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This thesis is a part of Master Degree within the field of Special Education at Malmö University. The purpose of the research is to elucidate how the supportive material Assessment Tool for Accessible Education of the Swedish National Agency of Special Needs Educations and Schools is being used by educational institutions in Sweden and how it contributes to the change in the learning environment among preschools and schools. The reading provides valuable knowledge for how the agency can develop their support to educational institutions, as well as for the actors of the field to make the learning environment accessible to the students. The study looks at similarities and differences between the inclusive learning environments based on previous research, and the accessible learning environment based on Assessment Tool for Accessible Education. A lot of similarities can be found in the pedagogic and social aspects, while the differences become prominent in aspects of the physical environment which can only be found in accessible learning environments. Further, pros and cons of supporting individual needs in relation to the learning environment are discussed and what consequences it may give rise to for disabled students. Research questions are as follow; Does the Assessment Tool for Accessible Education contribute to a change in the learning environment? What developing processes contribute to the change? How should institutions be supported in order to develop the accessible learning environment?Mixed methods have been used for collection of data; a poll was answered by 425 people and interviews were held with nine focus groups from four different institutions, including one group of students. The theoretical frame of the analysis follows the organization theory; learning organization and rational-analytic, interactional, and political perspective. The empiric has been worked through thematically and is presented in a chronological order from when people first came in touch with Assessment Tool for Accessible Education, how the work has been implemented and processed at the institutions, and a description of what changes has been processed and its effects upon the learning environment. Obstacles and factors of success experienced by the respondents as well as the need of support for development are also presented. The results of the research show that the assessment tools contribute to a change in how the pedagogues approach the knowledge of how the learning and development of the students is affected by the learning environment when organizational development exists within the institution. Development launches when structural and cultural conditions exist and are processed which in turn leads to development of the learning organization. The research looks at the consequences when these conditions are lacking. Further, when good conditions exist the learning environments develop. The research shows changes that have been processed through the physical, pedagogic, and social environment. Also, all students receive a higher level of accessibility than disabled students. The conclusion is that the Assessment Tool for Accessible Education contributes to a higher level of knowledge regarding the significance of the learning environment which implies changes, provided that organizational development exists within the institution. Keywords: Accessible Learning Environment, Disabilities, Inclusive Learning Environments, Learning Organization, Organization theory, Process

Scholars have examined how occupational mandates – shared understandings of an occupation’s purpose – are established and how these mandates, to be fulfilled, translate into occupational jurisdictions. To date, however, we lack a clear understanding of how occupational members uphold their mandates when they are impossible to fulfill. I define an impossible occupational mandate as a purpose pursued by a given occupation, but almost impossible to attain. I draw from observations, interviews and archives related to the work of reentry counselors, whose occupational mandate is to ensure former prisoners (i.e., their clients) secure stable employment. My findings suggest that counselors faced multiple challenges in fulfilling their mandate. Faced with an impossible mandate, counselors revised their mandate in different ways, emphasizing their roles as experts in shaping success (advisors), assisting clients with their specific needs (aides), or advancing clients’ cause through their work (advocates). In doing so, they deflected their attention away from their initial mandate and onto their revised mandates. Counselors also shared their mandate with others in their proximate environments. To different degrees, counselors from each group projected partnerships with outsiders to their occupation: they imagined clients, employers, other human and correctional service professionals as possible partners who could share the responsibility for fulfilling their mandate. In doing so, they diffracted the mandate towards people outside of their occupation. Findings suggest that how counselors revised their mandate shaped who they projected as key partners, and how they reported feeling about failed mandate partnerships. Additionally, while all counselors performed the mandate despite the strain it could induce, and used different strategies to cope, the advocates expressed the strongest feelings of emotional strain of all groups. I discuss the connections between deflection and diffraction — namely, the two main strategies people used to uphold impossible mandates — and the conditions under which these strategies can limit professionals’ strain and help them uphold their mandates. Findings add to our understanding of an understudied yet key part of today’s occupational landscape — professionals who hold impossible mandates – and extend the study of occupations and meaningful work. I also discuss implications for labor market inequality, social justice, prisoner reentry programs, and practice. / 2024-05-16T00:00:00Z

