Laboratories of agency

Abstract

Something happens when management programmes move “into” the workplace of their participants. According to recent observations, such commissioned programmes are characterized by a more dedicated participation and transfer than open courses. This article interprets the mechanisms that can account for the observed pattern. One interpretation focuses on the realization of managerial regimes and forms of subjectivation. Another interpretation looks for the unleashing of new and multiple forms of agency. These two interpretations are mediated in the understanding of commissioned programmes as an institutionally contradictory context, where contradictions present both breakdowns and openings for agency. The article suggests that this dialectical movement must be followed in the further development and testing of the initial hypothesis. Implications for both further research and teaching practice are discussed.

Keywords

agency institutional contradictions management programmes paradox transfer

Introduction

In a culture of austerity, management programmes become more focused on organizational goals. Briggs and Raine (2013) observe a significant decrease in financial sponsorship of organizational employees on open access postgraduate programmes. On the other hand, the interest in commissioned in house programmes is rising. Programmes seem to be investments in the development of the organization, in long-term succession and raising the next generation of managers in house. Education is not just an adventure of the individual, but also a journey for the organization – it is use of scarce resources in the service of collective targets.

Facing this development, Briggs and Raine (2013) observe yet another and even more interesting pattern: Commissioned programmes are characterized by 1) stronger mechanisms of selection and admission, 2) higher discipline and work ethics and 3) a deeper sense of commitment to transfer learning to the practice in the organization. Teaching is 4) conducted in a climate that combines competition and collaboration in a particular way. As a result, commissioned programmes demonstrate overall higher levels of grades and keener application of acquired knowledge and skills to the workplace.

This hypothesis still needs to be tested in a wider context. This article does not take up this task. Rather it attempts to prepare the ground by exploring the causal assumptions of the hypothesis. What kinds of mechanisms are at play? How do they appear as both constraints and resources in a learning context? And how does it involve boundary setting between the classroom and the host organization? A practical implication is to look into how reflections on these conditions can be a resource in the teaching situation.

Exploring these questions, different approaches could be mobilized. Commissioned programmes are apparently marked by a higher discipline, and this could be seen as the breakthrough of a managerial regime reconstituting skills, learning and professional identities as manageable objects within the context of the organization. We could ask how such regimes manifest themselves in different approaches to knowledge and knowledge production, and how these processes influence professional identity (Smith and O’Leary, 2013). On the other hand, we could understand commissioned courses as hybrid contexts that allow participants to explore boundaries and passages and to develop the kind of cross-sectorial agency and adaptivity that are called for by e.g. Bennington and Harltley (2009, 2011) and Pedersen and Tangkjaer (2013). This article will, indeed, acknowledge discipline and power as constituent moments of the learning environments, but it will explore them as much too ambiguous and conflictual phenomena to be captured by the singular notion of “the dominant neo-liberal form of governance” (Pedersen and Tangkjaer, 2013) or by ascribing agential powers to “NPM” and “managerialism” (Smith and O’Leary, 2013).

This attracts attention to the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between “the class room” (space of teaching) and the “daily practice” of the participants (space of practice). Commissioned courses brings these contexts “closer together” – or they even bring teaching “into” the work place. This could be understood as a matter of transfer (Salomon and Perkins, 1989). By establishing the programme within the organization, we facilitate (high or low) roads for transfer – that is, the use of knowledge across contexts. The metaphor of transfer applies a certain spatial structuring of learning and practice as distinct contexts, between which a distance must be overcome (by hugging or bridging – according to Solomon and Perkins, 1989). This article will point to commissioned courses making these spatial arrangements more ambiguous. Actually, the very boundary between academia and practice is being constantly renegotiated within the learning context, and this can be material of the very learning process itself. This enables a certain agency and reflexivity that might account for the learning opportunities and commitments that arise in these programmes.

In sum, the contribution of this article is to qualify sensitivity to commissioned programmes as arenas of renegotiating very fluid and ambiguous boundaries between academic teaching and the practice of the work place. The guiding concepts for this endeavour will be institutional contradictions, paradoxes and transformative agency (Haapasaari et al., 2014; Seo and Creed, 2002; Smith and Lewis, 2011). Commissioned programmes are understood as constituting contradictory institutional contexts that enable the transformative agency of participants.

The next section discusses the approaches to diagnosing the disciplining aspects of commissioned programmes – emphasizing managerial regimes and agential opportunities. The article then considers the exploration of the hybrid and contradictory nature of this kind of learning environment. This is illustrated by a case story. The implications of further research are then discussed. Finally, there follows discussion how contradictions can be both constraints and resources in cultivating agency and reflexivity through teaching practice.

