HOW PUBLIC SECTOR PROFESSIONALS USE POSTFORMAL THOUGHT IN PRACTICE by

JACKIE B. THOMAS (Under the Direction of SHARAN B. MERRIAM)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). This study utilized a qualitative design consisting of in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 10 purposefully selected public sector professionals. Participants ranged in age from 35 to 63 and reflected diversity in race and gender as well. Professions represented were engineers and utilities/financial analysts. Three questions guided this study: (1) What are the elements of postformal thought? (2) What informal learning experiences at work influence the development and use of postformal thought? (3) What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

Data analysis was guided by the constant comparative method, which led to three sets of findings: (1) The elements of postformal thought clustered around five themes: framing the problem, constructing knowledge, coping with ambiguity, finding a solution, and looking back. (2) Informal learning experiences influenced the development and use of postformal thought: being self-directed, learning from and with others, and building models. (3) Certain contextual factors shaped

learning and development: the context of the work, the organizational culture, and access to resources.

Two conclusions were drawn from this study: First, the use of postformal thought is shaped by the context of professional practice, and, secondly, informal learning experiences are the critical path to the development and use of postformal thought in the workplace. Findings from this study suggest that public sector professionals, with the appropriate contextual support, will develop and use postformal thought as conditions warrant in today’s fast changing and ill-structured work environment. Practical implications from this study suggest that understanding and identifying learning experiences and contextual factors that foster cognitive development benefits the working professional in the development of practice, benefits educators preparing adults to enter or advance in the workplace, and benefits the organization in preparing a 21st century workforce.

INDEX WORDS: Informal learning, Public sector workplace, Cognitive development, Postformal thought, Practical logic, Formal logic, Qualitative research, Adult learning, Adult development

HOW PUBLIC SECTOR PROFESSIONALS USE POSTFORMAL THOUGHT IN PRACTICE

by

JACKIE B. THOMAS B.S., Brenau University, 1996

M.A., University of Georgia, 1997

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2008

© 2008

Jackie B. Thomas

All Rights Reserved

HOW PUBLIC SECTOR PROFESSIONALS USE POSTFORMAL THOUGHT IN PRACTICE

by

JACKIE B. THOMAS

Major Professor: Sharan B. Merriam

Committee: Laura L. Bierema Ronald M. Cervero Bradley C. Courtenay

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2008

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ithaca has given me a beautiful voyage and many people have helped me and held me up on this journey (see Cavafy, 1911, for my favorite poem).

My family, especially my husband, and friends have been a source of encouragement, support, and forgiveness for all those missed occasions when I was buried in classes, books, and chapter writing.

At Brenau, I met Dr. Robert Rowden. He believed in me and what I could achieve long before I believed it.

In my masters program, Dr. Margaret Holt was my mentor, my advisor, and my role model for classroom teaching and learning.

In my graduate program, Dr. Sharan Merriam has been my critical path to the highest achievement in my professional life and I appreciate my committee for their advice and suggestions. They have added so much value to this dissertation.

Finally, I owe much to the public sector professionals I have been privileged to know and work with for many years. I want to express my sincerest appreciation for their willingness to participate in this study. v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

LIST OF TABLES ...... vii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Background to the Problem ...... 1

Statement of the Problem ...... 17

Purpose and Research Questions...... 17

Significance of the Study ...... 18

Definitions ...... 19

2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE...... 21

Experiential Learning...... 23

Adult Cognition and Postformal Thought...... 37

The Nature of Professional Practice...... 58

Informal Learning in Professional Practice...... 62

Chapter Summary...... 73

3 METHODOLOGY ...... 76

Design of the Study...... 77

Sample Selection ...... 80

Data Collection ...... 82 vi

Data Analysis ...... 89

Validity and Reliability ...... 91

Research Bias and Assumptions ...... 93

4 FINDINGS ...... 96

Part 1: Participant Profiles...... 97

Part 2: Findings ...... 111

Chapter Summary...... 154

5 DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS...... 157

Conclusions and Discussion ...... 159

Implications for Practice...... 176

Recommendations for Further Research ...... 178

REFERENCES ...... 180

APPENDICES ...... 198

A INTERVIEW GUIDE...... 198

B CONSENT FORM...... 199 vii

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1: Chronology of Postformal Research ...... 49

Table 2: Sinnott’s (1998) Operational Aspects of Postformal Thought ...... 52

Table 3: Participant Profiles...... 98

Table 4: Findings ...... 112 viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: Adult Cognition ...... 39

1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Background to the Problem

Much has been written about work and its role in adult lives. It has been estimated that one-third to one-half of the waking hours of adult life are consumed by work (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). This single activity, shared by most adults, is one of the significant developmental aspects of adult life (Bee &

Bjorklund, 2000), yet the experience of work, “what people actually do and think in everyday work activity,” has remained essentially unexplored (Fenwick, 2008b, p.25). While the activity called work has remained constant in the lives of adults, the context of work has changed over time.

The Changing Nature of Work

The agrarian society that existed in this country before the 1900s changed over to an industrial society at the turn of the 20th century, but the skills necessary to succeed at work still consisted of two good hands and a strong back (Cook,

1977). Scientific and technological developments drove the development of the

Industrial Age in America where factory work was reduced to its smallest component. Farmers converged on the cities to work on assembly lines six days a week and to spend the seventh in movie houses with a new-fangled invention known as air conditioning (Hofstadter, 1955).

As larger organizations formed and became more sophisticated, knowledge and the power to make decisions were the exclusive domains of management. “In 2

the ideal large bureaucracy, pyramids of supervisors did the thinking" (The future of workplace learning and performance, 1994, p. 44). These organizations required little learning from their workers and worker roles were defined by specific instructions on job duties and responsibilities. However, in the 1980s, overseas competition changed the rules of work:

Out of this upheaval emerged the high-performance work

organization--a catch-all phrase for companies in constant search of

better results....The standards of performance set by the global

economy require new ways of working, new ways of organizing work,

and new ways of thinking and learning about work. (Galagan, 1994,

p. 22)

The behaviorist paradigms of the Industrial Age no longer describe or prescribe appropriate and meaningful thinking and learning at work. The industrial model of work has been replaced with what is often called the Information Age,

Knowledge Age or the New Economy, where ideas and innovation drive every aspect (Tapscott, 1999). Defining the New Economy in the mid-90s meant considering two broad trends occurring in the world. The first trend was the spread of capitalism around the world after the collapse of socialism. The second trend was the rapid spread of technology. In the late 90s, the convergence of cheap semiconductors, the rapid diffusion of the Internet, and trends in increased productivity in the U.S. workforce changed the speed of work, connecting countries, free market economies and workers worldwide (Pohjola, 2002). 3

In a major report commissioned by the U. S. Department of Labor, The 21st

Century at Work, Karoly and Panis (2004) describe the new knowledge-based workforce this way:

The transition to a knowledge-based economy continues to fuel

demand for well-educated workers…Shifts in organizational forms and

the nature of employment relationships, brought on by new

technologies and global competition, favor such high-level cognitive

skills as abstract reasoning, problem-solving, communication, and

collaboration, attributes associated with knowledge work. (p. xviii)

Today, most of the thirty fastest growing occupations are in the professions (Dohm

& Shniper, 2007). Completion of a college education, once considered a luxury for most workers, is just the starting point of adult learning in the new workplace of the 21st century. Knowledge workers, unlike their predecessors, may change jobs four, five, or six times during their careers or work as independent contractors, forsaking the traditional employer-employee relationships of industrial America.

“We can expect a shift away from lifetime jobs towards less permanent, non- standard employment relationships” (Karoly & Panis, 2004, p. xv).

The physical location of work has changed. “Workplace can be an organization, a website, a kitchen table, even a car” (Fenwick, 2008b, p. 18).

According to Karoly and Panis (2004), the move away from vertical organizations toward decentralized business organizations may result in some sectors being comprised of “e-lancers, workers linked by electronic networks in a global marketplace” (p. xv). 4

Rapid restructuring of organizations in response to global, economic, social and technological change, combined with the shifting identity and responsibility of the worker in the organization, reflect the complexities of modern life in today’s workplace. The power to make decisions once rested exclusively in the domain of management, but the effects of technology and globalization have resulted in responsibility, ownership, and authority at work being transferred from the traditional management structure to the worker (Kegan, 1994). The means of production, as well as its ownership and control, has shifted to the thinking skills of the worker, where the only assets that count are the intellectual assets of the workers and the knowledge they create (Tapscott, 1999). “Increasingly, the term

‘knowledge worker’ is applied to workers who go beyond just providing information to now being responsible for generating and conveying knowledge needed for decision-making” (Karoly & Panis, 2004, p. xxiii).

This qualitatively different kind of thinking is as different as the four levels of thinking described by Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958), and this kind of adaptive thinking is critical to the survival of both the individual worker and the organization

(Sinnott, 1998). Making a similar argument are workplace learning writers like

Barnett (1999), who argues that we are living and working in an age of

“supercomplexity” where “work demands learning” (p.40). The two, work and learning, have become one and are inextricably linked.

The Nature of Learning in Today’s Workplace

Workplace learning refers to learning that occurs during the activities and experiences of work. The organization often hosts some type of structured formal class or presentation where the learning outcomes are geared to accomplish 5

organizational goals. Workplace learning may also refer to a framework created by the organization for learning activities such as on-the-job training, mentoring, or coaching for performance. Additionally, workplace learning may describe the social interaction between people, people in groups, and groups across boundaries. No matter the viewpoint, workplace learning is a mechanism for change in the adults who inhabit the world of work.

Workplace learning comes with many descriptors: informal, formal, non- formal, structured, unstructured, self-directed, other-directed, intentional, unintentional, accidental, personal, collective, organizational, situated, distributed, tacit, implicit, and reflective. In a major literature review of workplace learning research published during the period 1999 through 2004, Fenwick (2008a) concluded that, for these studies, workplace learning is defined as “formal and informal learning related to paid work” (p. 227). Fenwick’s findings were based on an analysis of 343 articles, published in nine journals, representing three fields of study: organizational studies, adult education, and human resource development.

In the U.K, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) has surveyed adult learners every year since 1999. In 2004, the Centre for Labour

Market Studies, University of Leicester, was asked to design a survey module of questions on learning at work, specifically the sources of learning found in the everyday work experience. Almost 2000 employees across all disciplines and occupational levels were chosen at random and surveyed in face-to-face interviews over a three-week period in February, 2004. In answer to the question, “To what extent have the following activities helped you learn to do your job better?” (p.

369), nearly 85% reported that their best learning was done in the everyday 6

activities of their job. Other important sources of learning given were: being shown by others, 65%; reflection on performance, 64%; watching and listening, 58%; reading books, manuals, and work-related magazines, 47%. Using the internet did not score well as a source of learning, with only 24% reporting it as an important source of learning (Felstead, Fuller, Unwin, Ashton, Butler, & Lee, 2004). This finding could be attributed to the makeup of the participant pool and the fact that many participants would not have access to the internet while at work.

The most comprehensive study of the U.S. workplace, completed in 1997 and published as The Teaching Firm (Center for Workplace Development, Educational

Development Center, 1998), estimated that about 75% of job knowledge comes from informal learning. The U.S. Department of Labor, state governments, and the

Pew Charitable Trusts funded the Educational Development Center (EDC) study of seven large organizations in the private sector. According to the EDC research, a

“teaching firm,” or learning organization, embeds teaching and learning into the culture of the organization by actively shaping the environment in this direction

(Cofer, 2000). Barnett (1999) writes that informal learning is already embedded in work in a sociological way because work is being subjected to the external forces of a global economy, public sector regulation of private sector business, and the technology revolution. “Ultimately, the call to learn now embedded in work cannot be ducked” (p. 34). He argues that individuals and organizations can put off learning and change, but eventually they both will be faced with the inevitable.

The Four Dominant Discourses in Workplace Learning

Garrick (1999) offers a framework to understand what are described as the four dominant discourses of work-based learning and he identifies them as human 7

capital theory, generic competencies, experiential learning, and the cognitive approach. Understanding workplace learning through this lens is helpful in situating this proposal in the literature.

Human Capital Theory

Cost-to-benefit ratio and return-on-investment are familiar measures in the affairs of a market economy. Traditionally, they have been applied to the cost of capital and physical plant investments in manufacturing and commerce. Human capital theory carries the concepts a step farther and applies them to the workforce, where learning is linked to performance and the bottom line, the generation of profit. “A measurement approach which is growing in popularity is that of the balance scorecard – of adding return on knowledge assets to the traditional return on financial assets to the organization’s yearly accounting metrics” (Marsick & Watkins, 1999, p. 206). Human capital theory has been criticized as a model that serves the capital interests of employers and neglects the ethical issues in workplace learning (Garrick, 1999).

Generic Competencies

The second discourse—generic skills, capabilities and competencies— describes behaviors, skills, knowledge, and abilities that apply across all jobs in an organization. Problem solving, teamwork, quality, creativity, communication and leadership are the competencies often mentioned in the Human Resource

Development, leadership, and management literature. These competencies appear in job descriptions and job advertisements and, while these competencies may be identifiable in all jobs, contextual factors in the workplace impact the development of these competencies in varying ways. There also is some question about the 8

transferability of particular competencies from one job context to another.

Additionally, many employers expect institutions of learning to teach this operational know-how as part of the curriculum in preparing graduates for the world of work. Garrick (1999) connects this particular workplace learning discourse to preparing people for the marketplace, a variation of human capital theory, where learning activities are linked to performance and profit generation.

Experiential Learning

The third discourse, experiential learning, is one of the major research areas in adult learning theory. Its roots can be traced to one of Knowles’s (1970) five assumptions about adult learners—adults learn through experience. Boud, Cohen and Walker (1993) further define experiential learning where experience is the stimulus for learning; where learners participate in the active construction of their learning experiences; where learning is a holistic interaction of the emotional, the cerebral and the actions of the learner; where learning is socially and culturally constructed; and where learning is influenced by the context in which it occurs. In the field of adult education, Marsick and Watkins (1990, 2001) are closely identified with this discourse, having led the inquiry into informal and organizational learning.

Their influence in the literature on Human Resource Development, learning organizations and theories of informal workplace learning is considerable.

Fenwick (2000, 2003), seeking to disrupt conventional notions and invite response and critique, has expanded the traditional definition of experiential learning based on current scholarly writings to include: (1) personal meaning- making based on reflection (a constructivist perspective); (2) resistance, tension and unconscious interference (a psychoanalytic perspective); (3) participation in a 9

community, tools and activity of a situation (a situative perspective); (4) awareness of and resistance to the power relations present in all human activities (a critical cultural perspective); and, (5) co-emergence, the interconnected learner and context (the enactivist perspective).

The Cognitive Approach

The fourth discourse in Garrick’s (1999) topology, the cognitive approach to studying workplace learning, may be the most appropriate when the work performed is of a cerebral nature, the kind of work most often found in the professions (Cheetham & Chivers, 2001). Cognitive approaches “look at the way people absorb information from their environment, sort it mentally, and apply it in everyday activities of learning and problem solving” (p. 251). There can be little understanding of problem solving, decision-making, or expertise without understanding how the mind works. The complexity of today’s workplace escalates the need to develop cognitive approaches to workplace learning as professionals often find themselves in situations where previous frames of reference and understanding are unreliable and ineffective (Barnett, 1999). Beckett (2001) argues for a new “understanding of understanding” learning in the workplace.

“Instead of asking how the learning, through training, is presented to the learner—

Has there been a change in the state of the learner?—we need to ask a more profound question: What inferences can now be articulated by the learner?” (p.

73).

Traditional psychology is criticized because it portrays cognitive ability as a skill derived from the internal attributes of the physical brain, ignoring the influences of contextual factors, viewing the mind as “isolated from the social 10

world” (Garrick, 1999, p. 222). Much of the research in cognitive development has been experimental in nature and “has not differentiated adults from children”

(Merriam, 2001, p. 4). Additionally, the usefulness of development models in adult education has been questioned as the research participants in foundational models were either very young or very old, white, middle-class males (Courtenay, 1994).

Two cognitive development models that have dominated Western thinking in the

20th century are Piaget’s (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) four-stage model of cognitive development in childhood and adolescence, and Riegel’s (1975) dialectical thinking.

Subsequent models of adult cognitive development widely used in adult education can be linked to one, the other, or to elements of both.

In the early 1980s, a group of developmental psychologists began investigating a common theme they called Positive Adult Development, focusing on the development of adult thinking beyond the level of Piagetian formal operations, a level called postformal thinking (Boucouvalas, 1998). “This field examines ways in which development continues in a positive direction throughout adulthood”

(Commons & Richards, 2003, para. 3). Many postformal researchers approach this topic from different perspectives, but a common characteristic shared across the various approaches to positive adult development is the notion of stages of cognitive development that extend beyond the formal operation stage previously identified by Piaget as the endpoint of intellectual development.

Several threads of research laid the foundation for the study of positive adult development and what came to be known as postformal thought. Arlin (1975) was the first to identify a possible fifth stage of cognitive development and labeled it problem-finding, observing that problem-solving moved into problem-finding for 11

some research participants who were faced with solving ill-structured problems.

Problem-finding includes much of what is also investigated as creativity (Bee &

Bjorklund, 2000).

Perry (1970), in his study of the intellectual development of college students, already had described a kind of thought he observed as contextual relativism, where the conceptions of knowledge and truth are not absolute but relative to the person holding them. Some theorists identify relativism as an important component of wisdom and Sternberg (2002) identifies dialogic thinking as an important component in teaching for wisdom—“to be able to understand other people’s points of view, whether or not one agrees with such views” (p. B20).

Basseches (1980), using Riegel’s (1975) framework to study the development of adult thinking, defined dialectical thinking as the ability to tolerate contradiction and ambiguity. This kind of thinking is especially useful in dealing with the problems of adulthood where there is often no single right solution and important information about the problem may be missing.

Thus, postformal thinking came to be characterized by problem-finding, the acceptance of relativism, and dialectical thinking (Kramer, 1983). Postformal thought is a pragmatic way of adaptively solving complex and ill-structured problems related to specific contexts in adulthood. It develops with the social experiences of mature adulthood. Its most significant features are the ability to choose the most appropriate logic for the situation, and the realization that all knowledge is incomplete and subjective to the knower (Sinnott, 1998).

Drawing on the literature in adult learning and adult development, Brookfield

(2000) calls this kind of adult thinking practical logic. According to Brookfield, 12

practical logic is domain-specific reasoning that develops from a deep understanding of the context of the situation. Practical logic is made up of flexible logic systems that include experiential and inferential ways of reasoning and it does not always follow formal rules of deductive reasoning. Instead it allows for the existence of gray areas as well as right/wrong problem solutions. While practical logic may be observed in any setting in adult life, it is particularly conspicuous in the workplace, where knowledge constructed from experiential learning is combined with technical rational knowledge and applied inferentially to problems in practice.

Several lines of cognitive research are related to the development of the professional in the workplace. One of these lines of research is called practical intelligence (Sternberg, 2000), a kind of intelligence that contextualists believe cannot be understood outside a cultural context (Sternberg, 1994). Research by

Sternberg and Wagner (1986) identifies practical intelligence as a kind of adult thinking found in the professions, a kind of intelligence that is highly correlated to business success. They also found that traditional measures of intelligence and practical intelligence scores were uncorrelated (Sternberg, 1994). Perhaps the most significant application of Sternberg’s work is in his idea that what he calls practical intelligence can be taught (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999).

A second line of research related to the development of the professional in the workplace is called expertise. In a review of the literature on the development of expertise, Tennant and Pogson (1995) define expertise as a kind of practical intelligence “applied in the context of a particular domain of work” (p. 49). They report the common factors found in expertise: experts excel in their particular domains and this knowledge is not transferred easily to another domain; experts 13

sense large meaningful patterns or chunks of knowledge in their domains; experts generate solutions without extensive research and are able to anticipate actions and events; experts have excellent memory capacity concerning problems encountered in practice; experts represent problems in their domains on a more complex level than novices; experts spend considerable time conceptualizing or defining problems, which has a major impact on the quality of solutions; and experts are aware of their errors and reflect on the need to revisit solutions.

Tennant and Pogson point out that, while experience is a major ingredient in the process of moving from novice to expert, not much is known about how professionals, in the process of acquiring expertise, use their experiences for learning.

Another line of research touching the cognitive development of workplace professionals is related to the use of tacit knowing, a kind of knowledge used in thinking and problem solving that is unconscious to the professional, confirming the assertion by Schön (1983) that professionals know more than they can tell.

Working first as a professor in higher education and later as a consultant in business, Schön sensed a disconnect from the academic knowledge stressed in higher education and the practical knowledge actually employed in professional practice, leading Schön to investigate how professionals develop and value various kinds of knowledge used in their practice. His model of professional problem- solving is called Reflection-in-Action, where problems are reframed in the context of the professional’s tacit knowledge.

While Schön describes his theory of the development of professional thinking as non-logical and, consequently, not likely to be found in a discussion of the 14

literature about the cognitive development of logic systems, connections to this constructivist view of knowledge can be found in psychology. Sternberg and

Wagner (1986) investigated the tacit knowledge of two diverse groups of professionals—business executives and academic psychologists—and found that, across the two groups, training and experience accounted for tacit knowledge differences in novices and experts.

Words of caution come from Tennant and Pogson (1995) about the overemphasis on tacit knowledge in the workplace where expert performance may come to be known as unteachable or elitist. Ferry and Ross-Gordon (1998) point out that Schön presents two conflicting ideas about how reflection-in-action develops. On the one hand, Schön describes it as thinking that develops from an innate process coming from existing professional competencies, and Schön also claims that reflection-in-action develops from experience and reflection. Whether this model is a theory or a methodology is debated, but the contribution to improvement of professional practice is recognized (Usher, Bryant & Johnston,

1997).

Sinnott’s (1998) research has tracked the development of postformal thought in adulthood. According to Sinnott, postformal thought is a socially constructed concept where realities are co-constructed in and from the interactions of people.

Postformal thinkers acknowledge the existence of multiple realities and the existence of multiple right solutions to a problem. Knowledge is not out there in the hands of experts but, instead, resides in each person’s conception of it. A high tolerance for conflict, complexity, ambiguity, and paradox are evident in the behavior and thinking processes. Because it is a socially constructed way of looking 15

at the world, it can be understood and recognized by others and taught to others.

Finally, postformal thought is particularly useful in dealing with the issues in today’s

New Economy workplace.

Taken together, these lines of research represent the characteristics of adult thought in the professional workplace, where learning is experiential, reasoning is contextual, knowledge is constructed, thinking is dialectical and reflective, and problem-solving is intuitive.

Public Sector Professionals

Public sector workers and organizations are not immune to change as government workers manage public organizations and implement public policy; and they make up a significant portion of the civilian workforce in the U. S. There are approximately 18 million federal, state and local government employees, constituting 13% of the U. S. civilian workforce of 135 million (U.S. Census Bureau,

2008).

The role of government in our lives is changing from the “rowing” of political leaders, to the “steering” of special interests, to the “serving” of the multiple facets of law, community, politics, professional standards and citizen interests (Denhardt

& Denhardt, 2000). For many years, government bureaucracy had the luxury of lagging behind modern management practices and the organization of work because government was insulated from most of the problems and changes in the private sector. Where once the command-and-control tactics of political leaders and government workers maintained civil order and kept government programs running fairly efficiently, the problems of the 21st century have catapulted 16

governing bodies and public sector professionals into the issues of today’s workplace.

One example of the changing role of government is the deregulation of monopolies such as communications, transportation, and energy that is requiring a re-framing of the problems to be solved. The introduction of competing interests, for example, the needs of the consumer and other interested parties versus the legislative mandates required by law and the performance required by the organization, is forcing public sector professionals to become collaborative partners in the decision process (Young & Denize, 2008).

More dramatic examples of the changing role of government include box cutters and shoe bombs that suddenly captured the attention of transportation safety officials. The mailing of deadly anthrax paralyzed the United States Postal

Service and challenged the national public health system. Intelligence failures highlighted the need for more collaboration among government agencies in dealing with security and the threat of terrorism. Previous ways of decision-making and problem-solving in the public sector have been compromised. The ability to problem-find and possibly prevent potentially catastrophic events is much in demand.

The more collaborative role of serving multiple constituencies demands a new way of thinking about the structures, strategies and impact of individual and collective problem solving and decision-making. Merget (2003) argues that one of the most significant challenges impacting public sector professions today is the ability to make reasoned judgments in the face of complexity and change.

According to Merget, the best way to understand the constructs of flexibility and 17

adaptation in thinking skills is through using research that draws “on the insights that practitioners can thoughtfully and critically impart” (p. 394).

Today’s workplace requires an understanding about how this adaptation to change is learned by today’s public sector professional, how this learning contributes to the development of adult cognition and the application of postformal thought, and how this learning can be shared for the development of other working professionals.

Statement of the Problem

The 21st century workplace demands a qualitatively different approach to thinking and learning in the workplace. Public sector professionals, once bound up in bureaucratic hierarchies with rules and laws covering every topic, find themselves challenged to find new ways of learning to solve complex and ill- structured problems that often have no single right solution. The responsibility of providing crucial services and responding to critical issues such as safety and security with reasoned judgments compels public employees in the professions to learn how to deal with complex problems; but little is known about how these professionals learn and use the postformal thought necessary in today's public sector workplace.

Purpose and Research Questions

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context 18

of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). Three questions guided this study:

1. What are the elements of postformal thought?

2. What informal learning experiences at work influence the development

and use of postformal thought?

3. What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

Significance of the Study

Decisions of public employees in the professions profoundly impact society and its citizens; therefore, the cognitive frames of mind or reasoning structures that drive these decisions are of paramount concern to society and its citizens, organizations and their workers, and educators and their students. Yet, while cognitive growth is possible throughout adulthood, little is known about the experience of workplace learning and the application of postformal thought to complex problems. This study contributes to the theoretical explanations of adult cognition by exploring and understanding how learning experiences at work contribute to the development of public sector professionals as they apply postformal thought to complex problems.

The practical significance of this study lies in the idea that certain learning experiences in the workplace influence adult thinking, and more specifically, postformal thought. Understanding and identifying learning experiences and factors in the workplace that foster cognitive development has practical applications for the working professional, for educators preparing adults to enter or advance in the workplace and for organizational leaders, managers, and developers preparing a 21st century workforce. 19

Definitions

For the purpose of this study, the following definitions are used:

Adult cognition – “Capacities that seem to be observable chiefly in adult learners: the capacity to think dialectically, the capacity to employ practical logic, the capacity to know how we know what we know, and the capacity for critical reflection” (Brookfield, 2000, p. 90).

Cognition - The mental process of knowing, from the Latin word cognoscere, learn (adapted from The American Heritage Dictionary, 2000).

Postformal thought - A level of adult thinking beyond Piagetian formal operational thought characterized by problem-finding (Arlin, 1975), contextual relativism (Perry 1970), and dialectical thinking (Basseches, 1980); a pragmatic way of adaptively solving complex and ill-structured problems related to specific contexts in adulthood (Sinnott, 1998).

Professional - Any person with knowledge in an advanced field of arts, sciences or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized academic instruction and study; a kind of work that requires theoretical and practical application of highly-specialized knowledge; a kind of work that is predominantly intellectual and varied in character, as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work (adapted from the U. S. Code of Federal

Regulations, 29 CFR 541.3 – Professional, Section Number: 541.3, Section Name:

Professional).

Public sector - “Those parts of the economy that are financed out of taxation, are under state control, or both. It usually embraces central and local government, education, health and social services, police and armed forces, public institutions, 20

and certain businesses essential to the life of the community, such as the public utilities and other monopolies” (Issacs, 2000, www.xrefer.com).

Workplace learning - Learning that occurs during the activities and experiences of work.

21

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Introduction

Today’s public sector professionals practice in a chaotic and uncertain world, far removed from the bureaucratic rulebook that provided a kind of dull stability for most of 20th century government work in the U.S. Law enforcement agencies reeled in the aftershocks of 9-11. Hurricane Katrina exposed the failings of every level of government. Caseworkers and social protection systems are under fire as children suffer in horrific family or foster home circumstances. The 2003 power grid failure in the northeastern U.S. and Canada raised serious questions about what kind of oversight federal and state regulators have been giving to the nation’s power generating companies. Revenues are depressed and budgets are cut while one crisis after another lands on the desks of public sector employees. Systemic changes are taking place as well.

Merget (2003) summarizes the systemic changes impacting the professions of those that serve in the public arena. The globalization of the political economy has transformed the once domestic issues of national security, the environment, pollution, and immigration, to name a few. With globalization comes the demand by developing nations for our public sector expertise in market-based economies, tax codes and revenue systems, budgeting, judicial systems, and the other trappings of civil society. 22

A second systemic change discussed by Merget concerns the rapid spread of technology that has changed the meaning of expertise, requiring not only content knowledge and procedural knowledge, but also requiring the technical expertise to quickly capture, interpret, manage and communicate information electronically.

Another change is the imperative for public and private partnerships that is evident in the types of issues facing our society today. “Virtually all matters in the public domain cannot be secured by government alone.” Public and private collaboration is essential in “making the nation and its communities healthy, safe, and secure.”(Merget, p. 392). The long accepted practice of public sector professionals making unilateral decisions has given way to the collaboration of many diverse interests inside governmental agencies and across the boundaries that once clearly defined the public and private sectors.

