Transformative Interventions in Practice: Three Interventionist Approaches at Work
Résumé
Today’s organizations offer an increasingly unpredictable and changing work environments that challenge learning and transformative interventions in the workplace. By suddenly bringing thousands of workers to experience remote working, the global pandemic further accelerated the implementation of flexible work arrangements such as blended-working, activity-based offices, digitalization of services and processes. Today, both academics and practitioners appear to agree on the “transformative potential” of the Covid19 crisis on work and workplaces. The pandemic is expected to bring forward fundamental changes on the way we live and work that the public media refer to as “the future of work” or “the new normal”. Critical in such a complex environment is the ability of managers and practitioners to individually and collectively reflect on their practices and engage a dialogue on work and work-related issues.
Collaborative research and interventionist approaches such as the Clinic of Activity approach (Clot, 2009), the Finnish school of cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1987; Sannino & al., 2015) and the dialogical action-research (Shotter, 2000; Cunliffe, 2002; Ripamonti & al., 2016) provide basis for developing knowledge, learning and change within organizations. These approaches share a focus on dialogical processes as a way of supporting individual and collective reflective practices and developing human transformative agency (Stetsenko, 2017). The ability to elaborate or to reflect upon one’s own work is considered as an intrinsically interactive, dialogical and sociomaterial process rather than the result of an (or the sum of) individual effort(s), attitude(s) or personal characteristics.
While a number of studies highlight the empirical and theoretical foundations of interventionist research, there is lack of overview on the way different intervention “apparatuses” support workplace transformation. What are the settings, tools and methods they rely upon? For instance, how do interventionist and practitioners collaboratively make sense of video data? How do they define and enact the role of the researcher or the interventionist? How is the initial shared idea of the object of the intervention constructed with the management and the practitioners? In what way are all the parties - the practitioners, the interventionists and the management - involved?
This symposium gathers academics and practitioners and intends to open up theoretical and methodological discussion on tools, processes and settings of workplace transformative interventions in the field of Work and Organizational Psychology. A particular attention will be brought to the practical conditions and resources for supporting dialogical and reflective activities on work, as well as on both the differences ant the commonalities between different interventionist approaches. The expected contribution of the symposium is to provide the ground for a stimulating and meaningful dialogue on intervention practices.