Diagnosing the phenomenon of commissioned programmes: Embeddedness versus autonomy

The climate of financial austerity is assumed to favour a more focused and disciplined use of management development programmes. From this point of departure, Briggs and Raine (2013) present a quite linear causal reasoning: Austerity conditions a preference for in-house programmes with 1) stronger selection mechanisms, 2) higher work ethics, 3) a deeper sense of commitment to transfer and 4) a certain combination of competitiveness and collaboration. The result is a higher level of performance measured both in the level of grades and the application of obtained skills in the workplace.

What kind of mechanism could be at work in this case? How does austerity realize effects in participants’ attitudes to learning and transfer? Smith and O’Leary (2013) analyse how managerial cultures influence learning environments in the case of Further Education in the UK. They point to the influence of managerial positivism as an ideological orientation, which values objectives and results that can be quantified and made meaningful in a marketized public sector. Data become decontextualized and quantified and create an impression of quantitative wholeness by marginalizing local qualities and perspectives. In Foucauldian terms, managerial “regimes of truth” are put to work establishing an “apparatus of control”. Smith and O’Leary (2013) reveal how this ideology manifests itself in participants’ (student teachers’) attitudes to their practice and profession. As one way, the intensified speed of launching educational reforms makes it necessary for participants to orient and legitimize themselves according to shifting political priorities even though this may neglect the needs of the local community of learners. Furthermore, funding is being tightly coupled with measurable outputs, and having worked under these conditions for many years, consciousness becomes economized. Finally, participants (student teachers) are themselves evaluating the market currency of their qualifications and, thereby, forming their professional identities in the image of managerialism.

This, indeed, defines a possible context for exploring the causal assumption by Briggs and Raine (2013). In their analysis, management development in a stricter sense becomes an investment. Research could further investigate what kind of calculus lies behind these investments – how are objectives, results and progression made into manageable objects within the host organization, and how they are linked to shifting strategic priorities and structural changes? From the perspective of the participants, their learning activities are framed by certain expectations, and their future position in the organization might depend on their compliance. In this way, “the class room” becomes a panopticon of the host organization – a structured space for the enactment and exhibitions of performances. With Smith and O’Leary (2013), we could share a research agenda of demonstrating these mechanisms of power and of giving a voice to marginalized actors and unseen perspectives.

Any attempt to make sense of Briggs and Raine’s observations could hardly succeed without recognizing the mechanisms of power mentioned. What seems problematic is the identification of an univocal regime that “is manifested in the FE sector” and “works on the individual to produce particular ways of being and knowing” (Smith and O’Leary, 2013: 262). Smith and O’Leary describe NPM and managerialism as if it is something definite that can exercise influence on (or through) the participants. The analysis thereby becomes less sensitive towards what could be the more ambiguous and contradictory aspects of the institutional context. Performance systems are not univocal. Under the conditions of scarcity, there can be many claims to define the “focus” needed in order to prioritize. These are competing claims to speak on behalf of the “whole”, of the general organizational interest – and, in this case, to define what kind of management should be nurtured through the commissioned programmes. It is in the core of management to raise the claim for legitimate agency by speaking on behalf of the “whole”. A basic managerial paradox is that this can only be done from particular and local positions (Griffin, 2002; Stacey, 2007). Defining the “whole” is a struggle for recognition in a Hegelian sense where particular actors are establishing positions for agency and reflexivity by articulating normative contexts (Honneth, 1992; Pippin, 2008).

In in-house programmes, the organizational struggle for recognition moves into the teaching context in a much stronger sense than in open access courses. Teaching an open access course, you have participants from many different organizations – bringing in stories from various contexts. In the in house programmes, the daily “combatants” are sitting right in front of you. Courses are part of the internal processes of inclusion and exclusion, of authorizing and de-authorizing organizational agency. Selection mechanisms, curricula, assignments, tests and transfer mechanisms are managerial technologies mobilized. It would be very restrictive to assume a hierarchical and linear order of this struggle. Agency is local, power is distributed. Organizational power is not just being “imposed” upon the learning environment. Power is at play in the classroom in very unpredictable ways.

Following this line of reasoning, agential opportunities are highlighted. In a report to the UK School of Government, Bennington and Hartley (2009) recommend the development of leadership programmes that nurture an agency that can work across sectorial, hierarchical and organizational boundaries, and which can tackle the complex, tough and cross-cutting problems in the community. To do this, we need learning formats where participants can train, working across contexts in the public service system. This kind of agency is named adaptive leadership. Pedersen and Tangkjaer (2013) are unfolding a whole range of analytical, community-building, reflexive and performative (managinative) skills that form the normative pillars of an involving network state.

