Jörgen sandberg. Stockholm School of Economics. A classic managerial problem, страница 16

Another central guiding principle is to organize particular encounters between workers and their work as developmental triggers. These encounters can be seen as directed "reflective practicum" situations, which Schön (1987: 18) suggested for schools. The aim of presenting a challenge in the form of a work problem is to stimulate a worker to reflect on his present conception; here, questions would include these: Why is it not possible to accomplish the encountered optimization situation in an appropriate way? and What is inappropriate in my present competence in accomplishing it? The encounter must also be organized in such a way that when an optimizer begins to realize the limitations of his present conception, the desired conception is revealed as an alternative. However, a shift from one conception to another is unlikely to take place through a single encounter between an optimizer and an organized optimization situation. Even if optimizers change their ways of conceiving of an optimization situation and begin to conceive it according to the desired conception, they may revert to their former conception when encountering a new situation. Therefore, the development of competence is more likely to proceed as a chain of changes in conceiving different work situations rather than as a single, major change. Moreover, in order to reinforce and refine a certain competence, it is necessary to organize several encounters between the workers and the work that highlight the attributes of the newly achieved conception in different situations.

Finally, it may appear paradoxical that although I recommend that managers understand competence as workers' conceptions of work, I criticize advocates of rationalistic approaches for predefining competence as a set of attributes. However, I do not question the need to predefine competence itself. Predefining a research object is unavoidable because basic assumptions. of ontology and epistemology underlie any research approach. Instead, my concern is that by defining competence in advance as a set of attributes, researchers overlook workers' conceptions of work, which, according to my findings, define what competence workers develop and use in performing their work. Predefining competence in terms of conceptions of work enables a fuller description of competence and, thus, a better likelihood of achieving the desired competence development.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

The interpretative theory and method developed here can be used to identify and describe competence at work in terms of workers' conceptions of their work. That is, by taking workers' conceptions as the point of departure, it is possible to identify and describe what constitutes competence in various work and professions such as management, engineering, accounting, medicine, policing, teaching, and finance. But can the conceptions of engine optimization described here also be generalized to other work? The findings of this study and of other interpretative studies on competence, such as the works of Barley (1996), Benner (1986), and Schön (1983), suggest that competence is context-dependent. Even if apparently similar conceptions could be identified in other work, they would express a different competence in that work. For example, conceiving of managerial work in terms of optimizing separate qualities might mean dealing with emerging issues separately and sequentially. Whether or not conceptions identified in one work context are applicable to another is ultimately an empirical question. Therefore, further empirical studies similar to the present one are needed to explore the possibilities of generalizing identified conceptions to other types of work. Being able to identify similar conceptions in different types of work could also be a way to further enrich understanding of competence at work more generally.