Globally, COVID-19 has stressed social and personal tensions in professional life. This chapter focuses on the networked dimension to highlight the workers need for social connections. Some suggestions are proposed to implement an epistemic community to sustain creative and collaborative professional development in disruptive time. Two points are discussed to scaffold epistemic communities in the organisation: 1) the inter-professional dimension to embrace complex topic and 2) the emotional dimension as resources to embrace professional transformation.
TopIntroduction
The immediate change imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic forced professional and organisation to act and react with urgency. The rapid switch to remotely working at home or the re-organisation of the workplace have required a rethink of the access to the resources, embracing new temporal and spatial configuration to adapt the working condition. At the same time, Covid-19 showed how issues, resources and dynamics are local and global entangled. An intense exchange of information and the growing connections among people, knowledge, and communities could nourish and transform a professional mindset. Two research questions guide the discussion, both from educational literature and from daily ethnographic observation of social networks about working conditions:
- 1)
Which representation of the working condition during Covid-19 emerges in social networks?
- 2)
How does the engagement in online social networks discussions support a creative individual and collective professional mindset, also in times of crisis?
First, a reflection is proposed on the social network’s potentiality for professional development. An explorative analysis is done on the sharing in informal social-networks about the working conditions in Covid-19 To answer, at least in part, to the research questions. The paper then proposes a focus on epistemic communities - defined, according to the classic definition of Haas (1992), as a network of knowledge-based experts who together represent the problems they face, identify various solutions, and evaluate the results. In the last sections, two points are discussed to sustain a creative and collaborative epistemic community: a) the inter-professional dimension to embrace complex topic; b) the emotional dimension as resources to embrace professional transformation.
Professional Mindset in Troubled Times
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many countries have adopted a broad spectrum of containment measures. Corporations and governments alike have strongly encouraged workers to telecommute where possible.
A recent review of the literature points factors that seem to influence our well-being during the quarantine period negatively: 1) the duration of the quarantine itself; 2) the fear to get infected/spread the infection; 3) feelings of frustration and boredom; 4) inadequate supply capacity; and 5) lack of sufficient/salient information (Brooks et al., 2020). To deal with this situation, institutions and universities worldwide have activated online counselling services (Xiao, Zhang, Kong, Li, & Yang, 2020) or shared guidelines to deal with the immediate emergency and promote psychological support.
An informal and easy way to cope in a stressful situation is the narratives, stories and storytelling. Narratives are pervasive in our existence, survived from the past to the internet revolutions. Bruner (1986) considers narrative (based on linguistic connections) as one of the modalities to make sense of the word in dialogue with the paradigmatic manner (based on distinct categories).