However, from which position do managers pursue this complex task of forming new wholes of public value creation? In some sense, the approach seems to assume some kind of meta position from where managers can overlook different sectors and institutions in order to balance and bridge their inherent logics. There is nothing surprising in management raising claims to act on behalf of some normative whole, but this can be done from nothing but a very local and particular position. The idea of meta governance is in this way a paradoxical figure – and as such a very productive one. Where Smith and O’Leary (2013) are in danger of assigning too much unity and agential power to the macro subject of NPM, the suggestions of Bennington and Hartley (2009) could lead to idealizing the autonomous subjectivity of the adaptive public manager. (For an analysis of this kind of polarization, see Griffin, 2002 and Stacey, 2007.)

It appears that we need to reconcile seemingly opposing aspects of the phenomenon. On the one hand, the institutional embeddedness of educational practice in existing managerial regimes, and on the other hand, the transformative agency to break out of a given frame of action and taking the initiative to transform it (Seo and Creed, 2002; Virkunnen, 2006).

Institutional contradictions and transformative agency

When we describe “the classroom” and “the workplace” as distinct contexts between which there can be more or less distance (and needs for transfer), we refer to an institutional landscape that is structured metaphorically in different domains and dimensions (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). Entering a programme, it can feel like stepping “into another room”, going through a metamorphosis from being “a manager who knows the answers” to being “a student who is insecure and searching”. Language and discourse are different, and so are roles and the structuring of interaction. Practice can seem far away. The distinctions and distances are not given, but created and maintained through myriads of routines and patterns of interaction.

In a sense, these distances and tensions can be traced back to inherent contradictions in the very processes on institutionalization. According to Berger and Luckmann (1967), institutionalization involves a double movement: Human actors externalize themselves through actions and artefacts. The meaning of these is objectified into social structures, which somehow gain a life of their own and act back to (are internalized by) the individual actors. Actors are, at the same time, embedded and autonomous. In this relationship, two sources of contradictions appear (Benson, 1977): First, the ongoing practice of actors can clash with institutional structures that form the conditions of legitimacy. What seems effective in a technical sense may not be legitimate in the institutional context. Secondly, the actors may take part in different institutional environments that uphold incompatible norms of legitimacy (see also Friedland and Alford, 1991). Referring to Benson, Seo and Creed (2002) expand the perspective to include four mechanisms of institutional contradictions:

What are functionally effective clashes with norms of institutional legitimacy.

What originally was a creative adaption to a changed environment becomes a new rigidity.

What is legitimate is defined according to competing institutional standards stemming from different contexts.

What is legitimate is negotiated in a struggle between different segments and subcultures of the organization.

Going on in our daily practice, we make choices that give priority to certain values and contexts and marginalize other. This creates tensions. According to Smith and Lewis (2011) these tensions may rise to the surface as paradoxes when the original choices are challenged and re-actualized by new pressures (scarcity, change and diversity). A paradox involves contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. Jarzabkowski et al. (2013) identify three levels of paradoxes: A macro level of organizational paradoxes, where tension arises from the co-presence of various institutional environments. A meso level of belonging paradoxes consisting of competing attachments to organizational units, groups, and values, and finally a micro level of performing paradoxes, where individual actors face opposing role expectations and performance standards. The central issue is how paradoxes in organizational structure “spill over into” individual and group identity paradoxes (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013: 246).

Studied under this perspective, commissioned management programmes constitute a paradoxical setting for learning by connecting different institutional environments – the host organization and the university. This organizational paradox “spills over into” ambivalent relations of belonging and competing performance standards.

These paradoxes can be met by different responses (Jarzabkowski, 2013; Seo et al., 2004). One is selection or suppressing. This means that the complexity is ignored and one side of the contradiction is made more or less absolute. In this case, it could be denied that there are different standards of knowledge and discourse. The objectives of the host organization could be dominant and made directly applicable to the teaching situation. An argument could be devalued if it had implications contrary to the authorized objectives of the organization. On the other hand, a commissioned programme could install an academic hegemony insisting on some idealized standards of theorizing and reflexivity – ignoring the kinds of conflicts this could create for the participants. Another strategy is separation or splitting, where the different rationales are assigned to different times and places. This would mean negotiating a boundary and some passages between what goes on in the classroom and the workplace. Participants would need to be quite aware of what context they are “in” – reading various context markers indicating whether the conversation is about developing possible perspectives and reflections or a decision is being made. This strategy could develop into integration or adjusting, where a certain balance point is being sought. Participants would be looking for what would be a “reasonable” sensitivity to the context “outside” the classroom. Participants are recognized as students. Yet we do know that they represent different hierarchical positions and sectorial interests. As a teacher, I try to move in a way that respects the organizational roles of the host while, at the same time, I insist on some norms of academic discourse (e.g. “let the best argument win”). Still another strategy could be transcendence. In the collision of contexts, a new and bridging context is emerging, e.g. a kind of network regulated by its own negotiated logic.

