Defining student participation and empowerment in higher education

Customer participation has been studied for decades; however, it gained a postmodern perspective around the year 2000. Customers have become co-creators of personalized experiences, moving from the audience to the stage. In the educational context, students must take responsibility for their learning process and participate in the production of the service. This changing is providing opportunities and challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs) to redefine their relationship with stakeholders, especially with students. This study is based on the service dominant logic (SDL) perspective because students are assumed to take the role of co-creators of knowledge in the educational setting. The research uses adapted frameworks and concepts applied in organizational, knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and also medical studies to advance the understanding of value co-creation in the HEI context. The current study addresses a lack of research in the higher education context focusing on defining students’ participation and students’ empowerment in higher education context. An empirical investigation was developed with traditional schools in Brazil. This investigation allowed the description of the constructs in the specific context. The description of student participation in HEIs context reflects the relevance of three dimensions – information sharing, personal interaction and responsible behavior. In the Brazilian context, responsible behavior is the weakest dimension in the construct, because the responsibilities are unbalanced between students and professors. The main reasons identified for this unbalanced relation were cultural issues and local regulation. Student empowerment was described as composed by four dimensions – meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice; however, one of them – choice – was identified as the weakest dimension, facing cultural and bureaucratic barriers for implementation in the Brazilian educational context. Moreover, interviewees spontaneously cited the idea of trust in the faculty as an important antecedent of student participation that must be considered when analyzing student participation and empowerment mechanisms. An additional contribution was the proposal of a theory-based framework for understanding the service dominant logic perspective in the HEI context, in which student participation and student empowerment were explored as mechanisms leading to positive student behavior toward institution.

As práticas que sustentam o trabalho colaborativo em espaços de coworking e o papel das tecnologias de informação e comunicação: estudo de caso da Goma

A presente pesquisa teve como objetivo explorar o papel das tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TIC) em espaços de coworking. Para tanto, adotou-se como foco central a investigação das práticas de trabalho colaborativo, como uma das manifestações deste tipo de ambiente. Como coworking entende-se o fenômeno social que reúne profissionais independentes e aqueles com local de trabalho flexível que trabalham melhor em conjunto do que sozinhos, definição sustentada pela própria comunidade, como se demonstra neste trabalho. Espaços de coworking, de acordo com o que estabeleceram, são ambientes relacionados com construção de comunidade e sustentabilidade, nos quais os participantes concordam em defender os valores estabelecidos pelos fundadores do movimento, bem como interagir e compartilhar uns com os outros. A literatura sobre o tema, sobretudo no campo de Sistemas de Informação (SI), é ainda incipiente e expõe um tema de estudo ainda em construção. Quando o termo coworking surgiu, no fim dos anos 1990, ainda designava uma nova forma de realizar o trabalho, com o apoio das TIC dentro das organizações tradicionais. Os estudos realizados em campo acusam um amadurecimento desse conceito, que se distingue entre uma nova forma de realizar o trabalho, a partir do co-working - mais ligada à prática da colaboração em um ambiente de trabalho tradicional -, e um novo modelo de trabalho, com a emergência dos espaços de coworking. O presente trabalho busca contribuir com esse novo campo de estudo, desenvolvendo uma pesquisa qualitativa de caráter exploratório com um estudo de caso realizado na Goma, que se identifica como uma associação de empreendedores. Os dados encontrados em campo - a partir dos métodos da observação, entrevista semiestruturada e análise documental - expuseram um espaço em que as práticas de trabalho colaborativo ultrapassam o âmbito empresarial. Ao ser um espaço cogerido pelos seus membros, os quais são, todos, donos da associação, eles a transformam em um ambiente dinâmico de cocriação e aprendizado. Nesse espaço, que também é um coworking, as TIC apresentam-se como recursos estruturantes que ajudam tanto na organização do grupo quanto na realização dos seus trabalhos em conjunto.

The art of being together: a social constructionist perspective on dialogic methods in the organizational context

The purpose of this project is to understand, under a social constructionist approach, what are the meanings that external facilitators and organizational members (sponsors) working with dialogic methods place on themselves and their work. Dialogic methods, with the objective of engaging groups in flows of conversations to envisage and co-create their own future, are growing fast within organizations as a means to achieve collective change. Sharing constructionist ideas about the possibility of multiple realities and language as constitutive of such realities, dialogue has turned into a promising way for transformation, especially in a macro context of constant change and increasing complexity, where traditional structures, relationships and forms of work are questioned. Research on the topic has mostly focused on specific methods or applications, with few attempts to study it in a broader sense. Also, despite the fact that dialogic methods work on the assumption that realities are socially constructed, few studies approach the topic from a social constructionist perspective, as a research methodology per se. Thus, while most existing research aims at explaining whether or how particular methods meet particular results, my intention is to explore the meanings sustaining these new forms of organizational practice. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 25 people working with dialogic methods: 11 facilitators and 14 sponsors, from 8 different organizations in Brazil. Firstly, the research findings indicate several contextual elements that seem to sustain the choices for dialogic methods. Within this context, there does not seem to be a clear or specific demand for dialogic methods, but a set of different motivations, objectives and focuses, bringing about several contrasts in the way participants name, describe and explain their experiences with such methods, including tensions on power relations, knowledge creation, identity and communication. Secondly, some central ideas or images were identified within such contrasts, pointing at both directions: dialogic methods as opportunities for the creation of new organizational realities (with images of a ‘door’ or a ‘flow’, for instance, which suggest that dialogic methods may open up the access to other perspectives and the creation of new realities); and dialogic methods as new instrumental mechanisms that seem to reproduce the traditional and non-dialogical forms of work and relationship. The individualistic tradition and its tendency for rational schematism - pointed out by social constructionist scholars as strong traditions in our Western Culture - could be observed in some participants’ accounts with the image of dialogic methods as a ‘gym’, for instance, in which dialogical – and idealized –‘abilities’ could be taught and trained, turning dialogue into a tool, rather than a means for transformation. As a conclusion, I discuss what the implications of such taken-for-granted assumptions may be, and offer some insights into dialogue (and dialogic methods) as ‘the art of being together’.