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Thursday 21 August 2014

Place (and time) of engagement

People interact in places, and behave and engage differently in different places.  Imagine the different engagement between a lecturer and students in a lecture theatre, and engaged behaviour in a chemistry lab.  Place influences engagement.

Consider place to include material objects and time. Nonaka and Konno described Ba (equivalent to "place" in English) as a shared space for emerging relationships (Nonaka and Konno, 1998). Environment is the place in which people engage, and it includes time and the material objects with which people interact, like science lab benches.
  1. Physical proximity enhances learning (Skerlavaj 2006) and the physical structure of a room can allow easy engagement. For example, round tables are more indicative of a democratic approach to listening and decision making than an auditorium with fixed seating facing forward (Block, 2000: 277). Sturdy et al suggested that consultants and clients could cross or blur boundaries by meeting in other than at routine places and times, in liminal spaces, spaces where institutionalised or cultural rules, norms and routines are suspended (Sturdy et al., 2006: 932), like hospital waiting rooms or car parks, or the water-cooler.
  2. Materials invite people to do something. Orlikowski (2006: 465) suggests that “the materiality of infrastructures, spaces and technological artefacts structure […] knowledgeability” thus extending place to include other material objects. Materiality is the context in which people interact and engage.  Material objects include shared physical tangibles and intangibles such as time. Objects that are shared and sharable across different key parties are boundary objects (Carlile, 2002, Bechky, 2003, Star and Griesemer, 1989) and can help solve problems. Skovgaard-Smith observed consultants facilitating discussion using flipchart material, which provided a tangible aspect of consultancy service to the group. Thus a place affords combination capability.  
  3. Time is another aspect of environment, crucial in combination with space (Maaninen-Olsson and Müllern, 2009). Orlikowski, using a scaffolding metaphor, for knowing suggests that “Scaffolds are emergent – they are erected over time, changing in form and function, as needed to continue supporting the changing scale and scope of the element(s) being built over time” (Orlikowski, 2006: 462) Such scaffolds of knowing afford a temporary stability (Orlikowski, 2006). 
In summary, aspects of environment that are likely to be relevant to understanding engagement are shared place, time and material objects.

BECHKY, B. A. (2003) 'Object Lessons: Workplace Artifacts as Representations of Occupational Jurisdiction'. American Journal of Sociology, 109, 720-752.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, 2 ed, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
CARLILE, P. R. (2002) 'A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development'. Organization Science, 13, 442-455.
MAANINEN-OLSSON, E. & MÜLLERN, T. (2009) 'A contextual understanding of projects--The importance of space and time'. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 25, 327-339.
NONAKA, I. & KONNO, N. (1998) 'The Concept of "Ba": building a foundation for knowledge creation '. California Management Review, 40, 40-54.
ORLIKOWSKI, W. J. (2006) 'Material knowing: the scaffolding of human knowledgeability'. European Journal of Information Systems, 15, 460-466.
SKERLAVAJ, M. & DIMÖVSKI, V. (2006) 'Social Network Approach To Organizational Learning'. Journal of Applied Business Research, 22, 89-98.
SMITH, I. S. (2010) Materializing the Organization - The role of consultants in processes of objectification. Academy of Management Annual Conference Montreal, Canada.
STAR, S. L. & GRIESEMER, J. R. (1989) 'Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39'. Social Studies of Science (Sage), 19, 387-420.
STURDY, A., SCHWARZ, M. & SPICER, A. (2006) 'Guess who's coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy'. Human Relations, 59, 929-960.

Previous literature on engagement

I review engagement literature here because Andrew comments:
"who can tell you how to engage in general, becuase as far as I know there has been little work on systematically analysing engagement either qualitatively and quantitaivley"
I'm considering literature that addresses different articulations of engagement:
  • involvement,
  • participation,
  • commitment,
  • collaboration and
  • motivation.
Previous research on engagement focused on outcomes and products and seems one-sided, focusing on for example,
  • employee engagement with work (Saks, 2006, Schaufeli et al., 2006),
  • student engagement with learning (Handley et al., 2007, Robinson and Hullinger, 2008, Arbaugh, 2000),
  • client engagement with child welfare services (Yatchmenoff, 2005)
  • customer engagement with a brand (Mollen, 2010).
These approaches apparently use engagement as a one-way relationship, rather than share knowledge.

