this thesis is to combine communication analysis and content analysis to delve deeper into the communications within an online community to try and determine how online communities exist, and how that information can be leveraged to improve online knowledge translation. Using a novel approach this project will map the contents of online conversations to a structured medical lexicon (MeSH), and then use the inherent relationships of that lexicon to calculate term, user and thread similarities within an online community. These similarities, combined with connection analysis results, will provide a much deeper understanding of how online communities function. The methods developed here will then be tested on two separate mailing lists, the Pediatric Pain Mailing List (PPML) and SURGINET, a mailing list of general surgeons.

This thesis tells a story of a single year in the life of a primary care teaching practice from the multiple perspectives of clinical learners and those supporting learning. This story involves many people from junior medical students to nurses and doctors with twenty years of experience. It explores how they learn as clinicians. The research takes the form of a single descriptive case study based within a purposefully chosen GP teaching practice in West Yorkshire, England. The case study comprises interview, observational and documentary data collected over a single academic year in 2008/9. Interview data from 33 subjects were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis within a modified grounded theory approach. The evidence from interview data was strengthened through direct and indirect observation and from documents relating to learning and teaching. I present a theory of how clinical learning occurs within the chosen practice, and on the nature of being a teaching practice. The findings are presented in the context of the existing literature of learning in this setting and within a theoretical framework of literature on social learning and communities of practice. Clinical learning appears to occur through engagement and opportunity. Engagement in learning is made up of four elements; recognition, respect, relevance and emotion. The elements are remarkably consistent across learner groups. Opportunity includes the availability, authenticity and immediacy of patient encounters; and the opportunity to learn with and from peers and professional colleagues. The research findings are consistent with existing work on social learning from other settings, but add to the literature. Engagement appears possible through recognition, relevance and respect and in the absence of meaningful participation, belonging or a clear trajectory of learning. Meaningful opportunities for clinical learning include those where patient encounters are made powerful through the authenticity that arises from the social and personal context of illness, and from the immediacy of hearing patient narratives de novo. The teaching practice studied in the case study is not dissimilar to others described in the literature of primary care learning, but this case study offers a far more detailed exploration of the elements which contribute to learning in the practice. These elements include strong whole practice support for learning, a skilled and committed clinical and educational workforce and a more indefinable additional element which is best summarised as a passion for education.

The purpose of this study was to examine traditionally aged developmental mathematics college students’ experiences of mathematical practices, in a 4-week summer learning community, using a qualitative explanatory single case study approach (Yin, 2009). This study used the methodological framework of Local Communities of Mathematical Practices (Winbourne & Watson, 1998), the conceptual theory of situated cognition (Brown & Duguid, 1988), and the theories of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and learning communities (Tinto, 1997). The objectives were to highlight contextual factors that allowed participants to be academically successful as evidenced by their mathematical practices (Ball, 2003). The research question was: How does participating in a 4-week summer learning community shape developmental mathematics college students’ experiences of mathematical practices? The participants of this case study were one group of four women. Data were collected in the form of video and audio tape of classroom interactions, observations and reflections, diagnostic pretest, and participant interviews. Findings revealed that participants’ mathematical practices were shaped in part by: a) the way students identified with mathematics reflected their ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in the mathematics course; b) the students level of participation within the community; c) the students collaboration with purpose, discussion, and reflection; d) the students shared repertoire confirmed the consensus of knowledge; e) the students mutual engagement played a large part in their motivation, and f) the students joint enterprise within the learning community led to a self supporting system verifying that learning is the intersection of activity, concept, and the classroom.

Studien har tagit sin utgångspunkt i det kunskapsintensiva arbetslivet där individen ses som kunskapsbärare. Det blir avgörande för organisationen att ta tillvara på denna kunskap och således ställs kunskapshantering centralt för studien. Syftet har varit att undersöka hur chefer upplever och uttrycker hur individburen kunskap kan komma organisationen till gagn. För kunskapsöverföring, mellan individ och organisation, har forskning betonat vikten av ett kollektivt lärande. Studien utgår därför från ett socialt perspektiv på lärande. Med hjälp av en kvalitativ strategi med semistrukturerade intervjuer inhämtades empirin. Sedermera problematiserades och analyserades resultatet utifrån Wengers teori om praktik-gemenskapen och Alvesson och Kärremans modell för kunskaps-hantering. Slutsatser som kunnat göras är bland annat att social interaktion och gemenskap är avgörande för en lärande organisation, dock kan inte praktikgemenskapen tillskrivas mening som ett managementverktyg. Teorin kan däremot anammas som förhållningssätt för cheferna i att uppmärksamma olika slags gemenskaper och deras potential till kunskapsutveckling för hela organisationen.

This study seeks to understand how collaborative information communication technologies (cICT) are used to support knowledge translation and optimize physician’s roles in chronic pain management. A survey was developed and distributed to 170 physicians in two chronic pain mentoring networks in Ontario and Nova Scotia. With a response rate of 74.1% the study identified the use of a broad variety of cICTs; with email as the most used. A majority of respondents (85.0%) used email to support discussions and 69.8% found it to be valuable in learning about chronic pain management. A higher frequency of email (adjusted OR=10.70, 95% CI: 2.84-40.33) and number of cICTs (adjusted OR=2.93, 95% CI: 1.19-7.21) used to communicate in the networks were associated with more interactions. These results highlight how cICTs can support the interactions and learning that are part of the knowledge translation process in optimizing the roles of physicians in chronic pain management.

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.