Puolustusvoimien perusyksikön päällikkö työyhteisössä ja yksikön ulkopuolisissa sosiaalisissa verkostoissa

The aim of this paper is to analyze a company commander’s activity within his or her workplace community and external professional network in the Finnish Defence Forces (FDF) context. FDF’s company commander’s expert activity is thus networked and relational in nature. Such expertise can be seen as social interaction, knowledge sharing, and shared problem solving in interaction between individuals, communities and broader networks. These dynamics can be analyzed with the help of social networked analysis (SNA). Within SNA, these networks fall under the concept of egocentric networks. Workplace communities in FDF are not isolated from one another. Their development and pursuit of innovation depends on the fact that many of the participants are also members of other professional communities extending beyond the professional organization in question. New perspectives offered by professional development in interaction, knowledge sharing, knowledge communities and networking, mainly applied in business setting, have relevance in company commanders’ professional development too. It is also essential to understand how such pedagogical communities focusing on creation of new knowledge and novel social practices, function and how these kinds of communities can deliberately be cultivated. Also, a company commander’s personal life, formal and informal relations and accumulation of experience all affect her or his working behaviour. This is one of the realizations that broadens the perspective on professional development of company commanders from individual achievements to a larger framework of relations, where professional development is contributed to by the interaction of relationship of networks