However, consultancy practitioner literature advises consultants how to engage to with clients to get and share information. Axelrod (2002) suggested four underlying principles that would produce an engaged organisation:
  • widening the circle of involvement through people and ideas,
  • connecting people to each other,
  • creating communities for action and
  • embracing democratic principles.
Block advised setting out the room in a manner than encouraged people to engage with each other.  i.e. adapt the conditions of the setting or environment and you'll get different behaviour.

Involvement
How does engagement differ from involvement?
Barki et al suggested involvement is a separate construct from participation and refers to a psychological state, although they do not elaborate on what that state might be.  For Saks, job involvement relates to self-image, and to how employees perform their jobs (Saks, 2006 p. 602).    Axelrod, (2004) states that involvement is “working with others to get things done” thus implying that involvement and engagement may be similar phenomena (Axelrod et al., 2004 p. iv). In conclusion, in the sense that involvement is working with other people, it is highly relevant to engagement.

Commitment
The term engagement has the sense of 'engagement with' someone, so implies some form of relationship that might require commitment. Commitment may affect sense making and the social structure (Weick, 1995). An organisational context with visibility (behaviour is public), volition (with an element of choice) and irrevocability (behaviour cannot be undone) “should generate stronger commitment” (Weick, 1995 p. 159). Nevertheless, commitment is “also a liability because it reduces flexibility, learning and adaption”. However McCormick, who developed a survey tool to measure the impact that participation in large-group intervention had on attitudes and beliefs of participants, found engagement increased commitment (McCormick, 1999) suggesting engagement leads to commitment. Perhaps we can collect data on commitment as a measure of engagement.

Collaboration
Collaboration may also be related to engagement. Collaboration is what organisations do together and is closely related to cooperation (Huxham, 1993).  Cooperation and collaboration both mean “something to do with working together,” (Huxham, 1993 p. 5) which is similar to Axelrod’s involvement being the art of bringing people together (Axelrod, 2001). Huxham uses the concept of “collaborative advantage” (Kanter, 1994) to solve problems together (Huxham and Vangen, 2005). Collaborative advantage, meaning being a good partner, arises from organisations pooling resources and expertise for a common aim, creating synergy. A reason to discard Huxham’s collaborative model is that it focuses on cooperative relationships that have complementary rather than shared goals.

And it depends whether we're researching engagement between individuals or between organisations.  If the stakeholders for this research project are individuals, then data from a collaborative model of organisations is not relevant.

Motivation
Marcum, comparing motivation with engagement, points out that people choose to be engaged. He reviews literature on engagement from learning theory, information management and philosophy, concluding that “An engagement mindset offers a more useful model for cultivating mutually beneficial working relationships with staff and colleagues ... engagement is based on learning and involvement” (Marcum, 1999  p. 46). Marcum’s perspective concurs with Hartwick and Barki’s findings that participation and involvement depend on whether IT system use is mandatory or voluntary (Hartwick and Barki, 1994). Previous discussion explored different constructions of engagement, but did not identify an existing conceptual framework for the phenomenon. We still do not understand the quality of the engagement, what produces it, how and whose engagement leads to effectiveness.

Participation I look at participation in a separate posting because it merits special attention.

We need research that looks at the process of engagement and how interaction between people builds commitment