Andersen (2009) has analysed the practice of playing as a part of organizational development. Two ways of communicating are identified: One way is formal decisions, which transform open contingency into fixed contingency. The other is playing. Where decisions are ascribed to a subject (the decision-maker), play makes subject positions fluid and ambiguous. Play and decisions can be connected in three manners. Play can be “a break” from the humdrum of daily practice. Members go to an innovation camp to reinvent their services and ultimately themselves. The camp is a “free space” where all ideals are appreciated – the more transcending the better. Afterwards, the organizational hierarchy is re-installed. Furthermore, play could also be a more continuous process. “Next to” the formal organization, a playful parallel organization is established (e.g. networks) upholding different imaginary universes. Finally, the organization can oscillate between playing and deciding in unpredictable ways. This creates a constant insecurity about the context. Participants might find themselves invited into a playful experiment, but suddenly their doings and saying have “real” consequences. A manager suddenly “concludes” on the basis of “the experiment”. Participants are being included or excluded due to their choices in the game. In the end, it seemed that some answers could be wrong.

The oscillation between play and decision has some resemblance to what Bateson (2000) characterizes as a “double bind”. A double bind arises when two contrary messages are communicated at different contextual levels, and the participant cannot escape the situation. Whatever he does, he will be punished. In Andersen’s analysis, a double bind could consist of appealing to trust and playfulness while at the same time posing a threat. Commissioned management programmes can very well be greenhouses of double-binded communication. Participants are invited to take part in a more academic discourse at their workplace with an expressed intention to nurture a climate of reflexivity (a “free space” according to some separation strategy). Yet, it turns out that the course is a competitive arena forming positions in the future organization. As a lecturer at a military academy, I was impressed by the many questions and reflections from the participants. While being tempted to ascribe it to my stimulating teaching style, I discovered that the participation was being monitored and evaluated by the internal instructors. According to Bateson (2000), double binds result in a breakdown of meaning and logic in an ordinary sense (schizophrenia). An indicator of this could be that appeals to academic ideals of discourse lose their meaning. When I invite participants to a free discussion, they know that this means a fight for positions. When I express trust, they hear threats. In my own teaching practice, I have met participants who reacted aggressively when I used certain phrases from an appreciative-systemic rhetoric. To them, these words were infused with threats and manipulation.

Engeström (2001) and Engeström and Sannino (2011) point to double binds as the source of more expansive learning processes. Contradictions are only expressed as double binds when they are persistent and systematic. They can only be transcended by a collective transformation of the frame of action. This constitutes what they call transformative agency – that is, breaking the given frame of action and taking the initiative to create a new one (Haapasaari et al., 2014; Virkunnen, 2006). Being in the midst of institutional contradictions is a zone of construction between the past and the future (Virkunnen, 2006: 46). Agency can be defined as exactly this process to create meaningful connections between a past, a future, and a present that allows for action – which reproduces and transforms the structural setting (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Building on this, Hitlin and Elder (2007) describe different forms of agency: Pragmatic agency restores the basis of action when habits and patterned behaviour break down. Identity agency defends and maintains a certain perception of identity. Life course agency includes the extensive time work of making the life course into more than just a series of accidental occurrences. All three kinds are made possible by existential agency – that is human existence as an openness towards interpretative possibilities.

The purpose of this part of the analysis is to explore concepts that can reconcile the institutional embeddedness with the possibility of transformative agency. For this purpose, Seo and Creed (2002) suggest praxis. Institutional contradictions mobilize agents to change their institutional environments. With reference to Benson (1977), they define praxis as “the free and creative reconstruction of social arrangements on the basis of a reasoned analysis of both limits and [latent] potentials of present social forms” (Seo and Creed, 2002: 230). Using this as a starting point, we can both follow Smith and O’Leary (2013) in diagnosing the subtle forms of power that are realized when educational practice is regulated by managerial measures, and follow Bennington and Hartley (2009) in forming ideals of adaptive leadership as a distinct expression of transformative agency. The consequence is to approach commissioned programmes as a field of praxis which (a) is characterized by competing institutional contexts, and (b) in which these contradictions give rise to transformative agency.

