Amanda Wolf

Orientations to Academic Workloads at Department Level

Universities confront many challenges in their efforts to manage staff activity with the aid of workload assessment and allocation systems. This article sets out fresh perspectives from an exploratory study designed to uncover patterns of subjective views about various aspects of workloads. Using Q methodology, academic staff in a single department provided composite pictures of the intensity of their views on workload policies and systems, and about their experiences of workloads. Factor analysis, interpreted with the aid of interviews, reveals three orientations based on traditional independent scholarship, collectivism, and stress and overwork. Together, the three orientations in one department show evidence of a generational shift, with leadership implications. Looking ahead, workload allocation systems may need to give weight to personal choice and to consider ways to credit shared work in ways that fit the contemporary university environment.

Approaches to Transferable Learning in Comparative Policy Analysis and Practice

Abstract The five articles collected in this special issue build on current scholarship to examine under-explored facets of policy learning that improve or degrade its transferability, including career portability, multi-level collaboration, regional leadership, crisis learning, vicarious learning and single-case learning, aided by abduction and phronesis. The articles place these concepts within the context of existing theoretical frameworks and point to directions for future research into transferable learning in comparative public policy and public management. Although many organizational settings pose large obstacles to learning transfer, practical steps can be taken to improve individual and institutional capacities.

Learning Transferable Lessons from Single Cases in Comparative Policy Analysis

ABSTRACT Policy exemplars offer potential value to policy professionals seeking new ideas. Realizing that value typically assumes a learner who is both equipped with a well-specified policy or process objective and able to model causal connections to extract lessons. Yet there is a gap in explicating how, exactly, policy professionals find ideas worth pursuing. This article draws on the concepts of abduction and phronesis – broadly a flash of insight and practical judgement, occasioned by an observation – to fill that gap. The natural capabilities associated with abduction and phronesis rely on noticing what stands out, making analogical connections, and discerning which connections merit following up. With attention to these capabilities, policy professionals can extend their learning of transferable lessons from single cases.

Between-case dialogue: public engagement in the second-person voice

Interactive public engagement on challenging environmental issues centres on dialogue, which typically focuses on views about an issue, conflict or need to act. Participants are conceived as individuals who have and can change such views. Accordingly, theory and practice attend to the variables and contexts conducive to sharing and developing views. Less attention is accorded the ‘lived experience’ that gives the personalising contexts people carry into dialogue and the stories they tell. This article scrutinises the merits of focusing on the dialogic exchange of stories, treated as cases of experience in the round. An ideal–typical between-case dialogue entails first-person case stories (‘what I see’) and second-person responses (‘what I see, from my perspective, what you see from yours’). The second-person voice operates between unique individual narratives, but retains the insights of their temporal–spatial specificity. A dialogic engagement can discover locally generalisable patterns and create new second-person understandings that advance policy aims: ‘what we see’ and, therefore, ‘what we see can (or should) be done’.