Michal Izak

Learning from a fool: searching for the 'unmanaged' context for radical learning

Drawing on the existing theorizing of organizational learning from a radical perspective, this article attempts to problematize such notion of learning and position it within the existing organizational contexts informed by divergent types of rationality. The study scrutinizes these frameworks with a view to reflect on the potentiality for radical learning to occur within them. In this vein, the conceptual analysis of non-technical and non-marginal notions, namely, ‘spirituality’, ‘luck’ and ‘wisdom’, in different modes of rationality is conducted. This article demonstrates that since the conceptual inclusiveness is entailed by the specificity of sensemaking mechanisms, which these modes employ, the analysed notions can be approached as their litmus paper. The functionalist rationality types are found to be incommensurate with exigencies of the radical context for learning. In pursue of the conducive area for radical learning, the notions of unmanaged organization and the technology of foolishness provide the theoretical frame for the study, and their joint sensemaking context is discussed using examples. This unmanaged space driven by inclusive foolishness is recognized as one that enables the liminal sensemaking processes conducive for radical learning to occur.

The future of university education

This collected volume of essays offers glimpses of the future of university education. While universities consider the spirit of theoretical exchange and intellectual pursuit to be a defining trait of their identity, this book argues that this heritage is disappearing under the influence of the short-term demands of societies and markets. Universities used to be sites of dissent, civil courage and societal conscience, but have now instead become little more than pseudo-businesses, rendering them incapable of remaining critical or independent. However, with more people going to university every year, there is a strong resistance to the notion that the university as a collegial and critical institution is dead, among academics as well as the broader public. With contributions from scholars across the world, this edited collection explores the ramifications of marketization on universities, and provides glimpses of what higher education will look like in the future. It will be of great interest to teachers and students in higher education, as well as policy makers and those interested in the current and future state of higher education.

Translucent society and its non-fortuitous design: Producing and consuming reality through images

The recent inquiries into the dynamics of exchanges between social actors evoke the notions of ‘liquidity’ and ‘mcdonaldization’, while their objects are rendered distant from ‘the real’. Using the ‘popular’ examples from the nonymous (Facebook) and anonymous (YouTube) social media, the current study emphasizes the role of increasing mediation of images in the processes of ‘liquid’ societal sensemaking. Managing the relationship between reality and image is conceptualized in terms of ‘translucency’ – the capacity to make oneself explicitly visible as an ‘image consumer–creator’ while still enjoying the fantasy that reality is inherent in ones rendition. Since contingency is disabled, its associated notions: ‘luck’ and ‘serendipity’ are reconceptualized and can be employed as heuristics of translucent sensemaking expressed through its construal of ‘actor’, ‘image’, ‘performance’ and ‘success’. Finally, it is argued that the ‘translucent’ – display-only-oriented – mode of interaction is feasible to become populated by arbitrary ideological contents.

Introduction: The Future of University Education

Gazing at Raphael’s masterpiece The School of Athens, one is confronted with a range of characters epitomizing distinct branches of knowledge; you notice a spirit of theoretical exchange and intellectual pursuit imbuing the canvass. This has been a heritage universities across ages have been cherishing and considering to be a defining trait of their identity. Nowadays, such interactions are disappearing under the influence of the short-term demands of the societies and markets. The surrendering of universities to these demands turns them incapable of remaining critical or independent. Universities used to be sites of dissent, civil courage and societal conscience but have now instead become pseudo-businesses. And yet, there is a strong resistance to the notion that the university as a collegial and critical institution is dead, among academics as well as broader public. This book is a result of such conversations taking place in different places and among different people, going well beyond stating the facts or providing ready-made recipes. We hope it will generate momentum for further discussion on the future of university education, and, potentially, will become a small contribution towards change.

Nothing left to learn: Translation and the Groundhog Day of bureaucracy:

Beyond the existing theorizing of translation as a creative disruption in both occupational and semantic terms, this study explores it critically in the experiential framework of professional translators and as a meaning-making process. Acknowledging the role of translation in creating dialogic and radical climates for learning, the article proposes to explore the other side of this relationship by studying how the limiting of space for translation delimits the possibilities for meaning-creation, thus precluding dialogue. In addition to this general point, it ponders the specific aporia of organizationally embedded adversity of translation in the occupational context (apparently) devoted to semantic labour, namely that of translator’s work. It demonstrates that the rigidity of meaning-making and the inexorableness of partaking in the uncanny déjà vu are the reflections of specific organizational (bureaucratic) frame and posits that they may be used as experiential and semantic heuristics for better understanding learning and non-learning in organizations.