Perhaps the most significant challenge outlined by Merget is the challenge to manage complexity and change by making reasoned judgments. This could be accomplished, according to Merget, not by technical rationality and objectivity alone, but by study and research into real problems in practice. Consequently, this investigation sought to understand how public sector professionals develop this reasoned judgment, or postformal thought, in practice. This chapter represents a review of current theory and research into several areas germane to the problem— experiential learning, adult thinking and postformal thought, the nature of professional practice, and how professionals learn informally in the workplace. The chapter concludes with a summary and considers the implications for research. 23

Experiential Learning

Professionals enter the workplace with content knowledge learned from the textbooks and professors associated with their discipline. They have been taught a set of thinking and problem-solving skills prescribed by their particular profession

(Donald, 2002). Most of these professionals are required to complete minimum hours of in-service training or continuing professional education to maintain their credentials. Yet there is a growing body of research that indicates that the most common form of learning at work is experiential in nature, self-directed and informal (e.g., see Alderton, 1999; Center for Workplace Development, Educational

Development Center, 1998; Cheetham & Chivers, 2001; Marsick & Watkins, 1990;

2001).

What does it mean to learn from experience? Experiential learning may refer to the kind of learning that students engage in when they have the freedom to explore, develop, and evaluate their own learning in some educational setting.

Experiential learning may refer to the immediate experience of learning in a hands- on situation, for example, actually dissecting a pig in a lab instead of reading about it or performing a virtual dissection mediated by a computer monitor and mouse.

For this study, experiential learning refers to what Houle (1980) described as learning that occurs from direct participation in life, specifically the “hot action” of the workplace (Beckett & Hager, 2000, p. 304).

Self-Directed Learning

Knowles popularized the term andragogy, the art and science of helping people learn, which became the conceptual framework for the development of several adult learning theories that dominate the field of adult education today. 24

The foundation of andragogy consists of Knowles’s (1970, 1984) five assumptions about adults in his approach to adult learning and teaching:

1. Self-Concept: Adult learners are self-directed and have a deep need to

participate in making decisions affecting them. They see themselves as

competent and responsible for their own decision-making and

participation in life and resent being treated like children. In a learning

activity, adults will resist or avoid situations where they are made to feel

incompetent. Additionally, when adults first experience a learner-

centered activity facilitated by another adult in a learning situation of

mutual inquiry, they may feel disoriented and confused. Once the

connection of self-directed learning is made to a learning situation, the

learner engages the learning “with deep ego-involvement, with results

that are frequently startling both to himself and to his teachers”

(Knowles, 1970, p. 40).

2. Experience: Adult learners are more apt to rely on their own experiences

rather than on the experiences of others. This experience is a rich

resource for learning. Knowles differentiates childhood experience from

adulthood experience by illustrating how children describe who they are

and how adults describe who they are. Children describe who they are by

their relationships to other people and places, e.g., someone’s child,

someone’s sibling, where they live, where they go to school. Adults

describe who they are by their “accumulation of unique experiences,”

meaning that “an adult is what he has done” (Knowles, 1970, p. 44). 25

3. Readiness to Learn: Adult learners are ready to learn when they

experience a need to know or do something directly related to their lives.

Just as children face the developmental tasks of growing up—learning to

talk, learning to walk, learning to read, learning to write—adults have

phases of growth in their personal and social roles, which change over the

course of adulthood, i.e., selecting a career, selecting a mate, starting a

family, participating in civil society as a citizen, adjusting to being older.

These developmental tasks, regardless of age, produce a readiness to

learn in the learner (Knowles, 1970).

4. Orientation to Learning: Adult learners have a life-centered, task-

centered or problem-centered orientation to learning. For children and

young adults, education and learning represent the accumulation of facts

and skills that might be useful later in life, thus they tend to have a

subject-centered focus on learning activities. Adults tend to engage in

learning because of some tension created by an immediate need in their

current situation in life. Another important facet of the orientation to

learning for adults addresses adults’ “need to know” what will be learned

and how it is relevant to their needs (Knowles, 1984, p. 12).

5. Motivation: Adult learners have internal motivators to learn. Adults do

have some external motivators for learning, such as securing a better job,

advancing in the organization, or receiving monetary rewards for learning,

but “the andragogical model predicates that the more potent motivators

are internal—self-esteem, recognition, better quality of life, greater self- 26

confidence, self-actualization” (Knowles, 1984, p. 12), similar to the

hierarchy of needs described by Maslow in 1970.

In Knowles’s (1970) first assumption about adult learners, he drew several comparisons between children and adults. Children are born dependent on others and strive for independence as they grow and develop. Children are dependent on adults for the basic needs of life but as they mature they take on the role of provider as worker, spouse, parent, and citizen. As children mature they come to see themselves as independent persons in their own right, able to make decisions and manage their own lives. Thus, the first assumption of Knowles about adult learners and self-directedness comes from the idea that just as people seek personal responsibility and control in life, they want responsibility and control over their own learning.

By 1980, Knowles had codified the skills of the self-directed learner: (1) the ability to act on natural curiosities; (2) the ability to answer questions through deductive and inductive reasoning; (3) the ability to identify the data needed for inquiry; (4) the ability to locate reliable, relevant data; (5) the ability to collect the data efficiently; (6) the ability to organize, analyze and evaluate the data; and (7) the ability to communicate the findings. These skills mirrored the findings of

Tough’s (1971) research into the learning projects of adults, but like traditional models of adult development, the findings have since been questioned as the participants were white, middle-class and educated (Tennant, 1997).

The idea of adults as self-directed learners resonated strongly with the research community and in a relatively short period of time a significant body of research literature formed. Some distinct facets of self-directed learning emerged 27

from the literature: (1) the adult’s desire for personal autonomy, (2) the adult’s ability to self-manage learning, (3) the adult’s pursuit of learning outside formal organizations or institutions, (4) the educator’s learner-centered environment for teaching and learning, (5) the educator’s responsibility in the development of self- directedness and critical reflection, and, (6) the politics of self-directed learning as an organizing concept for legitimate education. (Brookfield, 1985, 1993; Caffarella,

1993; Candy, 1991).

In 1996, Hiemstra, who had been studying self-directed learning since 1974, conducted a content analysis on the books published following each self-directed learning symposium from 1986 through 1994. He was interested in how the language used to described self-directed learning was changing. He expected to find three or four dozen unique ways to say self-directed learning. He found a minimum of 247 (Hiemstra, 1996).

By 1999, Merriam and Caffarella concluded, after an extensive review of the literature on self-directed learning, that the research agenda had stagnated. What are the personal characteristics of a self-directed learner? Is self-direction a personality characteristic or a process? How is autonomy affected by the context?

What is the role and responsibility of the facilitator in a learning transaction? The research results are mixed and confusing. “Although there is disagreement on the amount and the type of self-directed learning that goes on in the general population, we can say without reservation that the existence of the independent pursuit of learning in natural settings has been established” (Merriam & Caffarella,

1999, p. 295). 28

In 2006, Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner, revisited the literature on self-directed learning and found considerable recent “interest in the concept’s applicability to lifelong learning, human resource development, and online learning”

(p. 124), and particularly in research related to the professions of nursing, teaching, and human resource development (see Cho, 2003; Cole & Glass, 2004;

Dunlap & Grabinger, 2003; and Williams, 2001; as reported by Merriam, Caffarella,

& Baumgartner, 2006).

Constructivist Views of Experiential Learning

Constructivism underlies the traditional notion of experiential learning. In this view of adult learning, the learner is the central figure in a quest for meaning making or understanding, where new information is encoded in mental structures of knowledge and stored in memory. This personal knowledge is called forth as needed and used to understand each learner’s idea of reality. New knowledge structures are created or current knowledge structures are transformed as the learner interacts with the environment and reflects on experiences.

In 2000, Fenwick offered an article expanding the traditional view of experiential learning to include five contemporary perspectives drawn from current scholarly writings. In the Reflection (Constructivist) perspective, learning is individualized. Major theorists include Kolb (1984) and Boud, Cohen and Walker

(1993). Critics argue that this view is too simple and does not take into account the desire to learn, power structures in the learning environment, or the ability to learn without a conscious effort.

In the Interference (Psychoanalytic) perspective, learning is derived from interactions in both the conscious and unconscious mind. Major theorists include 29

Felman (1987) and Britzman (1998). Critics argue that this view relies too heavily on internal factors and suggests that learning is entirely a cerebral function with no regard for socially constructed learning.

In the Participation (Situative) perspective, learning is derived through physical activities and tasks, through participation and interaction with community, resources, and activities. Major theorists include Wilson (1992) and Greeno (1997).

Critics argue that this view leans too heavily on a dependent learner, who also may not have equal access to resources and opportunities. It also discounts conceptual learning without the need for physical activity.

In the Resistance (Cultural) perspective, learning is filtered through the power structure of teacher, learner, and environment, significantly impacting learning, activities, identity, and meaning making. Major theorists include Kellner

(1995), Flax (1990), and Giroux (1992). Critics argue that individuals can be deeply embedded and defined by their environment and that it is impossible to separate the individual from these environmental factors.

In the Co-Emergence (Enactivist) perspective, a relatively new conversation in learning literature in 2000, learning occurs through cognitive and sensory analysis, both working together to foster learning. Major theorists include Davis and Sumatra (1997) and Maturana and Varela (1987). Fenwick lists possible challenges to this view, such as, the lack of full recognition of the learner’s individual meaning-making and identity-construction processes, and poses some interesting questions; for example, if all interactions between people co-emerge, how are power relations accounted for? 30

In 2003, Fenwick published a book on this topic of five perspectives where she examines additional critiques and debates on the issues, suggests roles for adult educators, outlines approaches to educational practice, and updates the research literature.

Foundational Theories

The foundational theories of the constructivist view of learning can be found in the writings of Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) and Vygotsky (Mooney, 2000).

Piaget theorized that learning occurred when individuals interacted with their environment and thus continually refined the knowledge in their heads. Piaget's major contribution to the field of educational psychology is based in the finding that individuals, in their desire to adapt to their environment, are their own agents of education and development (Gutek, 1992).

Piaget theorized that this adaptation comes about through assimilating new information and adjusting existing mental structures to accommodate this new information. In Piaget's model, adaptation achieves equilibrium, a desired state of mental balance with the environment. Existing mental structures grow and change when new information no longer fits in the current schema. In Piaget’s model these structures are organized into four stages, with the endpoint of cognitive development culminating in the attainment of formal operational thought, occurring somewhere between the ages of 15 to 20.

Some years later, Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky emphasized that children’s learning, while still an individual experience, was the result of learner engagement in the sociocultural world (Mooney, 2000) and included a process of personal reflection (Fenwick, 2000). Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development 31

represents a specific place and time where experiences either limit or increase cognitive development. The vehicle for engagement in the zone is language, where learning is an active and conscious activity. Just as Piaget’s theory has influenced the teaching practices of many educators, Vygotsky’s social learning theory has since been incorporated into sociocultural theories of adult learning (Bonk & Kim,

1998; Fenwick, 2000; Hansman, 2001).

Central to both theories is the idea that learning is an individual experience where the learner engages in an active and conscious participation in the construction of knowledge in the learning process. Understanding how the term social is used in the two theories is important in distinguishing how these theories are used in other models of experiential learning. In the Piagetian conception of social, learning is an individualistic construction of knowledge that takes place inside the mind of the learner as the learner interacts with the social environment.

In the Vygotskian conception of social, learning is a social co-construction of knowledge that takes place outside the mind as the learner interacts in the social environment. For example, as one reads a book, there is also an interaction with the personal social, cultural and historical experiences that the reader brings to the experience of reading. There may be other cultural artifacts available, for example, the dictionary used to look up words as the reading progresses. Social learning in this scenario also is mediated by the use of language, another cultural tool. Thus, knowledge is co-constructed using personal social/cultural/historical knowledge, cultural tools, and context—outside the mind.

Kolb (1984) theorized that adults learned by integrating affect (emotional experiences) with reflection, a theory derived from Dewey’s pragmatism, Lewin’s 32

social psychology, and Piaget’s cognitive development. The integration of emotion was in response to purely cognitive theories that emphasized cognition over affect and behavioral theories that did not allow any role for subjective experiences in learning (Kolb, Boyatzis, & Mainemelis, 2000). In Kolb’s four-phase model, the learner lives through a concrete experience, perhaps in a classroom or in the workplace or any other setting. The learner then consciously reflects on the experience. From this reflection the learner creates a conceptualization of the experience and stores this new learning in memory for future use. Then, through active application and experimentation, the learner shapes and refines the new learning. Learning occurs with reflection on, and internal processing of, the experience. For new learning to occur, the learner must make sense of the experience, connect it to some previous learning, and transform that previous learning into a new or deeper understanding. “Experiential learning theory defines learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 41).

Kolb et al. (2000) summarize the dual facets of ELT (Experiential Learning

Theory) as providing “a holistic model of the learning process and a multilinear model of adult development, both of which are consistent with what we know about how people learn, grow, and develop” (p. 2). Kolb’s recommendations for future research include the empirical testing of the theoretical assertion that integrated learning (a more sophisticated form of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting) occurs in response to the learning situation and what is being learned.

Perhaps this is in response to various criticisms in the literature that Kolb 33

acknowledges as a “post-modern perspective where the theory is seen as individualistic, cognitivist, and technological” (Kolb et al., 2000, p. 22).

Boud, Cohen and Walker’s (1993) model of experiential learning seeks to explain the role of experience in learning by focusing on systematic reflection and feelings. While their model is similar to Kolb’s, two premises were added: Both varying contexts and personal histories can shape an individual’s experience in different ways (Fenwick, 2000). First, the learner recalls the experience without judgment or evaluation. Second, feelings associated with the experience are explored. Third, the experience is re-evaluated by a series of steps: linking it to other experiences, integrating it with existing learning, testing it, and finally, absorbing the experience as new learning (Boud, Cohen & Walker, 1993). This model highlights the importance of feelings, demonstrating that unattended negative feelings can block learning (Fenwick, 2000). According to Boud, Cohen and Walker (1993), learning is a holistic process involving feelings and emotions, the intellectual and cerebral, and some type of action. More importantly, “learning is not readily constrained by time and place. All of our experience, past and present, is potentially relevant to any given learning task” (p. 13).

Boud, Cohen and Walker (1993) summarize their research about experiential learning in five propositions: (1) experience is the foundation of, and the stimulus for, learning; (2) learners actively construct their experience; (3) learning is a holistic process; (4) learning is socially and culturally constructed; and, (5) learning is influenced by the socio-emotional context in which it occurs. “Learning can never be linear or neat, and lived experience can never be transmitted to another and meet the same response….experience always says less than it wishes to say, there 34

are many readings of it, it is never exhausted and total clarity may never be reached” (p. 16).

Fenwick (2000, 2003) describes this view of experiential learning as

“Reflection (A Constructivist Perspective),” where learning is individualized, the learner has experiences, the learner reflects on these experiences, and the learner develops or reorganizes knowledge after each period of reflection. The absence of reflection in the public sector workplace has been a topic for consideration. In

1987, Brookfield described public sector professionals this way:

Public sector professionals who mediate between individuals and public

service agencies often develop routines to process clients in

standardized ways that become ends in themselves. Attempts by

clients to deviate from these standardized procedures become

interpreted as trouble emanating from ‘difficult’ clients. Lipsky (1980)

quotes studies of legal service lawyers and welfare workers who

penalize those clients trying to circumvent or challenge established

routines and procedures. Far from being concerned to help clients in

as flexible a manner as possible, these professionals act in ways rigidly

antithetical to critical thinking. (pp. 136-137)

He went on to say, “Sometimes the only reason for workers to challenge existing workplace norms is some kind of failure or major disaster at the workplace” (p.

137). Today’s literature reveals just how much the workplace has changed since

Brookfield wrote those words. The combined effects of globalization, technology, and deregulation, along with failures and major disasters, has created a public 35

sector workplace that resembles the age of supercomplexity described by Barnett

(1999):

We live in an age in which our very frameworks for comprehending the

world, for acting in it and for relating to each other are entirely

problematic. We live in a world characterized by contestability,

challengeability, uncertainty and unpredictability. Under conditions of

supercomplexity, work has to become learning and learning has to

become work. (p. 29)

According to Brookfield (1987) three actions integral to learning through critical reflection are vital in today’s workplace: (1) naming the assumptions that frame assumptions and actions, (2) connecting assumptions to the actual experience of reality, and, (3) reconstructing assumptions to make them more connected to and integrated in the experience of reality. Brookfield asserts that, through confronting basic assumptions that support organizational norms, workers can change the underlying values and beliefs of the organization.

Theory of Informal Learning in the Workplace

With the publication of Informal Adult Education in 1950, Malcolm Knowles gave a name to a form of adult learning that continues today. Knowles recognized what many adults, educators, and workers intuitively knew…that much of the learning in adulthood was experiential and informal. One constructivist view of experiential learning in the workplace is Marsick and Watkins’s (1990, 2001) theory of informal and incidental learning. It is considered a good fit for understanding workplace learning for the reasons already mentioned: Work is a major developmental factor in adult life; work is supercomplex and fast changing, leaving 36

little time to plan structured learning; responsibility for work has shifted from the organization to the individual; and most workplace learning is informal.

Marsick and Watkins (2001) summarize the characteristics of informal workplace learning as learning that is “...integrated with daily routines, ...an inductive process of reflection and action, [and] ... linked to learning of others” (p.

28). In this theory, informal learning includes incidental learning, a by-product of some other activity. Informal and incidental learning have conscious and unconscious facets. Informal learning is intentional, and like previous theories of constructivist learning, a conscious mental activity. Incidental learning may be unconscious to the learner. Elements of informal and incidental learning theory resemble Schön’s problem framing and tacit knowing, “but they are not synonymous with the terms in the way that we use them here” (Marsick & Watkins,

2001, p. 26).

While informal learning may be facilitated by the organization, the individual controls the actual learning process. Examples of informal learning either sponsored by the organization or encouraged by the organization include mentoring programs, networking through membership in professional groups, and performance planning. Informal learning also can take place without organizational knowledge or sanction. There are three conditions that enhance informal learning:

“critical reflection to surface tacit knowledge and beliefs, stimulation of proactivity

[self-directed learning] on the part of the learner to actively identify options and to learn new skills to implement those options, and creativity to encourage a wider range of options” (Marsick & Watkins, 2001, p. 30). 37

Adult Cognition and Postformal Thought

There is considerable, and conflicting, literature in the fields of cognitive psychology, life span developmental psychology, and adult learning about the development of adult thinking (Pourchot & Smith, 2004). Arnold (1997) asserts that adult cognitive development literature could greatly influence effective thinking for career management in today’s complex and tumultuous world. In a thoughtful essay, he discusses how four strands of research—postformal thought, wisdom, expertise, and adult learning—could impact not only the professional in practice interested in career management, but career choice as well. In 19 propositions, the tenets of each field of adult cognitive development research are skillfully woven into a discussion of career development and career management, with implications for career counselors and educators. Arnold suggests a cross-disciplinary research agenda to develop this untapped resource.

Following the advice of Creswell (1998), a concept map was begun to help organize and clarify the adult cognition literature base, as well as situate the problem in the literature. A book chapter by Brookfield (2000) containing a brief review of the literature on adult cognition was instrumental in organizing the adult cognition literature. In Figure 1, a pictorial metaphor of an incomplete puzzle represents the various dimensions of adult thinking and the corresponding major theorists. The overlapping boundaries and missing puzzle pieces are intention, meaning these dimensions not discrete or complete. Moving clockwise around the figure, and beginning in the Dialectical Thinking puzzle piece, Brookfield organizes these forms of adult cognition into four areas: (1) the ability to think dialectically;

(2) the ability to understand how we come to know things, what can be known and 38

not known, and how certain we can be in knowing; (3) the ability to reflect critically; and (4) the ability to employ practical logic. 39

ADULT COGNITION Forms of thinking observable primarily in adults (Brookfield, 2000)

Relativism (Perry, 1970) Epistemic cognition (Kitchener, 1983) Dialectical thinking (Riegel, 1973) Ways of knowing (Belenky, 1986) Faith development (Fowler, 1981) Transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991) Moral development (Kohlberg, 1981)

A self-conscious awareness of Wisdom (Sternberg, 1990) how we come to know what we know, what can be known and not Universalistic and relativistic known, and how certain we can modes of thought co-exist be in knowing (Brookfield, 2000) (Brookfield, 2000)

Contextual reasoning in a Judging the fit between the rules specific domain (Brookfield, of life learned in childhood and 2000) the realities of adulthood; understanding the difference Practical intelligence between espoused theory and (Sternberg & Wagner, 1986) how things really happen (Brookfield, 2000) Expertise (Tennant, 1991) Critical reflection in adulthood Postformal thought (Sinnott, 1998) (Brookfield, 1994)

Figure 1 Adult Cognition. Adapted from Brookfield (2000). Adult cognition as a dimension of lifelong learning.

40

A comparison of the concept map of adult cognition literature with the tenets and premises of postformal thought indicates that postformal thought not only includes the hallmarks of contextual reasoning in a specific domain but also exhibits characteristics of the other modes of adult thought, suggesting that it may be the most relevant version of adult thinking in the workplace as well as other aspects of adult life (Brookfield, 2000).

This idea is supported by studies on postformal thought and conflict resolution in the workplace (Weitzman & Weitzman, 2006); postformal thought and elements of dialectical thinking (Arlin & Levitt, 1998; Armon & Dawson, 1997;

Dobson, 2000; Foster & Sprinthall, 1992; Guerriero, 1997; Johnson, 1998;

Mehltretter, 1996; Westbrook, 1995; Worthen, 2000); postformal thought and epistemic cognition (Manigaulte, 2000; Martin, Silva, Newman & Thayer, 1994;

McBride, 1999; Rycek, Stuhr, McDermott, Benker & Swartz, 1998; Tahir, 1996); postformal thought and critical reflection (Browne, 1992; Miller & Cook-Greuter,

1994); postformal thought and medical treatment outcomes (Rakfeldt, Rybash, &

Roodin, 1996); postformal thought and patient-physician interaction (Morton,

Worthley, Nitch, Lamberton, Loo & Testerman, 2000), postformal thought and God concepts (Noffke & McFadden, 2001), and, postformal thought and teaching (Arlin,

1999; Pruyn, 1999).

In a powerful piece of writing, Kincheloe and Steinberg (1993) demonstrate the importance for postformal thinking for the educator. They argue that postformal thought informs and extends critical, feminist, and postmodern thought.

They challenge educators to give up the traditional notions of formal thinking and adopt a postformal approach in their practice as educators. “Moving to post- 41

formality, critical educators politicize cognition...” (p. 297), breaking the boundaries

“for those who were excluded from the community of the intelligent...,” the non- white, the poor, and the feminine. Kincheloe and Steinberg (1993) delineate the four features of postformal thinking as

“etmology—the exploration of the forces that produce what the culture

validates as knowledge; pattern—the understanding of the connecting

patterns and relationships that undergird the lived world; process—the

cultivation of new ways of reading the world that attempt to make

sense of both ourselves and contemporary society; and

contextualization—the appreciation that knowledge can never stand

alone or be complete in and of itself. (p. 302)

Postformal thought problematizes the accepted Western standard of expertise, intelligence, formal operational thought, and context-free knowledge.

Brookfield (2000) acknowledges that the tenets of adult learning as a separate and distinct field of study are being disputed by other theorists and popular culture icons who are wed to the notion that lifelong learning concepts remove the distinctions between children and adults. He argues that there are distinct forms of learning that occur chiefly in adulthood, and “while these forms of learning are discernable at earlier stages of life, it is in adulthood that they stand out in particularly sharp relief” (p. 90). Brookfield organizes these forms of learning into four areas: (1) the ability to learn to think dialectically; (2) the ability to learn to understand how we come to know things, what can be known and not known, and how certain we can be in knowing; (3) the ability to learn to reflect critically; and (4) the ability to learn to employ practical logic. It is the idea of practical logic, 42

more specifically postformal thought, combined with experiential learning in the workplace, which provides the organizing framework for this proposal.

Employing Practical Logic

Practical logic is defined as the ability to reason contextually “in a deep and critical way. It is more domain-specific than dialectical thinking, concerned with reasoning within a well-defined situation in a way that pays attention to its internal features” (Brookfield, 2000, p. 91). Brookfield identifies three strands of research in this area that can be directly related to the concept of practical logic in the workplace—practical intelligence, expertise, and postformal thought.

Practical Intelligence

Armed with a body of quantitative research indicating little relationship between measures of g (general intelligence) and actual performance, Sternberg

(1988) proposed a theory of intelligence composed of three skills that he called the triarchic theory of intelligence. In this theory, equal weight is given to creative and practical skills, as well as analytic and memory skills, the traditional notion of intelligence. Context is an important subtheory. “Marshaling the triarchic theory to frame an account of adult learning, we argue that the consideration of practical intelligence (and attendant tacit knowledge) changes significantly the picture of adult learning” (Torff & Sternberg, 1998, p. 111).

Our society is enculturated with the belief that there is a difference in academic intelligence and practical intelligence, book smart versus common sense

(Torff & Sternberg, 1998). Beginning in the late 70s, researchers started noticing and measuring the difference in academic intelligence and practical intelligence. In a now often-quoted study of workers at a dairy, Scribner (1984) found that the 43

blue-collar plant workers who filled orders for various dairy products routinely outperformed the more educated white-collar workers in the mathematical calculations required to complete partially-filled cases of various product orders.

The blue-collar workers’ superior performance could not be related to intelligence test scores, math test scores, or grades in school. From this and other considerable evidence, Torff and Sternberg conclude that “practical intelligence is separate from academic intelligence, and unlike the academic variety, practical skills are maintained or increased through late adulthood” (Torff & Sternberg, 1998, p. 115).

It is important to note here that Scribner’s dairy study “is located firmly in a research movement that attempts to identify the features of adult intelligence and thinking, especially as it is manifested at work” (Tennant & Pogson, 1995, p. 48).

Drawing on the philosophy of Polanyi (1966) that people know more than they can tell, Sternberg asserts that tacit knowledge is an important feature of practical intelligence. He defines tacit knowledge as practical know-how that is not directly taught or openly expressed. It is learned in the everyday experiences of life rather than through any formal educational intervention.

There are three characteristic features of tacit knowledge. These

features address the structure of tacit knowledge, the conditions of its

use, and the conditions under which it is acquired. First, tacit

knowledge is procedural in nature. Second, tacit knowledge is

relevant to the attainment of goals that people value. Third, tacit

knowledge is acquired with little help from others. (Sternberg,

Wagner, Williams, & Horvath, 1995, p. 916) 44

Sternberg also argues that tacit knowledge needs change over time and the ability to acquire tacit knowledge over time is important for continued success in the workplace. It is not simply experience that matters, but what is learned from experience, that allows adults to adapt to the changing world (Torff & Sternberg,

1998). Tennant and Pogson (1995) summarize the research literature describing practical intelligence: the terminology used to describe practical intelligence emphasizes practice over theory; direct usefulness over intellectual curiosity; procedural knowledge over declarative knowledge; and thought and action with immediate and obvious consequences. “Practical thinking thus has a real-life end in mind: it seeks to do, to move, to achieve something outside of itself, and works toward that purpose” (p. 42).

Expertise

“Practical intelligence, when applied in the context of a particular domain of work or knowledge, is often referred to as expertise” (Tennant & Pogson, 1995, p.

49). Hammond’s Cognitive Continuum Model of Expertise (1980) focuses on the types of cognitive processes applied to different kinds of problems in practice. The cognitive processes range from purely analytical to purely intuitive and are applied in various mixtures related to the problem at hand. Hammond’s central argument is that no problem is solved in a purely analytical fashion or purely intuitive fashion and that “people’s reasoning is more effective when the mode of thinking they adopt corresponds to the critical features of the task. But to many professionals this advice must seem a little idealistic...” (Eraut, 2001, p. 126), given the fast- paced nature of today’s work combined with pressure for professional productivity. 45

The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) is a descriptive stage model of the characteristics displayed as novices move through the various stages to expert. Like the Hammond model, the cognitive processes move from analytical to intuitive as the knowledge base used changes from propositional to practical. Experiential learning is the change mechanism that moves professionals through the stages of novice, to advanced beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert (Cheetham & Chivers, 2001).

In contrast to the traditional theories of expertise, which argue that professionals use a deeper level of cognitive processing, is the model of medical expertise proposed by Schmidt, Norman, and Boshuizen (1990). They contend that medical professionals build up a series of scripts, or mental templates, from previous cases in practice and apply these scripts to patient diagnoses. In their view, medical expertise is little more than having the ability to organize thousands of scripts in superior working memory. They argue that these scripts bear little resemblance to the propositional knowledge of medical school or the practical knowledge acquisition theorized by experience. Tennant and Pogson (1995) raise interesting questions for consideration here. The implications of such findings would seem to indicate that expertise is simply the ability to recall learning templates and apply previous experiences to current problems. If so, then what happens in a professional domain where problems are new, ill-structured, and supercomplex? The next section of this chapter reviews Sinnott’s postformal thought, the final and, according to Brookfield (2000), the most significant thread of research related to adult intellectual development. 46

Postformal Thought

A common characteristic shared across the various approaches to positive adult development is the notion of stages of cognitive development, modeled after and extending the four stages of cognitive development described by Piaget (1970).

The most influential researcher in the development of the mind in modern times,

Swiss researcher Jean Piaget (1896-1980) identified the four stages of cognitive development as:

1. sensorimotor stage-birth to 2 years of age

2. preoperational stage-2 years to 7 years of age

3. concrete-operational stage-7 years to 12 years of age

4. formal operational stage-15 years to 20 years of age and the five universal criteria as:

1. invariant movement (cannot skip a stage or go back to a lower

stage);

2. qualitatively different thinking (how the individual understands reality,

not just accumulation of facts);

3. hierarchical integration of previous stages (each previous stage is

embedded in current stage);

4. universal progression (everyone moves through these stages in

invariant sequences that are completely culture- and context-free);

and

5. structured wholeness (individuals can only understand current reality).

