The present article describes the use of action learning by a group of 30 franchisees to organise themselves and work through a period of upheaval and uncertainty when their parent company faced liquidation. Written from the perspective of one of the franchisees who found herself adopting action learning principles to facilitate the group, it…

A growing consensus exists regarding Quality of Life measures and their use to support person-centred planning and organisational development. A survey designed to assess current Quality of Life of 256 adults with intellectual disabilities was conducted across a range of 22 service providers in the Republic of Ireland using Personal Outcome…

The role of work-based learning is a pivotal part of developing the learning region. With rates of employment at their highest for many years across Europe, the need for up-skilling the workforce in many areas will be essential to retain competitiveness and employability. This paper will focus on quality management up-skilling in small to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the pattern of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) by Irish MNCs, and more specifically, to investigate their approach to human capital development and how these correspond to foreign MNCs in Ireland. In particular, it seeks to investigate training and development expenditure, adoption of…

Focusing on Irish high-tech start-ups, this paper reports on the results of an empirical study of organization building by entrepreneurial firms, specifically in relation to human resource practices. The research findings are benchmarked with findings from SPEC, the Stanford Project of Emerging Companies (Baron and Hannan, 2002). Human resources…

A survey of 56 small/medium-sized Irish enterprises showed that 46% were highly proficient in electronic commerce, 42% were at the basic level. Media pressure significantly influenced adoption. In 40% of firms, owner-managers were the driving force. E-commerce was not yet business critical and relevant training was not yet a comprehensive…

Ethnography is used sparingly in audits, giving "richness" to phenomena which are preferably measured rather than interrogated. This paper considers the development of qualitative tools for equality audits in education settings, drawing upon an equal status review conducted in Ireland during 2005-2006 with dual interests in…

The aim of this paper is to dwell on the trends in the development of Jewish education in Dublin. The discussion is based on books written about the Jewish community and central figures in it, on interviews with people who were involved in shaping the Jewish education and with others who were familiar with it, on community magazines and documents…

While much of the literature on action learning focuses on managers developing their capacity to learn and transform their own organizations, this article explores how action learning has been used in inter-organisational settings. Two settings are presented: the first an EU-funded management development programme called the National Action…

Purpose--The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a learning organisation can be created within the framework of the family SME in Ireland. Design/methodology/approach--No comprehensive list of independent family businesses in Ireland was available. To overcome this problem a pragmatic approach was taken in the construction of a sampling…

Inspired by observation of a teacher-designed management studies program at an Irish secondary school, this paper demonstrates that whole school improvement is possible only after staff have acquired proficiency in the disciplines required of learning organizations. Free of externally imposed syllabi, teachers were forced to rethink, relearn, and…

This paper explores the landscape of training and development in the Republic of Ireland, a country with an impressive economic record in recent years. Both the Irish economic context and business context are explored. The national system for training and development and the surrounding policy and strategy context are set down. Survey data are…

Transfer of learning from management development programmes has been described as the effective and continuing application back at work of the knowledge and skills gained on those programmes. It is a very important issue for organizations today, given the large amounts of investment in these programmes and the small amounts of that investment that…

The committee reports on adult education needs in Ireland and proposes a structure to service them. An initial examination of existing adult education services, published in an interim report with a directory of agencies, stimulated further submissions of information from Ireland and abroad. Basic conclusions on the type of permanent structure…

This volume, the second of a two-volume publication, comprises 15 papers that present the work of individual European projects dealing with learning within organizations. These five chapters in Part 1, The Meaning of the Learning Organization, examine the conceptual frameworks and dilemmas at the heart of the notion of the learning organization:…