Universitetet i Agder: UiA Journal System
Not a member yet
368 research outputs found
Sort by
Employee Creativity in Coworking Spaces: Towards a Conceptual Framework
No full textCreative performance of knowledge workers outside the traditional office setting has become highly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. The prepandemic trend of companies using coworking spaces as an alternative workplace arrangement is expected to grow further. One important driver is that these collaborative workspaces are considered effective facilitators of creativity and innovation. The aim of this study is to fill a research gap by examining how corporate coworking may foster employee creativity, crucial for firm´s competitiveness and long-term survival. A systematic review of the coworking literature is conducted to critically evaluate employee creativity in coworking spaces. Structural, relational, and cognitive social capital along with an individual and contextual view of creativity are utilized as the theoretical foundation for analysis and synthesis. A novel conceptual framework is proposed for empirical examination of creative performance in a corporate coworking context. The study reveals that creative outcomes of coworking are largely taken for granted. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the most prominent factors influencing employee creativity in coworking settings are social interaction and knowledge sharing. We argue that fostering creativity in shared office environments is a complex phenomenon worth further scholarly attention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and future research avenues are proposed
Managers’ support for workplace innovation in the public sector: Wedged between expectations and conditions
No full textOver the past few years, public policy interventions have been initiated to promote public sector innovation. These top-down initiatives have been aimed at generating bottom-up movement, and first-line managers are believed to play an important role in this transformation. However, little is known about the challenges first-line managers face in their role as agents of change. This article therefore explores the expectations and conditions that first-line managers face when innovation support is implemented in municipalities. The article draws on 23 interviews with participants from three Swedish cases where innovation support has been implemented in the municipal context. The findings reveal that a multitude of expectations pointing towards an explorative logic are placed on first-line managers to lead, dare and support in connection with employee-driven innovation, but the conditions under which they operate point towards an exploitative logic. The managers find themselves wedged between high expectations and a lack of mandate, resources and organisational support for workplace innovation in the public sector context
Promoting Workplace Innovation in an Innovation Policy Context: The Case of the Finnish Liideri Programme
No full textThe wider societal impact of workplace innovation development programmes has typically been limited by their poor ability to scale up project outcomes and disseminate good practice. Researchers have proposed different means to address the challenges of diffusion. One of the suggested means is to strengthen the integration of programmes to industrial or innovation policy frameworks, instead of an industrial relations framework. Using the “Finnish Liideri – Business, Productivity and Joy at Work” (2012–18) programme as an object of analysis, this article examines what added value the programme’s attachment to the innovation policy context brought compared to previous Finnish programmes and to what extent this attachment helped to bring new solutions to the challenges of diffusion. The analysis shows that the Liideri programme included many new features compared to previous Finnish programmes, opening up opportunities for more holistic development work in companies. However, based on the data available, it was not possible to give a clear answer to the question of the real added value of this integration to the development of companies or compared with the results of projects funded by previous Finnish workplace innovation development programmes. Concerning the question on dissemination of good practice, the article concludes that, despite its large-scale and high-quality activation work, the Liideri programme did not include sufficiently efficient and innovative measures that would have enabled it to meet better the challenges of diffusion. 
University language students' motivations for their language of study
No full textWhile there is abundant research on motivation in second-language learning, we know little about what motivations students may have for choosing a specific language of study in the Norwegian university context. The number of students who apply to English study programs every year is high, while the numbers for the traditional foreign languages beyond English, especially German and French, are concerningly low. The present study surveyed students in their first year of university language study, asking key questions about their reasons for choosing their language of study. Overall findings are that students of English are particularly instrumentally motivated, believing that English will be useful for future work. Students of French and Spanish, on the other hand, are more affectively motivated, while German students fall in between the other languages in responses to questions of motivation. While all students generally feel that knowledge of foreign languages beyond English is important, Spanish students were especially consistent in this response. In terms of interest in sub-disciplines of university language study, all student groups were relatively similar in showing a stronger interest in learning about the cultural and social aspects of countries where the language is spoken compared to literature formal aspects of language. The main conclusion is that motivations may be different for studying different foreign languages beyond English, and that in order to recruit more students to academic language programs, focusing on each specific language and its potential motivations is necessary.
Keywords: foreign language, motivation, language studies, English, French, Spanish, Germa
RailActivation project: the adoption of Workplace Innovation in the Rail Sector
No full textThe rail sector has a significant impact on European industry, hence it is important that it follows current innovative trends if it wants to stay competitive. To this end, the railway sector has to adapt to the new digital revolution that is sweeping the sector, but especially the small and medium-sized companies that are part of it, and Workplace Innovation will play a key role in this process. During the RailActivation project it has been seen that SMEs have difficulties when it comes to developing and applying innovation, but due to their size SMEs can gain the advantage of implementing innovation more quickly.
The RailActivation project aimed to help SMEs from the railway sector and provide solutions to the problems faced by companies when adapting to this new revolution, by creating an organisational mechanism that would help companies in the process of adopting Workplace Innovation. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper develops the research model for the railway industry, based on the concept of Workplace Innovation and the needs of SMEs. In addition, a general overview of the Innovation Way methodology applied during the workshops of the RailActivation project is presented, as well as the general and specific results obtained in the companies where the Pilot Scheme was applied
Bokrecension: Dörte Hansens Altes Land (Körsbärslandet) och Mittagsstunde (Middagstimmen)
No full textEvidence-based support for effective classroom interaction and language use in primary English instruction
No full textTeachers’ use of the target language is a crucial aspect of instructed language learning, especially so in the case of English teaching in primary school, which aims to foster motivation, confidence and oral engagement in English, but also support the overall development of each child. Although contemporary research rejects exclusive target-language use, monolingual approaches are still regarded good practice in many educational settings, as they are thought to promote learning. Yet, language learning is a cognitive, but also a social and emotional endeavor, and language use in the classroom therefore needs to be considered beyond the cognitive and linguistic dimensions of language input. The professional discourse, however, lacks a comprehensive and nuanced way of describing the various classroom functions, consequences and motives that may underpin the use of the target language and the first language. The Teaching through Interactions framework (Hamre et al., 2013) was developed to capture teacher effectiveness and quality in primary education in general. This article argues that examining language use through the socioemotional, organizational and instructional domains of instruction that are outlined in this model, facilitates our understanding of the various considerations at play in the language classroom and highlights the close link between quality and language use in the primary classroom. The framework may be useful for teachers, teacher educators and student teachers to identify, systematize and share their deliberations in relation to language choice, and advance the professional discourse at all levels of education
Development of written L2 French: a longitudinal study of learners in the Norwegian school context
No full textThis paper presents a longitudinal multiple case study that focused on the development of the written interlanguage of four learners over their three years of learning French as a second language (L2) in upper secondary school in Norway. The development of macro-level syntactic complexity and the development of micro-level measures of accuracy in morphosyntactic features specific to written French were examined. In order to trace development of syntactic complexity, we used two well-established measures in the SLA literature: T-unit length and the number of dependent clauses per T-unit (Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998; Verspoor et al., 2017), whereas the morphosyntactic features representing the basis for our analysis of accuracy were gender and number in the noun phrase in French. The results illustrated that the written French of all four learners clearly became more syntactically complex over the three years of the study. As regards the development at the morphosyntactic level, progress was less straight forward in the individual learners, and the developmental tendencies varied according to the nature of the features studied