Abstract
This chapter explores the potential for strategic organizational frameworks and applied methodological perspectives to aid workforce contexts in harnessing the transferable agency of those equipped experientially for leadership in times of unprecedented crisis. Academic research and scholarship must be needs-led not methods-driven, and as the recent pandemic demonstrated, authentic leadership had never been more important. Transitional change through the crisis of the global pandemic led to shifts to greater acknowledgement of the need for a different type of knowledge creation and replacing the contexts of validity and reliability in empirical research with those of trustworthiness and authenticity. In providing some of these organizational frameworks and methodological perspectives in an accessible manner, many can be systematically applied to the context of everyday strategic planning and institutional management settings so that tangible target outcomes are visible, achievable, and perhaps, most importantly, remain person-centered.
TopIntroduction
“Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.”
(Confucius 551—479 B.C.E.)
Business in the context of the 21st Century knowledge economy is driven by the dynamics of policy, practice and the institutions and organisations which drive their capacity to function and develop professionally and in the context of applied research amidst emerging crises (Bogoviz, 2019). It is within these contexts that the emergence of Professional Doctorate programmes, the Doctorate of Business Administration, in particular, which has forged a landscape of the need to address the professionalisation of knowledge, to acknowledge the agency that applied knowledge equips personnel with and how more traditional mechanisms of doctoral education are less suited to the application of theory to practice and more suited to theoretical emergence and academic contexts such as education (Cardoso et al, 2020). The gap between perceptions of usefulness and purposefulness of the two though, has narrowed in recent years (Aarnikoivu, 2021). The prospect of responding reflexively and adaptively to new crisis events and key epiphanies such as the COVID-19 pandemic has ensured the visible and tangible impact of professional doctorate programmes in practice, reflecting a shift to greater respect for a different type of knowledge creation and replacing the contexts of validity and reliability in empirical research with those of trustworthiness and authenticity in applied praxis environments such as the workplace (Dirks and de Jong, 2021).The objectives of this chapter are fourfold in a) providing a theoretical basis for the facilitation of knowledge creation in work based settings and its translation into practice via optimal leadership in crisis b) Framing the translation of doctoral knowledge in crisis by mid-career professionals; c) The consideration of the complex ambiguity surrounding knowledge creation in crisis and post-crisis from a methodological perspective and d) Introducing transformative learning theory as a lens through which the need for cognitive, metacognitive and epistemic perspectives can be acknowledged and used to drive positive action in workplace crises.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Performativity: A philosophical means of describing the power of language to effect change in the world.
Disruptive Innovation: Refers to the innovation that transforms previously inaccessible products and ensures their availability to wider more generalised populations.
Knowledge Transfer: Is a diverse range of activities used in the support of mutually beneficial collaborations within and between universities, businesses and the public sector for the civic benefit of society.
Action Research: Also, often and interchangeably, termed Participatory Action Research (PAR), co-operative enquiry and action learning is a research approach focused on the systematic improvement and positive change of the structure and agency afforded to people within context specific settings.
Impact: Something that has a marked effect or influence.
Transformative Learning: A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.