Toward Regional Circuits. Attitude Transformation of Regional Stakeholders: Transgressive Organizational Educational Professionalization

• In Event: The Armageddon Club: Educating for the Future of Humanity — Educating Toward Equitable Futures 2

Abstract

The climate crisis has already had catastrophic effects and is even speeding up (IPPC 2021). Keeping pace with these developments requires the involvement of the governments of the world and the participation of regional stakeholders. Multi-stakeholder-partnerships are proven to have catalytic effects (Eweje et al. 2021) on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Universities can support this process with organizational education for sustainability. This may refer not only refer to the professionalization of students, but to creating ‘new public spaces’ like the classical marketplace of the greek ‘agora’. The mode-3 of science (Nowotny et al. 2001) as well as other concepts have lead into ‘living labs’ methodologies, Schneidewind and Singer-Brodowski (2014: 69) suggest. Science here becomes a ‘knowledge broker between systems’ and a ‘network node in differentiated modern societies.’
The paper presents the empirical results of three innovation labs, which in a longitudinal approach were realized over the course of one year (2018 and 2019) within the project ‘Toward the regional nutrition cycle: Greening the University Canteen by regional Innovation Labs’. This project funded by the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE), supported the professionalization of regional stakeholders and the set up of a regional circular economy (Geissdoerfer 2017) in the field of sustainable nutrition.
By including heterogeneous stakeholders from all relevant subfields of the regional nutrition cycle, the whole system was brought into one space (Weisbord & Jannoff 2007). The approach taken here was ‘innovation learning’ (Weber et al 2020) in and of the multistakeholder setting, which carries characteristics of transgression.
Each innovation lab addressed a specific dimension of the regional development process: The level of products and process, system building, and the inner attitude and imaginaries were addressed in a ‘deep innovation’ approach (Scharmer 2007). Image-based methods were used to transgress rationalities and normalities and “support the polyphony of vision, perspectives and skills” (Weber & Heidelmann 2019: 430). Also, the students, who facilitated the process within the innovation labs, were trained to support “inclusion and voicing” and “the articulation of systematical unspeakabilities” (ibid.: 432). They also aim at transgressing ‘speaking positions’ and to deal with the integration of different rationalities.
The qualitative longitudinal empirical study presented here included image-based interviews with the participating stakeholders. The image based interviews realized before and after each innovation lab contributed to show the transgressive mode of ‘innovation learning’ of regional stakeholders.
Interviews and images were analyzed together within a metaphor- (Lakoff & Johnson 2004) and discourse-oriented (Karl 2019) analytical methodology in order to reconstruct the transformation of mind and world relations. The metaphors used shifted and transformed in the stakeholder narrations towards design-, future- and equity-oriented critical attitudes among stakeholders. The empirical results show those transforming attentional structures (Scharmer 2007) towards an equitable organizational education process.

Author

• Tobias Klös, Philipps-University Marburg