By considering the number of spaces and ways employees' education and learning disclose, a large number of objects (material actors) must be investigated. Such objects might be animating or inanimate, namely human and non-human. Nonetheless, researchers in organization studies and professionals still tend to disregard or subordinate material objects that settle the backgrounds of professional work and learning practices. However, organizational daily learning practices would simply not exist without them. The so-called ¿practice turn¿ and the changing sociomaterial context pave the way for exploring how education and learning in Knowledge Management can vary from a specific learning setting through organisational settings. By drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this research aims to analyse how a Corporate University (CU) shapes and reshapes its identity to achieve its main goal: members¿ lifelong learning and development of skills and knowledge needed to implement the organizational Industrial Plan. In an exploratory ambition, the research design draws upon qualitative data collection and analysis techniques. In accordance, ANT is concurrently employed conceptually, methodologically and empirically to follow the introduction and affirmation of an ICT for corporate education and learning. It provides a framework for identifying and supporting relevant calculative centres.
Whit the aim of analysing the role of a modern CU within one of the most important Italian telecommunication companies, the black box of organizational learning is opened.
According to several authors, ANT and IT can be combined to guide the investigation of networks of people, organizations, software and hardware (Holmström and Robey 2005; Lanzara and Morner 2005). The boundary between the social, the material and technology is dissolving. ¿ANT regards the technological artefact as being moved and changed by social actors who are engaged in it¿ (Holmström and Robey 2005:167), and social actors themselves are also changed through the diffusion of the IT. Overall, IT devices must now be seen as materials for enrolling in actor networks (Callon et al. 2002; Holmström and Robey 2005; Norén and Ranerup 2005). Materiality has been widely discounted by organizational and management research, even though sometimes inspected separately from the multiple and dynamic ways in which the social and the material are constitutively entangled (Jones 2014). However, conceptualizing technology as a material determinant of organizational characteristics led to limited attention to either technological specifics and the role of human agency in determining technology (Orlikowsky 2009). ANT analyses show how knowledge is generated through the process and effects of assemblages. Hence, learning is not simply an individual or cognitive process, nor a social achievement. It becomes enacted as a network effect (Fenwick and Edwards 2010). There is an underlying link between education and sociomaterial world, as the personal and the social cannot be separated from things in all educational endeavours. In this vein, education is the set of material artifacts that are continually distributed, employed and managed (Lawn and Grosventor 2005). Objects shape workplace learning, technology implementations and all the other activities when they associate with human actions and meanings. Things cannot be seen as mere products of human design, or as empty tools advancing educational practices and performance (Waltz 2006). Artifacts act and relate exerting their force to regulate, create or exclude forms of participations within networks. ANT does not focus on what things mean, but on what (and how) they do in relation to humans (and non). This results into an identifiable assemblage: an actor-network, which is not agentic itself, but is an effect of associations. Diversely from Social Network Analysis, ANT does not represent the study of the individual actor or the social; it aims at accounting for a real essence of society and nature (Latour 1996). Instead of staring from social or natural universality by analyzing local contingencies, it starts from irreducible and unconnected localities which somehow end into temporary commensurable connections. As a consequence, to study actor-networks means to abandon mathematical properties (those typical of SNA) and shift from static topological properties to dynamic and ontological properties of networks (Latour 1996). ¿ANT's key contribution is to suggest analytic methods that honor the mess, disorder and ambivalences that order phenomena¿ (Fenwick and Edwards 2010:1). From an organizational point of view, this can have relevant implications. First, the possibility to account for the analysis of the effectivity of material networks of objects and technologies in determining the success of departments, and the necessity of rethinking the signification of context (McGregor 2004). Alike Law¿s (1992) study of educational technology, materialities are active constructors of relationships and interactions, as well as the spatial configuration of the network they belong to. Contexts are materially constructed through this heterogeneous production that involve humans, things, structures. Organizing is a network effect, and ¿ANT explores how organizations keep themselves in place¿ (McGregor 2004:353). Hence, there is a need to overcome ¿the blindness toward the question of how educational practice is affected by materials¿ (Søresen 2009:2). This sets the ground for an in-depth analysis of knowledge generation, ¿that is so often missed in studies of learning¿ (Fenwick and Edwards 2010:29). This work will also contribute to show how ANT can serve as a valid framework, to complete and integrate both the social learning theory and the sociomateriality perspective. On the empirical level, in an era where problem-based solutions and experiential approaches to professional learning are increasingly encouraged, there is a necessity of investigating multiple perspectives and ontologies, in order to achieve a certain degree of coherence. This is possible through the application of ANT for studying different enactments as a result of competing local knowledges. It also allows for understanding the underlying reasons behind the enforcement of standards and knowledge, by making them visible. It provides a framework for identifying and supporting relevant calculative centres. ANT can also connect the empirical observation of actors involved, by redefining their roles in the organization.