Conference Agenda

How can we engage in societal changes based on new and unfamiliar rationalities e.g. large politically initiated reforms? How can we cope with complexity and develop sustainable organisations connecting past and future? These are but two questions relevant when discussing the future development of organisations.

The increasing complexity of everyday organisational practice may explain why organisational and workplace learning research has recently shown growing interest in pragmatist perspectives, theories, and concepts. (Brandi & Elkjaer, 2024; Simpson & den Hond, 2021; Thomassen, 2024). One foundational dimension of John Dewey’s philosophy that remains curiously underdeveloped is the concept of habit. While organisational learning scholars increasingly draw on notions such as inquiry, experience, and situated actions, habits are often treated implicitly as inert routines or obstacles to change rather than as constitutive elements of learning itself (Cohen, 2007; Dionysiou, 2021). This paper argues that Dewey’s understanding of habit represents a forgotten yet crucial dimension in a pragmatist approach to organisational learning.

In dominant approaches to organisational learning, habits are frequently framed as obstacles to learning or as patterns to be disrupted (Deken et al., 2016; Dionysiou, 2021; Feldman et al., 2021; Turner & Rindova, 2012). From a Deweyan pragmatist perspective, however, habits are not mindless repetitions but intelligent, embodied, and affectively charged dispositions for action, continuously shaped through experience (Dewey, 1922/1988; Dewey, 1938/1986). Habits can be defined as socially acquired dispositions for action that integrate cognition, emotion, and embodied experience, enabling coordinated practice while remaining open to modification through inquiry when habitual action encounters resistance or uncertainty (Dewey, 1922/1988). As such, they constitute the primary medium through which continuity and learning in organisational life are enacted.

Drawing on Dewey’s pragmatist theory of action, this paper develops a conceptual argument that places habit at the centre of organisational learning processes. Dewey conceptualised learning as emerging from the dynamic interplay between habit, inquiry, and experience. (Dewey, 1938/1986). Habit provides stability and orientation in everyday action, while inquiry is triggered when indeterminate situations disrupt habitual conduct. Organisational learning, from this perspective, is not primarily a cognitive or procedural process, but an embodied and experiential one, unfolding through the gradual transformation of habits in practice. Learning is thus inseparable from emotion, temporality, and lived experience in the workplace (Elkjaer, 2022; Lorino, 2018).

The paper further suggests that the neglect of habit limits current understandings of organisational learning, exemplified in this paper by a case study in the public sector and welfare contexts characterised by complex and dynamic professional practices and reform pressure. Drawing illustratively on reform processes in the elder care sector, the paper highlights how organisational learning initiatives in the elder care sector often struggle because they insufficiently engage with the habitual dimensions of professional practice through which learning is enacted, sustained, and valued. Reforms that focus predominantly on formal standards, documentation, or new organisational models risk colliding with deeply sedimented professional habits, moral orientations, and embodied ways of acting that cannot simply be transformed through policy mandates or training programmes.

By foregrounding habit as an analytical lens, the paper makes three contributions to organisational education and workplace learning research. First, it advances a non-dualistic account of organisational learning that integrates cognition, emotion, and action, thereby challenging behaviourist and purely cognitive models of learning in organisations. Second, it extends pragmatist approaches to organisational learning by moving beyond inquiry and reflection to emphasise the stabilising and generative role of habit in sustaining practice over time. Third, it reconceptualises organisational learning as a process of habitual reconfiguration rather than knowledge acquisition or behavioural alignment, offering a more realistic account of how learning unfolds in practice.

Organizational knowledge and knowing have long been subjects of discussion in academic discourse. On the one hand, scholars ask what organizational knowledge means; on the other hand, particularly in knowledge management literature, it is treated as a resource in inter-organizational comparison and competition, which should be optimized and promoted (Dick & Wehner 2018). In my doctoral research, I also focused on organizational knowledge, which I, following sociology of knowledge, systems theory, and praxeological approaches, do not understand as the individual possession of members but as a social practice.

The praxeological sociology of knowledge proposed by Bohnsack (2017) is based, among others, on the work of Mannheim (e.g., 1980) and emphasizes the sociality and contextual embeddedness of knowledge. Knowledge is thus dependent on social experience and changeable. Central to Mannheim is the distinction between communicative and conjunctive knowledge. Communicative knowledge is reflexive, theoretical and can be expressed in words. Conjunctive knowledge recalls Polanyi’s (2016) concept of tacit knowledge and is considered atheoretical knowledge that cannot be communicated. In this context, Mannheim introduces the concept of the conjunctive space of experience, whose members share conjunctive knowledge and intuitive understanding, while outsiders can only interpret it. Individuals typically belong to multiple spaces of experience, which develop in different social contexts. In some works, organizations are understood as a single space of experience; however, Mensching and Vogd (2013) show, that organizations develop multiple experiential spaces.

