Boundary objects, power, and learning: the matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

Hawkins, Beverley, Pye, Annie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5392-2533 and Correia, Fernando 2017. Boundary objects, power, and learning: the matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations. Management Learning 48 (3) , pp. 292-310. 10.1177/1350507616677199

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Abstract

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	SAGE
ISSN:	1350-5076
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 January 2017
Last Modified:	25 Nov 2024 12:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/97801

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