While Piaget's stage theory of intellectual development worked well in describing the development of children and adolescents, some criticisms of the 47

theory as it applies to adult thinking have been offered. Hoyer, Rybash and Roodin

(1999) contend that formal operational thinking, while powerful, has limitations:

1. Formal operations overemphasize logic in problem-solving.

2. Formal operations underemphasize the pragmatics of real life

problem-solving.

3. Formal thinking works well only in scientific- and mathematical-based

problems.

4. Formal operations are directed at solving closed-system problems that are

well defined.

5. Formal operations do not consider the relative nature of knowledge and

multiple frames of reference, overemphasizing physical reality to the

exclusion of social reality and the different ways of knowing.

6. Formal operational thinking emphasizes problem-solving over

problem-finding.

Postformal operational thought is a generic term used to describe the qualitative changes in thinking beyond Piaget's stage of formal operations. It is characterized by problem-finding, the acceptance of relativism, and dialectical thinking (Kramer, 1983). Emphasis is placed on the ability to synthesize contradictory positions as they arise in competing systems of thought. For example, formal operations do not allow cows to be sacred (Hindu belief) and not sacred

(Christian belief) at the same time (Basseches, 1984). Postformal reasoners also adopt a contextual approach to problem-solving, constantly adjusting guiding principles to the changing conditions of their lives, instead of applying one set of principles across domains and circumstances (Rybash, Hoyer & Roodin, 1986). 48

Postformal thought is a complex way of adaptively solving problems. It is a form of reasoning that occurs within a well-defined context, more domain-specific than general forms of reasoning and requires deep contextual understanding (Brookfield,

2000).

A number of theorists have put forth various conceptions of postformal thought. This section will briefly identify the early theorists who established empirical evidence of continuing cognitive development beyond, or at least more complex, than the reasoning abilities described by Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958).

As Commons & Richards point out in a review of postformal research, "All [of the postformal theorists listed in Table 1] argue in common that postformal behavior involves one or more of the following: perceiving, reasoning, knowing, judging, caring, feeling, or communicating in ways that are more complex or more all-encompassing than formal operations" (Commons & Richards, 2003, para. 14).

Pourchot and Smith (2004) conclude that these theorists mentioned in Table

1 hold certain viewpoints in common. They all propose stages beyond Piaget’s formal operational stage of development. They all reject the notion that the formal stage is final stage of adult development. They agree that not all adults exhibit postformal thought but many adults frequently do not use formal operational skills either. Postformal thought is a function of mature adult thought that enables mature thinkers to “exhibit skills in interpersonal relationships, practical judgment, creative endeavors, and wisdom” (p. 73).

49

Table 1

Chronology of Postformal Research

Theorist(s) Focus of Research

Riegel (1973) Subjective realities

Arlin (1975) Problem finding

Commons & Richards (1978) Irreducible stages

Labouvie-Vief (1980, 1984) Embedded logic

Basseches (1980, 1984) Dialectical thinking

Commons, Richards, & Kuhn (1982) Multi-level stages

Sternberg (1984) Higher order reasoning

Powell (1984) Category relationships

Pascual-Leone (1984) Perception

Koplowitz (1984) Unitary operations

Fisher, Hand, & Russell (1984) Mechanisms of development

Benack (1984) Epistemologic thinking

Armon (1984) Ethical reasoning

Demetriou and Efklides (1985) Structural development

Rybash, Hoyer & Roodin (1986) Domain integration

Demetriou (1990) Stage integration

Sinnott (1984-1998) Adult logic systems

50

Sinnott (1998) defines postformal thought as a special kind of adult intelligence, a complex way of adaptively solving ill-structured problems. It develops with social experience and usually not before the onset of mature adulthood. Postformal thought is a socially constructed concept where realities are co-constructed in and from the interactions of people. Postformal thinkers acknowledge the existence of multiple realities and the existence of multiple right solutions to a problem. Knowledge is not out there in the hands of experts but instead resides in each person's conception of it. A high tolerance for conflict, complexity, ambiguity, and paradox are evident in the behavior and thinking processes.

Because it is a socially constructed way of learning and looking at the world, it can be understood and recognized by others and can be taught to others. This special kind of adult intelligence, as Sinnott refers to it, has been observed in the behavior of people for many years. It is not wisdom, although some postformal thinkers are wise. It is not invariant, as described by Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget,

1958), because postformal thinkers can choose the kind of logic that fits the problem at hand.

The development of Piagetian formal operations is considered to be a prerequisite to the development of postformal thought. This ability to think with formal logic is required to meet the next step—the ability to accept the validity of more than one logic system in a problem-solving situation. The ability to commit to one of these logic systems as true, even though there is no absolute way to know the complete truth of any situation, distinguishes this kind of thought from the formal logic of Piaget. Recognizing that there is no one causal linearity to the truth 51

of a situation is another condition to be met, along with acceptance of the idea that the truth of a variable or problem is manipulated by the context of the situation.

One of the most important concepts of postformal thought is the idea that there is no value-free, objective observation or solution to a problem.

Acknowledgment that in real life there are multiple and conflicting right causes, along with multiple and conflicting rights solutions, each of which can be equally correct, is an essential requirement. Additionally, the process to the solution is as important as the solution itself. The use of all eleven operational aspects, identified by Sinnott (1998) as evidence of postformal thinking (see Table 2), is not required to be considered a postformal thinker, although analysis of the use of these operations is a good indicator of how often, if ever, this type of reasoning is used in problem-solving, problem-finding situations. 52

Table 2

Sinnott’s (1998) Operational Aspects of Postformal Thought

Item Descriptor Explanation

1. Theory shift Thinking in at least two logic systems, e.g. shifting between idealized and practical interpretation of a problem. Going beyond the obvious logical solutions to question the definitions of the problem elements.

2. Problem definition Naming a problem as a member of more than one class of problems.

3. Process-product shift Seeing a problem as an on-going process requiring the generation of many ideas and as a problem with a concrete solution

4. Parameter setting Naming key variables that are limits to the solution to be created.

5. Pragmatism Selecting one of several created solutions as best.

6. Multiple solutions Creating more that one correct solution.

7. Multiple goals Giving several points, each of which, when arrived at, would mean the problem is solved.

8. Multiple methods Giving several ways to reach the same solution.

9. Multiple causality Considering several causes operating in the problem.

10. Paradox Seeing the inherent contradictions in reality.

11. Relativistic awareness Acknowledging that problems and their solutions are relative to the solver.

53

Sinnott (1998) says, “The operations [described in Table 2] were taken from responses [to carefully crafted problem statements] during open-ended dialogues.”

These individuals crossed paths with Sinnott by happenstance but they impressed her as adaptive people, “wise, complex, generative, mature adults” who not only survived the “onslaughts of adulthood, but also actually thrived there in that developmental period. I wondered in particular what aspect of their cognition made them so good at life.” They had a special way of describing processes of solving problems, both structured logical problems and “problems in the broader sense of difficult situations. I began to categorize the ways these people interacted with, constructed, and knew reality as they thought about it” (p.35).

Postformal thought is activated when a “lack of fit occurs between formal operations and reality,” when all data cannot be accounted for (p. 36). For the individual, the search for a better fit leads to the testing of new systems by shifting boundaries, logic systems, or other elements of the problem at hand. There is acceptance that the fit may be arbitrary and subjective but necessary for that moment. A subjective choice is made as to the best-fit system. For the group,

“several people working together judge the best-fit system in a situation where no system fits a reality that involves them all and is seen somewhat differently by each…Group explorations lead to a concensus choice…Necessary subjectivity leads to a collective understanding” (p.36).

Table 2 represents “a list of key thinking steps or operations on reality that are present in postformal thought.” Postformal thought can be present even if all operations are not present in thought processes. The more operations present, however, the more certain it is that postformal thought is present. Some of the 54

operations listed in Table 2 are simply scored as present, such as, 1, 3, 5, 10 and

11, and others are counted in frequency of occurrence. Identifying particular operations can be difficult because several may appear in one statement.

According to Sinnott, the development of postformal thought begins in relationships where shared truths are essential for good communication. Shared truth exists between individuals as a couple, a family, a workgroup, or a society.

Individuals initially have their own views of what is true. Relationships become fertile ground for conflicting personal truths and that conflict can nurture the development of postformal thought. “To have an interaction they must make those truths match in order to communicate” (p. 51). Trying to see the other’s point of view expands their logic system to see reality through another’s reality frame.

From the literature in this chapter, we can conclude the following:

Postformal thinkers

a. use formal and postformal operations in their thinking

b. are able to choose an appropriate logic system to fit a problem

c. can shift between logic systems when necessary

d. are problem-solvers and problem-finders

e. can define the boundaries of a problem that limit the solutions to be

created

f. can identify multiple causes operating in a problem

g. can generate multiple right solutions to a problem

h. are pragmatic, making the best choices possible and moving on

i. are realistic and grounded in subjective reality

j. accept that problems and the solutions are relative to the solver 55

k. are ethical and moral reasoners with value systems

l. are caring, feeling, helping

m. are perceptive, intuitive

n. can commit to a set of beliefs from many choices

o. are critically reflective

p. are self-consciously aware of how they know what they know

q. understand that knowledge is subjective, context dependent, and

value laden.

r. can tolerate conflict, complexity, ambiguity, paradox, and

contradiction

s. co-create knowledge in relationships, using best available information

All aspects of postformal thinking, and this list does not claim to be exhaustive, do not have to be present to be considered a postformal thinker.

Selected Research

Kindle (2002) investigated the question of who is most likely to develop postformal thought as a level of adult development beyond Piaget’s formal operational thought. Three self-report scales were administered to a convenience sample of 110 adults, ages 18 – 74. Other biographical information related to formal education and other major life experiences was also collected. The researcher purposefully sought diverse respondents among community dwellers in the Houston, Texas, U.S. area. Despite attempts for diversity in the sample, which worked well for all other categories, the educational levels reported by the respondents revealed that all were high school graduates, with only four listing a college diploma as a terminal degree. 56

The 18-item Need for Cognition Scale identifies individual differences among those who engage in and enjoy thinking. “Individuals low in need for cognition are labeled cognitive misers, while those high in need for cognition are referred to as cognizers. The difference between cognizers and cognitive misers is a difference in intrinsic motivation, not intellectual ability, and tends to be a stable individual trait across domains and life contexts” (Kindle, 2002, p. 19).

The 19-item Modes of Problem Solving Scale contains two independent subscales measuring associative thought (single-minded and mono-disciplined approach to problem solving) and bisociative thought (creative and multi-disciplined approach to problem solving). “Associative thought is indicative of formal operational thought with a given domain knowledge...typical of conventional logical thinking....Biosociative thought involves a conscious decision to suspend relationships, established procedures, and to merge unrelated disciplines” (Kindle,

2002, p. 20). Biosociative thinking may be conceived as an operational definition of intuition (Jabri, 1999, reported by Kindle, 2002). This scale was chosen because biosociative thinking is more likely to be associated with postformal thought.

The third scale used in this study was the Adult Scale of Intellectual

Development, developed from the King and Kitchener (1994) model of reflective judgment. It consists of 44 groups of statements containing two to five sentences in each group. Respondents choose a response along a 7-point Likert scale of Least

Like Me to Most Like Me. This scale measures the presence of three epistemological styles: absolutism, where reality is composed of facts that can be known; relativism, where reality is constructed by choice and is subject to the knower; and evaluativism, a middle-ground position between absolutism and relativism, where 57

“reality is constructed by the knower in a good faith exercise of judgment and commitment” (Kindle, 2002, p. 22). This scale was chosen because absolutism is usually associated with lower levels of development and relativisim and evaluativism are more likely to be associated with more advanced stages of development.

Need for cognition was determined to be a significant discriminating

variable for two characteristics of postformal thought: bisociative

thinking and evaluativistic epistemological style. High cognizers are

more likely to exhibit both characteristics. These findings provide, for

the first time, an efficient means of identifying those individuals most

likely to exhibit characteristics of postformal thought by utilizing a

short (18-item) self-report instrument. (Kindle, 2002, p. 37)

Further, based on the analysis of the results of the Need for Cognition Scale, this study indicates that high cognizers (people who have a high need to engage in and enjoy thinking) are the individuals most likely to develop postformal thought.

Falcone (2000) studied 100 males and 83 females ranging in age from 24 to

83, looking for a relationship between postformal thought and wisdom. Using the

86-item Social Belief Paradigm Inventory, he found that, while cognitive development is important to the development of wisdom, emotion is equally important. Other findings in this study indicate that while formal education does not translate into more wisdom, it does seem to indicate the opportunity to develop dialectical thinking, which may lead to higher forms of thinking, and perhaps wisdom. The respondents in this study indicated that wisdom is gained from experience, lending support to adult learning theory which asserts that adults learn 58

new material in many ways, and “use emotion and reflection in deriving meaning from experience” (Falcone, 2000, p. 73).

The Nature of Professional Practice

In The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983),

Schön argues that professionals are “essential to the very functioning of our society” (p.3) and many of the professional responsibilities to civil society that

Schön mentions belong to public sector professionals. Acting on a personal belief that higher education privileges academic knowledge over practical, intuitive knowledge to the detriment of the professions, Schön set out to answer the questions, “What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage?

How is professional knowing like and unlike the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks, scientific papers, and learned journals?” (p. viii).

By studying what professionals actually do in practice, a model of reflective practice emerged. Beginning with the assumption of Polanyi (1966) that people and, therefore, practitioners, know more than they can tell, Schön started with the study of actual problems in practice and asserted that knowing was in the actions of everyday practice. From there he postulated that in the midst of knowing-in- action, practitioners reflect-in-action, actually thinking about what they are doing while doing, intuitively adjusting and refining the doing.

Knowing-in-action is understood to have three properties: (1) professionals carry out actions and make judgments spontaneously, without having to think about them in advance; (2) professionals are not consciously aware that they have learned to do certain things, they just do them; and (3) professionals are usually unable to articulate how they learned to carry out actions and judgments in 59

practice. This body of practical knowledge is added to by the process of reflecting- in-action, and later by the process of reflecting-on-action, which is akin to a mental debriefing of what they did, how they did it, and what they might do differently.

The most important aspect in Schön’s model of reflective practice is that reflection must be critical.

When people engage in critical reflection, they question the way they

framed the problem in the first place…practitioners ask why things are

the way they are, why events unfold the way they do…why did I do

what I did…what beliefs inform my practice, and how are these beliefs

helping or hindering my work? (Fenwick, 2000, p. 12)

Schön (1987) called for the systematic study of practitioners: “Here a constructionist perspective is critically important; for the phenomena of practice in organizations are determined by the kinds of reality individuals create for themselves…and what happens when people with similar and different ways of framing reality come into collision” (p. 322).

Ferry and Ross-Gordon (1998) tested Schön’s model by studying the use of reflection-in-action by adult educators in resolving problems in practice. The purposeful sample was made up of female educators classified as novice (less than two years experience) and experienced (more than ten years experience). First, 52 novice and experienced educators completed a questionnaire that recorded their responses to a fictional problem in practice that was developed by similar educators not included in the study. Through content analysis, the educators were classified as reflective or non-reflective. Then, eight novice and ten experienced educators 60

were interviewed for approximately one hour each and asked to think out loud about specific problems in their practice and how they solved them.

Findings indicate that experience alone does not account for the use of reflection in practice; that novices and experienced educators use reflective thinking to solve problems, but in a different manner from non-reflecting educators, who tend to rely on technical rationality to solve problems. Noteworthy in this study was the finding that not all experienced educators used reflection and that one novice exhibited true artistry in problem solving, apparently supporting Schön’s claim that practitioners have an innate ability to reflect-in-action. Ferry and Ross-

Gordon (1998) conclude that “the key to expertise does not seem to reside in merely gaining experience, but in how the individual uses experience as a learning mechanism” (p. 100), a detail that is not addressed by Schön. As Cervero (2001) and others point out, Schön’s work does not reveal how this ability to reflect-in- action is learned. Is it an innate ability of some individuals or it is learned through experience and reflection?

Cheetham and Chivers (2000) “attempted to assess the validity of the reflective practitioner view of professional practice delineated by Schön (1983;

1987), and particularly the assertions behind it, comparing these with those that characterize the technical-rational approach” (p, 374). Data came from interviews with 80 practitioners from 20 professions, and survey data from 372 practitioners in six representative professions in the U.K.: dentistry, accountancy, civil service, surveying, the clergy, and training. [The civil service administrators were from the areas of policy and administration.] 61

The focus of this study was on how practitioners actually handle problems in their professional practices. Do they use tacit knowing, artistry, and repertoires of solutions as advocated by Schön or do they use technical knowledge in a systematic way? Do they use some combination of the two or do they use something unknown until now? Results indicated that neither artistry nor technical rational knowledge offered a definitive explanation of how professionals operate in practice but suggested that the answer lies somewhere between the two. There appears to be more use of technical rational knowledge and less drawing on previously successful experiences than Schön would subscribe to. The participants rated specialist knowledge as very important to their practice but also acknowledged the use of what Schön would call artistry. The results did, however, support the importance of reflection in practice.

Cheetham and Chivers argue for a model combining the two views of professional practice and call it “technically grounded extemporisation” (p. 381), asserting that their combination model is consistent with Hammond’s Cognitive

Continuum Model of Expertise (1980) and the Dreyfus and Dreyfus Model of

Expertise (1986). Schön’s “emphasis on the use of ‘repertoires of solutions’ to solve problems, and the primacy he gives to tacit knowledge in professional performance more generally are both challenged by the data” (p. 382).

Practitioners in this study were shown to be pragmatic, varying their approaches to situations and problems as needed. Cheetham and Chivers support a model of practice that includes a combination of professional knowledge, workplace competence, rational and reflective thinking, flexible and innovative practice, continuous improvement, and a commitment to lifelong learning. 62

Informal Learning in Professional Practice

Perhaps the largest study to date of informal learning in the professions found that informal learning over time was the more significant factor in the development and recognition of competence when compared to professional development programs (Cheetham & Chivers, 2001). Data were drawn from the same data collection described in the previous study. On-the-job learning, working with more experienced colleagues, and teamwork were rated the top three contributors to developing professional competence, while support from a mentor, use of role models, and pre-entry experience were rated the bottom three contributors to professional competence. Reflection scored in the middle range, and upon further analysis, was found to be more meaningful and used more often by professionals with more experience in their particular field, suggesting that

“reflection does not become fully effective until practitioners have built up sufficient experience against which to reflect” (p. 270). Learning from clients, networking with peers doing similar work, and learning through teaching others completed the middle range of items on the list of ten contributors to professional competence.

A closer look at responses from within the professions indicated varying differences in types of preferred learning experiences. Pre-entry experience scored high among the clergy but low among the dentists. The use of mentors and role models scored high among the clergy and trainers gave a high rating to learning through others. These differences were attributed to the varying backgrounds and methods of entry into the field for each of the professions, i.e., many clergy have other occupations before entering the profession while dentists usually enter dental school directly from college. 63

Using the survey data and the interview data, Cheetham and Chivers constructed a taxonomy of twelve informal professional learning methods. They are identified as:

1. Practice and repetition

2. Reflection

3. Observation and copying

4. Feedback

5. Learning and experience transferred from formal education, previous

occupations and volunteer experiences

6. Demanding or complex tasks or problems

7. Perspective taking

8. Mentor/coach relationship

9. Working with other expert professionals

10.Using mental models, mind maps, visualization, and positive thinking

11.Teaching or mentoring others, writing papers, presenting at conferences

12.Collaborating with others across disciplines

Additionally, certain environmental factors were identified in the interviews as important to professional development: the importance of the first job, a balance between structured training and experiential learning, a question-friendly and blame-free atmosphere, challenging and collegial learning experiences, and

“deep-end experiences” (p. 284). The experiences of the first professional appointment either contributed to or were detrimental to a personal image as a competent professional. Developing self-confidence as a working professional was attributed to supporting environments where resources for help were available, 64

where there was time for learning the ins and outs of the organization and its work, and newly-minted professionals were allowed to find their own way of doing things.

Non-supporting environments of destructive criticism or new work assignments without resources or support contributed to a lack of self-confidence, resulting in poor job performance and also a job change or career change for some. The linkage of self-confidence to feelings of competence was a recurring theme in the interviews.

Another environmental factor, the inclusion of both structured and experiential learning, was identified as important, calling for a balance between being supportive and allowing the freedom to try things “on your own, ” and learning from your own mistakes (p. 283). This ties into the next factor of question-friendly and blame-free environments. While appreciating the open atmosphere, respondents reported that mistakes were not treated as unimportant, but instead turned into positive learning experiences. In some professions, e.g., the medical profession, respondents reported that some superiors made it hard to admit mistakes and even harder to point out the mistakes of superiors.

Challenging work and mutually respectful working relationships were mentioned as important to professional development. Cheetham and Chivers speculate that these types of environmental factors lead to beneficial learning mechanisms such as collaborative learning, networking opportunities, role models and learning through unconscious absorption. Finally, “the effects of being

‘dropped in at the deep end’ to do something difficult, unfamiliar or at short notice were mentioned by a significant number of interviewees” (p. 284). Some reported the initial experience as either traumatic, terrifying, or counter-productive, but 65

perhaps beneficial in retrospect. Others reported the initial experience as very beneficial to their development. Again, Cheetham and Chivers speculate that the differences may be related to individual personalities or whether the professional feels adequately trained to undertake the work.

Several general factors leading to professional competence were synthesized from the data: (1) the opportunity for a wide range of developmental experiences,

(2) the motivation for continuous improvement, (3) practice in carrying out tasks and responsibilities, (4) persistence and perseverance with difficult work assignments, and (5) the influence and support of others on an as-needed basis.

Additionally, even though the focus of this study was centered on informal learning in the professions, the participants also discussed the importance of formal training and development, especially the importance of the immediate application of new content knowledge or new skills.

The fact that there exists considerable research into professional development in some public sector professions, i.e., healthcare and teaching, has already been noted. Cheetham and Chivers (2001) also acknowledge the wealth of existing research within these certain professions but point out that there is “little cross-professional research related to professional development, especially informal development” (p. 267) and that, in spite of the size and scope of this study, much work in this area still needs to be done. Included in their recommendations for further inquiry was the call to investigate learning mechanisms and how professionals develop particular kinds of competencies, what makes an “effective, autonomous, self-directed learner” (p. 286), and the surfacing of unconscious learning. Also ripe for study is why certain learning experiences work well for some 66

and not for others, with the possibility of predicting which type of learning suits certain individuals or professions.

In a related cross-professional research study, Daley (2001) asked “How does knowledge become meaningful in professional practice?” (p. 39). Eighty semi- structured interviews were conducted with participants from across four professions—social work, law, adult education, and nursing. “Professionals across all groups in this study described how their knowledge was constantly changing and that experiences, CPE programs, and dialogue with colleagues all contributed...(p.

50) to the construction of meaningful knowledge. For information to be meaningful, it had to connect to some other familiar concepts and be useful in practice in some way. In the process of using the information, professionals transformed the information again, “in other words, incorporating new knowledge is a recursive, transforming process, rather than a simple, straightforward transfer of information from one context to another” (Daley, 2001, p. 50). Among Daley’s conclusions is the finding that the process of making knowledge meaningful in practice is tied to the nature of professional practice and that more work is needed on the nature of professional work and its connections to constructivist learning.

In another major study conducted in the U.K., Alderton (1999) was interested in factors that facilitate workplace learning among professionals. Two interviews, six months apart, were conducted with 120 professional, managerial, and technical workers in business, engineering, and health care across 12 organizations. What sector these professionals worked in, public or private, is not clearly identified, but from a close reading it appears they are from the private sector. The Learning Society Programme of the Economic and Social Research 67

Council provided funding for the study. Additionally, organizational representatives were included in the research process through periodical consultation with the research team.

The research questions centered on what is being learned at work, how learning is taking place at work, and what factors affected the amount and direction of learning in the workplace. Participants were given the opportunity to review transcripts of their first interviews before the second interview took place. In the second interview, participants were asked to elaborate on particular learning episodes and explicate general statements contained in the first interview.

Alderton (1999) found that most of the learning at work was informal and developing from the external demands of work such as solving problems, improving productivity, or adapting to change, as well as internally motivated learning such as understanding situations, colleagues, the employing organization, and oneself.

Additionally, the data indicated that skill learning was important to the participants: technical skills, learning skills, interpersonal skills, and thinking skills. Even when formal training mechanisms provided learning, meeting work demands always included “learning from experience and learning from other people” (p. 3).

Experienced professionals also learned through reflection and experimentation.

A qualitative analysis of the data “yielded a complex map of what is being learned, how it is being learned and the factors affecting learning” (Alderton, 1999, p. 2). They concluded that the mutual interaction of three factors—challenge, support, and confidence—contribute to the development of professional confidence.

Alderton (1999) asserts that developing confidence makes for more competent professionals and enhances organizational goals of quantity and quality of work. 68

In a related study of what conditions at work contribute most to growth and development within the context of the workplace, Deems (1998) explored how people experience and make meaning of the natural workplace. The workplaces selected were a 25-person marketing organization and a 850-person manufacturing firm. The workers represented all ranges of educational attainment, job categories, service time, and ages. Data were collected from focus groups, in-depth and unstructured interviews, non-confidential documents, and informal observations.

Nine themes emerged that described the experience of work in a “vital” workplace

(p. 2). Being at work evoked intense feelings ranging from “frightening to exhilerating.” Work processes were loosely structured, leaving considerable room for personal autonomy. Work was performed in teams, in a convivial atmosphere emphasizing the cultivation of informal relationships. Previous rigid and structured workplaces were reported as restricting and constraining. Emphasis was placed on self-directed learning with many organizational supports built in, e.g., tuition reimbursement and a corporate library of resources.

An atmosphere of trust and responsibility was demonstrated by the lack of rules and regulations concerning work behaviors and practices. Leaders did not act like “managers.” Participants also described a “dark side of work” in an ambiguous and contradictory environment where personal conflicts were hard to resolve with co-workers who shared a personal and social relationship as well as a work relationship. For these participants, work created an identity that tells the world how they care for others and how they contribute to society. Growth comes through solving the daily problems in the workplace to achieve meaningful and 69

useful outcomes. Deems (1998) argues that organizations need to re-frame their assumptions about workers and cultivate natural workplaces.

In Worlds within Worlds: The Relationship between Context and Pedagogy in the Workplace (Unwin, Felstead, Fuller, Jewson, Kakavelakis, Lee, & Butler, 2008),

Unwin articulates what current research is focused on, saying,

There is now much more awareness of the symbiotic relationship

between workplace learning, the organization of work, the level of

employee involvement, organizational performance, and the broader

economic, regulatory, and social context, within which organizations

have to operate. (p. 1)

The authors of this study argue that “contextual factors shape the nature of learning at work” (p. 9) and must be taken into account in order to understand why organizations, public and private, adopt different learning practices or create different learning environments.

In 2004, Eraut published an extensive report on several of his funded research projects that focused on learning in the professional workplace. Evidence was collected from 16 accountants, 34 engineers, and 40 nurses, all part of a three- year, longitudinal study of informal workplace learning. Their learning involved a combination of learning from other people and learning from personal experience,

“often both together” (p. 248). All of the research projects ask the same three questions: What is being learned? How is it being learned? What factors affect the learning effort? The data were derived from interviews, short observations, and one participant observation study. Critical incidents were avoided and the focus was kept on normal practice, how they learned to do what they were then doing. 70

Findings for the first question, what is being learned, fell into eight categories, each category having multiple properties. The eight categories are: (1) task performance, (2) awareness and understanding, (3) personal development, (4) teamwork, (5) role performance, (6) academic knowledge and skills, (7) decision making and problem solving, and, (8) judgment. Findings for the second question, how is it being learned, fell into four main types of work activity that included learning: (1) participation in group activities, (2) working alongside others, (3) tackling challenging tasks, and, (4) working with clients. Findings for the third question, what factors affect the learning effort, fell into two categories, learning factors and context factors. Learning factors has three properties or themes: confidence and commitment, challenge and value of the work, and feedback and support. The overwhelming importance of confidence was striking. “Confidence arose from successfully meeting challenges in the work, while the confidence to take on such challenges depended on the extent to which learners felt supported in that endeavor” (p. 269). Context factors has three properties or themes: The allocation and structuring of work; expectations of role, performance, and progress; and, encounters and relationships with people at work. “Our research evidence indicates that learning at work is either facilitated or constrained by (1) the organization and the allocation of work, and, (2) relationships and the social climate of the workplace” (p.270).

Other studies centering around informal workplace learning and contextual factors include a qualitative case study by Ellinger (2005) that explored organizational contextual factors that positively and negatively influence informal learning; a survey study of 318 professionals by Lohman (2005) that compared two 71

professional groups, school teachers and HRD professionals, identifying environmental factors and personal characteristics that influenced informal learning; and a study by Berg and Chyung (2008) that investigated, through an anonymous online survey of 125 professionals, the relationship between informal learning engagement and the presence of learning organization characteristics.

In a second collaboration with the National Institute of Adult Continuing

Education, Alan Felstead and his colleagues (Felstead, Fuller, Jewson, Unwin &

Kakavelakis, 2007) were asked to develop and administer a survey of the social context in which learning takes place and its impact on performance. The findings are based on a survey administered to 1899 employees, who were interviewed in

2007 about their relationships at work, their learning experiences, and how they rated their own work performance. There were nine key findings: (1) Strong social bonds between employees have a positive impact on learning and performance, (2)

Younger workers have a stronger sense of being part of a group than older workers,

(3) 37% accepted total responsibility for their own learning while 22% felt their employer was responsible for this issue, (4) 83% agreed or strongly agreed that they had ‘to give and take to get the work done’ and 80% said that ‘most of the time, my colleagues and I figure out together how to get the job done,’ (5) over two-thirds said they decided jointly with colleagues on what tasks are to be done, when, and how, (6) respondents were evenly divided on whether the work group to which they belonged fit the description of a Community of Practice, with shared stories, anecdotes and histories, (7) negotiation and group work strongly related to type of job, meaning that managers, professionals, and associate professionals scored the highest in these areas, (8) women were more likely to rate their 72

workplace as friendly and community-like, 72% to 66% for the men, and, (9) there was a strong association between learning (formal and informal) and the social context in which it takes place, meaning all learning activities were useful in improving job performance in situations where the notion of a community of practice was strongest.

