Inter-organizational co-production is widely recognized as critical for achieving sustainable innovation. This paper takes on a community of practice (CoP) perspective to examine how an epistemic CoP forms in a sustainability oriented research project involving university researchers and companies across the industrial value chain. While such communities bring together specialized expertise, their formation is often complicated by divergent interests and goals among highly autonomous actors. Drawing on a qualitative case study, the paper advances understanding of how the early stages of community formation are managed. The findings show that the university researchers have a central role in the formation stage, representing trust, experience, knowledge, and a non-competing agenda, and thereby possess a keyboundary spanning role to negotiate a shared community foundation. This paper contributes to the Work-Integrated learning (WIL) literature by empirically demonstrating the conditions that underpin inter-organizational co-production of knowledge and contributes to the CoP literature by highlighting the inherent tension in the boundary-spanning role: While boundary spanners are central to successfully form and manage epistemic communities, it also entails the risk of sacrificing their own goals and ambitions in favor of maintaining community engagement.

This year’s NEON conference was situated in Tromsö, Norway. We, a group of researchers from University West, arranged a track, Learning in work life, featuring contributions from researchers across various universities and disciplines.

Innovations and urban development activities are frequently embedded in claims about the future that justify and supports certain business activities. For instance, legal and regulatory reforms may recognize claims made about certain new transportation or energy producing technologies being developed. So-called promissory organization make claims either to support their own business activities or clients’ interests, and this anticipatory logic being used oftentimes includes politically charged claims. In the field of urban development, premised on the access to finance capital and shared beliefs and ambitions about what the future would ideally look like, promissory claims play a key role when mobilizing partner companies as well as policy makers.

This article reports empirical material that shows how promissory claims are supportive of the development of a site hosting sustainable mobility technology innovation activities and energy production. While plausible and appealing images of the future-in-the-making serve to align interests and to promote concerted action, such claims need to be combined with managerial skills (in the corporation) and administrative capacities (in the city agencies that handle the development process) to deliver results that are consistent with optimistic promissory claims.

The Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) community represents a growing field within social science, characterized by diverse and intersecting research interests. This year’s NEON conference (https://www.neondagene.no/), held in Tromsø, Norway, features a theme highly applicable to WIL: “Bridging Theory and Practice: Possible, Desirable, and Useful?” The primary objective of the NEON conference is to serve as a nexus for organizational researchers and practitioners, fostering mutual learning and the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and research findings.

A group of researchers from University West has proposed a conference track titled “Learning in Work Life” which takes its starting point in WIL as a field focusing on the relationship between learning and working life. In the track description, work is defined broadly to include all forms of paid and unpaid arrangements, and similarly, the concept of learning is expansively defined, allowing for the integration of multiple perspectives and theoretical frameworks. This way, researchers from various disciplines and fields can find a place in the track and contribute to the conference program.

The track is further framed by addressing the dynamic challenges organizations face. Structural transformations such as globalization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rapid digitalization compel organizations to continuously restructure, develop, and adjust their operational strategies, work systems, and workforce competencies. These changes necessitate ongoing development and adaptation to ensure that organizations and society can meet their competence requirements effectively while also prioritizing sustainability. In response to these changes, there is a renewed interest in competence development and sourcing, often framed under concepts such as industry 5.0 and the re-skilling of Europe. These broad themes are frequently conceptualized through I-WIL, highlighting the learning aspect and necessity in ongoing changes.

The response to this conference track has been overwhelmingly positive, with abstracts submitted from numerous universities and disciplines. This diversity promises a rich selection of scholars (and potentially practitioners) to engage in discussions on the theme from a Scandinavian perspective over the two-day conference. The submitted manuscripts offer valuable insights into learning in work life and have been categorized into three main themes:

1) Work-Integrated Learning for Students: This theme focuses on providing students with practical relevance in their education, exploring pedagogical strategies to achieve this balance.

2) Learning in an Interorganizational Context: This theme examines how learning occurs between actors with differing agendas and institutional logics.

3) Professional Learning – Learning in Work Life: This theme investigates the foundations of professional learning in contemporary workplaces, including hybrid and knowledge work environments.

The themes illustrate the multifaceted applicability of WIL in fostering lifelong learning across various contexts. We eagerly anticipate the conference and will provide an analysis of our key takeaways in Part 2 of this blog.

Over the last two decades, a growing number of ‘Greening of the industry’ initiatives have been launched to adjust industrial designs to meet sustainability demands. Initiatives, referred to as circular economy and industrial symbiosis, have become attractive initiatives to apply into a given industrial setting. The industrial symbiosis builds on the premise that it "engages traditionally separate entities in a collective approach to competitive advantage involving physical exchange of materials, energy, water, and by-products" (Chertow, 2000). A symbiosis requires networks to be geographically close and is often initiated and driven by private-public collaborations across organizational borders. The symbiosis networks connect industrial actors wherein heterogenous institutional activities are negotiated, aligned and compromised and generates a space for learning. 

Literature on inhabited institutionalism (see e.g., Fine & Hallett, 2014) invites scholars to  recognize the role of institutional logics and also to explore how a specific interaction order shapes the institutional milieu wherein a specific practice is being located. Inhabited institutionalism provides an analytical lens to study groups that mediate both the micro and the macro foundations of institutions, but also has semi-autonomous properties. As ‘greening of the industry’ initiatives connect heterogenous institutional activities, this meso-level theory allows to explore social interactions in greening of the industry initiatives.

The coastal town of Noba (a pseudonym) provides the context for this case study. Noba has a long tradition of fishery. Over time, the fishery industry has expanded, but the emission quotas have remained stagnant due to the increasing environmental impact attributed to the traditional fishery industry. For a coastal village with a historical connection to the industry and aspirations for its continued growth, a reimagining of industrial design has been necessary. This challenge has engaged a variety of stakeholders, including business actors, local municipality actors, and the local community and in engagement to establish industrial symbiosis networks.

This study employs a qualitative research methodology, comprising semi-structured interviews and observations of meetings from ongoing symbiosis projects. Data collection commenced in 2022 and continues to date, with interviews and biweekly meeting observations. The current dataset includes 22 hours of interview material, with 12 hours of interviews conducted with business representatives, symbiosis developers, and municipality actors involved in the symbiosis initiatives, and 10 hours of ongoing updates from project leaders in symbiosis projects. Additionally, 55 hours of meeting observations have been conducted. All interviews and meeting observations have been documented, resulting in 338.5 pages of field material to date. 

As institutional pressures penetrate organizations, the practical implications and meanings of these institutional pressures are worked out in social interactions and therefore re-negotiated in settings, in this case a symbiosis network. As such institutional milieu gets established, through e.g., the creation of a symbiosis map that serves as a blueprint for a planned and established symbiosis network, it creates a position and an ability to drive change that would not be accessible within one of the participating public-private organizations.