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This chapter presents the COLAB model for promoting organisational learning and innovation with potential application in criminal justice-related organisations. We describe this model as a toolkit that built on the Change Laboratory model of workplace transformation but one augmented with the beneficial components of Activity Clinics, Boundary Crossing Workshops and Codesign methods and developed within the criminal justice context. Limitations and future directions for the model are discussed.

In prison, the provision of care and the surveillance of inmates takes place in multiple locations with several often contradictory demands. Inmates may experience a fragmentation of services because of the separate silos in which criminal justice service and mental health professionals work and the distinct ways of working that develop within these. A greater alignment between services is required. This chapter focuses on interagency meetings in a Norwegian prison. These are groups that aim to develop an holistic perspective of the inmate’s situation and problems, and are seen as an innovative way to overcome the contradiction between ‘treatment’ and ‘punishment’ prison paradigms applied by the different professionals working together in the prison and mental health services. We analysed how the professionals interact at interagency meetings, and how they align their tasks, goals, roles and expertise to support the inmate’s imprisonment and rehabilitation. Our analysis illustrates the multiple ways in which this collective activity is conceptualised by the participants and then provides a model of interorganisational dynamics through which these collaborations may be fostered. By so doing, we have made suggestions about how to enhance interprofessional collaboration between prison and mental health services. The chapter also contributes to research on challenges and opportunities for collaboration in complex organisational settings.

The voluntary and community sector (VCS) is a key player in the support of prisoners and ex-prisoners in the English and Welsh criminal justice system. Organisational learning and innovation is urgently required in this sector to adapt to the current political and economic environment. The chapter describes exploratory efforts to introduce participatory methods drawn from Change Laboratory Methods and Clinics of Activity within a local VCS organisation that would help (re)build dialogue between stakeholders with the aim of promoting organisational learning and innovation. The intervention comprised an ethnographic phase of observing the staff, interviews with 19 key stakeholders, and a final developmental workshop with the staff. The analysis of these data by the researcher (first author) provided insight into the experience of mentors working in the voluntary sector as well as providing a trigger for dialogue in a subsequent workshop that used these data to establish dialogue between staff. These served as dialogical artefacts, introducing micro-dramas in the form of selected user stories. These dialogical artefacts triggered diverse reactions and analyses by the various participants, highlighting different elements than those anticipated by the researcher. We discuss the different readings of our research data by the researcher and staff members, presenting these two contrasting perspectives, and the implications this has for workplace development methods.

Collaboration and learning are especially needed in times of change in the workplace. This chapter describes a novel method for developing work practices and enhancing professionals’ proactiveness through collective, participatory experimentation and evaluation. We used the method in a low-security closed prison in Finland to advance prison staff’s rehabilitation work with prisoners. The design, implementation and evaluation of the innovations prison officers introduced to advance their work (recording the inmates’ behaviour and needs into their sentence plans) are illustrated. Besides describing how the method was applied in practice, we also identify and discuss the gaps within prison work where there are opportunities for organisational learning and innovation.

Resume Cet article rend compte d’une recherche realisee avec des chirurgiens finlandais autour de la chirurgie robotique (ablation de la prostate). Elle s’appuie sur l’approche methodologique des autoconfrontations croisees (Clot et al., 2000), enrichie par les travaux de Leena Norros autour de l’orientation interpretative au travail dans les environnements technologiques complexes (Norros et al., 2015). Cette intervention vise a encourager le developpement de la reflexion productive (Boud et al., 2006). Dans ce papier, nous commentons deux sequences ou cette reflexion productive est a l’œuvre. Ces deux sequences presentent un cas interessant de double stimulation : dans ces dialogues, l’observation detaillee de la video et la discussion entre les chirurgiens sont motivees par la presence de « marges positives », c’est-a-dire, une information medicale sur la presence residuelle (ou non) de cellules cancereuses, qui est disponible a posteriori dans le dossier du patient et oriente la demarche d’investigation. L’article s’appuie sur la puissance de cette double stimulation dans le dispositif des autoconfrontations croisees pour esquisser une methode d’apprentissage qui encourage la reflexion productive et l’orientation interpretative au travail.

The global importance of crowd or on-demand work via digital platforms is increasing. Platform enterprises create and manage two- or many-sided markets by enabling suppliers and buyers of services meet in a flexible and scalable way, creating new economic efficiencies. However, platform work may also increase invisibility, uncertainty, risks, and competition for workers [2]. This paper investigates the sustainability of on-demand work through a dynamic analysis of the resources available to workers when facing an abrupt change in their work organization. Our empirical case is a platform-driven food courier company in the Helsinki region, Finland. We discuss the resources we found in the light of the immunity, control and fungibility mechanisms that lead to both opportunities and vulnerabilities for the on-demand workers [9]. The paper yields practice-based empirical insights of how immunity, control and fungibility are experienced by workers, and thus add our understanding of the often invisible and dark side of on-demand work. At the end, we present our conclusions regarding research on sustainable development. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://link.springer.com/

BACKGROUND Sustainable development requires learning, but the contents of learning are often complex and ambiguous. This requires new integrated approaches from research. It is argued that investigation of people's learning challenges in every-day work is beneficial for research on sustainable development. OBJECTIVE The aim of the paper is to describe a research method for examining learning challenges in promoting sustainable development. This method is illustrated with a case example from organic vegetable farming in Finland. METHODS The method, based on Activity Theory, combines historical analysis with qualitative analysis of need expressions in discourse data. RESULTS The method linking local and subjective need expressions with general historical analysis is a promising way to overcome the gap between the individual and society, so much needed in research for sustainable development. CONCLUSIONS Dialectically informed historical frameworks have practical value as tools in collaborative negotiations and participatory designs for sustainable development. The simultaneous use of systemic and subjective perspectives allows researchers to manage the complexity of practical work activities and to avoid too simplistic presumptions about sustainable development.

Despite the importance of the expectations and visions of the actors involved in sustainable innovations, only the societal, motivational perspective is usually considered. The fact that local actors may have different multi-motivations is typically overlooked. The aim of this study is to examine and understand the multi-motivational perspectives in a sustainable production project. First, we introduce the concept of the object and analyze the case of a biogas production project as a mediating activity for making swine production more sustainable. We argue that the object of the activity, as manifested in motivational perspectives, shapes the way in which biogas production (BP) systems are implemented. The article concludes by discussing how the concept of object can be used to explore the actual and future possibilities of using artifacts for increasing the sustainability of production.

The local, as opposed to global, food system refers to the idea of achieving food equitability, access, security, responsibility and environmental stewardship by means of localising food. We studied the effects and learning challenges of localising the food system at municipal and provincial scales in a Finnish case. In our multidisciplinary project, we developed a conceptual system model to facilitate interdisciplinary communication and integration. In the model, a food system was divided into the economic, the biophysical and, as the link between these two, the learning subsystems. The model and our disciplinary results from case studies within each of the subsystems are described. The theories and methods in analysing environmental and socioeconomic impacts of, and learning challenges for, localising the food system are discussed. Our experience gives support to foodshed thinking: it is essential to include both the rural source and the urban sink areas in a food system.