Following the contours of agency

In this sense, commissioned programmes are laboratories of agency. They provide a paradoxical setting that provokes both breakdowns (double bind) and transformations of the given frame of action. To understand this kind of learning environment we must follow agency as a process in which positions for acting are created and recreated. To illustrate what this could mean I will bring narratives from participants in a commissioned programme conducted in a large city administration. It is a two-year leadership development programme, which is conducted by a partnership of a business school and a consulting agency. This offers the option for participants to pass exams in particular modules of a master programme at the business school. I teach in the programme myself and have asked two participants (P1 & P2) and the programme manager from the consulting agency (PM) to tell stories about the interplay between the course and the workplace (individual narrative interviews).

A design for integration

After the programme had been running for some years, PM was put in charge in order to strengthen its relevance and transfer value for the host organization. As he describes it, the issue was:

… it is super fine that these leaders have a personal development, that they obtain skills, and that they have learned some theories, but how can the organization sense some impact during the two years? Can we accentuate some connections to the creation of results by the leaders during the programme – and not only make sure that they are well equipped at the end? And then they get a new job [laughs].

His task was to “build a bridge” between academic themes that could be “huge, abstract, and exciting” and “what is useful?” (measured in terms of e.g. increased productivity, lower absenteeism and more innovative approaches). The idea was that the participants should become a kind of “consultants” or innovative agents during their study. The main distinction is between “during” and “at the end”: Study is not an intermezzo or a break from practical engagement. Study is a practical engagement.

This integration between academia and practice was mediated by a cluster of mechanisms:

A development contract between participant and his/her superior was introduced. The headlines of the contract were seen as items in an assignment on personal development that participants could write in order to pass an exam in the master programme.

The objectives and the progression of the participant were discussed at three career conversations between the participant, the superior and a consultant from the programme.

By means of surveys among participants, cases were picked out to be used in the course.

Participants were organized in network groups offering each other discussions and feedback.

Participants visited each other’s workplace (internships).

Top management of the host organization offered innovative challenges to be taken up in student projects.

The programme looked for teachers with practical managerial experience, e.g. with a hybrid, practical and scholarly background.

PM points to some demarcations between the programme and the organization. The purpose of the programme was to enable “consciousness” and “awareness of biases” and thereby qualify the practice of the leaders – not “tell them what to do”. However, this integrative structuring of the relationship between programme and host organization was challenged. I will emphasize some critical passage points between the two contexts, as they are experienced.

From competition to collaboration – a romance with cracks

Briggs and Raine (2013) point to a particular mixture of competition and collaboration as a feature of the learning environment in commissioned programmes. In this case, actors were very much aware of the challenge of how to overcome competitive relationships. Participants come from different sectors and branches of the administration. Different cultures and interests are ascribed to the organizational communities. All participants are appointed as “leadership talents” and they will be competing on promotions. At the same time, the idea of the programme is to develop leadership as a common and collaborative practice binding the organization together. In the stories, this dilemma is transformed by a temporal separation – a competitive relation caused by organizational divisions (before) that turns into a collaborative relation caused by personal intimacy and reflexivity (after):

In the beginning, they watch each other [.] They are slightly observant – “Who are you? Where do you come from?” They measure each other a bit. They are part of the same organization. They are all talents. And, in fact, some of them are competitors for the same positions. Maybe not today, but later. So somehow it’s a competitive situation – and “we just need to take notice and show off”. And then, during the first semester, when they get closer to each other […] something happens. […] In the beginning they are very concerned about what they do, which department they come from, what their professions are. And after a couple of sessions, this turns into: I am who I am – for better or worse. (PM)

This experience is recognized by the two participants: They are surprised how much they had in common. They “built bridges of understanding” and “developed a network” that makes the daily collaboration run much more smoothly – even when they include “everyone’s scapegoat – Internal Services” (P1). According to P2, “the turning point” was the module on personal development, where participants e.g. – facilitated by psychologists – shared personal stories and compared psychological profiles. The learning environment was personalized, that is, it shifted from being a space of representatives to a space of persons, and intimate relations were seen to somehow outweigh organizational conflicts of interest.

An effect of this was that the frame of dialogue and learning became experiential and personal. For P1, this led to a kind of under-emphasis of theory:

Where I actually think things crash a bit is that the frame of experience becomes the one that counts in the group discussions […] It does not seem very heavy on lectures or heavy on theory but more heavy on practice […] Even though we have a lecture, as soon as you sit with your network group it is experience that speaks …

This is contrasted with the academic standards they meet when they sign up for exams at the business school: “And then something happens when you enter the examinations. Then there are wholly different requirements.” P2 contrasts the programme with a traditional master’s programme.

[To complete a master study] that’s really fine, but it reminds me of the university. What is especially valuable in this programme is that it’s a stepping-stone. It’s announced as a stepping-stone – you’re in a leadership loop. At the same time, there are other leaders that you can spar with. […] I think it gives some vision: Well, it’s there I’m going! My fully personal development process.

