Bruce LaRue

Synthesizing Higher Education and Corporate Learning Strategies[1]

Bruce LaRue and Stephanie Galindo

“The acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge has come to occupy a place in the politics of the knowledge society in the same way that acquisition and distribution of property and income have had a powerful influence in the Age of Capitalism over the last 2-3 centuries.” –Peter Drucker

The conceptual foundations underpinning this chapter are based on doctoral research and consulting activities conducted by Bruce LaRue in consultation with diverse multinational organizations representing network technology, forest products, commercial airlines, wireless telecommunications, financial services, surgical products, chemical manufacturing, management consulting, and the U.S. Department of Defense. While the organizations span various levels of technological complexity and their workers function at various levels of professional competence, each organization relies increasingly on the use of network technologies to conduct routine business affairs across cultural and national borders and each faces similar challenges in addressing the need for increased skill and knowledge requirements of its dispersed workforce. Each is also facing heightened levels of competition and rapid change due in large measure to economic forces propelled by the burgeoning use of information and communication technologies, leading to what has become known as the knowledge economy.

This chapter also draws upon Stephanie Galindo’s experience in higher education administration, curriculum management, and instructional design. Both authors have designed programming for mid-career graduate students from major global organizations who are conducting their studies through an online learning environment. These students seek to design models for managing vision and change in highly complex organizational contexts in international and multi-national settings as diverse as Iceland, Mexico, Canada, and Qatar.  Other students focus on themes such as integrity, loyalty, trust, and faith, leveraging their impact in the organizational environment.

We argue in this chapter that knowledge work[1] is predicated on a significantly heightened level of epistemological development and theoretical reasoning capacity wherein otherwise tacit systems of inference, inductive, and deductive schemata are made explicit as a basis of communication and coordinated action within and between knowledge-intensive organizational environments. This characterization of the geographically dispersed knowledge worker forms the basis for a model of networked learning that integrates selective aspects of higher education and corporate training with emerging forms of social networking technologies.

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Published in:

LaRue, B. and S. Galindo (2009). Synthesizing Corporate and Higher Education Learning Strategies. Handbook of online learning : innovations in higher education and corporate training. K. E. Rudestam and J. Schoenholtz-Read. Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications.