Imagining futures: Theorising the practical knowledge of future-making

The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organisation, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

Persuading Pre-Professionals to be Participant Observers: Reflections on Teaching Anthropology and Education to Professional Teacher Candidates

This paper explains how I design and teach an Anthropology and Education course within a professional teacher education program. After establishing how some teacher candidates might initially imagine that this course is irrelevant to their professional education, I argue that anthropological knowledge and being able to think anthropologically enables teacher candidates to become better teachers. Specifically, I argue that becoming a participant observer of one’s own and others’ practices provides an easily accessible crossover between an anthropological method and mindset, on the one hand, and teacher actions like instruction, observation, assessment, and reflective practice (Schön 1982), on the other. To support this claim, I describe how I teach teacher candidates concepts and theory from anthropology that are applicable to the study of education, and can be used to inform their work on a video ethnography of a classroom (Hester 2012) that I assign to develop their practice of professional participant observation. I then describe how I prepare teacher candidates to consider the context of that video, especially as it offers an encounter with ideological diversity within the teaching profession and schools. The conclusion explains how I encourage the candidates to continue using the participant observer concept to inform their professional work post-graduation.

The Lived Body and Embodied Instructional Practices in Maritime Basic Safety Training

This paper explores the role of the lived body in maritime professional training. By focusing on how instructors include students’ subjective experiencing bodies as an educational resource and context for directives and demonstrations, the study aims at informing training of professionals for survival in emergency situations onboard ships. Drawing on a mobile video ethnography and on phenomenological analyses of the presence/absence of the body in experience, the study illustrates how instructors direct students’ attention towards or away from their appearing corporal field depending on the stage of the training. The article documents three instructional practices incorporating students’ lived embodiment during training: coping with distress by foregrounding the lived body, backgrounding the lived body for outer-directed action and imagining others’embodied experiences. The study contributes to our understanding of intercorporeal practices in instructional interaction and guidance in simulation-based vocational training.

Place – The final frontier: Exploring the outer reaches of collaborative agency using the Japanese concept of Ba

Scholars within the field of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) address the way that individuals ‘transcend their own immediate embeddedness’ to achieve volitional coherence known as collaborative agency. The process of collaborative agency is described as inseparable from LAP, yet it remains a nascent field of enquiry requiring additional empirical research. This article presents an investigation of collaborative agency through an abductive case study using video ethnography and interviews. To interpret our results, we turn to the Japanese ideogram for ‘place’, known as ‘Ba’. Rather than a physical reality, Ba is considered an existential space in which leadership groups weave together to create and ripen collaborative agency. Ba guides us to look across and around a group and its socio-material practice. We find that collaborative agency is trans-subjective in nature and sits on a spectrum on which we identify the outer reaches, from one end where Ba is woven through to the other end, called Collapse. We suggest that the place of leadership is within the warp and weft of collaborative agency, including but not limited to a special place woven in Ba where collaborative agency is high and where the group reports they are able to transcend their individualism.