In a study conducted by Boud and Middleton (2003) featuring informal workplace learning and communities of practice, professional groups in the same large organization were interviewed to identify ways in which participants learn with and from others. Boud and Middleton were particularly interested in whether the framework of communities of practice is a useful or sufficient framework for discussions about informal learning at work. Four workgroups were interviewed: teachers of floor and wall tiling, educational planners, HRD professionals, and business studies teachers who offer off-campus training to commercial clients.

Findings included the following: “People have explicit contacts for learning, some of which are determined by structural relationships, other of which are created informally” (p. 200). There were a variety of informal networks through which learning took place, including virtual networks, which were not geographically bounded. These networks of contacts for learning and virtual networks do not fit the elements of a community of practice as envisioned by Lave and Wenger (1991).

The workgroups themselves had some features of a community of practice and lacked others. The researchers concluded that while communities of practice provided useful ways of looking at workgroups, it also had limitations and was not sufficient for studying informal learning at work. 73

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, the review of the literature is organized around four topics pertinent to the question of how public sector professionals develop in practice: experiential learning, adult cognition and postformal thought, the nature of professional practice, and informal learning in professional practice.

First, experiential learning is examined through the lens of self-directed learning. Embedded in the concept of experiential learning is the notion of the self- directedness of adult learners. Drawing on the foundational work of Knowles, we find that adults are learning independently in natural settings, with some recent interest in examining self-directed learning in the professions. Experiential learning then examined in discussions of the foundational theories of Piaget and Vygotsky and later traditional theories of Kolb (1984) and Boud, Cohen and Walker (1993).

Five contemporary views of experiential learning emerging from the literature are also discussed.

The foundational theories of Piaget and Vygotsky are explained and contrasted to reveal how knowledge construction occurs, both individually and socially. Building on this, we see how Kolb’s (1984) theory of experiential learning integrates affect and reflection into a four-phase model of experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting. Boud, Cohen and Walker’s (1993) theory is similar to Kolb’s but they add two more dimensions to the factors that shape experiential learning— context and personal histories. The most influential constructivist learning theory for the workplace, informal and incidental learning, is discussed. Marsick and

Watkins (1990, 2001) crafted a theory of informal and incidental learning that is 74

adaptable to the workplace, adding the idea of incidental learning as learning that arises incidentally to an intentional learning episode.

Second, adult cognition and is examined from three workplace perspectives— practical intelligence, expertise, and postformal thought. Practical intelligence consists of creative skills, practical skills, and analytic skills in equal measure. Tacit knowing, knowing more than one can tell, is also a feature of practical intelligence.

The importance of procedural knowledge is privileged over propositional knowledge.

Practical knowledge when applied at work is known as expertise.

Three models of expertise are considered—one that focuses on cognitive processes, one that focuses on experiential learning experiences as the change agent from novice to expert, and one that theorizes that expertise is nothing more than superior memory, a notion related to the traditional views on intelligence.

The final perspective on adult thinking is postformal thought, also a constructivist view of knowledge construction. This perspective has a long quantitative research history and has produced measures that can be used to operationalize this study. Postformal thought may undergird all four dimensions of adult thinking.

Third, the nature of professional practice, according to Schön’s model of reflective practice, is discussed, along with the implications of conflicting research in this area. The question of how practitioners learn to reflect-in-action is still unanswered and doubt is cast on how much tacit knowing is used in actual practice.

Fourth, informal learning in professional practice and the factors that promote workplace learning and development are explored. From the literature we can conclude that the majority of learning in practice is informal and that 75

practitioners construct their knowledge bases through experience and relationships, as well as formal education. The question of how they develop certain thinking skills, such as postformal thought, remains unclear, as well as what the impact of contextual factors might be on that development.

Throughout this chapter, the literature on workplace learning and professional development has returned to the idea of the importance of learning, thinking professionals, especially in the climate of today's workplace where the ambiguity, stress and complexities of work and life can seem overwhelming.

This review has generated questions for consideration: How is adult thinking, more specifically postformal thought, developed in the public sector workplace? How do formal and informal learning influence its development? What personal social/cultural/historical experiences do professionals bring to their learning and how do these experiences influence learning? What contextual factors shape learning at work? How is the concept of knowledge construction changed?

What are the implications for professionals in practice, organizational developers, and the educational community? 76

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). Three questions guided this study:

1. What are the elements of postformal thought?

2. What informal learning experiences at work influence the development

and use of postformal thought?

3. What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

Globalization, technology, and deregulation have thrust public sector professionals into the 21st century workplace where work demands the application of new ways of thinking and learning. Practical intelligence, expertise, and postformal thought are terms that are used to describe the kind of thinking that professionals use in practice. Brookfield (2000) suggests that these lines of research contribute to the development of what he calls practical logic, a kind of contextual reasoning that comes from a deep understanding of some specific domain, and that postformal thought is the most significant thread of research for adult intellectual development. However, not much is known about how public sector professionals develop postformal thought in practice. 77

Given the increasing importance of providing and maintaining services critical to the safety and support of civil society, the development of postformal thought in public sector professionals is an important topic for investigation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals use postformal thought in practice. This chapter describes the qualitative design of the study, the criteria for sample selection, methods of data collection, strategies for data analysis, and ways to strengthen the study. Because the researcher in any qualitative research project is embedded in the process in such a personal way, a discussion of biases and assumptions will contribute to the reader’s understanding of how the researcher came to be interested in this topic.

Design of the Study

Designing a research study always begins with the nature of the problem to be explored and problems that involve understanding human processes lend themselves to qualitative research design. “All qualitative research is characterized by the search for meaning and understanding, the researcher as the primary instrument of data collection and analysis, an inductive investigative strategy, and a richly descriptive end product” (Merriam, 2002, p. 6). Because qualitative research seeks to understand experiences related to the problem, sample selection is purposeful.

In the search for meaning and understanding, it is not the researcher’s take on the problem that is important. Instead, qualitative researchers want to understand the meanings that the study participants have constructed from their experiences. There is a delicate balance to be struck here because the researcher actively participates in this construction as the instrument that gathers and 78

interprets the data. Unlike quantitative researchers who often deconstruct the data of a contrived phenomenon to find a theory, qualitative researchers are looking for a theory that explains their naturally occurring data. The rich description in the final report is a word picture, supported by the words of the participants (Merriam,

1998).

Creswell (1998) lists eight criteria that are characteristic of qualitative study to consider when choosing a qualitative design. Using the framework provided by

Creswell, I offer these reasons for choosing a basic interpretive qualitative design for this study. First, the research questions often begin with how or what and are designed to trigger a description of what is going on. The problem explored in this research study does begin with a how question, more specifically, how public sector professionals develop postformal thought in practice, making this an investigation concerned with the process of learning for cognitive development.

Second, the research topic needed to be explored because there is a lack of knowledge in some areas of theoretical development. Several strands of research in professional development have been identified as pieces of a metaphorical quilt of adult logic, but much work needs to be done in stitching this quilt together.

Third, the problem needed a detailed view because current knowledge about adult cognitive development is too global for practical application and use by adult educators and lacks a unifying framework. A detailed, qualitative view of developing postformal thought adds to the knowledge base of learning in professional practice, the theory of cognitive development of adults, and the professional practice of adult education. 79

Fourth, the problem needed to be studied in its naturally occurring setting.

For this study, fieldwork was required to gather data from public sector professionals as they went about their work. Contrived situations could not help us understand.

Fifth, the researcher was part of the research process. I am a public sector professional, a member-researcher of the public sector community, and the sole researcher for this proposal, making me an inherent part of the meaning-making process as I asked the questions, probed for details, analyzed the data, and explicated the data through my lens on the world.

Sixth, the researcher had the time and resources to collect saturated data in the field and to analyze extensive text information. I spent five years preparing myself and gathering resources in order to devote as much time as necessary toward saturated data collection and detailed analysis, which also included learning a specialized software package for the coding and retrieval of large amounts of text data.

Seventh, the audience for the study was receptive to qualitative research. I consider myself fortunate to study in a Research 1 institution where qualitative work is respected and encouraged as a legitimate research strategy for knowledge creation.

Eighth, the researcher deliberately planned to tell the story from the participants’ points of view. One of the primary goals of this study was to understand and report meanings and experiences from the differing perspectives or worldviews of the participants, recognizing that reality is a social construction

(Merriam, 1998). 80

Underlying the entire design process were the philosophical assumptions of the researcher, especially how the researcher understands and defines knowledge

(Creswell, 1998). Polanyi (1966) argues that knowledge is personal, within us, and since we can never articulate it all or in complete detail, it becomes something less when we express it. Since I am a constructivist, believing that knowledge is a socially constructed phenomenon that exists in the eye of each beholder, this is a comfortable, if somewhat ambiguous, position from which to work.

Deciding on the type of qualitative design was the next decision in the design process. Given the nature of the problem and the eight characteristics of basic interpretive inquiry, the problem in this proposal was best suited for a basic interpretive qualitative study (Creswell, 1998; Merriam, 1998; Merriam, 2002).

Drawing on the literature in adult learning and various models of developmental and cognitive psychology, I was interested in studying the learning experiences of public sector professionals in the context of the workplace, how they developed postformal thought in practice, what kinds of learning they valued, and what factors shaped the process. The analysis of these many detailed particulars led to the development of common patterns and themes in the learning and thinking of professionals in practice, a process well-suited for the inductive nature of basic qualitative research.

Sample Selection

The best way to collect qualitative data on these many detailed particulars is to purposefully select participants with the most relevant information related to the topic under study. This study used criterion-based sampling, meaning that the method of sample selection was purposeful according to specific criteria designed to 81

identify participants who offered the richest and most relevant data related to the problem (Merriam, 1998; 2002). I used my personal knowledge of these working professionals to generate possible candidates. All participants selected met the criteria established for participation.

Three criteria were used to select participants. First, potential participants met the study definition of professional, a person with advanced knowledge acquired by a prolonged course of study in an institution of higher learning. I chose from participants who were taught some form of thinking skills as they prepared to enter their respective professions. Certainly, many professionals can be found who have accumulated a wealth of knowledge through organizational training and experience, and while they did meet other definitions of professional and even expert professional, they did not meet the requirements of this particular study.

Second, participants were employed in the public sector, specifically in the

Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, a state agency charged with the regulation of public utilities, and in one of these professions: engineer or analyst.

Third, participants were employed in a described profession, in a government position, for a period long enough to earn recognition as an expert in their area. An example of this would be the designation of expert witness, which is defined as a person qualified by education, training, and experience to testify in a judicial proceeding. All of the participants in this study are expert professionals in their areas of expertise and have testified as expert witnesses.

Recruiting and working with these kinds of professionals for many years, and enjoying their support and interest in my academic endeavors, put me in an enviable position in terms of generating willing participants. Being an insider also 82

afforded me certain insights about who would provide the richest data. First, I applied the three criteria listed above to generate a list of approximately 40 candidates. I contacted the group by email, explaining the research and asking for participant pool volunteers. I designed my study around 10 participants. From these 40 professionals, I chose 10, keeping in mind a spread in ages, race, gender, and position to make as diverse a pool as possible.

Data Collection

Qualitative researchers deal with multiple, socially constructed realities.

Research into these realities centers around how people construct the world around them and, through the eyes of the researcher, an interpretive understanding is induced. Metaphors are often employed by writers to explain the role of the researcher in qualitative research, and qualitative researchers have been likened to detectives or jigsaw puzzle creators. One of my personal favorites is the researcher as a bricoleur, a jack-of-all-trades with a toolbox full of tools (Denzin & Lincoln,

1998; 2000). This study will employ two of the most commonly used tools in the bricoleur’s toolbox—interviews and documents.

Interviews

The desire to learn about others has made interviewing the most common data collection method in qualitative research. “The long interview gives us the opportunity to step into the mind of another person, to see and experience the world as they do themselves” (McCracken, 1988, p. 9). Interviewing does what no other form of data collection can do, especially in situations when there is no other way to get the data. Interviewing is a useful, adaptable data collection method used to capture the behavior, feelings and interpretations of other people. It is 83

especially useful when the topics are complex or emotional. A skillful interviewer can bring out information that cannot be obtained through any other means

(Merriam, 1998; Merriam & Simpson, 2000).

The interview, however, is not a neutral situation. Interviewing is a co- constructed performance created by the interviewer who situates the problem, which accordingly situates the responses, during a specific interview setting (Denzin

& Lincoln, 1998). Selecting the best interview method is integral to the process.

There are three basic interview types from which to choose: structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. Numbers of participants in any given interview setting might range from one to several to larger focus groups. “The most common way of deciding which type of interview to use is by determining the amount of structure desired” (Merriam, 1998, p. 72). Two factors considered here were the research problem and the number of participants in the study. In the structured interview, each participant is asked the same ordered set of pre-determined questions. The structured interview is often used in survey research where obtaining the same information about certain specified variables is critical to the research question. Interviews might take place by telephone, face-to-face, or by roving researchers in public places, wherever the desired participants might be found (Montana & Frey, 1998). An advantage of the structured, face-to-face interview over the written survey questionnaire is the freedom and availability of the researcher to clarify or explain items to the participant (Merriam & Simpson,

2000). Additionally, several researchers can be trained to deliver the same interview process to many participants in different locations. 84

While structured interviews are useful when dealing with large groups of study participants or where time and money is limited, the structured interview method is based on several questionable assumptions: that the context of the interview has no impact; that the interview interaction is emotionally neutral; that the personal attributes of the interviewer have a neutral impact on the participants; and that the interviewer and participants share a common vocabulary and therefore share common meanings. Another drawback to using this interview method stems from the previously defined questions and rigid format that most likely represents the interviewer’s worldview instead of the participant’s worldview (Creswell, 1998;

Merriam, 1998; Montana & Frey, 1998).

A structured interview setting might be used to explain a certain phenomenon. The unstructured interview setting seeks to understand the phenomenon (Montana & Frey, 1998). The interviewer is purposefully non- directive. There may be some initial guiding questions, but the interviewer is free to move the conversation in any direction. This type of interview is particularly useful when the existing knowledge base of the phenomenon is thin. It also provides a mechanism for the participant to freely express whatever comes to mind. Unstructured interviewing is helpful in exploring a topic or experience in the broadest possible terms and the data gathered may be used to formulate questions for later interviews or research studies (Merriam, 1998). The unstructured interview is a test of skill for the researcher who must balance the desire for immersion in the participant’s world and the real danger of collecting reams of useless, unrelated data. This becomes especially problematic when trying to compare conversations across participants (Trochim, 1999). 85

Semi-structured interviewing methods take on the best features of structured interviewing and unstructured interviewing strategies. For example, the interviewer can intentionally collect the same data, e.g., basic demographic information, from each participant while also allowing great freedom in the use of open-ended questioning and flexibility in the study design when pursuing unexpected leads.

Well thought out boundaries prevent the inadvertent collection of useless data while allowing the largest space possible to cover the topics of interest to the study.

Researchers must allow participants enough time and space to discuss, in their own words, issues that are important to them. To set the parameters, the researcher works from groups of questions. One group contains the structured interview questions that will be asked of each participant. The other groups contain the topics of discussion that set the parameters of the interview in a very general way, with the researcher asking more open-ended questions, with follow-up probe questions (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998; Merriam, 1998; Merriam & Simpson, 2000;

Montana & Frey, 1998).

Probing is an important skill in interviewing and one that suits qualitative research well as the researcher is always looking for more explanation, more detail, more clarification, more description, all the while knowing that it is impossible to know everything about a topic (Glesne, 1999). Probing techniques may include silence, encouragement, requests for clarification or elaboration, and repetition

(Trochim, 1999).

The interaction of interviewer and participant is replete with opportunities for success and failure. Asking participants to open up and express their thoughts about a topic that, from the researcher’s point of view seems ordinary, may trigger 86

some unintended discomfort or embarrassment for the participant. Building trust through skillful interviewing techniques is paramount in generating useful data.

The context of the interview situation and its emotional quality is improved when the researcher actively establishes rapport and empathy with the participant. Using the Human Subjects research guidelines and requirements creates part of this layer of comfort (see Appendix B), but other personal qualities in the researcher are just as important. Good listening skills and setting aside assumptions and biases to create a supportive and non-judgmental environment are also important in establishing comfort and trust during the interview. Meaningful interaction between the interviewer and the participants is essential to any qualitative study (Glesne,

1999).

For this study the in-depth interview was the best way to “step into the mind” of the public sector professional, to encourage thinking out loud in order to surface the experiences, feelings, ideas, and thought processes of the participants.

Polanyi’s (1966) now famous statement that we know more than we can tell may be mediated by a well-constructed interview guide that transforms this famous quote to mean we know more than we have been asked to tell.

The semi-structured interview was the most appropriate interview method for this study because certain demographic information was collected from each participant. Another reason this interview method was used was to guard against collecting piles of useless data. Mining the literature with an eye toward setting some theme boundaries established some loose but flexible parameters in the questions themselves. Many of my assignments over the past five years required a small research project and, whenever possible, my projects involved interviewing 87

adults, usually public sector professionals. This, combined with years of experience in interviewing adults as part of my own practice in Human Resource Development, established a level of personal confidence in creating the right climate and the right questions for eliciting data. In spite of my best efforts to avoid piles of data, the data collected was so thick and so rich that it was difficult to decide which quotes were the most salient. I used a semi-structured interview guide to allow for the collection of the same demographic information and then used open-ended questions to address the research questions. Probing questions were used to elicit data on personal perspectives on formal and informal learning experiences; contextual factors of the workplace that influence learning; and any other factors related to the development of their worldview as it relates to learning, thinking, and the valuing of different kinds of knowledge. The interview guide can be found in

Appendix A.

Interviews were taped and transcribed by the researcher. This was a deliberate decision made in order to stay as close to the data as possible.

Interviews were conducted in libraries, homes, and restaurants across the city.

Some telephone interviews were used when schedules and geography prevented face-to-face interviews or when needed for following up with member checks.

Documents

Data analysis of documents has been described as the “interpretation of mute evidence” (Hodder, 1998, p. 110). These mute texts and artifacts are defined as documents of a personal nature such as diaries, letters, and field notes; records of official transactions such as transcripts, annual reports, marriage licenses, death certificates, census records, contracts, and bank records; and artifacts as diverse as 88

beer cans, tools, films and photographs. The global terms of texts and artifacts include just about any physical thing, including online materials in existence prior to the research study, or texts and artifacts generated as part of the research study such as field notes of the researcher or diaries, journals, or letters generated by participants during the study (Hodder, 1998; Merriam, 1998).

The definition of documents includes not only physical traces of things but things that have worn away as well. Glesne (1999) mentions the paths worn into the grass on a college campus and the shine on the handrails at a popular museum.

Scratches on a recording or worn pages in a book might help complete a story or verify data from an interview. The challenge of what to observe in qualitative research is in noticing not just the obvious, but what is missing as well.

Document research has many advantages. Documents can provide more and better data than other sources. Documents are permanent in the sense that the researcher can revisit them when needed. New perspectives or questions may arise to enrich interviews or observations. Information not available anywhere else may be provided by documents. Access to documents, especially with the increasing utility of the Internet and the World Wide Web, can be easy and affordable. Documents, used in conjunction with other data such as interviews or observations, can be invaluable in adding validity or trustworthiness to a research project (Glesne, 1999; Hodder, 1998; Merriam, 1998).

Document research also comes with stipulations. Documents were contextual in their creation and are contextual in the researcher’s interpretation.

“As the text is reread in different contexts it is given new meanings, often contradictory and always socially embedded. Thus there is no ‘original’ or ‘true’ 89

meaning of a text outside specific historical contexts” (Hodder, 1998, p. 111).

Documents also contain data that is useless from the research perspective and the useful information must be sifted out. Additionally, documents may not be authentic or accurate (Merriam, 1998). Other considerations are whether a document is an original or secondary source, firsthand or secondhand account, solicited or unsolicited, edited or unedited, anonymous or signed (Webb, Campbell,

Schwartz & Sechrest, 1966, as reported by Hodder, 1998).

One tremendous advantage of researching a problem in government is the wealth of documents created to record the discussions, reasons, and actions of public officials and their employees. Members of the governing entity as well as official court reporters, newspaper journalists, television reporters, and other interested parties create these documents and they are available for public review.

Documents, along with my years of membership and observation in government, lent support and understanding to data gathered in the interviews.

Data Analysis

One of the goals of qualitative research is to create a rich and thick description, a word picture, for the reader of the study. Perhaps this accounts for the generous use of metaphors when writing for and about qualitative research studies and the researchers themselves. One particular metaphor in the qualitative research literature recently caught my eye because it touched me in a very personal way. It conjured up a word picture that resonated with my personal experience—that of the researcher as a quilter, systematically piecing together little scraps of data cloth until the whole quilt emerges (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). As a child, I played with and slept under the many patchwork quilts that my 90

grandmothers pieced, both for the utilitarian purposes of providing warmth on a cold winter night and for the plain joy of creating a thing of beauty out of a pile of scraps, leaving nothing to waste. As an adult, I am carrying on their tradition by learning and practicing the art of quilting, so the idea of inductive research in an uncontrolled environment using what is naturally available resonated with me as a quilter of scraps.

“Text [is] a window into human experience” (p. 769) and there are two kinds of interview text in the social sciences tradition—text from systematic elicitation and free-flowing text, meaning text from open-ended interviews (Ryan & Bernard,

2000). In my data collection, I gathered both kinds of text from each participant.

I thematically analyzed the text. Ideas for identifying themes and theme boundaries were developed throughout the research process using the literature and the coding of the interview texts.

An analysis of the interview text using the constant comparative method began after the first interview was completed and transcribed. The interviews were spaced so that a complete transcription could be read and data segments coded before the next interview took place. Initial analysis consisted of reading and re- reading of the text, underlining significant phrases, marking metaphors, inductively labeling (or coding) chunks of texts, clustering these chunks into categories related to the research questions, identifying text that did not fit, and asking questions of the data, not only about what was said, but also about what was left unsaid.

Eventually, as each text was coded and the data constantly compared and categorized, themes emerged from the data. Concurrent with theme development and coding, I used memoing to make code notes, theory notes, operational notes, 91

and reflective journaling notes about the research process. I started out memoing in a very structured way, but my notebook was not always available when an idea hit me, so I wrote on anything available. My notes and scribblings are literally captured in a binder, glued, taped, and stapled to letter-size, punched paper. Using coding software, I also created an organized list of codes, a digital codebook of definitions and theme boundaries, to be used in future systematic research on this topic. It is here in the process that my time spent learning a code-and-retrieve qualitative data analysis software program will pay dividends in future projects.

Following the transcription and coding of all transcripts, I spent an extensive period of time further refining, identifying and adjusting the categories and themes emerging from the data (Merriam, 1998).

Validity and Reliability

Acting on a piece of research by incorporating its ideas into our professional practice or into our personal lives implies a level of trust that the researcher used ethical and rigorous methodologies in its design, implementation, analysis, and findings. When the experimental research community appropriated and redefined what counted as knowledge, any piece of research that did not live up to the scientific definition of rigor was deemed flawed and untrustworthy—not scientific.

When experimental researchers speak of internal validity in research, they are referring to whether the study successfully measured what it claimed to measure in the design. When experimental researchers speak of external validity, they are referring to whether the findings can be generalized to other populations. When experimental researchers speak of reliability, they are looking for findings that can be replicated in additional studies. Consequently, the validity and reliability of 92

qualitative research continues to be challenged by some researchers and lay people who mistakenly apply quantitative criteria for rigor to qualitative research.

Scholars in the field of qualitative research have developed a number of strategies to answer these criticisms. These range from early attempts to integrate qualitative research procedures into the “scientific” notions of validity and reliability, as discussed previously, to creating their own language for establishing validity and reliability, i.e., trustworthiness and authenticity (Creswell, 1994, Miles

& Huberman, 1994). When the definitions of validity and reliability are discussed within the framework of a research problem that seeks understanding of a human or social problem as it is naturally occurring in some context of life, the perceived problems of qualitative research are mitigated. Paraphrasing Merriam (1998), internal validity answers the question of how well the findings match the participant’s construction of reality. Reliability in qualitative research seeks to answer the concern of whether the findings are consistent with the data collected.

External validity (or generalizability) addresses how the findings of one study might be applied in another situation or context. In qualitative studies, it is understood that the researcher is interested in studying a particular phenomenon in depth, “not to find out what is generally true of the many” (Merriam, 1998, p. 208). When considering the issue of generalizability, readers will ultimately decide the usefulness of a study for their particular situation or context.

Merriam (1998) summarizes various strategies that a researcher can use to maximize validity and reliability: the audit trail, triangulation, member checks, long-term observation, peer examination, participatory research, full disclosure of the researcher’s biases and assumptions, thick and rich description, and multi- 93

site/multi-case designs. Creswell and Miller (2000) suggest that the choices of validity and reliability strategies are determined by two factors—the lens that the researcher chooses to validate the study and the particular qualitative research orientation or paradigm assumption of the researcher.

Having worked in a government agency where documentation is required by law, since government is spending millions of dollars each year of taxpayer monies, and where programs and facilities are subject to strenuous annual audits, the idea of strengthening validity and reliability with appropriate strategies and detailed documentation did not seem to be an impossible or unreasonable task. The following strategies were used to strengthen the validity and reliability of this study.

Triangulation, looking at the phenomenon of interest from different perspectives, was used. This included interviews with a purposeful sample, supported by public documents and long-term insider observation and experience. During this study I used participant feedback to increase my understanding of what the data was representing. Disconfirming evidence in the data also was disclosed and accounted for. Researcher biases and assumptions have been disclosed from the beginning and examined throughout the process. Finally, a thick and rich description was generated as a record of the entire experience.

Researcher Bias and Assumptions

Recently a colleague who also was involved in preparing a proposal remarked on how much she enjoyed writing the methods chapter, “because it was such a personal chapter.” I think I know what she felt as we finally get to a point in the process where we, as doctoral students, can tell about our journeys that led us to this place. 94

I approached this study as most doctoral students, curious about a problem in my practice. My entire public sector career has been spent as a member- researcher in a state government agency, working with and observing other public sector professionals in various practices. I first recruited and then worked with many career professionals. Over the years, I observed them as they adapted to the changing context of public sector work in a deregulated environment. The complexities of these new issues, the lack of time and resources for formal interventions, and the intense public scrutiny of their actions made me wonder about how they were learning to deal with these new, complex and ill-structured problems in their everyday practice. As the Director of Human Resources and Staff

Development, I was very familiar with the formal development activities of the employees in my agency and knew they were not learning to use the tools in their metaphorical toolboxes in a classroom. This fueled an intense curiosity about how these people were learning to meet the continuing challenges of their careers and job responsibilities.

From my perspective, professionals whose careers are in public sector work are intrinsically motivated to do good work, to help others, and to make a difference in the world, knowing full-well that they will never be financially rich at the end of the day. This applies both to how I see myself and how I view the participants in this study. Since the participants are professionals that I recruited into the agency and with whom I worked, I have a vested interest in their well- being and portrayal in this study as something more than the public perception of government employees. Consequently, I monitored myself closely to make sure that I represented their stories in an honest manner. I came to this systematic 95

study of public sector professionals with a valuable reservoir of experiences and observations, a deep contextual knowing, that helped me interpret the data generated in the interviews of the participants.

96

CHAPTER 4

FINDINGS

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). Three questions guided this study:

1. What are the elements of postformal thought?

2. What informal learning experiences at work influence the development

and use of postformal thought?

3. What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

A qualitative design was chosen for this study in order to understand the thinking and learning of public sector professionals from their point of view as they went about their work. The participants were asked to think out loud about current issues and specific problems in the immediate hot action of their practice and workplace. Data were collected primarily through long interviews, supplemented with document analysis. The unit of analysis is the public sector professional in the context of the workplace and findings were derived using the constant comparative method of data analysis. A pseudonym has been used in place of actual participant names and all proper nouns and specific place names have been replaced with general and regional terms. This chapter is divided into two parts, presented in this 97 order: Part 1, the participant profiles, followed by Part 2, the findings that were derived from the data.

Part 1: Participant Profiles

“As similar as we are as people, we are who we are because of our life experiences.” Pamela

Ten senior level professionals ranging in age from 35 to 63 participated in this study. There are four financial analysts, one systems analyst, one utilities analyst, three engineers and one engineer/financial analyst. Four are African

American. Six are White. Four are female and six are male. One recently retired and one recently resigned. Their years of employment at the state Public Utilities

Regulatory Commission range from 5 years to 28 years and average 16 years.

Many of the participants had previous public sector employment backgrounds in other state and federal agencies. See Table 3 for details on each participant.

In the following profiles, participants describe and reflect on formative learning experiences in their lives, their career choices, and the value of their work.

In social learning theory, knowledge is co-constructed using personal social/cultural/historical experience, cultural tools, and context. These participant profiles speak to those experiences and the intersection of how they learned to frame the problems in their practice.

