Tull, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1884-6904 and Dyson, Tom (2026) Diffracting Future War: how NATO's COE network produces military learning. In: "Future of War": University of Oxford and Netherlands Defence Academy, 26th - 28th October, 2026, Marine Etablissement Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Abstract

Organisational studies richly conceptualises learning as situated in practice, distributed across systems that have no central mind, tensional between explicit and tacit knowing, and hard to move across the boundaries. That literature explains why learning is local, but it tends to treat those boundaries as given and says little about how non-learning is produced, especially within inter-organisational networks of specialised communities. Drawing on written testimony from a dedicated workshop conducted with NATO’s Centre of Excellence Directors, we ask why a network built to share expertise learns so unevenly. Working within the practice focus and process ontology of pragmatist research, we read the network’s difficulty as patterns of interference – reinforcement, cancellation, absence -- informed by the diffractive methodology that Barad developed and pragmatist research has recently begun to incorporate. We close with a research design for applying network modelling to make the conceptualised process dynamics and filaments more visible.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	organizational learning, military innovation, adaptation, Centres of Excellence
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) L Education > L Education (General) U Military Science > U Military Science (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Greenwich Business School Greenwich Business School > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) Greenwich Business School > School of Business, Operations and Strategy
Last Modified:	09 Jul 2026 10:57
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53929

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