Jörgen Sandberg

Understanding Human Competence at Work: An Interpretative Approach

In the prevalent rationalistic approaches, human competence at work is seen as constituted by a specific set of attributes, such as the knowledge and skills used in performing particular work. As a...

Grasping the Logic of Practice: Theorizing Through Practical Rationality

There is an increasing concern that management theories are not relevant to practice. In this article we contend that the overall problem is that most management theories are unable to capture the logic of practice because they are developed within the framework of scientific rationality. We elaborate practical rationality as an alternative framework and show how it enables development of theories that grasp the logic of practice and, thus, are more relevant to management practice.

How Do We Justify Knowledge Produced Within Interpretive Approaches

The use of interpretive approaches within management and organizational sciences has increased substantially. However, appropriate criteria for justifying research results from interpretive approaches have not developed so rapidly alongside their adaptation. This article examines the potential of common criteria for justifying knowledge produced within interpretive approaches. Based on this investigation, appropriate criteria are identified and a strategy for achieving them is proposed. Finally, an interpretive study of competence in organizations is used to demonstrate how the proposed criteria and strategy can be applied to justify knowledge produced within interpretive approaches.

Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization?:

This article examines ways of constructing research questions from existing literature, which are likely to promote the development of interesting and influential theories. We review 52 articles in organization studies and develop a typology of how researchers construct their research questions from existing literature. The most common way across paradigmatic camps is to spot various ‘gaps’ in the literature and, based on that, to formulate specific research questions. The dominance of gap-spotting is surprising, given it is increasingly recognized that theory is made interesting and influential when it challenges assumptions that underlie existing literature. The article discusses why assumption-challenging approaches are rare, and it identifies a range of social norms that favour gap-spotting. Finally, the article proposes some ways of constructing research questions that move beyond gap-spotting, and discusses how these ways are likely to promote more interesting and significant theories.

Educating for Competence in Professional Practice.

In educating for the professions, teachers seek to enable students to engage in professional practice as competent practitioners. In this paper we question the adequacy of traditional approaches for promoting competent practice. These traditional approaches typically view competence in terms of attributes, such as knowledge, skills and attitudes. Competence development is then seen in terms of acquiring the necessary attributes. From an alternative view of competence as based on ways of experiencing practice, we argue that competence development focus on enriching experience of practice. More specifically, we point out that competence development involves change in the structure of the meaning for practice. Change in meaning structure for practice involves both a significant shift from one way of experiencing practice to another, as well as refinement and elaboration of the way of experiencing practice. Implications of this view of competence development for professional education are discussed. In particular, we deal with implications relating to the teaching-learning relation and the form the educational programme takes. In summay, we argue that enabling students to develop competence through experience of engaging in practice is most closely directed to the aims of education for the professions.

Professional Competence as Ways of Being: An Existential Ontological Perspective

The Organization Studies Summer Workshop is an annual activity, first launched in June 2005, to facilitate high-quality scholarship in organization studies. Its primary aim is to advance cutting-edge research on important topics in the field by bringing together on a Greek island, in early summer, a small and competitively selected group of scholars, who will have the opportunity to interact and share insights in a stimulating and scenic environment. Following on the tremendous success of the First Organization Studies Workshop on Santorini, we are happy to announce that the Second Workshop will take place at Saint John Hotel (http://www.saintjohn.gr), Mykonos, on 15 and 16 June 2006. Mykonos (http://www.mykonosgreece.com/, http://www.mykonos.net), a worldfamous resort with beautiful sandy beaches, unique Cycladic architecture, and unrivalled night life, will provide an ideal setting for workshop participants to relax and engage in authentic dialogue. With this workshop we aim to create a setting in which the juices of intellectual creativity will naturally flow. Because the aim of the workshop is to generate opportunities for creative interaction and intelligent conversation, the number of participants will be kept intentionally small — up to 50 papers will be accepted. Papers will be circulated in advance and participants will be urged to read them prior to the workshop. More about the practicalities and costs of the workshop will appear later on the Organization Studies website (www.egosnet.org/os).

Returning to Practice Anew: A Life-World Perspective

Our understanding of organizations is being advanced by a diverse range of practice-based approaches. Many of these approaches are inspired by what can be called a life-world perspective, although they do not necessarily adopt this perspective throughout the research. In this article, we propose that adopting a life-world perspective can bring us closer to how practice is constituted. We argue that the performance of organizational practices can be more closely examined by bringing to the fore the manner in which practice is constituted through our entwinement with others and things in our world. In order to discuss how a life-world perspective can be used as a basis for such empirical and theoretical investigations, we compare it with one of the more advanced frameworks for practice within strategy research.

Service Quality and the Consumer's Experience: Towards an Interpretive Approach:

As marketers and researchers we understand quality from the consumers perspective, and throughout contemporary service quality literature there is an emphasis on what the consumer is looking for, or at least that is the intention. Through examining the underlying assumptions of dominant service quality theories, an implicit dualistic ontology is highlighted (where subject and object are considered independent) and argued to effectively negate the said necessary consumer orientation. This fundamental assumption is discussed, as are the implications, following a critical review of dominant service quality models. Consequently, we propose an alternative approach to service quality research that aims towards a more genuine understanding of the consumers perspective on quality experienced within a service context. Essentially, contemporary service quality research is suggested to be limited in its inherent third-person perspective and the interpretive, specifically phenomenographic, approach put forward here is suggested as a means of achieving a first-person perspective on service quality.

Understanding the Basis for Competence Development

Developing competence in organisations has received increased attention among both practitioners and academics during the last two decades. This chapter aims to investigate what constitutes competence development at work, that is, the basis for what it takes to develop competence. Without such an understanding, we are unable to know what to focus on when developing competence at work. As a first step, different theories of competence at work are outlined as a precursor to exploring what constitutes the development of that competence. Based on that review, it is argued that developing an understanding of work is the basis for competence development. As a second step, what constitutes understanding and how it operates is investigated by drawing on the phenomenological hermeneutic theory of understanding. Based on that analysis, it is argued that understanding is constituted by an inevitable circularity, in the sense that developing an understanding of something presupposes that something is already understood. Finally, I discuss the implications that this circularity of understanding has for the way we develop competence at work.

The experiential meaning of service quality

Within dominant marketing approaches, service quality is conceptualized as a fixed set of static service dimensions such as reliability and responsiveness that reflect consumer expectations and/ or perceptions. As an alternative to the dominant approaches, the aim in this work is to identify and describe the consumer’s lived experience of service quality. Achieved through an interpretive approach the findings presented here demonstrate that the dimensions and attributes consumers’ use for evaluating service quality are based upon what service quality means to consumers and how consumers experience service quality in a particular services context. Moreover, the findings show that the experiential meaning of service quality varies and this theoretical contribution has important implications for improving service quality and future research on service quality.