Education and business, as professional disciplines, seem, at first glance, to be linked. Both are social enterprises involving relationships and processes derived to accomplish a particular set of tasks. However the track record of injecting business methodology into school communities has been poor. Historically the introduction of management…

In 1996 Hubert Saint-Onge and Smith published an article ("The evolutionary organization: avoiding a Titanic fate", in The Learning Organization, Vol. 3 No. 4), based on their experience at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). It was established at CIBC that change could be successfully facilitated through blended application…

A decision to don the chaos lens, adopt dialogue as its primary mode of communication, and to recognize the power of the organizational mind has fundamentally and irreversibly changed the way a Dutch capital-equipment manufacturer operates in its rapidly complexifying global marketplace. Beginning in September 1999, the focus of an ever widening…

The social-systems perspective in organizational theory faded because the increasing complexity of social relations hindered determination of an appropriate unit of analysis. Also, the business-school environment in which organizational research occurred discouraged examination of broad social questions, promoted a particular approach to science,…