Both agree that you can slip through the programme without reading the course literature. They chose to sign up for exams because this would make it imperative to read.

As these narrative connections are made, the transition from competition to collaboration was completed by personalizing the learning environment. Not all finished that journey, it is mentioned. Some were stuck in the competitive state, and you still had to be somewhat observant. But for those who entered the more personalized relationships, a new paradox was brought to the surface – that of a split (or a “crash”) between the intimate sphere of personal experience and academic requirements.

The development contracts and career conversation – “a mishmash”?

This paradox was brought to a new level by the idea of contracts and career conversations. To P1: this was a highly “strange concept”. First, it felt awkward to discuss long term career plans with one’s superior (“I never work with time horizons 5 years ahead”, “you can be a manager here and only see your superior for two hours once a month”, “my boss was like: I don’t know what to do with this”, “there’s a difference between just talking about it nice and easily and then this: You must move on in your career, 70 percent of the participants move on!”). What really made it crash was the idea that the pre-formed headlines of the contract should be a sort of disposition for the academic assignment:

In any case, it seems like a mishmash of demands when your boss is involved in what becomes your assignment – to me, this is a bit too much of a mishmash of demands. It would be easier if we agreed that in the dialogue with my superior it’s this … there I would like to set an agenda. But that a career dialogue should turn into an academic assignment, that feels difficult. And I don’t know if I’m wrong here … to me this was very difficult. I would have liked to know what was tied together and where I had the right to detach it. This was not clear.

What she asks for is the “right to detach” – or to control the passage point between her professional relation to her superior and what she wrote in her assignment. On the other hand, P2 was concerned about the lack of integration. The concept promised a connection between your study and your career opportunities. But could the organization keep this promise? As soon as someone was appointed a “leadership talent”, it was sometimes forgotten by the executives:

When you send people to this programme you need – in the organization – to be very much aware to use it to promote careers, and not just to use it as a site where you place someone that you really want to keep but have no leadership positions for. I think that you should really use it strategically. And there’s always a danger here. You start it as career development but forget it in the course of time.

Here, the problem is not that the programme is tied to a career development. The problem is that the ties loosen. The ideal of integration between programme and workplace is not questioned. Instead, another crack opens – that between what is promised (integration) and what is done (separation).

The career dialogue is a process where programme management has to navigate with care. PM sees his role in a nurturing dialogue and reflexivity. There can arise a split of loyalties between the participant and the host organization – especially when the participant is developing out of the workplace:

Sometimes we can sense that some participants start to realize: “Ok, I’m not in the right place”. The more ambitious can feel: “Ok, I want more, and my boss won’t leave me the space, or there are no positions available right now”, and then they move on. Some of these participants are quiet frank in relation to our consultants, and this is a bit of a balance as regards loyalty – between the organization and the participant, which is the one we’re immediately trying to help. My experience is that we generally […] have an honest focus on the participant and the development of the participant, and help them to get a clear view of their situation […] This kind of conversation doesn’t take place in the presence of their superior. Typically, when the superior has left the room, we stay – and sometimes we have a very open-hearted discussion. We see it as our obligation to help them to realize their own biases, and see things that they maybe can’t see right now, help them to get a clear view – and then, the decision is up to them.

Paradoxes as levers of learning

Clearly, the programme is a paradoxical space of learning. Right now, the two participants are (together with their colleagues) going to have an assignment – a strategic challenge presented by the top management of the host organization. PM is a bit worried about these kinds of assignments. There can be a clash when the ideals of innovative problem solving meet the hierarchy of the organization: “Participants have studied the theories, they’re ambitious. Then they come back and complain a bit: “We can’t get access. The CEO says that we have to go through him or her. We can’t talk directly with these people. Sponsors want to know the results of what we’re going to test before we’ve tested it.” Innovative prototyping meets a hierarchy with an urge for control.

At the same time, PM feels that

… it’s exactly there the big learning is. If you’re in a business school and study agility and design thinking and the lot – and everything is possible – and you can think out iterative processes – and everything! And then you go back to your organization and discover that things don’t work that way. But now, in our programme, the two worlds meet. You’re trying to apply these theories and you go back and realize: My god, I didn’t know how stuck we were in these old attitudes. We don’t solve the problem, but we bring to the surface this schism – or gap, if you want – between the reality of theory and the reality of practice. This is frustrating but also a huge learning […] The last one to see the water is the fish.

The programme provides a ground for paradoxical learning processes that allow for different individual strategies. The design claims to mediate integration, but P1 feels caught in the mishmash between academia and career development and struggles to establish some boundaries and control of passage points. Quiet differently, P2 uses the integrative mechanisms more strategically to commit top management to a development of organization and careers. In the dramaturgy of a hero story, they’re struggling their way to become master of two worlds (Campbell, 2008).

