"Appreciative Inquiry" (AI) is a structured approach to visioning focused on reflection, introspection, and collaboration. Rooted in organizational behavior theory, AI was introduced in the early 1980s as a life-centric approach to human systems (Watkins and Mohr 2001). Since then, AI has been used widely within the business community;…

Tim Clydesdale is professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey. This article is adapted from the author's forthcoming book "Calling on Purpose: The Conversation Every Campus Must Have with Students" (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Clydesdale met two students, James and Tracy, during their senior year of college, when his…

In this paper, four qualitative case studies capture the complex interplay between the social and structural relations that shape community - academic partnerships. Collaborations begin as relationships among people. They are sustained by institutional structures that recognize and support these relationships. Productive collaborations centralize…

This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

Purpose: Higher education is increasingly being scrutinised and discourse centred on its usefulness to stakeholders. In 1992, the University for Development Studies (UDS) was established in Northern Ghana with a mission to engage with local communities to develop the area. This paper aims to understand the quality perspective of the university…

This article is a historical case study of George Fox University (GFU) in Newberg, Oregon. Using organizational lifecycle as a theoretical framework, George Fox University had a long and delayed childhood in that it remained a small and struggling institution for most of the 20th century, and then experienced rapid growth in the late 1980s. This…

Within the broad theoretical context provided by debates on the South African education reforms and the civic engagement agenda in higher education, this article focuses on service learning in higher education and portrays complex relationships between the service-learning office and different existing structures within and outside the University…