98

Table 3

Participant Profiles

Yrs at Name Title Gender Age Ethnicity Education PURC

BS Math & African Christine Systems Analyst Female 45 Information 5 American Systems

Edward Engineer Male 62 White BS Engineering 7

Grace Financial Analyst Female 35 White BS Accounting 12

Jeff Financial Analyst Male 52 White BS Accounting 20

Kevin Financial Analyst Male 52 White BS Accounting 28

African Mike Engineer Male 40 BS Engineering 8 American

African BS Engineering Pamela Engineer/Analyst Female 42 20 American MBA

African Patsy Engineer Female 46 BS Engineering 12 American

BS General Russell Utilities Analyst Male 63 White 20 Science

BBA Accounting Tom Financial Analyst Male 57 White 28 MBA

99

Christine

Christine is a 45 year-old African American female employed at the PURC for the past five years as a systems analyst. She grew up in a small southern town during the turbulent 1960s when being African American was not always a pleasant experience. “The mayor brought out a tank to make sure that the black people did not riot and had that tank parked in front of City Hall for a long time. His picture with him holding guns was on billboards around town.” Christine lived in “an upper middle class neighborhood. My mother was a teacher, my grandmother's sister was a teacher, and she had a brother who was a teacher and a principal. That was what you were if you wanted to be comfortable.”

Now I did grow up during the civil rights movement and the message

that I got from the civil rights movement was, Oh yes, you can do

anything. You have the right to do anything. So that message came

loud and clear to me and I accepted it. My mother and grandmother

were scared of the message of the civil rights movement. The civil

rights movement said, “You can do anything,” but within my culture,

my [family] said, “Be comfortable, be safe, be a teacher.” But I knew

that I did not want to be a teacher. The problem was I did not know

what else I could be. I always knew I would go to college because I

was always classified as a smart girl with a high IQ.

Christine attended a prestigious private university for several semesters but dropped out to marry and have a family. While working in a federal government position, she discovered an interest in all things related to computers and re- entered college at the local university night school, graduating with a double major 100 in mathematics and information systems. Soon after, seeking to maximize her new credentials, Christine left the federal government and accepted a position with an information technology giant in the private sector. After 13 years of corporate life,

“I really felt that I didn't fit into the new corporate culture [that followed a reorganization and realignment of business objectives].” Christine returned to the public sector in 2002, accepting a position with the PURC.

In this job I feel successful. I feel satisfied in what I do in this job.

This job feeds my soul. I would not trade it for anything in the world.

Even after all I know now. We have had such successes in helping

consumers…when you know that you have helped some little old lady

get $1000 back from a marketer, that is what really matters. And we

have had quite a few successes here lately. So I like where I am right

now…I just really love what I do. One of the joys that I have in this

job is it really does just fit me, who I am.

Edward

Edward is a 62-year old White male employed at the PURC as an engineer for the past seven years. He grew up in the South in a life of comparative privilege where white men ruled. “Perhaps we [men] assumed a rite of passage and that's spelled R-I-G-H-T, you know what I'm saying? A right to position handed to us on a silver platter perhaps. I am ashamed of it but that was the view of the world at that time.” Edward’s father was a strong formative influence when it came to considering a career and the kind of work Edward pursued.

From a very young age, my father strongly suggested that I take up

the study of engineering. In a very loving way he did that. He was a 101

thinking man. His education was at a very fine private liberal arts

university, a bachelor's degree in public administration. He was very

strong as a worker bee for the Roosevelt administration. My father

was on the football field at State Military College when President

Roosevelt threw a switch in the 1930s, which symbolically turned on

all the lights all over this state through the Rural Electric

Administration. He had a vision of the future, of the world at that

time, and I think it was a pretty good one.

Edward previously worked in a number of industries where he used a more hands-on engineering approach, “for example, to figure out why the motor wasn't running correctly and to get the kind of isolation transformer so that it would start running correctly.” Now he is more involved with “work that is not principally about engineering as I have learned it in the past.” On one level he is involved in calculating and maintaining electric power generation performance data for each of the 144 energy-generating units operated by the power company. On another level, “my comprehension of it and the transmission of that comprehension to the upper levels of the organization to benefit the ratepayers of this state is my passion.”

Grace

Grace is a 35 year-old White female employed by the PURC as a financial analyst. She was brought up by her grandmother and father in a small town located in the Piedmont Region of the Appalachian Mountains in the rural South where rock quarries and cotton mills provided the best local employment 102 opportunities. A high school crush turned into marriage and motherhood at a young age.

My parents did not give me much direction about anything. I have

always been a self-driven person. I took accounting in high school and

I liked it. I said, I am going to do this when I grow up. Nobody

encouraged me to do it or not to do it. I just made up my mind to do

it. When I set my mind to do something, if it can be accomplished, I

am going to do it.

At her first opportunity she commuted 40 miles to the closest university, finishing a degree in accounting in two and one-half years, while working and keeping up her home and family responsibilities. Shortly after graduation she accepted an entry level accounting position with the PURC. In twelve years she has risen to a senior level financial analyst position. “I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. It felt really good, but even today no one else has graduated. My son will be the second person, hopefully…”

Respect and credibility are very important to Grace and these are recurring themes in her conversation.

Over time, other professionals will respect you even though you don’t

belong to the best country club because they know you are smart….[It

is important to] be prepared, be assertive and be confident. If you

don’t present yourself well it impacts your credibility.

Grace values projects that allow her to work in the best interest of the ratepayers, but “I don’t always have a project that allows that point of view.

Sometimes the best I can do is try to create a balance for all sides of an issue or 103 project.” Graces says her general principle is, “and I try to live by this, always study the consequences because there is a consequence for every action and, I ask myself, am I willing do deal with that?”

Jeff

Jeff is a 52-year old White male employed at the PURC for 20 years as a financial analyst. A very confident and happy-go-lucky person, he grew up on the

Eastern Seaboard in an upper middle class family that sheltered him from the turmoil of the 1960s. “I understood my race, gender, and class but it was very subtle. There was no email [to me] or anything. Nobody said anything although it was imparted to me.”

My father was my role model. He was in real estate sales and I was

heading that way, business, studying numbers and finance. I went to

the State University in Maryland for four years and received a BS in

Accounting.

Jeff did not follow his father into the private sector, however, deciding that the private sector was too competitive, too uncertain, and too unstructured. He accepted a position with the federal government as an auditor and later worked in a public hospital as an accountant.

[The public sector] appeared to me to be more of a relaxed and open

environment as opposed to the private sector. I think I just generally

like the idea of structure, a transparent structure where you can have

a predictable career, a place where I could ponder things more,

analyze things more, a more academic-type environment than private

industry. 104

Jeff moved south and accepted an analyst position with the PURC in 1982.

Struck with the “green grass syndrome,” Jeff left public sector work for about four years. “In hindsight, I was chasing rainbows, but I came back to the fold. I guess it was an aberration that I left in the first place. I came back for the same reasons

I started.”

Kevin

Kevin is a 52 year-old White male employed at the PURC for twenty-eight years as a financial analyst. Kevin’s father held very strict views on religious affiliation, so strict that Kevin came to see it as part of a class issue with his family and community.

I lived in a very closed society in the middle-of-America town where I

grew up. Everybody I knew was Catholic, everybody. That is just the

way it was. I was the fourth son to attend college, but the first son

not to attend a Catholic college, so I broke that mold. I decided to go

to a large state university—a Big 10 school—and that is where things

opened up for me and I was exposed to other people and other

cultures and other religions.

After coursework in engineering and the humanities, Kevin settled into accounting “because I knew I could get a job with that.” After graduation, personal friendships brought Kevin south and he eventually was employed by the PURC as an auditor. The first twenty years of his career were spent working with regulated utility companies where “the rules were the rules, the rates were the rates.”

Deregulation in some areas of utility services dramatically changed everything about Kevin’s work. “The sense of accomplishment that I personally used to have 105 in being able to help people out was gone because we don’t have any control over certain aspects of the utility industry anymore.”

For the last several years Kevin has been involved with the telecommunications relay service for the deaf, hard-of-hearing, and speech- impaired.

I think about the outcomes and its genuine impact on people. I meet

people who are very thankful and they see the results of these

programs and what they are doing to help people. That’s how I see I

am making a real contribution where it really counts….I think this is

more satisfying than any work I have done. I am making more of an

impact now than all those years of auditing books and records at the

big utility companies.

Mike

Mike is a 40-year old African American male employed at the PURC for eight years as an engineer. He was raised by his grandparents in a small Southern town in the deep South and surrounded by community, teachers and church members who knew his potential. This village of supporters guided and encouraged Mike and made him “feel the sky is the limit. My grandparents knew the value of education but sometimes they weren’t sure how I was going to achieve it.” Surrounded by people in his community with strong educational backgrounds, he was shown how to get scholarships and financial aid. “When I graduated [with a BS in Civil

Engineering], I owed nothing. I was very, very fortunate.” Mike also gained an engineer for a wife while at college. 106

After graduation, Mike worked in the Midwest and West for two natural gas utility companies, mainly because the offers and areas appealed to him and his family. Other job and family considerations moved Mike back to the South and his position with the PURC. The prospect of learning a “different side” of the utility business appealed to him because the state legislature had just approved the natural gas deregulation competition act, which opened the market for consumer choice. After eight years,

…there are some things that will never get resolved and the outcome

has not been what was billed to the consumers. The way the model

was supposed to be set up, it wasn’t supposed to be The Gas

Company, the customer, and a middle man. It was supposed to be a

distribution company and marketers who serve the customers. It

hasn’t worked out that way. Now The Gas Company is a pipes-only

company and getting their worst pipes replaced by a rider on the

marketer, a sweet deal. They bill the marketers every month for pipe

replacement and the marketers pay the bill because they know their

supply will be cut off. Now The Gas Company does not have to worry

about collecting from millions of customers, just a few marketers.

They don’t have to worry about the one and a half million customers

that don’t pay their gas bills. And the marketers pass it all along to

the customers. I got so tired of trying to fix things that finally I said I

have to look for something else. 107

Pamela

Pamela is a 42-year old African American female employed at the PURC for twenty years. Currently she is an advisor to the Commissioners, where she makes good use of degrees in engineering and an MBA with a major in general business.

She grew up in a small town in the rural Deep South where opportunities for poor

African American families were few. But she always knew she would go to college because her mother set that as a goal for all five of her children.

My mother had five children and she always said, I want my children

to go to college. I knew early on that I was going to college. My

mother suggested teaching school. That’s what my aunt grew up to

do and my mother thought that was what Black people did where I

grew up. But I didn’t want to do that. My oldest brother was an

engineering student and he said, “If you are good in math and

science,” and I was, “you need to look at engineering, look at

engineering, look at engineering!” So I went to college and that is

where I ended up.

After a stint with a government agency in her home state, Pamela accepted a position with the PURC in 1986 as an engineer. Several promotions later, Pamela serves as an advisor to the Commissioners and is their liaison with federal regulators and other state PURCs.

It’s been a career that grows on you. From my perspective, it’s

rewarding for me that the kind of work that I do has such a huge

impact on so many people. It impacts people from various walks of

life in the same way, so that’s appealing to me. I feel like I am doing 108

something that has a positive impact on a lot of people and it is quite

rewarding, actually....Public sector employees are taken for granted by

a lot of people. They really do have vital roles and they do things that

affect your life, can save your life.

Russell

Russell is a 63 year-old White male employed at the PURC as a utilities analyst for the past twenty years. He was born in a large Southern city, but when his mother died, he was sent to live in the country on a 100-acre tree farm with his grandparents.

Most of the things I did were created in my own imagination. I had an

interest in electronics and I built radios and transmitters and crystal

radio sets and model airplanes. Before hang gliders were ever

invented, I built one and flew off the top of the barn. Flew across the

yard and landed too fast to keep up with it. Ended up rolling up in it,

but I was unhurt. I learned a lot from my experiences and my

mistakes, and then I came back to the city when I was about 15 and

lived with my father again.

When Russell was 17 years old, he joined the Marine Corps and “grew up. I was awfully confused about what I wanted to do after the Marine Corps, as most people are, I think. That’s when I started thinking about college…I was wanting to improve myself.” He attended college on the west coast where he studied general science because he liked it and the admissions office liked his science placement scores. Russell went to work as a rate analyst for an association representing all the railroads and trucking in the southeastern United States. The 1984 Federal 109

Deregulation Act finished his long career with the association; however, his job knowledge made him an attractive candidate for the PURC.

You are not aware of the knowledge that you have, but other people

seem to anticipate where your experiences will help them, and then as

you go into it, really, it is kind of like swimming; once you learn how

and you are in the water at the same temperature, you can swim

pretty good, and that is the way it was in transferring from trucking

and rail in the private sector to rail and trucking in the public sector.

Russell is guided by a strong sense of responsibility in his role as a public sector professional. “You have to do what is best for the public. That is what I was there for—to serve the public and to direct the industry to provide the best service at the lowest prices and make those recommendations.”

Tom

Tom is a 57 year-old White male employed at the PURC as a financial analyst. He has a very influential position in the PURC, and colleagues who work with Tom hold him in high regard. Tom served in the military during the Viet Nam

War and later twice worked his way through college, earning both a BBA and an

MBA.

I grew up in a small [southern] town in what you would call a lower

middle class family. We didn’t have a lot of money. We had enough

to do what we needed to do but not enough to do what we wanted to

do all the time. My work ethic and my attitude about trying to be

honest and do the right thing, trying to give people a good work

product for your pay, those sort of things, came from my father. Our 110

social economic class brought about a certain kind of feeling that I

brought into the workplace. Because I didn’t grow up with everything,

I think I had an attitude of trying to help people that I saw who might

need help or include people that might have been excluded otherwise.

I think your social economic standing and your attitudes growing up

and what you saw in your family and your community and around you,

those things helped mold you—the way you approach things, the way

you do your work, and the way you interact with people.

Through the years, Tom could have “gone to the other side” many times, meaning that he could have accepted a position in the companies that he was charged with regulating, but “I get a lot of satisfaction out of helping people. There is a lot to be said for it, although you are not going to get rich here. It is really important that you enjoy whatever you are doing.”

These ten participants were purposefully selected from a pool of approximately forty professionals who volunteered to be considered for this study.

They represent professionals in practice who have acquired advanced knowledge in their fields by successfully completing one or more degrees in higher education where they were taught particular forms of thinking skills relevant to their degrees.

All have earned the recognition of expert in their various endeavors in this public sector agency. In the next section, findings are presented from the interview and document data. 111

Part 2: Findings

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). Three questions guided this study:

1. What are the elements of postformal thought?

2. What informal learning experiences at work influence the development

and use of postformal thought?

3. What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

Three sets of findings are presented in this chapter: Elements of Postformal

Thought, Informal Learning and Postformal Thought, and Contextual Factors That

Shape Learning. As can be seen in Table 4, the first set of findings, Elements of

Postformal Thought, describes the kind of thinking used to deal with the new, ill- structured, and complex problems in practice that arose as a result of the deregulation of certain segments of public utilities. In the second set of findings,

Informal Learning and Postformal Thought, participants discuss what strategies they found most useful in learning to re-think these new problems in practice. In the last set of findings, Contextual Factors That Shape Learning, three properties stand out as important in this study. A brief history of the Public Utilities

Regulatory Commission (PURC) prefaces the first set of findings. 112

Table 4

Findings

Elements of Postformal Thought

Framing the Problem

Constructing Knowledge

Coping with Ambiguity

Finding a Solution

Looking Back

Informal Learning and Postformal Thought

Being Self-Directed

Learning From Others and With Others

Building a Model

Contextual Factors That Shape Learning

Working in Two Worlds

Organizational Culture

Access to Resources

113

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) is a small state regulatory agency located in a large southeastern U. S. city. It was created in 1879 to regulate a business monopoly of vital interest to the citizens and businesses of the state— the railroad. Twelve years later the authority to regulate telegraph and express companies was added. In 1907, the telephone, natural gas, and electric companies were added to the list of regulated monopolies.

Five commissioners, who are elected every six years in partisan statewide races for their state Constitutional seats, lead the PURC. Until the early 1990s, the

PURC had been the exclusive domain of white, male, Populist Democrats. In 1992, the first Republican since Reconstruction was elected to the PURC. Two years later,

1994, two additional Republicans were elected, shifting the balance of power from traditionally Democratic leadership to Republican leadership. While the white, male makeup of the PURC did not change over these years, the mission of the agency moved from government regulator to a business model style of governance, as evidenced in these mission statements:

[1994] The PURC: Ensuring the consistent delivery and future

development of energy, commercial transportation, and

communication services in a reasonable, safe, and informative manner

to help make this state the best place to live, work, and play. (Source:

1994 Strategic Plan)

[1999] The PURC: Making Business and Safety Decisions Affecting

Tomorrow. Ensuring that consumers receive the best possible value in

telecommunications, electric and natural gas services and to improve

transportation and pipeline safety. (Source: 1999 Strategic Plan) 114

[2003] The PURC: The mission of the PURC is to exercise its authority

and influence to ensure that consumers receive safe, reliable and

reasonably priced telecommunications, electric and natural gas

services from financially viable and technically competent companies.

(Source: 2003 Annual Report)

Public utilities in the United States have been regulated by federal and state agencies since the 1930s, in part to guarantee a certain level of service and reasonable cost to all subscribers and to expand service into areas that would not otherwise be considered profitable enough to serve. Airlines were once a regulated industry until October, 1978, when new laws allowed competition to enter the airfare marketplace. Following soon after came the deregulation of trucking, railroads, buses, cable television, stock exchange brokerage, financial markets, telecommunications, oil and gas, and local electric and gas utilities.

Deregulation of telecommunications and natural gas energy has changed the role of the PURC from regulator to mediator. Over these years the role of the agency has moved from a regulatory role of fixed rates and earnings and reliable service to the role of certifying service providers, monitoring customer complaints, and mediating among competing stakeholders, with the majority of rates being set by competition in the marketplace. Deregulation of natural gas energy and telecommunications sectors by federal and local governments has also dramatically changed the goals, stakeholders and work processes for public sector professionals as evidenced by this addition to the mission statement in the 2007 Annual Report to the Governor: 115

Over the past decade, growth, competition and technological advances

have significantly changed the PURC's role. With market segments of

the telecommunications and natural gas industries open to

competition, the PURC strives to facilitate market development,

educate consumers, arbitrate complaints among competitors and

monitor the effectiveness of the competitive markets. (Source: 2007

Annual Report)

Today the PURC is led by five Republicans: four white males and one white female. Their latest mission statement continues to reflect a business model style of governance. With an overall staffing level of approximately 70, most of the employees at the PURC are career professionals with formal education, credentials and experience in finance and engineering. Most of the employees who are in senior positions were employed during the years of Populist Democratic leadership, which coincided with the regulatory goals of consumer protection, reliable and safe service, reasonable rates, and fair earnings for the companies providing the service.

Kevin describes his practice since deregulation, saying,

It’s a totally different world than when we had one gas company with a

tariff and rules and orders and it was strictly by the book…Now all that

is thrown out the window. What, for the past two decades has been

very black and white for me has now become multiple shades of gray.

It’s incredible the types of things we are doing now. No one would

have dreamed it five years ago. Even the problems themselves are

unique. Consequently, the staff is spending a lot more time just 116

simply having to meet and talk about issues that no one ever

anticipated years ago.

The problems began with the legislation enacted in the state general assembly. Kevin says, “We’re given a new charter with no guidelines. What’s changed is there is no blueprint on how to solve these problems [brought on by deregulation] and we have had to re-think so much of what we do.” He describes the laws that brought about deregulation as, “very, very sketchy…just set out broad parameters…very vague.” And unlike the regulated world of work, Kevin continues,

“we have to get consensus with all these groups and group members.” Kevin’s interpretation of natural gas deregulation was that the legislators wanted the PURC

“to serve the public interest…and that was how we interpreted that part of the law and we developed the guidelines and rules along those lines.” The marketers “had their own interpretation and that was another problem….The challenging part of all of this has not been learning the content but figuring out the agendas of all the players.”

Jeff is very pragmatic about the changes in his work, saying, “A job by definition means that you are going to have challenges that can have you in discomfort for a while. That’s why you get paid.” One frustration for Jeff is

boiling down my information for the commissioners to ten words or

less with no multiple choices. Many times there’s a lot of gray area

and they want to know black or white. But you have to look at things

in context. I want to have qualifiers. You have to figure out the

issues and communicate it within a period of time to get to hopefully a

mutual understanding. Time is your enemy. 117

Elements of Postformal Thought

Deregulation brought about the need to re-think problems in practice. After years of comfortable expertise built on regulated utility experience, these public sector professionals had to think about issues and their solutions in new and different ways. The data in this finding cluster around these topics: framing the problem, constructing knowledge, coping with ambiguity, finding a solution, and looking back on their experience.

Framing the Problem

In 1995, one year prior to the federal telecommunications act, the state legislature passed the State Telecommunications Act. Deregulation of the telecommunications industry was “triggered by our economic growth and we were actually the first on the scene. That put us ahead of everybody else,” explains

Russell, “and I had to hit the ground running, learning everything I could.” But as

Tom points out, “[With deregulation] we did not have anybody to go to school on.

We plowed the field first. It was kind of rough. You had to get all the rocks out that first time and we had plenty of rocks.” In his work, Jeff says, “you can’t be a follower because many times there is no one to follow.” These very experienced professionals found that they had very little previous knowledge and experience to bring to bear on the issues and problems brought about by the deregulation of telecommunications. Professionals working in natural gas energy would face the same kinds of problems with the deregulation of natural gas.

In this section participants talk about how they go about setting up a new project and the logic systems that they use to frame the problem. “Planning is a big part of learning and doing. If you are setting up a project that you have never 118 done before and, because this work is subjective in nature, you are going to spend more time on planning and learning than the actual activity of doing the job.” Tom defines the act of planning this way: “I like to organize how I am going to think about a project. In my mind and physically, I like to start prioritizing and organizing things.” Tom organizes his information, collected in document form and sorted by topic with color coding, on a work table where he can visually and physically “move around in my project.” Like Tom, visualization is a technique that

Jeff uses when thinking about a new project. “First of all, I try to visualize where I want to go and then I try to figure out how to get there.”

For Pamela, working in the regulated world of electric energy, “being able to logically lay out all, each piece, of evidence or information that you have and then being able to draw a reasonable conclusion based on what you have seen,” has served her well for many years. But for Grace, who works in natural gas issues, it is not so clear cut. “In the accounting world, usually everything fits somewhere in the equation. It all ties up into a nice neat package and there is no left-over money that doesn’t have anywhere to go.” On this job, says Grace,

our problems don’t have a nice neat solution that fits in a box. The

numbers suggest policy or how things should be done. But there are

not always clear solutions about how things should happen because

there are other things that are going to happen if you do x.y.z. Often

there is no right or wrong answer, just lots of choices with effects.

Choosing the right logic system to fit the problem is illustrated above by Pamela and Grace. Jeff sums it up nicely, saying, “You need good instincts to glean things in both intuitive and logical ways.” 119

Finding the boundaries of a problem is a recurring theme for these professionals. For Edward, “abstract principles of thought are necessary for the systems I try to analyze are extremely complex. I struggle every day to find out what the boundaries are by asking other people who have been in the game longer.” One recent case was particularly frustrating for Jeff because it was “a high profile case in the telecom industry. It mattered to the players big time but there was no real resolution.” With only general instruction from the PURC, “we had no idea where to go. Our objective was never clear. It was a problem without boundaries. It was an unresolve-able case.” “Determining…the boundaries…” is integral to Russell’s practice in the deregulated world of telecommunications.

Seeing the big picture helps these professionals frame the problem in a context. Grace says, “I try to look at the big picture. Get the background, know what my objectives are, set up a work plan to get there. I do try to create balance and a lot of it is just what I think is fair and that is totally subjective.” Jeff adds,

“There is always a learning curve and a lot of it is trying to figure out what is expected, trying to fit what I am doing into the big picture.”

Constructing Knowledge

Employing practical knowledge gained through experience in practice, transferring conceptual knowledge from other work experiences, and relying on relationships are three important ways that knowledge is constructed in this new logic system. Grace and the rest of the participants all agree that that without practical knowledge learned on the job, there would be little understanding of their problems in practice. Several referred to practical knowledge as what is “real” or the “reality of what is out there.” Grace values her “practical knowledge most. The 120 on-the-job learning has been critical. We all joke about a two or three year learning curve because [deregulated work] is very complicated.” Pamela is also very firm in her belief about practical knowledge.

College gives you the foundation that you need but there is no

substitute for on-the-job learning, absolutely no substitute for that. I

would say that at least 70% of what you know on the job could never

be taught in college. You just have to get on the job and you learn.

Just do it. Some professions may be the other way around, but in the

type of work that we do, it’s 70% learned on the job. I got the basic

background in college and I learned the rest at work.

Jeff says that in his working career, “I have learned practical instincts, learned practical knowledge that you only gain through experience…I guess I just feel my way through, go with what I know…”

Mike, Edward, Russell and Patsy stated that being able to transfer conceptual knowledge from another job is important. Patsy said, “I had to learn everything but I transferred my knowledge because power flows through wires and gas flows through pipes. What I saw was that I could transfer the skills and I understood the concept of getting energy from one point to another.” Edward echoed this idea in talking about his work with power generation in prior private sector work and

Russell also described this in his ability to transfer conceptual knowledge about trucking and rail in the private sector to telecommunications in the public sector.

Constructing knowledge is not a solitary process among these professionals.

Relying on relationships to construct knowledge is discussed often in the interviews and the relationships mentioned tend to cluster around members of their peer 121 groups and managers, work teams, professional affiliations, informal affiliations, and, the most valued of all, their own go-to list of experts that they have compiled over the course of their careers. Mike described the importance of collecting and compiling “the number of contacts that you get.” Because the PURC is a small staff, “if I needed information from someone, I was responsible for getting it, whether it was the president of ABC Gas Company, or the president of a marketing affiliate, or the secretary.” Mike was responsible “for developing a trusting working relationship with all these people” because “our business involved the exchange of information, the gathering of information, so I appreciated the contact list that I managed to create.”

Pamela networks extensively at national meetings of energy professionals with “anyone who wants to talk” about the issues and has joined a committee of other interested professionals who have regular teleconferences to share information. Pamela’s official role is to “give the PURC the information to fight the battle at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. I have to stay on top of the issues. Maintaining relationships with all interested parties is my priority.”

Christine has a different twist on developing her go-to list:

Now that the Internet is available, I do searches and I find names and

phone numbers of people that might be able to help me. I sent an e-

mail to a guy at the FCC today because I found his name on a

document that he had written. And he has agreed to help me with a

problem. When you go to meetings, you talk to people, you find out

their background and I make contact list, and I call them. I find that

most people are willing to share and help. 122

When Russell needed help, his first stop was in-house. “I went to others who knew about certain things…fellow employees. We all seemed to hold each other up in different areas where we needed lifting up.” They would “come in and fill the gaps. Knowing who knew what was helpful because you knew who to go to for answers.” As Russell points out, “if you had to depend on what you know, you would not get very far because everything changes all the time—the regulatory technology—and you can’t know everything about everything.” Russell sums it up for many participants in this study by saying, “What is most important is knowing where to go—your resources—to gather information you need to accomplish your goals.”

Coping with Ambiguity

For every professional working in these gray and ill-defined situations, ambiguity is a problem that demands the development of coping skills. Jeff says that in his work, “there is an uncomfortable point. There is a point where I can almost get panicky when I don’t know how to get there.”

The hard part is trying to figure out how to get there. It is very

frustrating trying to figure out the expectation, maybe even having to

go back and scrap what you have done. In fact, you don’t have total

freedom because you have to tailor it all the time. I don’t want to go

too far down the line and find out that I am on the wrong road.

Jeff describes “zooming in, zooming out” as an important strategy he uses to manage the ambiguous and uncomfortable points in his practice. When he is assigned a team project, he first “strikes off on a course…on my own. The 123 objective is not always clear so there is tailoring involved. And my ideas don’t always fit.”

Here’s a rule of thumb that I have become more aware of recently.

The quicker I can build more flexibility into my approach, to zoom in,

zoom out more often, seeing how what I am doing is fitting with the

group, I find I am more at one with the group. I forge ahead on doing

my nuts and bolts thing, building lines of reasoning and support for a

feeling or opinion I have about the issues while trying to mesh with the

group.

Probed to reveal more about this technique and where he learned it, Jeff says, “This is from the practical world and I learned it in the workforce.” What he describes is zooming in to “stay within myself” and zooming out “to be a group member and listening;” zooming in “to my own approach,” and zooming out “to look at the big picture;” zooming in “to my own focus and my impetus about where I am going,” zooming “back to the forest, trying to see it the way everyone is seeing it.” All the while, “I am trying to communicate to the others what I am doing.”

Grace handles ambiguity by anticipating “what anyone could ask me…Just be prepared. I am always aware of the potential conflict that can come out of a project.” For Tom, the ambiguity of the law is frustrating at times. “There are orders I would have liked to be more specific and told somebody exactly what to do in a given circumstance but because of the way it had to be produced, I couldn’t.”

Legal orders are “very detailed and very precise but there is a certain amount of ambiguity to them and the law is ambiguous sometimes. Orders are a product of the law so you can’t get away from it [ambiguity].” Tom continues, “We try to be 124 real-world and pragmatic in what we order, but because it has to be ordered in a legal format, some of that preciseness is going to fall by the wayside.” Over time you learn “to do the best you can, put out the best work product you can, and hope for the best.”

Even in the regulated world of electric energy, the push for changes on the national level to create a national electric grid has introduced a level of threat and ambiguity into the practice of Pamela. If standard market design is adopted, “our consumers may be subsidizing Florida consumers and Florida consumers may be subsidizing Maryland, and so on. The stockholders of these companies might be at risk and I am not even sure they know it.” Pamela’s job is to represent the commissioners’ official position as the state liaison with the Federal regulatory agencies and develop arguments and evidence to support that official position. She explains her dilemma this way:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s position is that the good

of the many outweigh the good of the investors. But how do we know

it would be for the good of the many? That’s their position, but that

leads to an even bigger debate. What cost benefit study are you

looking at? Our cost benefit study says this, your cost benefit study

says that, and who knows? Nobody knows. So why the big dramatic

changes to remedy a problem that has not even been proven to exist?

