W. Edwards Deming has suggested 96% of organization performance is a function of the organization's structure. He contends only about 4% of an organization's performance is attributable to the people. This is a fundamental difference as most school leaders work with the basic assumption that 80% of a school's performance is related to staff and…

Support for producing systematic reviews about health systems is less well developed than for those about clinical practice. From interviewing policy makers and systematic reviewers we identified institutional mechanisms which bring systematic reviews and policy priorities closer by harnessing organisational and individual motivations, emphasising…

The authors in this special issue on systems-level consultation provide an excellent range of models for how school psychologists can work as system-level consultants within the various communities they serve. This article (a) provides commentary on the four articles in this special issue focused on systems-level consultation to serve diverse…

Following Snow's (1973) description of an "inductive" process of theory formation, this article addresses the organization of the knowledge base on school effectiveness. A multilevel presentation stimulated the conceptualization of educational effectiveness as an integration of system-level, school-level, and classroom-level…

Nowadays, the dissemination and exploitation of three-dimensional (3D) multi-user virtual worlds in higher education have been disclosed from their widespread acceptance as candidate learning platforms. However, it is still lacking a theoretical cybernetic macro-script to elaborate the coordination of multiple complex interactions among…

System-level consultation or organizational development in schools is an area in great need of theoretical models and definitions. The three articles in this special issue provide a unique learning opportunity not only for consultation across borders but also for consultation within the same nation. In my commentary, I limit my remarks to a few…

States, districts, and schools all across the United States are busy developing or implementing teacher evaluation systems. One can trace this flurry of activity to a variety of reports and initiatives that highlight two failings of past efforts: (1) Teacher evaluation systems have not accurately measured teacher quality because they've failed to…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…

The author notes that she finds the case for making spiritual development a priority surprisingly compelling--"surprisingly" because although she is an expert on adolescent development, she has not done research or previously written about spiritual development. She suggests that a systems analysis occur first, before engaging frontline youth…

In both the United States and Canada, higher education faculty have access to voluntary faculty development activities through continuing professional education departments, but rarely are preparatory programs available for those preparing to become faculty. Faculty development initiatives are only infrequently grounded in adult education…

Professions are occupational arrangements for dealing with human problems. Professional "people work" requires a certain interactive closeness; face-to-face communication is prominent in professional-client relations. This also seems the case in the educational system. But in education, organization provides the "raison d'etre" of this profession.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to show that changes in social systems do not occur randomly. They are consistent with what has gone on before, with the history and identity of the system. As long as the organizing principles of a dominant culture remain unchallenged, behavior of all the social-units originating from this culture will remain…

Following a landmark organisational change event within the University of Western Sydney, when the university ceased operating as a federation of four distinct, inter-related elements and merged to become a single entity, four foundation College Managers made a strategic decision to form an alliance. This alliance significantly enhanced the…

Information systems (IS) process modeling using the technique of Data Flow Diagramming (viz., Systems Analysis) can be defined as a complex task for IS designers. This study draws from the domains of educational psychology and organizational behavior in examining the training of novices in conceptual process modeling. Specifically, an experiment…

Despite growing research on the positive connections between work and family, antecedents and consequences of work-family enrichment are understudied. Using a sample of employees from a major insurance company, we assessed the relationship of (i) individual (i.e., work and family identities), (ii) family (emotional and instrumental support), and…