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This Master s thesis research examines organizational learning through artistic methods in Finnish social and health care organizations. The theoretical framework is based on social constructionism and consists of four main concepts (professional artistry, reflective practice, polyphony, third space) that discuss the importance of reflection and reflective processes when developing work communities with artistic interventions. The study was carried out as an ethnographic case study in a Finnish project Tukeva porras. The project has created a new kind of wellbeing service in the Lahti area where professional visual artists are placed in social and health care organizations as community s artists. Artists pursue their own artistic work in relation to the community, and aim to contribute to the wellbeing and learning of the whole community. The principal research method was participative observation as the researcher worked as an intern for the project from May 2014 until December 2014. In addition to the field diary, the research data consists of written material of the project and organized group interviews of four customer organizations, collected in Lahti in October 2014. The interviews were conducted as thematic interviews and analysed with the method of theory-bound content analysis. The interest of this research is to discover how the concept of community s artist is constructed within the project, and whether the working of the artists enhance individual and collective reflection in the work communities and lead to organizational learning. The concept of community s artist is a new job description that requires collaboration of multiple actors from the field of art and social and health care; yet the coordinators of the project play a significant role as they organize and support the co-working. It emerges that the community s artists inspired the workers of social and health care to employ more creativity in their work and to question normative ways of conducting their work. As people reacted differently to the working of the artist expressing divergent opinions and worldviews, the work communities were able to get to know themselves better and to grow in tolerance towards each other. In some communities the artist and the workers of social and health care came up with new ways of conducting their work in collaboration, allowing both parties to grow professionally. Even though the findings of the study cannot be generalized, the richness of the data enables the study to contribute to a deepening understanding of arts-based working in a specific context and providing information about the nature of the project Tukeva porras. It is concluded that an important characteristic of the concept is the way in which reflective processes and their following development initiatives are born at grass-roots level. |
