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Radical learning through semantic transformation: capitalizing on novelty
Bosma, B. Chia, R. Fouweather, Ian
Bosma, B.
Chia, R.
Fouweather, Ian
Publication Date
14/01/2016
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(c) 2016 SAGE Publications. Full-text reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.
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Abstract
That organizations exist in a fluid environment of unprecedented and discontinuous change seems beyond debate. We seem
to find ourselves immersed in a world in which events have a tendency to unfold and overtake us in unforeseeable and novel
ways that defy comprehension; a crisis of meaning takes place and conventional sensemaking is disrupted. Our need to
imaginatively construct new meanings that allow us to understand what is going on and to work out how to respond becomes
ever more pressing. We do live in interesting times. The emergence of the new, however, challenges current established
ways of knowing and opens a creative space for radical learning to take place. Novelty stimulates the generative process by
which organizations and individuals learn, adapt to and cope with the exigencies they face in order to survive and progress.
Such radical learning occurs when creative linguistic interventions in dialogue opens up semantic spaces whereby new terms
are coined and old ones broken up, combined and/or redeployed in novel ways, in an effort to give expression to the fresh
circumstances experienced or new phenomena observed. We call this kind of imaginative linguistic intervention semantic
transformation. In this paper we argue that it is this semantic transformation that promotes radical transformational learning.
Such semantic transformation is predicated on the improvisatory character of dialogue as a form of communication. We
explore how, through this dialogical process of semantic transformation, we discover the resources and means to respond to
the vagueness and equivocality experienced, by exploiting language in novel ways in our attempts to make sense of and
account for such experiences.
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Accepted manuscript
Citation
Bosma B, Chia R and Fouweather I (2016) Radical learning through semantic
transformation: capitalizing on novelty. Management Learning. 47(1): 14-27.
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