Search results

The paper argues that the diatextual analysis could be considered a psycho-cultural path of critical discourse analysis because it stresses the role of hermeneutical procedures in catching the inter-subjective nature of meanings. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these theoretical speculations in light with some empirical evidences coming from a discursive study exploring the construction of organizational identity through socialization practices.

Two focus group discussions were conducted, respectively, with retired workers and young workers employed in the same working organization to investigate how workers discursively shape their sense of belonging to the organization. Narratives of past and present membership were analyzed adopting the diatextual perspective, which was precious in tracking down the discursive traces of subjectivity, modality and argumentation emerging from their discourses.

Diatextual analysis was a precious tool to explore organizational identity through the different rhetoric that older and young workers used to make sense of it: “enchantment” vs “disenchantment.”

The study was a case study. It involved few people and results cannot be generalized, but the main aim of the paper was to support qualitative methodology.

The implication of the study are precious to design formal socialization and human resource management practices better attuned with the need of workers.

The social implications are connected with a wider revision of the organizational policies in terms of HRM.

The value of this paper is the discursive diatextual approach in organizational research.

With the purpose of promoting cross-field dialogue, this paper aims to review workplace learning (WPL) and human resource (HR) literature. The authors endeavour a conceptual examination and discussion of the bridges that link both research fields in relation to learning, in an effort to establish an integrated understanding of learning in workplaces.

This paper uses a scoping review focused on how learning is approached in WPL and HR studies. An analysis of the selected literature reveals fundamental themes and dimensions that further our understanding of learning in the context of work.

Overall, there are three learning dimensions where WPL and HR conceptually interrelate, namely, skills, incentives and work design. The scoping review also shows that HR is output-oriented and looks to learning as capital for enterprises, especially in light of enterprise performance for competence development. WPL centres more upon socio-cultural and practice-based configurations and the individual. It encompasses the human dimension of learning as something enriching the whole of life, including work life.

This paper contributes with a unique inquiry into the interrelations between WPL and HR approaches to learning, highlighting the complementarity between WPL theoretical features and HR practices. At the core of our findings is that WPL becomes analytically visible through how HR learning strategies are designed and deployed in the forms of skill development, incentive structures and work design, referring to both workplace structure and cultural features.

The current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies.

Project managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis.

Results showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed.

The originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career.

This paper describes a model of “Learning to care” derived from a study exploring how care workers in care homes learn to care for people living with dementia. The “Learning to care” model is primarily informal in nature in which influences such as formalised training and organisational culture impact care outcomes indirectly rather than directly.

This study used a focused, critical ethnographic approach in two care homes in England resulting in 63 h of observation of care of people living with advanced dementia, 15 semi-structured interviews and 90 in-situ ethnographic interviews with care staff.

The findings reveal a three-level model of learning to care. At the level of day-to-day interactions is a mechanism for learning that is wholly informal and follows the maxim “What Works is What Matters”. Workers draw on resources and information within this process derived from their personal experiences, resident influences and care home cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge is created through a worker’s interactions with colleagues and the training they receive, meaning that these organisational level influences affect care practice only indirectly via the “What Works is What Matters” mechanism.

This study makes an original contribution by explaining the nature of day-to-day informal learning processes as experienced by care workers and those living with dementia in care homes. In particular, it illuminates the specific mechanisms by which organisational culture has an effect on care practice and the limitations of formal training in influencing such practice.