Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of the history, the present and the future or the learning organization as a concept and a practical approach, from the perspective of Professor John Burgoyne. Design/methodology/approach: This conversation piece follows the development of the concept from its early days into the current debates and…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how the Nordic model, featuring highly regulated trade union-employer collaboration, has enabled the building of learning organizations through a co-generative learning model involving both practitioners and action researchers. Design/methodology/approach: A literature search on the Nordic sociotechnical…

This article discusses sensemaking as a broad framework for understanding organisational learning and its implications for leadership in a global context. Organisational metaphors, the concept of liminality and understanding organisations as interpretation systems are presented as possibilities for enhancing intercultural communication within…

For nearly three decades, the quality management philosophy known as Six Sigma has brought competitive advantage to organizations implementing it. The typical approach, however, has been to have leaders from operations, engineering, quality, and marketing manage this strategic initiative. Human resource's role has been to default to the…

The governance of most colleges and universities is shared among the board of trustees, the administration, and the faculty. Most four-year institutions endorse the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities (1966), which asserts that the faculty has "primary" authority over the…

Process improvement and organizational development go hand-in-hand. Building out your organizational process infrastructure will provide the tools necessary to build and maintain effective processes. It takes time, effort, and persistence to get through the initial stages, but the foundational steps of process awareness set the stage for later…

In a previous ethnographic study (Sebrant, 2000) a social constructionist view of how social identity is produced among professional groups in Swedish healthcare was developed. Looking at the workplace as an important environment for identity construction suggested that these processes were conditions for learning. The purpose of this paper is to…

The organization of institutions of higher education has been seen as operating with ambiguous purposes in vertically oriented structures that are only loosely connected. The rationale for this ambiguity is twofold: (1) to allow for creative thinking, and (2) to respect--and even encourage--the autonomy of different disciplines. But ambiguity of…

Evolving from experiences in a graduate seminar that led to new understandings of feminist pedagogy, this theory of feminist pedagogy in action rests on four phenomena that are each necessary but none sufficient. After describing the creation of a learning community as well as a search of educative research, a delineation of the four phenomena is…

Recounts the innovative changes in a newspaper's staff structure, noting the positive and negative results. (RL)

Five models commonly used to analyze change in the Swedish higher education system are described, and a sixth model related more to public administration than to education is proposed. The public administration model approaches higher education as a system of institutions interrelated by an authority structure, a relationship not fully considered…

Many school systems today find themselves in amazingly complex and puzzling environments. They are increasingly expected to turn direction quickly in response to changes in their environments, but they cannot change direction because they are bound by the arthritic bureaucratic designs of their systems, by old mental models of hierarchical power…

This paper provides information on the role of organizational development in the institutional planning process at Florida Junior College (FJC), using short statements on the functions and objectives of each of the major components within the planning process. First, an overview is provided of organizational development and its value in…

Planetary leadership (wanderers who seem to meander through their organizations making institutions work and change) can be a critical component of institutional change. Literature about management and organizational change is reviewed, and a case study of a major academic change at a public, suburban community college is discussed. (MLW)

Using a case study of a client with common problems in placing women in non-traditional positions, this speech raises questions of diagnosis and intervention and presents an alternative organizational model that is then applied to the case study. The organizational model emphasizes four components: (1) mission (purpose or rationale for existence…