A suitable approach to establish a theoretical foundation in organizational theory is Luhmann’s systems theory, which conceptualizes organizations as social systems based on decision communication (Luhmann 1984; 2006). This perspective also emphasizes the autopoiesis of social systems, which reproduce themselves. For business organizations that are not funded by third parties, this implies that they must sell their own products and services to survive within the societal economic system (Kette 2018; 2023). Kühl (2020), building on Luhmann, identifies three sides of the organizations: informality, formality, and the organizational façade. The formal side consists of decided decision premises, encompassing rules and personnel decisions. The informal side consists of undecided decision premises, which influence organizational action but are not formally codified. The façade represents the organization’s external presentation, which is maintained by the organization to project a positive image.

Against this conceptual background, my dissertation addresses the question of how knowledge is generated, used, and secured within a business organization. To answer this question, I interpret the data collected in the DFG-funded research project OLGEPRA (Organizational Learning and Memory Practices), in which I conducted participant observations, narrative interviews, and document analyses within an international-operating business organization. All data are analyzed using the documentary method (Bohnsack 2021), through which I reconstructed four types of organizational knowing that exhibit central differences in how knowledge is generated, applied, and secured. In addition, differences emerge in terms of orientation toward organizational learning, which can be distinguished as learning within and from the organization (Göhlich et al. 2016). While two of the reconstructed types focus on members’ learning within the organization, another type emphasizes organizational change, including its structures and practices (learning from the organization). The fourth type encompasses both learning within and from the organization.

Following the typology, I conducted a referential interpretation (Mensching 2020), situating the four types of knowing within the organizational spaces of experience that extend between the three sides of the organization (informality, formality, and façade). In my paper, I aim to present the central findings of my research, demonstrating that organizations exhibit diverse knowledge practices that are situated in different experiential spaces. Furthermore, I aim to derive implications and discuss what these results mean for the international community of organizational education.

Across Europe, education systems are increasingly confronted with the challenge of addressing persistent socio-spatial inequalities under conditions of growing complexity, multi-level governance, and poly-crisis. Since summer 2024, Germany has been implementing one of the most comprehensive educational programmes in its educational history, aimed at supporting approximately 4,000 socio-disadvantaged schools. In contrast to earlier reform initiatives that predominantly focused on individual schools, the programme explicitly targets system-level change by addressing governance structures. It is premised on the assumption that sustainable change depends on coordinated capacity building across the education system, rather than on isolated, school-by-school interventions (Fullan, 2011; Bryk et al., 2015). We also know, informal relational networks often prove decisive for how rapidly and how sustainably reform processes take hold, diffuse, and stabilise within the system. Yet, despite clearly defined strategies and resource allocations, change initiatives are frequently introduced without systematically considering existing informal networks (Daly, 2011).

The complexity of the programme is substantially rooted in the federal structure: whilst the federal government provides resources, the 16 federal states (Länder) are responsible for operational design and governance. This set-up exemplifies a broader European pattern of shared responsibilities in which coordination, knowledge production, and decision-making are spread across heterogeneous actors and organisational levels. To adress this multi-level governance, several states have established intermediaries (e.g., coordinating units) to coordinate ministries, schoolinspectorates, local education authorities, and schools. However, while data-led approaches for school development are widely documented at the school level, systematic system-level knowledge remain heavily output- and outcome-oriented and thus provide limited insight into the conditions and processes shaping policy enactment and system change (Gouëdard, 2021).

From a perspective of organizational education, this absence is critical, as governance arrangements constitute arenas of organizational learning in which knowing and acting are relationally produced through interaction and shared practice rather than through linear transmission. When this organisational-educational lens is combined with an educational governance perspective, reform programmes can no longer be explained solely by formal responsibilities and decision-making structures but must be understood through the concrete arrangements of cooperation and coordination among actors across administrative levels. At the interface of organisational learning and governance research, Altrichter (2018) emphasises that these arrangements themselves constitute learning and action contexts: governance-related knowledge becomes effective not through direct implementation, but through processes of recontextualisation, coordination, and the gradual stabilisation of practices across administrative boundaries. The project presented here addresses this research gap by empirically examining, for the first time, state-specific actor constellations and their collaborative structures.

Collaboration is widely discussed as a success factor for the transfer of educational innovations (Rode & Michelsen, 2012; Kolleck, 2014). We theorise influence not as a static attribute ofhierarchical position but because of relational network positions (Daly, 2011a; Daly & Finnigan, 2010). The central assumption is as follows: the capacity for organisational action and thedistribution of reform-relevant knowledge depend substantially on embeddedness in communication and information flows (Song & Miskel, 2005). Structural holes or ruptures in these networksexplain why reform impulses often reach the periphery (schools) only in fragmented form. Building on this perspective, the study addresses three guiding questions: (1) to what extent do formally attributed responsibilities align with empirically reconstructed network roles in terms of cooperation and information distribution; (2) who occupies relationally central positions in the mobilisation of knowledge, and where do structural holes become visible; and (3) what implications do these patterns have for the relational conditions of programme enactment at the interface of educational governance and organisation?

This constitutes a first crucial step for subsequent research phases aimed at examining the concrete practices through which these governance arrangements are enacted and stabilised.