Implications for research

As mentioned, Briggs and Raine (2013) outline the following hypothesis: Austerity conditions mean a preference for in-house programmes with 1) stronger selection mechanisms, 2) higher work ethics, 3) a deeper sense of commitment to transfer, and 4) a certain combination of competitiveness and collaboration.

Now, we could develop it in different ways. We could emphasize the disciplining aspect in commissioned programmes which are realized by integrating teaching into the power structure of the host organization (using a selection or an integration strategy, according to Seo et al., 2004). In the case story, we could see the programme as disciplining the academic learning of participants by development contracts and career dialogue (especially the tie between the contract and the academic assignment). With this emphasis, the focus of research could be how managerial objective and priorities are articulated and interpreted in forming the learning environment. To what extent is the managerial agenda understood as clear and consistent? How are local translations being made, and what rationales and contexts are mobilized in these processes of translation? To what processes of inclusion and exclusion does this give rise? What strategies do participants use? And what is it exactly that the mixture of competitive and collaborative behaviour does to the possibilities of inclusion and exclusion?

The opposite interpretation would emphasize the empowering aspect of the programmes. Here we can see commissioned programmes as arenas for mobilizing transformative agency (through a separation or transcendence strategy). In the case story, we could see the programme as a breeding ground for adaptive leaders (masters of two worlds) transcending institutional barriers. The institutional contradictions challenge the experience of the organization as a stable and reified structure. Within the frame of the programmes, new construction zones appear where agents reflect on paradoxes and dilemmas of the existing practices and structures. New narratives might appear to build the bridge from the past to the future. The research focus would scan the field for cracks and openings that appear as manifestations of institutional contradictions. Each opening is an occasion of transformative agency (pragmatically and narratively). What are the contradictions and openings in the specific situation? What kind of agency is at play – and what are their manifestations (Haapasaari et al., 2014)? What kind of constructive processes (praxis) unfold?

Both interpretations could make sense of Raine and Brigg’s observation. Both could account for the fact that education becomes more consequential for the participants when it is integrated in the host organization. In the same way, both would need to analyse how the structuring of the relation between teaching context and the work context come about. Actually, this structuring is what mediates how the structural embeddedness enables certain agential strategies. Selection, separation, integration and transcendence represent different configurations of this relationship.

This work of structuring the relationship between teaching and work seems to dance on the edge between breakdown of agency and transformation of agency. The relation can be expressed in double-bounded messages where participants cannot find any meaningful positions for action. And the same time, these breakdowns are openings for restoring agency on new premises. This is a dialectical movement of discipline and empowerment. To study the constituent moments of this dialectic means looking for how contradictions appear as both an overwhelming complexity (causing apathy, defensive responses, stress, loss of meaning and means of expression, etc.) and as calls to break existing frames of actions (letting go, seeing opportunities, taking responsibility, brave acts, etc.).

The insight into the processes could be qualified by quantitative as well as qualitative methods:

First, further quantitative studies could test if commissioned programmes are characterized by a higher level of discipline, commitment to transfer, and a certain combination of competitive and collaborative attitudes, than open courses. The impact of political and cultural characteristics must be mapped – such as levels of centralization, conflicts, institutional and professional heterogeneity, etc. Characteristics of the educational provider would also be relevant – e.g. experience and seniority of the teaching staff, content driven or process driven teaching styles, and flexibility of curricula.

Parallel to this, qualitative studies can track the actual mechanisms by which the causal regularity is constituted in the organizational processes of inclusion and exclusion. A useful strategy would be conducting commissioned programmes as a kind of collaborative research, engaging participants in an exploration of institutional contradictions and agential possibilities. Participants can be mobilized as co-researchers looking into contradictory contexts and their meaning in daily practice as well as in the teaching context. Haapasaari et al. (2014) and Engeström et al. (2014) present a methodology of change laboratories, where qualitative action research is supported by quantitative measurements.

Combining both approaches could provide a very relevant insight into the creation of productive learning environments.

Implications for teaching

As for the practice of teaching, the presence of conflicts can be important resources in the learning environment. In the development of management programmes, there is an expressed demand for learning formats that allow participants to be active and adaptive in integrating different logics and to work across the boundaries of different organizational contexts (Bennington and Hartley 2009, 2011; Helth, 2014; Pedersen and Tangkjær 2013). The commissioned course can be a “micro-cosmos” or a workshop for developing this competence. This is only possible to the extent to which teachers can promote reflexivity of what is going on – and of the paradoxes and strategies that are at play in the very learning process. Here the very boundary between “training” a set of skills and “performing in a live context” is blurred. The classroom becomes a reflection of what is going on in the organizational context, and at the same time, it is what is going on in the organizational context.

