A methodology for doing research into corporate spirituality should enable us to deal with the religious component of spirituality instead of trying to separate spirituality from religious beliefs, as the positivist school proposes. Waaijman’s phenomenological-dialogical research cycle enables us to deal with religious diversity in a scientific way. Sölle’s concept of democratized spirituality allows for discovering everyday (corporate) life as a finding place and workplace for spirituality. Replacing theistic terms by the concept of ‘alterity’ in a definition of spirituality may stimulate corporate spirituality without excluding or disqualifying spiritual diversity. Arendt’s concept of ‘action’ is closely connected to democratised spirituality. From that we can deduce a number of characteristics of corporate spirituality that give flesh and bone to what corporate spirituality can be. This allows us to see that many elements of corporate spirituality are already present in our organizational praxis. It also tells us that we need to become more aware of them and practice them. In doing so we set out on a ‘via transformativa’ that eventually may transform our organizations.
In the ambitions to upgrade the teaching profession, much attention is given to Master’s courses for teachers. As such Master’s courses ask for considerable investment in time and money, the question can be raised to what extent the upgrading of teachers to the Master’s level will lead to improvement in teaching and learning at schools. This paper presents the outcomes of a small scale study in which 7 teachers who recently graduated at a Master’s program in the Netherlands were interviewed on the climate and conditions they experienced at the workplace in their schools to apply their newly acquired knowledge, skills and professional attitude in their daily work. This explorative study shows that teachers engaged in a Master’s program can meet considerable obstacles within the organizational culture of the school. There appears to be a considerable misalignment between the teachers engaged in the post-initial Master’s program and their supervisors. While the teachers see the purpose of the Master’s program both in private terms (personal development) and public terms (contributing to school development), they experience an organizational climate that leaves no room for a wider public purpose of their studies, where they use the competences and qualities they have developed outside the boundaries of their own classrooms
In 2017, I introduced a new theoretical framework in Archival Science, that of the ‘Archive–as–Is’. This framework proposes a theoretical foundation for Enterprise Information Management (EIM) in World 2.0, the virtual, interactive, and hyper connected platform that is developing around us. This framework should allow EIM to end the existing ‘information chaos’, to computerize information management, to improve the organizational ability to reach business objectives, and to define business strategies. The concepts of records and archives are crucial for those endeavours. The framework of the ‘Archive–as–Is’ is an organization–oriented archival theory, consisting of five components, namely: [1] four dimensions of information, [2] two archival principles, [3] five requirements of information accessibility, [4] the information value chain; and [5] organizational behaviour. In this paper, the subject of research is component 5 of the framework: organizational behaviour. Behaviour of employees (including archivists) is one of the most complicated aspects within organizations when creating, processing, managing, and preserving information, records, and archives. There is an almost universal ‘sound of silence’ in scholarly literature from archival and information studies although this subject and its effects on information management are studied extensively in many other disciplines, like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and organization science. In this paper, I want to study how and why employees behave as they do when they are working with records and archives and how EIM is influenced by this behaviour.
Digital transformation has been recognized for its potential to contribute to sustainability goals. It requires companies to develop their Data Analytic Capability (DAC), defined as their ability to collect, manage and analyze data effectively. Despite the governmental efforts to promote digitalization, there seems to be a knowledge gap on how to proceed, with 37% of Dutch SMEs reporting a lack of knowledge, and 33% reporting a lack of support in developing DAC. Participants in the interviews that we organized preparing this proposal indicated a need for guidance on how to develop DAC within their organization given their unique context (e.g. age and experience of the workforce, presence of legacy systems, high daily workload, lack of knowledge of digitalization). While a lot of attention has been given to the technological aspects of DAC, the people, process, and organizational culture aspects are as important, requiring a comprehensive approach and thus a bundling of knowledge from different expertise. Therefore, the objective of this KIEM proposal is to identify organizational enablers and inhibitors of DAC through a series of interviews and case studies, and use these to formulate a preliminary roadmap to DAC. From a structure perspective, the objective of the KIEM proposal will be to explore and solidify the partnership between Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas), Avans University of Applied Sciences (Avans), Logistics Community Brabant (LCB), van Berkel Logistics BV, Smink Group BV, and iValueImprovement BV. This partnership will be used to develop the preliminary roadmap and pre-test it using action methodology. The action research protocol and preliminary roadmap thereby developed in this KIEM project will form the basis for a subsequent RAAK proposal.
Digital transformation has been recognized for its potential to contribute to sustainability goals. It requires companies to develop their Data Analytic Capability (DAC), defined as their ability to manage and analyze data effectively. Despite the governmental efforts to promote digitalization, there seems to be a knowledge gap on how to proceed, with 37% of Dutch SMEs reporting a lack of knowledge, and 33% reporting a lack of support in developing DAC. While extensive attention has been given to the technological aspects of DAC, the people, process, and organizational culture aspects are as important, requiring a comprehensive approach and thus a bundling of knowledge from different expertise. Therefore, the objective of this KIEM proposal is to identify organizational enablers and inhibitors of DAC through a series of interviews and case studies, and use these to formulate a preliminary roadmap to DAC.
Collaborative networks for sustainability are emerging rapidly to address urgent societal challenges. By bringing together organizations with different knowledge bases, resources and capabilities, collaborative networks enhance information exchange, knowledge sharing and learning opportunities to address these complex problems that cannot be solved by organizations individually. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the apparel sector, where examples of collaborative networks for sustainability are plenty, for example Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Zero Discharge Hazardous Chemicals, and the Fair Wear Foundation. Companies like C&A and H&M but also smaller players join these networks to take their social responsibility. Collaborative networks are unlike traditional forms of organizations; they are loosely structured collectives of different, often competing organizations, with dynamic membership and usually lack legal status. However, they do not emerge or organize on their own; they need network orchestrators who manage the network in terms of activities and participants. But network orchestrators face many challenges. They have to balance the interests of diverse companies and deal with tensions that often arise between them, like sharing their innovative knowledge. Orchestrators also have to “sell” the value of the network to potential new participants, who make decisions about which networks to join based on the benefits they expect to get from participating. Network orchestrators often do not know the best way to maintain engagement, commitment and enthusiasm or how to ensure knowledge and resource sharing, especially when competitors are involved. Furthermore, collaborative networks receive funding from grants or subsidies, creating financial uncertainty about its continuity. Raising financing from the private sector is difficult and network orchestrators compete more and more for resources. When networks dissolve or dysfunction (due to a lack of value creation and capture for participants, a lack of financing or a non-functioning business model), the collective value that has been created and accrued over time may be lost. This is problematic given that industrial transformations towards sustainability take many years and durable organizational forms are required to ensure ongoing support for this change. Network orchestration is a new profession. There are no guidelines, handbooks or good practices for how to perform this role, nor is there professional education or a professional association that represents network orchestrators. This is urgently needed as network orchestrators struggle with their role in governing networks so that they create and capture value for participants and ultimately ensure better network performance and survival. This project aims to foster the professionalization of the network orchestrator role by: (a) generating knowledge, developing and testing collaborative network governance models, facilitation tools and collaborative business modeling tools to enable network orchestrators to improve the performance of collaborative networks in terms of collective value creation (network level) and private value capture (network participant level) (b) organizing platform activities for network orchestrators to exchange ideas, best practices and learn from each other, thereby facilitating the formation of a professional identity, standards and community of network orchestrators.
