Eda Ulus

‘Oh, was that “experiential learning”?!’ Spaces, synergies and surprises with Kolb’s learning cycle

We share findings from empirical research into Kolb’s experiential learning approach, using our reflections as teachers and data from our undergraduate management students. The experiential learning experience emerges as a space where bodies, feelings and ideas move and develop in intimate relationship with one another. This is a space where teachers exercise authority over, and commitment to, the here-and-now, risking corporeal and intellectual exposure. We probe the concept of experience in experiential learning, suggesting that teachers require a kind of ‘experiential expertise’ to draw both on embodied felt sense and on what one has done in one’s own career to role-model the transformation of experience into knowledge, which is at the heart of Kolb’s theory. We explore a blurring of experiential agency, and the tendency for students to appropriate the teacher’s experience rather than dwell on or develop their own. For us, experiential learning is more usefully seen as ‘relationship-centred’ than ‘student-centred’, and we contrast this relational focus with the way experiential learning seems to have been popularised as anti-interventionist, a kind of educational ‘laissez-faire’. Based on these reflections, we suggest powerful connections between phenomenology and theories of space as a way of conceptualising the complexities and richness of teaching and learning experiences.

Workplace emotions in postcolonial spaces: Enduring legacies, ambivalence, and subversion

This article analyses the emotions of work in postcolonial spaces, where enduring racial tensions, arising from white privilege, continue to shape people’s experiences. Based on a close scrutiny of two interview extracts from field work in India, the article applies a postcolonial perspective to illustrate that colonial dynamics and attendant power relations are daily reproduced or subverted at work. Postcolonial arguments are extended to organizational emotions, by demonstrating how everyday narratives, including those told to researchers, uncover a wide range of experiences of race that may go unnoticed or may not surface through more structured methods. Ambivalence and subversion feature in these extracts as core experiences of emotionally charged postcolonial relations, which are often reproduced or experienced unconsciously. The enduring legacies of colonial history on organizational spaces are discussed, with implications for the emotions of working across racial and geographic boundaries. In a globalized work environment, such legacies may go unnoticed, but their effects are manifest in individual experiences.

Narratives of fate and misfortune in organizational life: Stories of success and failure

In this paper, we discuss how both success and failure induce anxiety, and how narratives help defend against it. We argue, using a psychoanalytic approach, that these narratives become culturally embedded through sharing and approval, and they become available as resources that are often drawn upon unconsciously when faced with anxiety-provoking experiences. Empirically, we draw upon data about Indian employees in India. The Indian cultural context offers rich insights into the interrelatedness of success and failure, anxiety, and narratives as defences in responses to these experiences.

Bridging the contradictions of social constructionism and psychoanalysis in a study of workplace emotions in India

This paper makes a contribution to the study of emotions in organizations by offering a systematic juxtaposition and cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic and social constructionist approaches. These two traditions have found it hard to communicate in the past when addressing organizational emotions. Points of similarity and tension between them are discussed in connection with two critical case studies of female Indian managers discussing their emotions at the workplace. These were obtained during field work in which emotions were studied through narratives generated by a free-association interview approach. Both the emotions described in the narratives themselves and the emotions of the interview encounter were analysed, as resources for a rapprochement of contrasting perspectives on emotion. This rapprochement acknowledges the psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious dynamics shaping the emotional lives of individuals and groups, while also honouring the social constructionist emphasis on how emotions are influenced by social, cultural and discursive practices.

The voice of introversion at work: Experiences, misconceptions, and implications for practice

This paper is a qualitative exploration of the lived experiences of introversion in management and working spaces. We critically interrogate the representation of introversion in management literature, in particular its juxtaposition to extraversion, and we argue that an analysis of individuals’ lived experiences of introversion, as explored through interviews, challenges misconceptions, with implications for organisational and management practices. We draw upon psychoanalytic and postcolonial frameworks to analyse our data, and to question the stark contrast between assumptions made about introversion in popular and academic literature, and the embodied, complex, diverse experiences of introversion as shared in our study by management practitioners and academics in the UK and the US. This project, through an empirical micro-focus on the nuanced experiences of introversion, has also raised questions about the devaluation of thinking within academic spaces. We note the implications of our work for a range of embedded dynamics in organisations, such as masculine norms, and we consider further expansion of this work in multinational organisational settings.