This problem will not have a nice, neat final solution. But the issue will

continue for years to come. 125

Finding a Solution

Ample time and information saturation are luxuries that public sector professionals do not have when working with problems and issues in deregulated utilities. Pamela says, “you have to make a decision on the information you have, recognizing that you may not have all the information or the best information.”

Pamela continues, “You can never reach closure on having all the right information at a point in time.” Russell sees it this way. The new systems and technologies are so dynamic, with “so many new players, problems, and issues” that “I have to gather as much information as possible, determine what the boundaries are, and discern which information is the most useful to me.” Time ran out for Jeff, making his work irrelevant, as he pointed out in a case that was very frustrating to him.

“One particular issue we were addressing was no longer an issue by the time we got to the hearing.”

Sometimes the commissioners have more relevant information than the staff.

Russell points out that in one particular problem concerning area code relief [an area code was about to exhaust all of its numbers],

they [the commissioners] had better information than I had. I

recommended a new area code and they told me to go back and do

some conservation measures. They were right and it worked. We

could have provided some relief but the PURC commissioners wanted

to go with conservation measures and it worked.

Mike’s experience did not prove to be so positive:

We always worked very hard on what we considered to be an air-tight

case, a case where we felt like not only were we fair to the rate payer 126

but we were also being fair to the utility. It is a shock, a blow to your

confidence, when the commissioners decide to use some other

information.

Tom adds, “You don’t lose your position as much as certain circumstances may change the way the pieces are addressed. The answers can change over time.”

Tom is a pragmatist and perhaps his long experience has taught him this:

Sometimes you get challenged on things that you don’t think you

should be. You have to learn what the rules are, you have to learn

who the players are, you have to learn what you can worry about and

what you should worry about. You have to put your best foot forward

and when you are through with it, you have to live with the results.

Working against time and with changing, incomplete information, these professionals must craft solutions to the problems and issues in practice. One way to reach a solution is to negotiate a settlement among the interested parties.

Pamela and Grace mentioned that being trained in negotiation was a tremendous asset and Grace included being able to accept less than perfect solutions as an essential quality for these jobs, saying, “In this job there is a lot of negotiating with parties on things. Nobody wins or loses on every issue.”

Grace points out that there are many negotiated settlements in this job.

“The PURC has to create that balance as well as it can between the customers and the utility companies.” According to Pamela, PURC hearing decisions can be appealed to a higher court so a settlement, a negotiated solution, might be reached without a hearing. 127

Sometimes a settlement is good and sometimes it is bad. Sometimes

I think if there was no settlement, ratepayers would get a better deal,

but that is what a settlement is, give and take by both parties. For the

sake of ironing out something that avoids an appeal and everyone can

live with it, you take it and go with it.

Christine made the settlement process work to her advantage in a hotly contested hearing. “We went to settlement before the hearing concluded. This was our strategy.” She explains how she made a settlement work in the best interests of the consumer, with a small advantage for the company.

Settlement is not always a bad thing. If we had assessed a fine at the

conclusion of a hearing, that money would have gone to the state

treasury. No consumer benefits from it. We might get a new road or

a new golf course somewhere. In a settlement, we have control over

the penalty, where that money goes, and we directed the company to

pay their penalty into LIHEAP [a fund established to help low-income

customers during the winter heat season]. Granted, they got a tax

break write-off for that but a lot of poor people got help paying their

high heating bills in the winter.

Jeff works as a consultant to the various teams and works in all three areas of the utility industries under the purview of the PURC. “I offer analytical thinking, looking at accounting and financial issues using the spreadsheet environment, connecting numbers so we can look at alternative views and scenarios of various issues.” According to Jeff, “there is always a practical solution among many. All of it is compromise.” Kevin says that some “advocate for the ideal solution but we 128 have to settle for what is possible with our resources and what the law says we can do and what will benefit the most people.” Grace confirms that “we don’t often get our ideal solution in this kind of work. We may have ten or twelve recommendations on issues that need attention….We will have to negotiate each one of these recommendations with the company and with the commissioners.”

Edward likens solutions to “someone’s cave allegory…I think it was Plato. There are ideal solutions but inside the practical cave we only see the shadows of the real, and you have to deal with those.”

Looking Back

Reflection is a regular habit in this public sector workplace, both individually and as a group effort when a team debriefs a completed project. The exhilaration of success is palpable in their voice when they talk about what they have learned about themselves and their work. Grace says simply, “I have surprised myself at what I have been able to learn,” and that statement captures the feelings of many of the participants in this study. Jeff says, “I can learn anything!”

Christine reflects on how learning to deal with deregulation has impacted her personally, how she and her team are actively involved in problem-finding, and what she envisions for the future:

I have been in so many situations that were ambiguous where I had to

create or learn to do something that I had never done before. Now I

know I can learn anything so I am not afraid of new things or new

circumstances or new situations because I feel like I can learn my way

through it, I will get through it. Part of the reason I am comfortable in

my decision-making is because I just feel more confident. 129

The experience of learning to deal with deregulation has dramatically changed the work processes in Christine’s unit. Instead of waiting for problems to appear, “we are now looking for complaint trends. Where we see patterns emerging…we are taking proactive action by notifying the commissioners. If we find a loophole in our rules, we request a change before the problem becomes systemic or endemic.” Christine points out that the advent of deregulation of natural gas has used up all their resources “just trying to manage all of these changes.” She envisions the day when her unit, “in its infancy stage right now in terms of understanding the role of enforcement,” completely matures into this role and “becomes completely proactive” in its consumer protection work.

Jeff says, “I think about what I have gleaned from a project, and in hindsight

I feel like I have accomplished something. When it is over I feel pretty good. I put it behind me and move on to the next project.” According to Jeff, “Looking back is part of the learning process, to work more and better, more efficiently with people.”

Looking back does not always generate positive feelings. About deregulation of natural gas energy, Edward says, “Frankly, I am fearful of it. I know it can work and perhaps has worked in other places but I keep searching for evidence of success and I can find none.” Grace is more direct, saying, “There is no doubt that deregulation [of the gas supply] does not save people money.” Pamela says she wants “to believe, I want to hope that the legislators honestly believed that deregulation would benefit consumers, every type of consumer in this state equally.

In theory it sounded great, but in practice it hasn’t worked out that way.” After working in the deregulated world of natural gas energy for eight years and feeling 130 crushed by the workload and lack of closure, Mike “went to the other side,” accepting a position in the private sector.

Deregulation changed the practice of public sector professionals. In the regulated world of practice, where they have worked for many years, they are rule makers, enforcers, consumer advocates, and problem solvers with great legal and judicial authority. In the deregulated world of practice, they are required to perform as negotiators, referees, and mediators. They must balance the interests of many diverse parties, reach consensus, and negotiate settlements and solutions. “I would say I enjoyed working on the deregulated issues initially because they were so totally new for a typical natural gas staff after 1996,” Mike explained. “It quickly became less enjoyable” because “becoming a deregulated state created literally hundreds and hundreds of issues and it was hard to keep up with everything that was required of us. We were often called upon to fix issues that did not necessarily require our intervention.” Mike also felt there were some positive aspects to deregulation. “Working for a regulatory agency with such a small staff, we were expected to become a jack of all trades in many areas. Just the sheer number of issues that were raised as a result of [deregulation] became learning experiences.”

Informal Learning and Postformal Thought

Participants were asked in advance of the interview to think about a recent or current problem or issue in their practice that stood out as a particularly significant event and relate how they went about learning what they needed to know.

Participants had long and complex stories to tell, but there were common threads to be found in their learning activities. Participants were immersed in their project and learning activities. Several stories are worth revealing in some detail in the 131 following vignettes to preserve the learning process they went through. Three themes of informal learning emerged from the data: Being Self-Directed, Learning

From Others and With Others, and Building a Model.

Being Self-Directed

In this section the self-directed learning experiences of Grace, Patsy, and

Edward typify what many participants described in the data. By her own account in her participant profile, Grace has always been self-directed, even as a child. “When

I first started in the gas section, no one did rate design.” When deregulation came along, “I saw this body of knowledge that needed to be developed and I staked it out for my specialty. I learned on my own how it was, how it is, and how they wanted to change things.”

Grace’s assignment of a new project tracks with the self-directed learning experiences of other professionals in this study. She is heading up an audit charged with “making sure there are adequate assets to keep customers in gas.”

Accounting and auditing in the general sense was very familiar to Grace, both in theory and in practice, but in the new deregulated world of natural gas she was faced with learning about financial derivatives, hedge funds, and futures. “There are traders in Houston that make transactions or trades to buy or sell capacity at a certain time. It’s very complicated and you have to understand unusual transactions.”

First, she located and read books about financial derivatives, “why people place hedges, what futures are, and different aspects of the financial markets.”

She did “lots of reading and research using databases and articles accessed through the internet.” She spoke with company officials and their in-house experts, made 132 conference calls, and sent data requests. “We have outside consultants providing information and one of them is working on this issue in New Jersey. He is providing good information.”

Asked what experience was most valuable in her personal learning about financial derivatives, Grace reiterated that it was “all important but going over it with the traders that actually do it was the most helpful.” This sentiment is reinforced by Kevin who said that searching out subject matter and technical experts “produces what we could not learn from reading. We learn the reality of what is out there, what is possible.” Grace concludes with, “I am still working on that project and I am still learning something new every day. My next project is a proposal from another company that is similar to the audit I am just finishing. So my learning curve will not be as great.” Grace says she already has “ideas about where and how I will develop information to look at asset management agreements. But I expect there will be different twists on the same issue because it is a different company.”

Patsy had worked in the electric energy field prior to being employed in the natural gas section. She arrived just as the deregulation of natural gas was beginning.

I stepped in on the ground floor. It helped me learn and that learning

helped me get where I am today [Director of the Natural Gas Section].

When I learned gas, I did not want to just read about it. I wanted to

feel, touch, and see the customers. I talked to supply experts, I read

FERC filings, I toured facilities, I talked to customers, and I talked to

the companies. 133

Patsy began her interview with a triggering event so common in many working professionals’ lives.

Commissioner Smith called me to his office one Thursday or Friday

morning and wanted me to tell him everything I knew about capacity

release. I looked him straight in the eye and asked when do you need

this information? And he said by Monday. I did not tell him I knew

nothing about capacity release.

This request sent Patsy on a “crash course” to learn everything she could by

Monday. She immediately went to printed materials from the Federal government and “I did a lot of reading.” Patsy contacted subject matter experts and technical experts and “I did a lot of listening and asking questions.” She spent time on the internet with Lexis-Nexus reading articles, saying, “I believe in thorough research.

Research is my M.O. and getting as much information as possible. I do my homework. I empower myself with knowledge so when I speak I know my topic.”

When Monday came, the meeting with Commissioner Smith never materialized but

Patsy is confident about her ability to speak with authority about capacity release when the next question comes along.

In another instance, Patsy got word that the state legislature was going to modify the universal service fund, a fund established for low-income consumer relief due to natural gas deregulation. A city wanted to use the fund for economic development. “We had to do our homework before we stated our position. The universal service fund is supposed to help low-income customers afford heat in the winter. To use it to install pipe would deplete the fund for many years.” Using the internet, Patsy looked at tax laws, economic development laws, and economic 134 development aid available through the governor’s office. She found an old docket in the PURC on economic development and familiarized herself with the official stance of the commission in years past. “As it turned out, the legislature adjourned without taking up this bill. But we expect it to come back up next year, so we will keep developing information on this topic.”

In a totally unexpected example of self-directed learning, Edward surprised the interviewer by confiding that since he had been asked to participate in this study, he had been doing a little research about adult learning. “One of the deans at my institute of higher learning said that when you leave here you will not know everything, but you will know how to dig. And I find that I still know how to dig.”

Edward explains,

I've learned about a topic called contextual teaching and learning. I

find this subject very fascinating. For example, in any book, an author

shares with us his entire life experience through his slant on the book.

That is contextual learning!

In summary, findings confirm the importance of being a self-directed learner.

As Jeff has already mentioned, these professionals cannot be followers because many times, there is no one to follow.

Learning From Others and With Others

When faced with a new problem that required learning, invariably these professionals sought out content and technical experts, asking questions and listening to harvest as much information as possible, “gleaning,” as Jeff calls it.

This social, yet one-way learning experience, where the learner is the receiver and 135 the expert is the transmitter of knowledge, is exemplified in Kevin’s approach to a new assignment.

“Twenty years of experience,” according to Kevin, has shown him that “it is best to gather as much information as you can from people that know.” Kevin said,

“I had to become a sponge” when faced with a new assignment created by a new law. He would be analyzing applications from natural gas marketers for reimbursement of bad debts from a newly created, PURC-administered, multi- million dollar fund. The rules called for a demonstration by the marketer that it had

“exercised due diligence in trying to collect this money. Basically, I did not know anything about this, and I had to find out as much as I could.”

I talked to people. People who knew banking. People who knew

collections. People involved in rule-making. I talked to a lot of

attorneys. I talked to people in other state agencies who handled

collections. I talked to collections people in other utility companies.

When Kevin felt that he was at a saturation point, he crafted a definition to fit the intent of his new assignment.

Pamela describes a very similar experience in learning from others, “like a sponge I just kind of soaked it in.” She says, “In the type of work that I do now, I also work on federal cases that have an impact, not just on this state, but impacts the whole nation.” Recent serious failures of regional electric grids caused the

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to propose “standardization of how transmission lines are designed, how transmission is added, and how generation is added.” To find out all that she could about standard market design, Pamela

“started listening in on teleconferences,” signing up for web conferences, attending 136 agency-sponsored training by outside consultants, attending the national association of PURC commissioner meetings, and “networking with people who wanted to talk about it. There is even a group now called Women in Energy.” At the national association meeting of state PURC commissioners, Pamela joined a sub-committee. Pamela’s group membership moved her from learning from others to learning with others, a two-way learning experience where knowledge is transmitted to and by every participant.

My sub-committee has bi-weekly teleconferences. We talk about what

the new issues and hot topics are and share information. We do have

differences of opinion but we do get together to talk about what those

opinions are, what our positions on the issues are, and that’s an

important learning experience.

Inside the workplace, learning is shared among the team members of various projects. Russell points out, “You can’t solve these problems working on your own.

If you had to depend on what you know you would not get very far.” Mike,

Christine, Jeff and Russell point out that teams develop the best information.

“Various members of the team bring pieces of expertise to the table. It’s the quickest way to develop a strategy to accomplish your goals,” explains Russell.

Especially, adds Mike, when there were “only eight of us, and at one time we had about 70 open dockets, and of that 70 dockets you may be project leader of 10 to

14 dockets, but as a team member, you may have been a team member on 35 dockets.” Team membership creates constant learning and knowledge sharing among professionals in groups and with other groups as they circulate through their project assignments. 137

Team work is not without its stresses. Jeff points outs that “when you work with a lot of different people, don’t get me wrong because it is all for the good, it can be frustrating. It is all compromise and it can be frustrating.” He says, “I think the best thing is just always keep the group workers up to date on what you are thinking and show them your stuff, what you are doing and your qualifiers.” Jeff likes working with team members who are “inventive and able to figure things out along the way…someone who can think on their feet and be flexible with what is given to them…and come up with something original. Originality is key.” Jeff also agrees with Russell, saying, “we all have our niche here and everybody offers up something different.”

In summary, learning from others is a necessary step in transitioning to learning with others, where collective individual knowledge leads to social co- construction of knowledge, a thing greater than the sum of its parts. In the next section of findings, a favored method of learning, building a model, is discussed.

Building a Model

Many participants described a process of understanding and testing their learning, a process they call building a model. Sometimes model building is a self- directed, solitary experience. Sometimes model building is a team learning activity.

Two months into his new job as a member of the electric energy section,

Edward found himself in charge of keeping up with the energy and power generation for each of the 144 generating units owned by the largest electric power company in the state. “First, I had to understand the subject matter…generation performance. I did not know the measures used to measure said performance.”

Edward absorbed as much information as he could by finding and talking to subject 138 matter experts and technical experts and others. Then he had to figure out “how to take and maintain generation performance statistics.” A co-op student turned

Edward on to Google. That led him to the North American Electric Reliability

Council web site where he was exposed to the complexities of generation performance statistics. “Using other web resources, I was able to study statistics on my own to be able to understand what I was learning about generation performance statistics.”

With those tools I was able to develop a database model and, to this

day, I take pride in keeping track of generation performance for all of

XYZ Power Company. Each month I discover new ways to improve the

process. I’m still learning, still evolving, still learning every day.

As Edward has described, building a database model to display generation performance was the foundation for understanding his new assignment and later for communicating that data in a meaningful way to the agency leadership. Edward’s model has become the gold standard for tracking generation performance.

For Russell, Kevin and Christine, building a working model was the best way to understand a new legislative mandate. “Experience has shown” Russell that when faced with a new law, “it is always best to build a working model” before trying to implement. During the course of this study, Kevin and Tom have each described building a working model when faced with new legislation. That is precisely the approach Christine and her team took when faced with implementing rules for the Natural Gas Consumers Relief Act. “First, I read it, and read it, and read it again. Highlight it and put notes in the margin. Then we [her team] compared notes and dialogued about our different perspectives on what we thought 139 the bill meant from a layman’s perspective.” Later in the project, attorneys were added to the team. Not even the attorneys had any expertise or previous experience “because it was new language to them.” They sought explanation and clarification. They identified explicit requirements and then turned to other areas.

On another path through the law, we looked for subtle references to

rules or things that we could define. We assigned meanings to the

language according to what we thought it meant…we redefined terms

and looked for loopholes and silences in the law. Where it was silent

on things, we filled in the gap! And we had to constantly remind the

commissioners and the companies that this law was designed to

protect consumers. We felt that was our mandate and focus. By the

time we brought the rules before the commissioners for consideration,

we were presenting our interpretation of the law.”

To prepare for questions and challenges, they “walked through it with as critical an eye as we could get from different perspectives. Of course, we all come with our own biases, but we tried to walk through it” from the company’s perspective, the commissioners’ perspectives, from the consumer’s perspective, and from the front line employees’ perspective (who would be actually talking to the consumers). “We deliberately looked at the process from different angles. Our

‘what if’ scenario thinking is reflected in our process flow and the decision points we put in there.” Before every meeting where these rules would be presented, informal role-plays were used to anticipate questions and develop answers. “We modified our presentations to try to pre-empt the problems or questions we anticipated…we were devil’s advocates…we tried to pre-empt as much as we could.” 140

The first case that Christine brought before the commissioners did not turn out as well as she had hoped. “We learned! What’s that old saying, once burned, twice learned. We figured out we had to test the waters.” By the third case, the model was working and working well. Eventually many hundreds of customers who had been victims of poor or malicious business practices got the relief the law envisioned. “This was learning…the company had to pay $400,000 and that was just the penalty. After years of trouble with XYZ Gas Energy Company, the bad press from this case may have finally driven them out of the state as a marketer.”

In summary, being self-directed, learning from and with others, and model building are important attributes and activities in this public sector workplace. All the participants demonstrated the importance of being self-directed. They described listening and questioning and gathering data from others. They described learning with others and the others might be fellow team members or official groups formed outside the agency or informal groups at conferences.

Several talked about the importance of building working models. Being self- directed in their learning activities, learning from others and learning in groups with others, and modeling building are the over-arching themes of how these public sector professionals learned to deal with new problems in their practice.

Contextual Factors that Shape Learning

This study centered around how deregulation changed professional practice in the public sector workplace and how these professionals think about the new, ill- structured and complex problems created by deregulation. Data emerged pointing to three contextual factors woven throughout their experience. Working in Two

Worlds, regulated and deregulated, played an integral role in their learning. 141

Additional factors were Organizational Culture and Access to Resources. The next section describes the public sector workplace and how deregulation has changed the context of the workplace.

Working in Two Worlds

Deregulation has changed the mission of the agency and consequently caused a major shift in roles and work for the public sector professionals at the

PURC. Mike describes the change in his job this way, saying,

We went from being a regulator to an arbiter many times. In fact,

there were times when the staff sat in meetings and directed both

individuals to work it out. We were the mediators. Often times we

would sit in all-day meetings with the parties trying to come up with

resolutions to certain issues that did not require the PURC; they just

wanted the PURC to bless it. They wanted to say to the PURC

commissioners that the staff has worked on it and they agree with it.

Arbitration, yes, we had to do that as well.

Some utilities are still regulated, or partly regulated, and some are deregulated. One major natural gas company chose to stay regulated while another chose to deregulate parts of the business. Professionals now must shift their roles back and forth as the work demands, from adversary to mediator, from enforcer to negotiator, from consumer protector to consensus builder. Below is an overview of the regulation of public utilities and how deregulation changed the mission of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), where these participants practice. 142

The government regulation of public utilities in the 1930s mandated the creation of public monopolies in order to provide universal, safe, reliable, and reasonably priced services. The companies were allowed to earn a fair return on their investment. When companies earned excess profits, i.e., earnings above the approved fair rate of return, those excess profits were returned to the consumer.

This method of regulation is often called adversarial, meaning that hearings are held in a judicial setting where they are overseen in this state by five state-wide elected officials (PURC commissioners) who serve as judges, and make decisions about rates based on evidence entered into the official record by attorneys and expert staff, representing the people, and attorneys for the company, representing the stockholders. From the time a company files for a rate increase until the conclusion of a hearing, years may pass. These proceedings culminate in a legal order of findings issued by the PURC commissioners or in a negotiated settlement that becomes a legal order of agreements. Careers are built on years of experience and knowledge of the vast history of case law, orders, findings, and rule-making set in the context of logical, fixed, known variables.

Deregulation has changed the mission of this agency to include another world of work. Certain segments of the markets in telecommunications and natural gas energy are no longer subject to the regulatory control of the PURC or even contained in one company. Many companies offer communication services, where competition has driven rates down and driven technological advancements up.

Telecommunication services are offered on the cafeteria plan now where consumers can custom design services and providers to meet their particular needs. In the natural gas markets, things are even stranger with many marketers offering natural 143 gas energy to consumers. The rates are set by the marketplace and the profit margin that each company builds in its business plan. Even Electric Membership

Corporations (EMCs) are selling natural gas energy to their customers. Power companies are working on a plan to offer DSL through their power lines. The lines of public utilities are blurred and services are blended. This is the present and the future in public utilities deregulation.

The deregulation of two previously regulated utilities, market segments of telecommunications and natural gas energy, substantially changed the practice of these public sector professionals, resulting in a significant shift in roles, from regulator to mediator, from adversary to consensus builder. Regulation has shifted from rates and services to business practices, but unless the offenses are egregious, PURC professionals can do little beyond serving as advisors, negotiators, mediators, and consensus-builders among the many interested parties. The laws require oversight by the PURC, but do little to proscribe how that oversight is carried out. These ill-defined mandates have turned a once black and white world into shades of gray where time is the enemy, information is incomplete and constantly changing, and the work is ambiguous. There is no deep history or experience to guide the public sector professional. Solutions must be practical, tailored to fit time constraints, the context and the players, and designed to produce the best solution out of many possible choices.

Public sector professionals in this agency now shift their work between these two worlds. Jeff says, “We gravitate between adversarial type of approaches to more advisory, trying to balance the interests of the rate payer and the utility.”

“We have our feet in both worlds,” says Tom, meaning that with the large, investor- 144 owned electric companies, “It’s still business as usual. They are not deregulated.

They are totally regulated by the PURC. We still have rate cases and we still present witnesses. There is an active adversarial procedure involved in setting their rates.” The PURC issues “orders describing the range of earnings they can enjoy, and at certain levels they have to share any earnings above those with their customers.” However, “there are ranges of compliance, so it is real hard to say that everything is black and white. There’s some gray matter in there.” He goes on to say that even in the regulated world the work is subjective, but “there are certain things that are objective, so you have to do both kinds of thinking along the way.”

Tom describes how a general rate case is handled with a regulated utility:

We ask: What are the right revenues for this company to earn a

particular return? We know that we can compute that mathematically,

even though some of the components might be subject to dispute.

Everybody won’t agree on the inputs. It always lends itself to

argument, but there are certain fixed things, certain rules, and values

that are involved.

In legal proceedings, the PURC commissioners hear testimony of interested parties and experts called as witnesses by the PURC staff or company attorneys.

Following a period of deliberation, Tom continues, the PURC commissioners issue “a legal order, a solution to a problem that considers all the interveners and mitigating factors. It must reflect the facts of the case.”

For Christine and her team, responding to consumer complaints requires constant shifting from enforcing comprehensive rules to interpreting the gaps in the 145 law. When someone has a question about gas service, “the gas rules are now comprehensive. You can read the gas rules and you do not have to look at the law.” When someone has a question about phone service, the approach is completely different. “The law is what the law says, and we will only promulgate rules if there's a gap or what the law does not specify. We have to manage both of those worlds.”

Mike works in two worlds, too. “When deregulation came about, of the two natural gas companies that the commission regulated, only one filed to elect to become deregulated, and that was ABC Gas Light Company.” He explains that

“XYZ Gas Company opted not to become deregulated so they were still the traditional, regulated gas company. So I had my foot in two worlds basically.”

One of the main projects I worked on with them was the pipeline

replacement program. So I had the same project going in a

deregulated company and a regulated company at the same time.

Each required a different way of planning and carrying out the work.

“Murky” legislative mandates have thrown Kevin into “the brave new world of advertising.” The law mandates that telephonic services and free equipment for the deaf be promoted through advertising. His office is covered with posters of ad campaigns and pitches. “Did you ever think we would be doing something like this?

We know how we want to do it, but the legislature says we have to get consensus with all these groups and group members.” The law says there will be a committee of all interested parties to agree on recommendations, but “we are responsible for the funds and if anything goes wrong, we are held responsible; yet we have these other concerns and interested parties involved.” Kevin points out that the law says 146

“our job is to steer it in the direction we think it should go but at the same time get a consensus.” He says, “Don’t you think it is ironic that guys like us are attending meetings and having to be super sweet to people, sugar-coated to the max, almost maudlin?” Kevin was always “tough on the regulated companies,” and now he is

“working with the advertising world and the multiple player world,” saying, “we think this is a good way to do it. What do you guys think?”

Deregulation and competition have changed the concept of market-driven utility services in other ways that were not anticipated, consequently changing not only the practice of public sector professionals but the players and services as well.

Russell describes the theory of deregulation and competition this way: “Competition drives rates down to a level that will benefit customers and drives up the proficiency of the company because competing for customers’ business spurs growth in technologies.” Perhaps an unforeseen consequence of these new technologies can be found in Pamela’s description of the new and sometimes strange world of utilities:

Telecom has been deregulated the longest period of time, or re-

regulated as the head telecom engineer likes to call it. We spent years

unbundling services and now the companies are selling bundles, re-

packaging of services. I was listening to a local consumer reporter on

the radio today and he was talking about power companies being able

to sell DSL high speed internet service by plugging into your electrical

socket. EMCs are selling gas now. You are going to see blending of

the industries and more re-bundling. 147

Pamela says that, given the problems with natural gas deregulation, electric power deregulation may be years away in this state, so the staff of the PURC will have their feet in both worlds, and perhaps blended worlds, for the foreseeable future. The next section discusses factors in the organizational culture of the PURC that shaped learning for these professionals in practice.

Organizational Culture

The organizational culture of the PURC emerged as an important contextual factor during the course of the interviews. The data clustered around three themes: autonomy, working in teams, and supportive management.

Autonomy. No participant in this study mentioned asking or receiving permission or instructions on how to conduct the daily learning or working activities of their practice. It operates as Jeff described in his participant profile. It’s “a transparent structure…, a place where [you] can ponder things more, analyze things.” Edward described it as “an even blend, about a 50-50 blend, of what I would call a very judicial-like culture [PURC commissioners sit as judges at legal hearings and render decisions] and a very lassiez-faire atmosphere. And I mean that in a good way.” In the project-based work that is prevalent throughout the

PURC, what counts is participation and results. In daily activities, Edward says, “I find my own path, deciding what needs to be done, and I enjoy that very much.

This kind of direction could be unnerving to a person not used to this kind of supervision.”

Finding his own path is very important to Jeff, who says, “The freedom to carry out my work is very important but it comes at a cost, because it adds an element of further responsibility in trying to figure out the issues myself. It would 148 be easier if someone said, just do a, b, c and d and give it to me. It would be easier if we had one process figured out and repeat it all the time. But I would not really be happy with that. No, I like this, I like this a lot.”

Working in teams. Because of the small size of the agency and the monumental workload, in part brought on by deregulation, PURC uses a team- based, project-driven style of working. Teams are formed and dissolved depending on the topic and the skill sets needed to bring a case or project to a conclusion. As one participant pointed out, in this environment “you are a member of many teams at any given time and also the team leader of other teams,” all happening concurrently. Working in project-based teams is not an optional activity for the staff at the PURC, but any initial resistance is soon dissipated when considering the scope of the work to be done.

Supportive management. A supportive management style, at the career level where these professionals work, and at the elected level where the commissioners work, was described by many participants in this study as being instrumental in their professional development and in their everyday working conditions.

At the career level of management, “I have been very fortunate to associate with and work for good people who willingly shared information and helped me,”

Russell said when asked about his work environment. Managers who were helpful and sharing early on in the development of these public sector professionals made a strong impact. Pamela described it this way:

When I first came to work for the PURC there were no black women

engineers; there were no women engineers, period. I happened to be 149

black. I worked for John and he was really helpful, really helpful in

helping me pick up knowledge and experience. All the knowledge that

he had, he shared with me. That helped a lot, being in the right place

at the right time, working for the right person at the right time.

