Creating Social Sustainable Organizational Learning through Action Research: A Danish Case Study from the public sector

This research paper explores organizational learning for social organizational sustainability and development through action research. The study draws from a larger action research project in a public institution specialized in supporting citizens with significant deaf-blindness and hearing loss.

In the paper, we argue that, in a late modern world characterized by complexity and wicked problems, we must rethink and reconceptualize leadership and facilitate collaborative organizational learning spaces drawing on the notions of withness-thinking and thinking-from-within (Shotter, 2005, 2010, 2012) to create institutions that are more inclusive. Inspired by John Shotter, we argue that the building of a collaborative action capacity makes it possible to jointly create development in organizations (Shotter, 2013). This will be explored in the perspective of action research focusing on social sustainability, inclusiveness, welfare and organizational learning. Social sustainability can be understood in an emergent process perspective with attention paid to the creation of communities based on well-being, strong relationships, belonging and 'liveability' (Dupret and Langergaard, 2020, p. 233). We argue that sustainable organizational learning and development must engage both employees and managers in dialogic, critical and imaginative collaborative reflexive (Cunliffe, 2002, 2022) and relational-responsive learning processes, which attempt to develop knowledge, professionalism, competences, and new practices in the organization. Learning can be considered as a social activity linked to experience, action, and the context (Örtenblad, 2018, p. 154). When learning is framed as a social activity, a basis is created for organizational learning from-within the organization in a social sustainable, critical reflective action-oriented and emergent process perspective.