A dialectical approach to the politics of learning in a major city police organization
提出一种辩证方法研究组织学习的政治学，通过分析某大城市警察组织，识别出四种相互依赖的学习政治模式：赋权、强制、反抗和缓和，并揭示主流文献忽视的缓和模式的重要性。
In this paper we develop a dialectical approach to the organizational politics of learning, exploring complexity, tensions and asymmetries. Turning this kaleidoscopic lens on our empirical setting, a major city police organization, we mix the blue light of police vehicles into Driver’s (2002) ‘fluorescent’ light of office workplaces, fragmenting the brightness of ‘Utopian sunshine’ and the darkness of ‘Foucauldian gloom’ perspectives on organizational learning, and making visible a wider spectrum of political colours of learning. We identify four interdependent political modalities of learning: empowering, coercive, insurgent and palliative and explore how they interplay in complex and contradictory ways. We note that, whilst mainstream and critical literatures tend to focus on organizational learning as, respectively, empowering and coercive, and to a lesser extent insurgent, much of the politics of learning in our study converges in the palliative modality, where the emphasis is on learning-to-cope (rather than learning-to-thrive, learning-to-comply or learning-to-resist). We show that the palliative modality of learning is in many ways an outcome of the dynamic and complex engagement between the other three modalities. We discuss the implications of our findings for a more nuanced understanding of learning as political, and of the relationship between organizational learning and power.