This means making the contradictory institutional contexts of the learning environment into the very material of the learning processes. Into the centre stage step actual and ongoing processes of inclusion and exclusion. In this situation, it would be highly unethical to pretend that what happens in the classroom cannot have consequences outside. It is necessary to renounce the innocence of the classroom and embrace the complexity of real organizational change. Still, as a teacher, your task is to protect a certain academic integrity – a form of discourse that is different from the one going on in daily practice. It would be much too simple and hegemonic to understand this difference in terms of a hierarchy of reflexivity – assuming the daily practice to be “less” reflexive than academic discourse. Practice can be highly reflexive (and academic discourse can be very routinized), but the difference in norms creates a breach – a contradiction of contexts – that allows for new forms of agency.

An illustration of this is the use of dilemma stories and dilemma workshops which are used in the MPA programme at CBS. Participants are forming stories of what they experience as dilemmas in their work right now. These stories penetrate into intricate institutional contradictions within the workplace as well as in the personal life of the narrator. The forming of the plot of the story can be seen as an attempt to create some kind of coherence (“discordant concordance” according to Ricoeur, 1988) that allows for meaningful action.

The stories are explored collectively by participants (forming partnerships or larger communities). Theoretical perspectives of the programmes are used reflexively to enlighten openings for transformative agency. Within the groups, participants agree to try out “moderately brave acts” in their “real” daily practice. These acts explore alternative interpretations and variations of plots. Afterwards, they tell stories of what happened being moderately brave – and what response it provoked. I describe this as a narrative-actionist approach to teaching management in paradox-laden contexts (inspired by White, 1991). This bears family resemblance to a lot of attempts to develop learning formats that are more reflexive and actionist at the same time (Cunliffe 2004; Cunliffe and Jun 2005; Kempster and Stewart 2010).

Another learning format is the Change Laboratory presented by Engeström et al. (2014), where the stakeholders of a complex problem are convened to a series of sessions developing an understanding of the problems and its different solutions. By the formative interventions of the facilitators, institutional contradictions are transformed: First, a systemic contradiction is manifested as a personally experienced conflict of motives. Next, an auxiliary stimulus is introduced (e.g. a theoretical model) which helps to understand the conflict and its systemic basis. Finally, the contradiction is moving towards some kind of transformation by experimenting with models and tools. In this context, transformative agency consists in the expansive transition from individual to a collective initiative to change the frame of action.

Comparing the two approaches, the first is describing a poetic transformation using the dramatic structure of contradictions and the externalization of conflicts in the narrative form, and the second is structuring a resolution of a conflict by rational discourse mediated by the introduction of models and tools. Actually, both accounts could be speaking of the same basic process – with the difference that one uses a poetic language, the other a more rational language. The two modes of expression are intertwined. No rational practice of problem solving could exist without the scene being set by a narrative introducing the characters and the intrigue.

To sum up, institutional contradictions can be productive for learning environments of managers. They consist of the on-going renegotiation of boundaries and positions for agency and reflexivity. Bringing power into play allows us to be working live with the very stuff organizations are made of. This is happening both in open access and in house courses (as the MPA-example indicates). But in in house courses it radically questions the boundary between academia and the host-organization, and it creates a paradoxical context learning that very loudly calls reflexivity. Studying and developing these mechanisms seems a very promising way to allow managers to nurture the kind of reflexivity, adaptivity and authenticity so much needed in the public sector.

Conclusion

Recent observations indicate that commissioned management programmes are characterized by a higher level of dedicated participation, commitment to transfer, and a certain combination of competitive and collaborative attitudes. This article has explored this as a hypothesis that needs to be prepared for further testing. Interpretations of the hypothesis can oscillate between the disciplining and empowering aspects of the way commissioned programmes link the teaching context to the daily practice of the workplace. To mediate these two aspects, this article suggests using the concepts of institutional contradiction and transformative agency – developed in institutional theory (Seo and Creed, 2002) as well as in activity theory (e.g. Engeström et al., 2014). One line of research could be to test if the hypothesis holds across different contexts. Another line of research is to look into the dialectical process of contradiction and agency using a more collaborative and qualitative approach. For teaching, the contradictory context of commissioned programmes can be a resource for cultivating transformative learning processes. Yet it can be risky for the participants and it places a high ethical responsibility on the shoulders of the teacher. The teaching process must be highly reflexive and caring – but to facilitate reflexivity and care is the responsibility of a teacher in any case.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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