Relations in Practice: Sorting Through Practice Theories on Knowledge Sharing in Complex Organizations

We examine practice theories concerned with knowledge sharing in complex organizations to distinguish common trends and variations in this complex body of work. We suggest that an analytical framework highlighting the relational thinking in practice theories can serve as a tool to sort through the literature on knowledge sharing. First, we delineate a relational framework consisting of seven attributes associated with a practice theory. Second, we use this framework to analyze a narrow set of practice theories represented by three seminal works on communities of practice. Third, we compare and contrast the relational dynamics found in the three seminal works in regard to how they conceptualize knowledge sharing within and across communal boundaries.     

Exploring the Adult Learning Research Field by Analysing Who Cites Whom

In this article we report on findings from a large-scale bibliographic study conducted based on the citation practices within the field of research on adult learning. Our data consist of 151,261 citation links between more than 33,000 different authors whose papers were published in five leading international journals in the field of adult learning during the time period 2006–2014. By analysing the composition of the dominating citation clusters we are able to construct a telescopic view of the research field based on an accumulation of bibliographic citations. The results consist of two parts. First we go through the dominating players active in the field, their position and mutual relationship. Secondly, we derive two main structural oppositions inherent in the citation networks, one connected to the research object (studying education or work) and the second to the level of analysis (cognition or policy). We find that the most dominating tradition within adult learning the last few decades – sociocultural perspectives on learning - occupies a very central position in the space of citations, balancing between these opposing poles. We hope that this analysis will help foster reflexivity concerning our own research practices, and will reveal the relations of dominance currently prevailing within the field of adult learning.