Several of the participants were hired by and worked for a former director, now retired. He once described his role as a manager as being like a gardener. He provided the soil, the nutrients, and the water. His people grew on their own.

Every participant who worked for this director recalled him fondly. Kevin described him and their relationship this way:

I never called him a mentor per se, but our former director who hired

me all those years ago was a very intelligent man. He had a degree in

management from State Tech, a law degree, and an MBA. We had a

very good working relationship and I could go in his office at any time

and talk about any problem or get any kind of advice. That was very,

very beneficial to my professional development.

The gardener has been replaced by “a bright young person,” according to

Edward, “a BYP, in our list of acronyms. He has a good lawyer’s mind. He is not impetuous; he does not act in haste. He thinks things through. He is not an

Olympic conclusion jumper, which is good in my book.” This “BYP” is a working professional as well as the head of the Utilities Division. Like every other professional in the PURC, sometimes he leads particular project teams; many times he is a member of other project teams, lending his legal expertise to the issues at hand. As a member of Christine’s team on implementing the natural gas consumer relief act, “he brought quite a diverse perspective because he had oversight of 150 several functions. He was very familiar with” [other models and processes], and

“he absolutely brought prior learning to the table…a breadth of learning to the table because he had himself worked on everything from rate cases to court cases. He was an integral part of the team.”

Concerning the elected level of management, study participants offered their perspective on working in an organization where the leadership is made up of five statewide elected, Constitutional officers. ”We’ve got five commissioners. Each of the five was elected by statewide popular vote. Now they don’t think as one. They have different ideas individually.” Consensus building skills start at the top of this organization. “If it is three for, it’s a go. If it is three against, it’s not. We make recommendations; they make the decisions, up or down. I affectionately call one commissioner Sandra Day. We have a Supreme Court and he is always the swing vote.” The working style of the PURC commissioners, being engaged in everyday activities of the agency and the issues, plus setting a more business-like, professional, judicial atmosphere, is well-received by the staff.

”Many came to into public service in the old days,” when the PURC was pretty much a political body of “old-line Democrats.” The one-time legislators were sometimes accused of looking for a place to finish their state career and qualify for a pension. “That might not be fair, but they were certainly political animals first.”

The PURC went through a period where politics played a huge role in decision- making. “There was a heavy political environment; a lot of politics was definitely involved in decisions.”

I am finding that the commissioners we have now are more active in

the everyday activities. They are more interested in the facts. They 151

come in the office and work on projects more often, and they ask

many more questions. In some ways they are tougher than what we

experienced in the past, but, for the most part, it has been in a good

way.

Opinions on the change in commissioners’ leadership style varies from

“generally speaking,” they do the right thing most of the time to “we have some real working commissioners at the PURC now, striving to do the job that they are elected to do,” and “our commissioners are actually working commissioners and they are a driving force in seeing that the staff moves forward.” The long-time employees do agree that the change in emphasis “has been good for the staff.”

Politics is still a relevant consideration. “We are in a political environment, and we are not going to get out of that,” but the commissioners “for the most part like to study the facts and base their decisions a little more on the evidence. They are interested in hearing what you have to say.” Having supportive management is important on both the career level and the elected level of this organization. The next section reports the findings on the third contextual factor that shaped learning in this organization, access to resources.

Access to Resources

The PURC is a resource-rich environment that meets many different learning needs in the organization. Continuing professional education is more than just encouraged. The agency pays the cost associated with the annual in-service learning required by the professions of the participants. For example, staff attorneys maintain their licenses to practice by completing their in-service training and the agency pays the fees and keeps them on the payroll while they are away 152 from the office. Financial analysts sit for the CPA exam with the support of the agency and professional staff members can flex their work time to attend a nationally recognized business college, part of a large state university just blocks from the office. Two professionals in this study have earned MBAs while working at the agency or on leave from the agency.

Camp NARUC [National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners] at

Michigan State University, a two-week introduction to the world of utility regulation, is an all-expenses paid, mandatory learning experience for new professional employees working with the utility industries. The PURC has hosted web events in large meeting rooms to allow “maximum attendance by the staff,” according to

Pamela, who attended an agency-sponsored web seminar to learn more about standard market design. Many other agency-sponsored seminars, management programs, and skills courses are available to the staff.

Attendance and participation in the national and regional associations of utility regulators and other similar groups is expected and funded by the agency.

Many professionals acknowledge that without these in-service learning programs, networking, and outside learning opportunities, they would not be able to carry out their work. Grace recounts the importance of professional conferences. “Attending national conferences and making presentations on deregulation” has helped her develop her professional practice and expand her thinking. She explains,

Being able to network with other state regulatory people, consultants,

industry experts and federal regulators was very important in helping

me get a bigger picture of how we impacted energy in other states and

how the national picture impacted us. 153

Ubiquitous technology provided by the organization provides universal access to the in-house network and digital repositories of legal orders and important documents created at the PURC or filed by interested parties in cases. The agency provides access to the outside world of digital information through paid subscriptions to Lexis/Nexis and important professional journals and government publications. It also provides unlimited access to the internet, which opened up a world of information and self-directed learning to every person in this study.

Lexis/Nexis was the first stop Patsy made when she needed background information on a topic.

Edward “googles every day” in his work and used the internet to take a free statistics course to help him understand how to build a database model depicting generation performance. When he runs across arcane language, “I'll look for it in my favorite Webster's on-line pronouncing dictionary. I’ve paid a little money for three years to belong to the advanced dictionary to get deep etymology on the words. I have no plans to drop it.” Grace says, “one of the main sources of information that I use now is the electronic filing log of old documents that have been filed. That’s a good research tool. And it would definitely hurt our efforts now if we did not have the internet to do our research and share databases of information.”

The motives of the PURC in providing all these opportunities for learning are not purely altruistic. The PURC commissioners and career managers seem to realize that in this fast-moving, fast changing world of utility regulation and oversight of the deregulated segments, those with the best information and sharpest skill sets rule the day. 154

In summary, contextual factors that shaped learning in this study clustered around three topics. First, these public sector professionals are continuing to work in the regulated utility environment. When certain utilities were deregulated, the context of the workplace changed significantly. Second, the organizational culture of the PURC enhances the practice of the professionals. Third, continuing professional education, networking, and access to other learning opportunities are vital to their practice.

Chapter Summary

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. The ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice were examined. Data analysis resulted in three sets of findings. First, the elements of postformal thought used by these public sector professionals clustered around five themes: framing the problem, constructing knowledge, coping with ambiguity, finding a solution, and looking back. Second, informal learning experiences influenced the development and use of postformal thought. Three properties or themes in this data set are being self-directed, learning from and with others, and building models. Third, contextual factors shaped learning and development. Three properties or themes in this data set are the context of the work, the organizational culture, and access to resources. Further, the organizational culture data set clustered around three themes: autonomy, working in teams, and supportive management. 155

Ten public sector professionals, engineers and utilities analysts, participated in this study. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews and additional data were drawn from public documents. The participant profiles are snapshots of formative learning experiences in their lives, their career choices, and how they perceive the value of their work. Deregulation of certain parts of the public utilities under the purview of their organization, the state Public Utilities Regulation

Commission, significantly impacted their professional practice. In addition to their adversarial role of representing the interest of the people, work changed their roles to include, in the words of the participants, being a referee, an arbiter, a negotiator, a monitor, and a consensus builder among many competing interests.

The hot action of the workplace required fast and informal learning in the everyday activities of their work. These activities are described in the findings as being self-directed, learning from others and with others, and building a model. All of the participants exhibited self-directed learning. As one said, there was no one to go to school on, so we were the first to plow the rock-filled field of deregulated work. Another said, you can’t be a follower in this work because there is no one to follow. Another said, research is my m.o. When I speak, it is from a position of knowledge. Individual learning efforts turned to learning with others in informal and formal groups. Building models was a favored way to test their learning.

Contextual factors emerged from the data. The practice of these professionals was impacted by the changing context of the work. Where once their practice was staid and predictable, judicial in nature, now a new context was added, where work was ambiguous, murky, gray, ill-defined and the agendas of many interested parties came into play. The organizational culture of the PURC and 156 access to the resource-rich environment provided by the PURC both had a positive impact on the informal learning of these professionals in practice.

157

CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The purpose of this study was to understand how public sector professionals employ postformal thought in practice. Specifically, the ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). Three questions guided this study:

1. What are the elements of postformal thought?

2. What informal learning experiences at work influence the development

and use of postformal thought?

3. What contextual factors shape learning in the workplace?

A qualitative design was chosen for this study in order to understand the thinking and learning of public sector professionals from their point of view as they went about their work. The participants were asked to think out loud about current issues and specific problems in their practice. Data were collected primarily through in-depth interviews with ten engineers and utilities analysts and supplemented with document analysis. The interview data were analyzed inductively using the constant comparative method, resulting in three sets of findings.

The first set of findings revealed the elements of postformal thinking used in the immediate hot action of practice. These elements clustered around five 158

themes: framing the problem, constructing knowledge, coping with ambiguity, finding a solution, and looking back. In the second finding, informal learning experiences that influenced the development and use of postformal thought emerged from the data. These experiences clustered around three themes: being self-directed, learning from and with others, and building models. In the third set of findings, data revealed that certain contextual factors shaped learning and development. These factors clustered around three themes: the context of the work, the organizational culture, and access to resources.

Two conclusions relating to how public sector professionals use postformal thought in practice are drawn from this study. First, the use of postformal thought is shaped by the context of professional practice. That is, when deregulation changed the mission of the agency to include another world of work previously unknown to them, these public sector professionals responded by using elements postformal thought to deal with new, complex, and ill-constructed problems in their practice. Second, informal learning is the critical path to the development and use of postformal thought in the workplace. These professionals were supported in this endeavor by two contextual factors, namely the organizational culture and access to resources.

This chapter is organized around three topics: Conclusions and Discussion,

Implications for Practice, and Recommendations for Further Research. It begins with a discussion of the experience of work in adult lives in 21st century workplace and how it relates to this study. 159

Conclusions and Discussion

The experience of work is a central and defining activity for adults and the workplace is a powerful site for learning and development, but organizations that employ adults and scholars who study the workplace know little about what people actually do and think in their every day experiences. With the advent of the global economy and knowledge work, aided by the rapid spread of capitalism and technology, the thinking skills of workers, their ability to create and communicate knowledge, and their ability to make reasoned judgments have moved to the forefront of interest in what happens at work.

The public sector workplace and the professionals in practice are not immune to the systemic changes afoot in the world. The growing demands for governance without government and government collaboration with the private sector have significantly changed the way governments approach their missions. More dramatic examples of change, such as terrorist events and natural disasters, have thrust public agencies and their employees into a critical spotlight, yet how public employees are meeting these challenges and making reasoned judgments for the protection of civil society has been essentially unexplored territory, ripe for exploration in this study.

This study describes the everyday activities of the public sector professional as they are experienced in the hot action of work and illuminates how professionals deal with the new, complex, and ill-structured problems in their practices. Learning in this study is embedded in the work and treated as a process, not as the outcome of an intervention. Learning in this study is about individual change as well as the

“connections of humans and their actions with rules, tools, and text” (Fenwick, 160

2008, p. 19). Most importantly, this study demonstrates that postformal thought is learned with others, socially constructed in relationships and, therefore, can be taught. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of informal communities of learning that exist outside formal organizational structures and the contextual factors that influence learning.

Conclusion 1: The Use of Postformal Thought is Shaped by the Context of

Professional Practice

The first conclusion drawn from this study is that the use of postformal thought is shaped by the context of public sector professional practice. Several participants used a similar phrase in the data, working in two worlds or feet in two worlds, meaning that another context of work and new roles had been added to their practice. The deregulation of certain public utilities at the state PURC brought about many of the systemic changes described by Merget (2003). For example, regulation for the protection of the public has given way to managing competition in a market-based economy. Unilateral decisions have given way to public-private collaboration of many interests. The role of regulator has given way to mediator.

But the world of regulated work still exists as well in the practices of these professionals.

Consequently, they have their feet in two worlds. As one participant put it, one is the black and white world of rules, laws, hearings, evidence, and judicial orders. The other world, the deregulated world, is a world of multiple shades of gray, ambiguous, with multiple new stakeholders and new goals. These changes have introduced new, complex, and ill-structures problems where there is no deep history or experience to guide the work process, where solutions must be practical, 161

tailored to fit time constraints and balance the interests of many. What’s changed, according to one participant, is a new charter with no guidelines and new problems with no blueprint, requiring a re-thinking of so much of the work at the PURC.

The study of how professionals learn and think in practice began in earnest in the mid to late 80s in response to the impact of the global economy and knowledge work, in concert with the publication of Schön’s work (1983, 1986), on how professionals think in practice, and the emergence of research focusing on the development of adult thinking, beyond the formal operations of Piaget, characterized by problem finding, contextual relativism, and dialectical thinking

(Arlin, 1975; Perry, 1970; Basseches, 1980). Sinnott’s (1998) work further focused the development of adult thinking on adults’ pragmatic way of adaptively solving complex and ill-structured problems in specific contexts of adult life.

The systemic changes in public sector organizations, combined with the recent failures of government to protect and serve society, called for a new understanding of how public sector professionals manage change and complexity with reasoned judgment. For the professional in practice, experiential learning, by its nature informal, is the foundation for building expertise and professional competence to produce reasoned judgments and that brings us to the focus of this study.

Examining the thinking of public sector professionals has a recent but rich history. Merget’s (2003) call for reasoned judgments from the public sector to manage complexity and change through more than technical rationality and objectivity alone echo the writings in Schon’s Beyond the Stable State (1973), and, later, The Reflective Practitioner (1983). 162

In Beyond the Stable State, Schon argues that change is a fundamental feature of modern life requiring the development of people and systems that can learn and adapt, both individually and collectively. Our institutions, especially government, have a tendency to fight to remain the same, while technological advances continually threaten the status quo. “The loss of the stable state means that our society and all of its institutions are in continuous processes of transformation…We must learn to understand, guide, influence, and manage these transformations…We must, in other words, become adept at learning” (pp. 28-29).

Particularly concerning government, Schon says that, if government is to solve new public problems, it must discard the old structures and mechanisms that have grown up around old problems and discover ways of learning for our society as a whole.

Schon continued his discussion of civil society and its professionals in The

Reflective Practitioner (1983), calling them essential to the very functioning of our modern society. Schon argued for and explored the knowledge that professionals created through experience in practice and their artistry in creative approaches to complex and poorly defined problems. According to Schon, professionals think on their feet, drawing on prior experience and moment by moment reflection, where academic knowledge provides the foundation on which to build a professional practice honed by experience, practical knowledge, and expertise.

Schon (1987) called for the systematic study of practitioners, with mixed results (see Ferry & Ross-Gordon, 1998; Cheetham and Chivers, 2000). Reflecting in action and reflecting on action has generated confusion and debate (Eraut, 1994;

Usher, 1997). Eraut (1994) says Schon failed to take into account how time, or the 163

lack of it, intersects with reflecting in action. Critics point out that, on the one hand, Schon says that reflecting in action is an innate ability, and, on the other hand, reflecting in action is learned through experience. Cervero (2001) asks how this ability to reflect in action is learned and Russell (2005) says that the past 20 years have produced “more rhetoric about the value of reflective practice” but few details about how professional educators can help new educators develop the skills of reflective practice (p. 199).

Like Schön, this study started with actual problems in practice, and like

Schön, this study assumes that knowing is in the actions of everyday practice.

Schön, like Sternberg, begins with the assumption of Polanyi (1966) that professionals know more than they can tell. Schon’s account of the impact of technology and change on the stable state, the importance of public sector professionals, and his argument for public learning to serve civil society using new ways of thinking about problems certainly resonate strongly as a framework for this study.

Schon’s model of how professionals think on their feet, knowing in action and reflecting in action, combined with reflecting on action, could possibly be the best way to look at the public sector professional in this study; but further reading across the various disciplines of adult development led to the method chosen, qualitatively investigating the hot action of the workplace (Beckett & Hager, 2000) using Sinnott’s (1998) Theory of Postformal Thought. The five elements of postformal thought embedded in the informal learning activities associated with the hot action of the workplace identified in this study do suggest an answer for

Schön’s critics on how reflection is learned. Schon’s argument that professionals are 164

essential to the functioning of civil society certainly meshes with perceptions that study participants hold about the value of their professional work for the greater good of society.

Data in this study resonates in each thread of research mentioned, but there is agreement with Brookfield’s (2000) idea that postformal thought is the most complete line of research applicable to adult cognition generally and most clearly operationalized in this study of public sector practice particularly. Through in-depth interviews, participants discussed new problems in practice brought on by deregulation and how they learned to deal with them. Using the constant comparative method of data analysis, text from the data were analyzed and compared with Sinnott’s (1998) research. The data clustered around five elements, defined and discussed below. They are presented in linear format here for the purposes of understanding, but the presentation does not indicate a linear process or a one-time process. One participant used the word fluid to describe how the process works.

The first element, Framing the Problem, means using any one of these operations: choosing the appropriate logic system for a problem, shifting between logic systems when necessary, and defining the boundaries of a problem that limit the solutions to be created (Sinnott, 1998). Finding the right logic system to fit the problems in practice requires good instincts to glean things in both logical and intuitive ways, according to one participant. This comment typifies the descriptions of participants on the necessity to use both formal and postformal thinking in framing the problem at hand. This brings to mind Hammond’s Model Hammond’s

Cognitive Model of Expertise (1980), where all cognitive processes from purely 165

analytical to purely intuitive operate on a continuum and the logic system selected on the continuum fits the problem at hand. Hammond argues that no problem is solved using one end of the continuum or the other, but is solved where the mode of thinking adopted fits the critical features of the task.

From the data, participants talk about planning, described as a process that includes learning content information and visualizing the project destination, and how it helps frame a new project where there is no prior experience. Finding the boundaries within the law, the resources available, and the time constraints are seen as important elements of framing the problem. Most important to these participants is seeing the big picture, situating their problems in a context that shows them how their work fits in the big picture. These concepts further flesh out

Sinnott’s ideas on boundary finding as a mechanism to frame a problem.

The second element, Constructing Knowledge, means understanding that knowledge is subjective, context dependent, and value laden. Knowledge is co- created in relationships with others (Sinnott, 1998). Participants in this study speak to the importance of both academic knowledge and practical knowledge learned on the job and are unwilling to discount either as unnecessary or unimportant in professional practice. Most, however, believe that the practical knowledge learned on the job, from and with others, is indispensable to performance in practice. One argued that learning is a continuum from college right into the workplace and makes no distinction between academic knowledge and practical knowledge. Eraut (2004, 2007) also eschews dualism, seeing learning, from formal to non-formal, and knowledge, from propositional to practical, on a continuum. 166

Concerning tacit knowledge and whether it is acquired with little help from others (Sternberg et al, 1995) or emerges as artistry (Schon, 1983), participants in this study echo over and over again the importance of personal learning experiences shared and filtered through the learning experiences of others. It is hard to accept the idea that the tacit knowledge of these professionals would not be affected by these shared experiences. Adherents of Vygotsky’s social learning theory would argue that we bring all of our social, cultural, and historical experiences to every learning situation, whether we can surface that knowledge consciously or not.

The third element, Coping with Ambiguity, means being pragmatic and tolerating conflict, complexity, ambiguity, paradox and contradiction (Sinnott,

1998). Each participant could articulate feelings of frustration or panic or worry about the new context of work; yet, pragmatism is evident throughout the data and articulated most clearly by one participant, who outlines the importance of learning what you can worry about and what you should worry about, doing your best work, and learning to live with the results. Others cope by always being prepared with knowledge as a way to deal with potential conflict. Being flexible is mentioned as a coping strategy.

One describes tailoring his work to mesh with the group, a strategy of zooming in and zooming out, working and continuously consulting with his work group, communicating his thinking, and staying on the right road as ways to relieve anxiety and moments of panic. It is here in the data that Schon’s (1983) reflection on action and moment by moment decision making resonate the strongest. 167

The fourth element, Finding a Solution, means identifying multiple causes operating in a problem, generating multiple right solutions to a problem, accepting that problems and their solutions are relative to the solver, and choosing the best solution among many (Sinnott, 1998). As one participant points out, you can never reach closure on having all the information or the best information or the right information. You make a decision on the information that you have. Several participants speak to generating many possible recommended solutions to a problem, each to be negotiated and each having some impact on other aspects of the problem. As one participant says, there is always a practical solution among many. Several discuss the subjective nature of the work, resulting in recommended solutions that they think are fair and balanced from their subjective point of view.

The fifth element, Looking Back, means being critically reflective and learning from experience (Brookfield, 1994, 2000). There are two types of reflecting in this organization. There is a collective reflecting when the work group concludes a project and the team debriefs the project and its outcomes or builds a model to test out their learning. What worked, what did not work, what will change the next time are part of the collective discussion. Problem-finding, another element of postformal thought, is strongly suggested in this data.

The other type of reflection is more personal in nature and suggests that being able to learn to deal with these new, complex, and ill-structured problems in practice restores feelings of confidence and professional competence. Embedded in these problem-centered themes are other elements of postformal thinking.

Congruent with the writings of Brookfield on critical reflection, all of the participants articulated their personal histories in such a way that it is evident in the data that 168

they are critically and thoughtfully aware of how their personal histories intersect with their belief systems as caring, helping people, and, also with how they approach their responsibilities in their practice as moral and ethical reasoners with value systems. These ideas from the data once again resonate with Schon’s writings on civil society and the role of public sector professionals in discarding old ways of looking at problems for new ways of adaptively solving complex problems.

Throughout the data in this study, examples of the operational aspects of postformal thought for adaptive problem solving can be found. However, the reflective component found in the data is not addressed in Sinnott’s (1998) operations. Perhaps this is due to the quantitative research methods used to develop this theory where the reflective component was not evident or included in the design. Postformal thought does have two important factors. Experiential learning is the change mechanism and is context-dependent.

Conclusion 2: Informal Learning is the Critical Path to the Development and Use of

Postformal Thought in the Workplace

The second conclusion reached in this study is that informal learning is the critical path to the development and use of postformal thought in the workplace.

Globalization, the rapid spread of technology, and the new economy built on fast- paced knowledge work changed the focus of learning in the workplace. Instead of the dual structures of work and training for skills or professional development, work and learning are seen as one continuous, informal, and developmental experience, embedded in the everyday activities of the workplace.

The literature is replete with studies, facts, and figures about the prevalence, importance, and cost of informal learning in the workplace (Cheetham & Chivers, 169

2001; Cross, 2007; Marsick & Watkins, 1990, 1999, 2001). Some data are disputed. Some data are unsupported. The very nature of informal learning makes quantification elusive. What can be agreed upon, and what the data in this study demonstrates, is that once the professional enters the workforce, informal learning is the learning of choice in everyday practice when hot action situations arise. This preference is supported in large research studies by Felstead, Fuller, Unwin,

Ashton, Butler, and Lee (2005), and others, which found that formal education, qualifications, and training provided only a partial explanation of skill acquisition in the workplace, with workplace learning and its daily activities providing the most highly rated source of learning.

In a major literature review of workplace learning, Fenwick (2008a) identified a prominent topic in the literature, the individual and collective learning processes in work activities, where learning is practice-based, participative, embedded in action, and distributed in the activities and relationships of people. Fenwick’s descriptor, individual and collective learning processes, and Ellinger’s webs of people-centered learning relationships and be found in the learning processes and relationships in this study.

In 1950, Malcolm Knowles named a form of learning that is still relevant today, maybe even more so than 58 years ago. His later assumptions about adult learners (Knowles, 1970) could have been taken from the data in this study. These professionals exhibit a strong desire to participate in decision-making that affects their practice; they are ready to learn when the need arises, they have a problem- centered orientation to learning, and they have internal motivators, for example, self-confidence and professional reputation. 170

The data clearly show that these professionals are self-directed in their learning activities. One assumption that Knowles made about adult learners, that they prefer to rely on their own experiences, may not hold true across all circumstances in this study, since these professionals are faced with situations where they have no previous experience. But these participants possess the abilities to meet this challenge through their self-directed activities and internal motivators, as the data demonstrates. Knowles’s (1980) seven abilities of self- directed learners do fit well with the findings in this study and highlight the importance of this defining characteristic in these public sector professionals.

According to Knowles, self-directed learners have the abilities: to act on natural curiosities; to use deductive and inductive reasoning; to identify data needed; to locate reliable, relevant data; to collect the data efficiently; to organize, analyze, and evaluate the data; and to communicate the findings. Additional abilities surfaced in further research that are pertinent to the self-directedness of these participants: the ability to self-manage learning and the ability to pursue learning outside formal mechanisms (Caffarella, 1993; Candy, 1991).

The participants in this study generally followed the same pattern or process when confronted with a new and complex problem in practice. Some of the individual activities mentioned in the data involved reading, researching, collecting data, locating experts, listening and observing, asking questions, and visiting or contacting other sites with similar problems or issues. They became “sponges,” as some participants described themselves. They sought out information from many sources and peppered experts with questions. They lurked in seminars, meetings, and conference calls, listening. This data is also supported in the findings of Eraut 171

(2007), who surveyed thousands of working professionals in a three-year longitudinal study in the U.K., and found that asking questions, getting information, locating resource people, listening and observing, reflecting, learning from mistakes, giving and receiving feedback, and use of mediating artifacts were all learning activities located within learning processes. Locating resource people was also seen in this study as participants compiled go-to lists of helpful and informed contacts, and then called them for help. This contacts idea is supported in a 2003 study by Boud and Middleton of four professional groups and their informal learning methods. Compiling and using explicit contacts for learning was found in their data.

These professionals participate in informally organized groups of colleagues at work and colleagues from outside the organization. Because of the fast-changing nature of the work, its complexity, and the heavy workload, learning from others and with others is highly valued in this organization. This data resonates strongly with Ellinger’s (2005) finding of webs of people-centered learning relationships. As one pointed out, it is impossible in this deregulated climate to know everything about everything. Reliance on others, informally and through formal team membership, is a necessary way to learn and get work done.

Working in teams is a structural requirement of the organization due to the nature of the work at the PURC. In this organization, professionals are members of many project-based teams running concurrently. They are project leaders on some projects and team members on others. Teams form and dissolve as projects or cases develop and conclude. As one participant pointed out, there might be as many as 70 projects in play, with you as the project leader on 10-14 project, and, 172

concurrently, also a team member on 35 of the projects. Any resistance to team work gives way under the crushing workload created by deregulation.

Another participant pointed out that that each public sector professional in this organization brings a different set of knowledge, skills, and abilities to the project table and this is a highly valued, ripe and rich resource for learning and working. The importance of maintaining good relationships in this kind of working environment is embedded in the data throughout. Working in teams was seen both as helpful, even necessary, and at the same time produced feelings of anxiety and discomfort for some. Generally, a pragmatic viewpoint was expressed by the participants concerning the changing nature of the work, working in teams, and the outcomes of team projects. However, during this study, one participant grew so disenchanted with the effects of deregulation and the workload that he left his position for the private sector.

Another learning strategy that was prevalent in the data is categorized as building models. In addition to thinking about problems in practice and talking about problems in practice, these participants described a process of understanding and testing their learning, a process they called building a model and Eraut (2007) calls trying things out. Eraut’s findings also mirror findings here where learning is found in participation in group processes, working along side others, tackling challenging tasks and roles, and problem solving.

What stands out in this data is that model building is a reiterative learning process where knowledge is co-constructed in relationships with others, whether one is learning from others or learning with others. The learning is mediated by the 173

constraints of the law, the organizational goals, and the interests of stakeholders outside the organization.

Three factors shaped learning and professional development in this study.

Autonomy, supportive management, and access to resources were often cited as important, even critical, to learning and job performance. These fit generally in the research of Ellinger (2005), who confirmed that informal learning is the most prevalent form of learning and looked for factors that supported, encouraged, and developed informal learning. Ellinger found four positive factors that supported informal learning: committed management, a learning culture, sufficient resources, and webs of people-centered learning relationships. Two negative factors surfaced in Ellinger’s study that are suggested throughout the data in this study: too much change too fast and lack of time. Lohman (2005), using survey research, found two negative factors, lack of time and lack of proximity to colleagues and experts.

Felsted, et al, (2005) found social relationships, a supportive environment, and job design to be important factors in enhancing informal learning in the workplace.

Other studies can be cited but the one central idea converging here is that while factors may vary according to the needs of organizations, groups, and individuals, there is no doubt that contextual factors impact informal learning in any organization.

Autonomy was cited by the participants as an important factor in learning and working. In this organization, the professionals, who are career employees, act and work more like self-employed professionals in practice or independent consultants. They expressed their approval and appreciation for the autonomy they enjoyed in their practice, though they looked at it from different perspectives. For 174

example, one said he appreciated the transparent structure where he could ponder things more, analyze things. The freedom to carry out his work was very important to him, even though it came with the price of added responsibility. Another said he enjoyed finding his own path, deciding what needed to be done, but qualified his remarks by saying that some would find this kind of direction unnerving. Another expressed autonomy as the freedom to learn during the course of his daily activities what he needed to know to practice at the PURC. This compares favorably with the findings of Candy (1991) and others, that adults desire personal autonomy.

Having supportive management was described in this study as very important and instrumental to their professional development and everyday working conditions. The willingness of others to share information, mentor newly hired professionals, and create an environment conducive to development is noted in the data as important to professional practice. Additionally, members in senior leadership positions work along side these professionals as team members, bringing valuable skill sets to the project table.