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The medical profession is in a state of social transformation. Medical education must follow suit to continue to produce physicians who can meet the demands of the ever-changing field of medicine and of the public it serves. In this study, an institutional logic framework is used in examining how the implementation of transformative pedagogy in medical education may be impeded by competing institutional logics, thereby disrupting the change process. This study proposed three questions aimed at examining and understanding the perceptions of social actors as it relates to transformational change in medical education: 1) What is the impact of institutional logics on the implementation of transformative pedagogy in medical education? 2) What are the institutional logics in medical education that may impact change, and are there any conflicts between them? 3) Is there any evidence that these conflicts, if they exist, act as a barrier or disincentive to pedagogical reform when diversity, equity, and inclusion measures are introduced? A mixed method approach involving a two-step method of data collection and analysis was used in this study. Information from websites were used to create interview guidelines for interviews with faculty, administrators, and students at two US-based urban medical schools. By analyzing data from the websites of two US-based urban medical schools and comparing those findings to that of the perceived notions retrieved from interviews of the impact logics have on service learning, this research has shown that understanding institutional logics aid in the implementation of transformative pedagogy by better understanding the role of competing logics. This researcher provides three recommendations for medical schools to consider when using an institutional logics framework to enact transformational pedagogy. The first recommendation is change on the micro level (i.e., on the program level). The second recommendation relates to change on the macro level (i.e., relationship with governing bodies). And the third recommendation is related to the influence on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices on the change process. I end with providing reasons for how examining the perceptions of the role of transformative pedagogy as a change agent in medical education can advance the field of medical sociology. / Sociology

While there is a large amount of literature on the socio-cognitive theory of technology evolution, most has focused on the interpretations of technologies that are already in existence. The literature has barely attended to the role of forward-looking cognition—mental representations of possibilities in the future. How do innovators and entrepreneurs envision the possible, and how do they translate those abstract concepts into new material and social reality? This dissertation first synthesizes the vast literature on technology evolution, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of forward-looking cognition in the evolution of technology. Using a large amount of historical archival data on the US robotics industry, my two empirical papers investigate (a) how a distant vision co-evolves with the actual technologies at the level of the organizational field (b) how entrepreneurial solutions and entrepreneurial search problems are co-constructed at the firm level. In the first paper of my dissertation, I review the literature on the evolution of technology. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on technology evolution. This essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholarship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. I further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mechanisms—variation, selection, and retention—that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. I integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. I emphasize the need for a co-evolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. In the second paper of my dissertation, I examine how technological visions—mental representations of technological possibilities in the future—co-evolve with the actual technologies. This paper is set in the robotics industry. The existing literature has focused on how backward-looking interpretations of technology shape its subsequent trajectory, but has rarely examined the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. To examine this, I conducted an extensive archival qualitative study covering the evolution of the field of robotics during the 100-year period from 1921 to 2020. I find that in a future-oriented field, the direction of technology evolution is largely shaped by the field participants’ attempts to narrow the vision-reality gap—the perceived temporal gap between the distant vision and present reality. I identify six distinct mechanisms—linking means to the distant vision, constructing a medium-term vision, envisioning sequences, decomposing, reconstructing, and reintegrating—through which field participants strive to narrow the vision-reality gap. I also find that the vision-reality gap is extremely volatile, and can rapidly expand and contract when salient artifacts (or reverse salients) emerge. In this study, I contribute to the socio-cognitive view of technology by highlighting the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. In the third paper of the dissertation, I study the process through which an entrepreneurial search problem is constructed. Previous studies have focused on search for solutions to a given problem. However, literature on entrepreneurship suggests that many entrepreneurs often start from formulating a very broad, abstract problem that a novel technological means is envisioned to be able to solve in the future. Forward-looking cognition, the mental representations of possibilities in the future, lies behind the process of problem formulation. In order to examine how construction of problems affects search for solutions, I conducted a qualitative analysis of archival data about 58 entrepreneurial firms founded by 42 entrepreneurs in the robotics industry. I find that most entrepreneurial firms start by linking a novel technological means to an abstract problem, and then proactively identify a core constraint in the solution space. In order to bypass the constraint, they engage in decomposing and reconstructing a core problem. In the stage of pursuing product-market fit, the issue of identifying core attributes, or core evaluation criteria weighted by users is brought to the fore. This paper contributes to our understandings of entrepreneurial search by highlighting the cognitive underpinnings of problem formulation.

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