ARBAUGH, J. B. (2000) 'How Classroom Environment and Student Engagement Affect Learning in Internet-based MBA Courses'. Business Communication Quarterly, 63, 9-26.
AXELROD, R. H. (2001) 'Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations'. Journal for Quality & Participation, 24, 22.
AXELROD, R. H. (2002) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, ed, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, ed, San Francisco, CA, Berrett-Koehler.
AXELROD, R. H. & MACLEOD, H. B. (2002) 'Engaging the Staff'. Health Forum Journal, 45, 22.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) 'Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement'. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, 2 ed, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
HANDLEY, K., CLARK, T., FINCHAM, R. & STURDY, A. (2007) 'Researching Situated Learning'. Management Learning, 38, 173-191.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) 'Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use'. Management Science, 40, 440-465.
HUXHAM, C. (1993) 'Pursuing Collaborative Advantage'. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44, 599-611.
HUXHAM, C. & VANGEN, S. (2005) Managing to collaborate: the theory and practice of collaborative advantage, ed, London; New York, Routledge.
KANTER, R. M. (1994) 'Collaborative Advantage: The Art of Alliances'. Harvard Business Review, 72, 96.
MARCUM, J. W. (1999) 'Out with motivation, in with engagement'. National Productivity Review, 18, 43-46.
MCCORMICK, M. T. (1999) The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants, Philadelphia, Temple University
MOLLEN, A. (2010) 'Engagement, telepresence and interactivity in online consumer experience: Reconciling scholastic and managerial perspectives'. Journal of business research, 63, 919-925.
ROBINSON, C. C. & HULLINGER, H. (2008) 'New Benchmarks in Higher Education: Student Engagement in Online Learning'. Journal of Education for Business, 84, 101-109.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) 'Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement'. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.
SAKS, A. M. (2008) 'The Meaning and Bleeding of Employee Engagement: How Muddy Is the Water?'. Industrial & Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 1, 40-43.
SCHAUFELI, W. B., BAKKER, A. B. & SALANOVA, M. (2006) 'The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study'. Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66, 701-716.
WEICK, K. E. (1995) Sensemaking in organizations, ed, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications.
YATCHMENOFF, D. K. (2005) 'Measuring Client Engagement From the Client’s Perspective in Nonvoluntary Child Protective Services'. Research on Social Work Practice, 15, 84-96.

Thursday 14 August 2014

Collecting data about engagement - quick questionnaires, quick conversations

We are aiming to develop and evaluate a variety of engagement data collection tools for their richness in informing us about engagement changes and effects for teachers, students and researchers. In this post I analyse a definition and some dimensions of engagement with the aim of characterising the kind of  data we should collect so as to give us the rich picture we are aiming for.

Thursday 7 August 2014

Engaged? definition and data

I need to know what engagement is, and as Richard Holliman points out in the Engaging Research blog "Public engagement with research and school-university partnership work means different things to different people". But if I'm working on engagement with the JuxtaLearn project and evaluating engagement, then I need to know what it is, what creates it, what its results are, and I need to know what data to collect in order to evaluate engagement. So I have to know what engagement is before I can evaluate it.
The OU 'Public Engagement with Research Catalyst Team defines engaged research thus:
Excellent public engagement with research is reflected in the different ways that researchers meaningfully connect and share research with various stakeholders, user communities and members of the public. Done well, public engagement with research will generate benefits, changes and effects for all participants as they share knowledge, expertise and skills. Excellence will be demonstrated partly through recognition of the contributions that all participants make to the shaping of research agendas, the processes of conducting research, and in the products of that research.[http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/per/?page_id=1621]
I read two actions here, where engagement
  1.  is reflected
  2. generates
"Excellent public engagement with research is reflected..." suggests that we'll recognise engagement when we see it, in the way that I recognise myself when I see myself in the mirror. But the reflection is not me but an image of me. Magritte painted "the Treachery of Images" as a pipe under which he wrote, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", French for "This is not a pipe", and indeed the painting is merely an image of a pipe, not a pipe. So we do not in the first sentence of the above definition of engagement have a definition of engagement, merely a statement that it will be (passive voice) reflected. I want to know actions: how to engage, what I have to do to engage, and I need to know beforehand what those actions are so I can plan my engagement and others' engagement, not have to recognise it after the event, when it's too late.
 "Done well, public engagement with research will generate benefits,..” This part of the definition tells me that engagement generates, I understand an action that "generates benefits, changes and effects" is an engaged action. Therefore to engage, I must plan to generate benefits, changes and effects. And from the first part of the definition, I will recognise engagement through the (I assume) consequent reflections that results from the action of generating.
What might an engaged relationship be? It might require commitment. a context with visibility (behaviour is public), volition (with an element of choice) and irrevocability (behaviour cannot be undone) “should generate stronger commitment” (Weick, 1995: p159). Benefits and changes must be the consequent "shared knowledge, expertise and skills". Would such context and behaviour generate benefits, changes and effects?
The given definition provides a means to recognise data to collect, but we must accept the data may be wrong data if the definition is flawed. What we may have however, is an opportunity to identify engagement and create a better definition.