As a group, the elected commissioners, who serve as judges in the hearing room and final decision-makers in the official administrative meetings, are active in everyday activities. According to the data, they are interested in the staff’s work and interested in what is best for the state, the consumer, and the companies, although they all have different ideas on how to get there. The participants agree that these commissioners have been good for the staff.

The PURC is a resource-rich environment for its employees and meets many different learning needs in the organization. Continued Professional Education

(CPE), association memberships, conference participation, skills courses, seminars, 175

and project management courses are just a few of the structured learning events, encouraged or required, and paid for by the PURC. Ubiquitous technology is available to everyone. It is used for everything from managing work calendars inside the agency, email, and internet access, to digital storage of databases of case information and the historical records of the PURC. Internet access provides access to these same types of databases on other networks, online classes, pronouncing dictionaries, Lexis Nexis, and a myriad of other resources mentioned in the data.

The findings in this study relate to the literature in various ways. For example, in 2001, Cheetham and Chivers identified twelve informal learning methods across professionals that generally compare with the findings in this study: practice, reflection, observation, feedback, learning transfer, complex tasks or problems, perspective taking, mentor/coach relationships, working with other professionals, using mental maps, presenting at conferences and collaborating with others. Environmental factors included a supportive environment to develop self- confidence and professional competence, resources, time for learning, and finding their own way of doing things.

In another example, Deems (1998) studied a marketing firm and a manufacturing firm, exploring how people experience work. Being at work ranged from frightening to exhilarating; work was loosely structured with ample room for personal autonomy; work was performed in teams and cultivated informal relationships; emphasis was placed on self-directed learning; and there were many organizational supports for learning resources. Participants also described a dark side of work, ambiguous and contradictory environment that they found 176

uncomfortable. Even though the participants in Deems’s study and the participants in this study varied in educational and occupational levels, and private and public sector contexts, the experience of work seems to feel the same across contexts.

Findings in this study and others reviewed here confirm that in the context of public sector practice, learning is experiential, reasoning is contextual, knowledge is constructed, thinking is dialectical and reflective, and problem-solving ranges from logical to intuitive.

Implications for Practice

This study has practical implications for professionals in practice, educators preparing adults to enter or advance in the workplace, and for the organization in preparing a 21st century workforce.

For the professional in practice, this study illuminates the value of informal learning for professional development and the areas of informal learning most likely available to be cultivated in their current practice. These groups do not have to be grounded in a particular place of practice or even in the same type of practice.

Many business people join the local Chamber of Commerce to network with peers, join the local Rotary Club, a service organization for business professionals, or join

Toastmasters, an organization with an explicit professional development mission.

Some informal learning groups are virtual groups linked together in networks worldwide. In addition to improving practice, these learning relationships can lead to the development of a different kind of thinking, one that can thrive and develop as we age.

For the adult educator, this study illuminates the existence of a different kind of thinking that can be taught to other adult learners. Scholars indicate that health 177

care professionals, adult educators, and Human Resource Development professionals are steeped in self-referential literature. Generally, health and science professionals, usually cognitive psychologists or similar practitioners, are working on cognitive development, adult educators are working on adult development, and HRD professionals are working on organizational and career development. Much could be learned by adult educators by broadening their reading into other areas of development literature. Most importantly, instead of teaching ways of thinking, modeling ways of thinking to adult learners is a much more powerful way to engage the topic of adult cognitive development.

Additionally, designing assignments and course content to elicit discussion on elements of postformal thought are very productive methods of teaching and learning

For the HRD professional, this study illuminates the many avenues for the development of professionals in their own organizations. Contextual factors are the key to creating or restraining learning in the workplace and this is a ripe area where

HRD professionals can make a significant impact. For example, as the official liaison between the executive offices or leadership of an organization and the career staff, the HRD validation of informal learning as a value-added activity can send the right signals and set a positive tone to encourage informal learning activities in the organization.

Additionally, this study highlights the advantages of hiring self-directed professionals. HRD professionals are skilled interviewers qualified to elicit pertinent information from candidates. Amending the interview guide to assess self-direction 178

would add value to the selection process and the organization as a whole when it results in better hires.

Recommendations for Future Research

This study looked at the use of postformal thought in public sector practice.

The ways in which public sector professionals took in, mentally sorted and weighed information were examined as they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill- structured problems in the context of their practice at the state Public Utilities

Regulatory Commission (PURC). Further research is needed to build a complete picture of thinking and learning in the public sector workplace by qualitatively examining public sector professionals and their workplace context.

Another direction for further research in the professional workplace is exploring the intersection of postformal thought and other aspects of Brookfield’s idea of adult cognition, contributing to a more complete understanding of the elements of adult thinking.

Another direction for further research in the professional workplace is exploring the intersection of Schön’s (1983) reflecting in action and the five problem-solving elements of Sinnott’s (1998) postformal thought identified in this study, contributing to a more definitive understanding of how professionals think on their feet.

Deregulation and the shifting roles of public sector professionals now require that public sector professionals mediate or negotiate the interests of many new stakeholders while still working in a political climate. Further study through this lens could add to the understanding of how public sector professionals learn to balance these interests while meeting professional and organizational 179

responsibilities in a power-laden climate and the impact on adult thinking and decision-making.

This study looked at individuals in public sector practice and how they learned to deal with new, complex, and ill-structured problems using Sinnott’s

(1998) Theory of Postformal Thought, a cognitive approach to understanding how individuals think and learn in practice. Eraut and Hirsh (2007) recommend putting the employee center stage to investigate the real experience of workplace learning, which this study had done, and then work outwards toward the group and the organization. The idea eventually evolves into how organizations can better facilitate workplace learning. Two frameworks seem very appropriate for further research on facilitating workplace learning as it relates to adult thinking and decision-making: Argyris & Schon’s (1974, 1978, 1996) Learning Organization or

Senge’s (1990, 2006) The Fifth Discipline. 180

REFERENCES

Alderton, J. (1999, April). Factors which facilitate workplace learning: Confidence,

challenge and support. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the

American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec.

Arlin, P. K. (1975). Cognitive development in adulthood - 5th stage. Developmental

Psychology, 11(5), 602-606.

Arlin, P. K., & Levitt, L. (1998). A developmental perspective on giftedness.

Creativity Research Journal, 11(4), 347-355.

Arlin, P. K. (1999). The wise teacher: A developmental model of teaching. Theory

into Practice, 38(1), 12-17.

Armon, C., & Dawson, T. L. (1997). Developmental trajectories in moral reasoning

across the life span. Journal of Moral Education, 26(4), 433-453.

Arnold, J. (1997, November). Nineteen propositions concerning the nature of

effective thinking for career management in a turbulent world. British Journal

of Guidance & Counseling, pp. 447-462.

Barnett, R. (1999). Learning to work and working to learn. In D. Boud & J. Garrick

(Eds.), Understanding learning at work (pp. 29-44). New York: Routledge.

Basseches, M. (1980). Dialectical schemata: A framework for the empirical study of

the development of dialectical thinking. Human Development, 23(6), 400-

421.

Basseches, M. (1984). Dialectical thinking and adult development. Norwood, NJ:

Ablex. 181

Beckett, D. (2001). Hot action at work: A different understanding of understanding.

In Tara Fenwick (Ed.), Sociocultural perspective on learning through work

(pp. 73-84). New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No. 92. San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Beckett, D., & Hager, P. (2000). Making judgments as the basis for workplace

learning: Towards an epistemology of practice. International Journal of

Lifelong Education, 19(4), 300-311.

Bee, H. L., & Bjorklund, B. R. (2000). The journey of adulthood (4th ed.). Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Belenky, M. F. (1986). Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice,

and mind. New York: Basic Books.

Berg, S.A. & Chyung, S.Y. (2008). Factors that influence informal learning in the

workplace. Journal of Workplace Learning 20(4), 229-244.

Bonk, C.J., & Kim, K.A. (1998). Extending sociocultural theory to adult learning. In

Smith, M. C. E., & Pourchot, T. E. (Eds.), Adult learning and development

(pp. 67-88). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Boucouvalas, M. (1998). Book reviews. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(4), 272-276.

Boud, D. & Middleton, H. (2003). Learning from others at work: Communities of

practice and informal learning. Journal of Workplace Learning, 15(5), 194-

202.

Boud, D., Cohen, R., & Walker, D. (1993). Understanding learning from experience.

In Boud, David (Ed.), Using experience for learning. Bristol, PA: Society for

Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. 182

Brookfield, S. (1985). Self-directed adult learning - a critical paradigm. Adult

Education Quarterly, 35(2), 59-71.

Brookfield, S. (1987). Developing critical thinking: Challenging adults to explore

alternative ways of thinking and acting. Milton Keynes: Open University

Press.

Brookfield, S. (1993). Self-directed learning, political clarity, and the critical

practice of adult education. Adult Education Quarterly, 43(4), 227-242.

Brookfield, S. (1994). Tales from the dark side: A phenomenography of adult

critical reflection. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13(3), 203-218.

Brookfield, S. (2000). Adult cognition as a dimension of lifelong learning. In J. Field

& M. Leicester (Eds.), Lifelong learning: Education across the lifespan (pp.

89-101). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Browne, J. (1992). Illusions in social cognition: A means of investigating

post-formal cognition. Irish Journal of Psychology, 13(2), 210-222.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.) Time spent in detailed primary activities.

Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a2_2007.pdf

Caffarella, R. S. (1993). Self-directed learning. In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), An update

on adult learning theory (pp. 25-36). New Directions for Adult and Continuing

Education, No. 57. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Candy, P. C. (1991). Self-direction for lifelong learning: A comprehensive guide to

theory and practice. California. 183

Center for Workforce Development (Education Development Center). (1998). The

teaching firm: Where productive work and learning converge. Report on

research findings and implications. Newton, MA: Center for Workforce

Development Education Development Center.

Cervero, R. (2001). Donald Schon. In P. Jarvis (Ed.), Twentieth century thinkers in

adult & continuing education, 2nd Ed., (pp. 207-219).

Cheetham, G., & Chivers, G. (2000). A new look at competent professional practice.

Journal of European Industrial Training, 24(7), 374-383.

Cheetham, G., & Chivers, G. (2001). How professionals learn in practice: An

investigation of informal learning. Journal of European Industrial Training,

25(5), 248-292.

Cofer, D. A., Jr. (2000). Informal workplace learning (Practice Application Brief

No.10). Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational

Education (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 441160).

Commons, M. L., & Richards, F. A. (2003). Four Postformal Stages. In J. Demick &

C. Andreoletti (Eds.), Handbook of adult development. New York: Kluwer

Academic/Plenum. Retrieved July 14, 2003, from

http://www.tiac.net/~commons/Four%20Postformal%20Stages.html.

Cook, W. D. (1977). Adult literacy education in the United States. Newark:

International Reading Association.

Courtenay, B. C. (1994). Are psychological models of adult development still

important for the practice of adult education? Adult Education Quarterly,

44(3), 145-153. 184

Creswell, J. W. (1994). Research design: Qualitative & quantitative approaches.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Creswell, J. W. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among

five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Creswell, J. W., & Miller, D. L. (2000). Determining validity in qualitative inquiry.

Theory Into Practice, 39(3), 124-130.

Cross, J. (2007). Informal learning: Rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire

innovation and performance. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Daley, B.J. (2001, November). Learning and professional practice: A study of four

professions. Adult Education Quarterly, 52(1), 39-54.

Deems, T.A. (1998). Vital work: Adult development within the natural workplace.

Paper presented at the 39th Annual Adult Education Research Conference,

San Antonio, TX.

Denhardt, R. B., & Denhardt, J. V. (2000). The new public service: Serving rather

than steering. Public Administration Review, 60(6), pp. 549-560.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1998). Collecting and interpreting qualitative

materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Dobson, S.H. (2000) Precursors of adult age differences in abstract and practical

problem solving. Unpublished dissertation, University of South Carolina.

Dohm, A. & Shniper, L. (2007). Employment outlook 2006-16: Occupational

employment projections to 2016. Monthly Labor Review, pp. 86-125 185

Donald, J. G. (2002). Learning to think: Disciplinary perspectives. San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.

Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human

intuition and expertise in the era of the computer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ellinger, A.D. (2005). Contextual factors influencing informal learning in a

workplace setting: The case of “Reinventing Itself Company.” Human

Resource Development Quarterly 16(3), 389-415

Eraut, M. (2001). Theories of professional expertise. In C. Paechter, M. Preddy, D.

Scott, & J. Soler (Eds.), Knowledge, power and learning (pp. 109-127).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Eraut, M. (2004). Informal learning in the workplace. Studies in Continuing

Education, 26(2), 247-274.

Eraut, M. (2007). Learning from other people in the workplace. Oxford Review of

Education, 33(4), 403-422.

Eraut, M. & Hirsh, W. (2007). The significance of workplace learning for individuals,

groups, and organizations, SKOPE Monograph 6. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford

University.

Eraut, M., Steadman, S., Furner, J., Maillardet, F., Miller, C., Ali, A., & Blackman, C.

(2004, April). Learning in the professional workplace: Relationships between

learning factors and contextual factors. Paper presented at AERA 2004

Conference, San Diego, CA.

Falcone, G.J. (2000). The relationship of postformal thought to conceptions of

wisdom as mediated by age and education. Unpublished doctoral

dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. 186

Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., Ashton, D., Butler, P. & Lee, T. (2004). Better

learning, better performance: Evidence from the 2004 learning at work

survey. Leicester: NIACE.

Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., Ashton, D., Butler, P. & Lee, T. (2005). Surveying

the scene: Learning metaphors, survey design and the workplace context.

Journal of Education and Work, 18(4), 359-383.

Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Jewson, N., Unwin, L. & Kakavelakis, K. (2007). Learning,

communities and performance: Evidence from the 2007 communities of

practice survey. Leicester: NIACE.

Fenwick, T. J. (2000). Experiential learning: A theoretical critique from five

perspectives. Adult Education Quarterly, 50(4), 243-272.

Fenwick, T. J. (2003). Learning through experience: Troubling orthodoxies and

intersecting questions. Malabar FL: Krieger Publishing

Fenwick, T. J. (2008a). Understanding relations of individual collective learning in

work: A review of the research. Management Learning, 39(3), 227-243.

Fenwick, T. J. (2008b). Workplace learning: Emerging trends and new perspectives.

In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), Third update on adult learning theory (pp. 17-26).

New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No. 119. San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.

Ferry, N. M., & Ross-Gordon, J. M. (1998). An inquiry into Schön's espistemology of

practice: Exploring links between experience and reflective practice. Adult

Education Quarterly, 48(2), 98-113.

Foster, V., & Sprinthall, N.A. (1992). Developing profiles of adolescents and young

adults choosing abortion. Adolescence, 27(107), 655-674. 187

Fowler, J.W. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and

the quest for meaning. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Galagan, P. A. (1994). Reinventing the profession. Training and Development,

48(12), 20-27.

Garrick, J. (1999). The dominant discourses of learning at work. In D. Boud & J.

Garrick (Eds.), Understanding learning at work (pp. 216-231). New York:

Routledge.

Glesne, C. (1999). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction (2nd ed.).

New York: Longman.

Guerriero, S.P. (1997). Roman Catholic ecumenists: An interpretive sociological

study of their life-world. Unpublished dissertation, The Fielding Institute,

California.

Gutek, G. L. (1992). Education and schooling in America (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn

and Bacon.

Hammond, K.R. (1980). Human judgment and decision making. New York:

Hemisphere.

Hansman, C. A. (2001). Context-based adult learning. In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), The

new update on adult learning theory (pp. 43-51). New Directions for Adult

and Continuing Education, No. 89. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hiemstra, R. (1996). What’s in a word? Changes in self directed learning language

over a decade. Paper presented at the meeting of the International

Symposium on Self Directed Learning, West Palm Beach, FL. 188

Hodder, I. (1998). The interpretation of documents and material culture. In N. K.

Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials

(pp. 47-78). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hofstadter, R. (1955). The age of reform: From Bryan to F. D. R (1st ed.). New

York: Knopf.

Houle, C. O. (1980). Continuing learning in the professions (1st ed.). San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hoyer, W. J., Rybash, J. M., & Roodin, P. (1999). Adult development and aging (4th

ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill College.

Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to

adolescence: An essay on the construction of formal operational structures.

New York: Basic Books.

Isaacs, A. (Ed.). (2000). The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001. New York: Macmillan

Reference USA. Retrieved February 26, 2003, from xrefer Library Services at

http://xrefer.com.

Johnson, E. L. (1998). Growing in wisdom in Christian community: Toward

measures of Christian postformal development. Journal of Psychology and

Theology, 26,(4), 365-381.

Karoly, L.A. & Panis, C.W.A. (2004). The 21st century at work. Arlington, VA: RAND

Corporation.

Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 189

Kincheloe, J.L. & Steinberg, S.R. (1993). A tentative description of post-formal

thinking: The critical confrontation with cognitive theory. Harvard Educational

Review, 63(3), 296-320.

Kindle, P.A. (2002). Adult cognitive development and the Need for Cognition Scale:

Identifying adults most likely to develop characteristics of postformal

thought. Unpublished thesis, University of Houston, Clear Lake.

King, P.M., & Kitchener, K.S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment:

Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in

adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kitchener, K.S. (1983). Cognition, metacognition, and epistemic cognition: A 3-

level model of cognitive processing. Human Development, 26(4), 222-232.

Knowles, M.S. (1950). Informal adult education. New York: Association Press.

Knowles, M.S. (1970). The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus

pedagogy. New York: Association Press.

Knowles, M.S. (1984). Andragogy in action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development (1st ed.). San Francisco: Harper

& Row.

Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and

development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Kolb, D.A., Boyatzis, R.E., & Mainemelis. (2000). Experiential learning theory:

Previous research and new directions. In R.J. Sternberg & L.F. Zhang (Eds.),

Perspectives on cognitive, learning, and thinking styles. New Jersey:

Lawrence Erlbaum. 190

Kramer, D. A. (1983). Post-formal operations: A need for further conceptualization.

Human Development, 26(2), 91-105.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Lohman, M.C. (2005). A survey of factors influencing the engagement of two

professional groups in informal workplace learning activities. Human

Resource Development Quarterly 16(4), 501-527.

Manigaulte, J. (2000). The art and science of political cultural criticism: Toward

developing a transrational pedagogy of film. Unpublished Dissertation,

Pennsylvania State University.

Marsick, V. J., & Watkins, K. E. (1990). Informal and incidental learning in the

workplace. New York: Routledge.

Marsick, V. J., & Watkins, K. E. (1999). Envisioning new organizations for learning.

In D. Boud & J. Garrick (Eds.), Understanding learning at work (pp. 199-

215). New York: Routledge.

Marsick, V. J., & Watkins, K. E. (2001). Informal and incidental learning. In S. B.

Merriam (Ed.), The new update on adult learning theory (pp. 25-42). New

Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No. 89. San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass.

Martin, J. E., Silva, D. G., Newman, J. H., & Thayer, J. F. (1994). An investigation

into the structure of epistemological style. Personality and Individual

Differences, 16(4), 617-629.

Maslow, A. H. (1970). Motivation and personality (2nd ed.). New York: Harper &

Row. 191

McBride, L. R. (1999). A comparison of postformal operations in diverse adult

populations: Contrasting African-Americans and standard average

European-Americans (working class). Unpublished Dissertation, Texas Tech

University, US.

McCracken, G. D. (1988). The long interview. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Mehltretter, G. W. (1996). The contribution of complexity of mental processing and

stage of ego development to transforming leadership. Unpublished

Dissertation, North Carolina State University.

Merget, A.E. (2003). Times of turbulence. Public Administration Review, 63(4),

390-395.

Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in

education (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. B. (2001). Andragogy and self-directed learning: Pillars of adult

learning theory. In S. B. Merriam (Ed.), The new update on adult learning

theory (pp. 3-13). New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No.

89. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. B. (2002). Qualitative research in practice: Examples for discussion and

analysis (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. B., & Caffarella, R. S. (1999). Learning in adulthood (2nd ed.). San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S., & Baumgartner, L. M. (2006). Learning in

adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Publishers. 192

Merriam, S. B., & Simpson, E. L. (2000). A guide to research for educators and

trainers of adults (2nd ed., with updated material). Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.

Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded

sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Miller, M. E., & Cook-Greuter, S. R. (1994). Transcendence and mature thought in

adulthood: The further reaches of adult development. Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield.

Montana, A., & Frey, J. H. (1998). Interviewing: The art of science. In N. K. Denzin

& Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp.

47-78). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Mooney, C. G. (2000). Theories of childhood: An introduction to Dewey, Montessori,

Erikson, Piaget and Vygotsky. St. Paul, MN.

Morton, K.R., Worthley, J.S., Nitch, S.R., Lamberton, H.H., Loo, L., & Testerman,

J.K. (2000). Integration of cognition and emotion: A postformal operations

model of physician-patient interaction. Journal of Adult Development, 7(3),

151-161.

Noffke, J.L. & McFadden, S.H. (2001). Denominational and age comparisons of God

concepts. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40,(4), 747-756.

Perry, W. G. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college

years. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Pohjola, M. (2002). The new economy: Facts, impacts and policies. Information

Economics and Policy, 14, 133-144. 193

Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension (1st ed.). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Pourchot, T.L. & Smith, M.C. (2004). Some implications of life span developmental

psychology for adult education and learning. PAACE Journal of Lifelong

Learning, 13, 69-82.

Pruyn, M. (1999). The power of classroom hegemony: An examination of the

impact of formal and postformal teacher thinking in an inner-city Latina

school. In J. L. Kincheloe & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Rethinking intelligence:

Confronting psychological assumptions about teaching and learning.

Florence, KY: Routledge.

Rakfeldt, J., Rybash, J. M., & Roodin, P. A. (1996). Affirmative coping: A marker of

success in adult therapeutic intervention. In M. Commons & J. Demick (Eds.),

Clinical approaches to adult development (pp. 295-310). Stamford, CT:

Ablex.

Riegel, K. F. (1973). Dialectical operations: The final phase of cognitive

development. Human Development, 16, 346-370.

Riegel, K. F. (1975). The Development of dialectical operations. New York: Karger.

Ryan, G. W., & Bernard, H. R. (2000). Data management and analysis methods. In

N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd

ed., pp. 769-802). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rybash, J. M., Hoyer, W. J., & Roodin, P. (1986). Adult cognition and aging:

Developmental changes in processing, knowing and thinking. New York:

Pergamon Press. 194

Rycek, R. F., Stuhr, S. L., McDermott, J., Benker, J., & Swartz, M. (1998).

Adolescent egocentrism and cognitive functioning during late adolescence.

Adolescence, 33(132), 745-749.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action.

New York: Basic Books.

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for

teaching and learning in the professions (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass.

Schmidt, H.G., Norman, G.R., & Boshuizen, H.G.A. (1990). A cognitive perspective

on medical expertise: Theory and implications. Academic Medicine, 65(10),

611-621.

Scribner, S. (1984). Studying working intelligence. In B. Rogoff & J. Lave (Eds.),

Everyday cognition (pp. 9-40). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Sinnott, J. D. (1998). The development of logic in adulthood: Postformal thought

and its applications. New York: Plenum Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (1988). The triarchic mind: A new theory of human intelligence.

New York: Viking.

Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development. New York:

Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (1994). Intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Thinking and Problem

Solving (pp. 266-290). New York: Academic Press.

Sternberg, R. J. (2000). Practical intelligence in everyday life. New York: Cambridge

University Press. 195

Sternberg, R. J. (2002). It's not what you know, but how you use it: Teaching for

wisdom. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 48, B20.

Sternberg, R. J., & Wagner, R. K. (1986). Tacit knowledge and intelligence in the

everyday world. In R. J. Sternberg & R. K. Wagner (Eds.), Practical

intelligence: Nature and origins of competence in the everyday world (pp.

51-84). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sternberg, R.J., Wagner, R.K., Williams, W.M., & Horvath, J. A. (1995, November).

Testing common sense. American Psychologist, 50(11), 912-927.

Tahir, L. (1996). Growth through opposition: The development of a point of view in

young Bernard Shaw. In M. Commons & J. Demick (Eds.), Clinical

approaches to adult development (pp. 29-53). Stamford, CT: Ablex.

Tapscott, D. (1999, January). Minds over matter. Business 2.0, 1, 89-97.

Tennant, M. (1991). Expertise as a dimension of adult development: Implications

for adult education. New Education, 13(1), 49-55.

Tennant, M. (1997). Psychology and Adult Learning. Second Edition. U.S.; New

York.

Tennant, M., & Pogson, P. (1995). Learning and change in the adult years: A

developmental perspective (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The American Heritage dictionary of the English language. (4th ed.)(2000). Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.

The future of workplace learning and performance. (1994). Training &

Development, 48(5), 36-47. 196

Torff, B. & Sternberg, R.J. (1998). Changing mind, changing world: Practical

intelligence and tacit knowledge in adult learning. In M. C. Smith & T.

Pourchot (Eds.), Adult learning and development: Perspectives from

educational psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Tough, A. M. (1971). The adult's learning projects; a fresh approach to theory and

practice in adult learning. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Trochim, W. M. K. (1999). Research Methods Knowledge Base. Retrieved November

14, 2000, from http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/kb/qualdata.htm

U. S. Code of Federal Regulations. (1973). Retrieved July 14, 2003, from

http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Title_29/Part_541/29CFR541.3.htm

Unwin, L., Felstead, A., Fuller, A., Jewson, N., Kakavelakis, K, Lee, T., & Butler, P.

(2008). Worlds within worlds: The relationship between context and

pedagogy in the workplace. In Nijhof, W. J. & Nieuwenhuis, L. F. (Eds.). The

learning potential of the workplace. Rotterdam: Sense Publications.

Usher, R., Bryant, I., & Johnston, R. (1997). Adult education and the postmodern

challenge: Learning beyond the limits. New York: Routledge.

Westbrook, T. L. (1995). The cognitive moral development of journalists:

Distribution and implications for news production. Unpublished doctoral

dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.

Weitzman, P.F. & Weitzman, E.A. (2006). Promoting postformal thinking on the job:

A protocol for interpersonal conflict resolution training. Journal of Adult

Development 13(1), 45-51. 197

Worthen, M. F. (2000). Life-span cognitive giftedness: The development of

relativistic thinking. In R. C. Friedman & B. M. Shore (Eds.), Talents

unfolding: Cognition and development (pp. 149-166). Washington, DC:

American Psychological Association.

Young, L. & Denize, S. (2008) Competing interests: The challenge to collaboration

in the public sector. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy

28(1/2): 46-58.

198

APPENDIX A

INTERVIEW GUIDE

1. Please give me a brief overview of your educational and work history.

2. Why did you choose a career in public service?

3. Why have you stayed with your career in public service?

4. Describe your current work setting. Culture? People? Work?

5. Tell me about a particular challenge at work.

199

APPENDIX B

CONSENT FORM

Dear Participant:

You are invited to participate in a research project entitled “Learning in the Workplace: A Study of Public Sector Professionals.” For this project I will be investigating workplace learning and problem solving. Please read this entire document very carefully and feel free to ask me about anything that is confusing or needs further explanation. Thank you, Jackie Thomas ______

CONSENT I agree to take part in a research study titled “Learning in the Workplace: A Study of Public Sector Professionals,” which is being conducted by Jackie Thomas, University of Georgia, College of Education ([email protected] or XXX-XXX-XXXX), under the direction of Dr. Sharan B. Merriam, College of Education ([email protected] or 706-542-4018). I do not have to take part in this study. I can stop taking part at any time without giving any reason, and without penalty. I can ask to have information related to me returned to me, removed from the research records, or destroyed.

PURPOSE I understand that the purpose of the study is to understand how learning at work fosters the development of adult thinking.

BENEFITS The benefits that I may expect from it are two-fold: First, it is anticipated that reflection on learning experiences at work will lead to a deeper personal understanding of adult thinking and its development. Second, the identification of meaningful learning experiences could be useful not only to the individual working professional but those who plan and deliver learning experiences as well as the organization that sponsors learning activities.

PROCEDURES If I volunteer to take part in this study, I will be asked to do the following things: Participate in interviews, allow audiotape recording and transcription of the interviews, and allow access to documents and other artifacts of work and learning activities. It is anticipated that my personal time devoted to interviews will not exceed two hours.

DISCOMFORTS OR STRESSES I understand that no discomforts or stresses are anticipated during this research.

RISKS I understand that no risks are expected. 200

CONFIDENTIALITY The only person who will know that I am a research subject is Jackie Thomas. Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with me will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with my permission or as required by law. During the course of the study, UGA colleagues of Jackie Thomas will have access to the data but will not have access to any information that can be identified with me. I understand that any records of my identity will be secured and kept separate from audiotapes and transcribed interviews. Audiotapes of interviews and any other identifying personal information will be erased or destroyed at the conclusion of the study. Any data in a published article will be appropriately masked.

FURTHER QUESTIONS Jackie Thomas will answer any further questions about the research, now or during the course of the project, and can be reached [email protected] or XXX-XXX- XXXX.

FINAL AGREEMENT & CONSENT My signature below indicates that the researcher has answered all of my questions to my satisfaction and that I consent to volunteer for this study. I have been given a copy of this form.

CONSENT FORM SIGNATURES

______Signature of Researcher and Date Jackie B. Thomas, XXX-XXX-XXXX voice and fax, [email protected]

______Signature of Participant and Date

IRB OVERSIGHT Additional questions or problems regarding your rights as a research participant should be addressed to Chris A. Joseph, Ph.D., Human Subjects Office, University of Georgia, 612 Boyd Graduate Studies Research Center, Athens, Georgia 30602- 7411; Telephone (706) 542-3199; E-Mail Address [email protected]

TITLE OF STUDY: Learning in the Workplace: A Study of Public Sector Professionals PROJECT NUMBER: H2004-10215 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Ms. Jackie B. Thomas