Whereas growth in international school numbers is widely reported, less attention has been given to how these schools have developed as organisations. Drawing on organisational life-cycle models (Greiner, 1972) and the work of DiMaggio and Powell (1983), this paper addresses that gap. As international schools grow individually, and as the field…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to place the idea of the learning organization in a historical, multidisciplinary context with the aim of identifying obstacles and opportunities for its greater realization in practice. Design/methodology/approach: Marking the 30th anniversary of publication of Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline",…

Workplace inclusion is a hot topic, defined as an organizational environment where everyone can reach his or her full potential. Much has been written over the last decade or so and themes of various annual conferences across the country have emphasized the need for socially conscious museums. Creating inclusive work environments and work…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose how a bottom-up creation of an ambidextrous organization can be enabled. By integrating research on "contextual ambidexterity" and "individual and organizational capacity building", an "innovation capacity building" framework is conceptualized that suggests how balance…

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…

As individuals and adult educators we consistently face an array of what seem to be increasingly complex challenges. These run the gamut from battling poverty and illness with their deleterious and deadly effects, to acquiring literacy and workplace competencies and to building expertise in communication, collaboration and innovation. And we live…

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…

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…

This paper explores the relationship between action learning and Organisation Development (OD). It proposes that they are overlapping fields of practice, with interesting similarities and differences. Both fields of practice are experienced as challenging to conventional ways of viewing organisations and people but are also subject to increasing…

This article examines the phenomenon of volunteering from a benefit-cost perspective. Both the individual making a decision to volunteer and the organization making a decision to use volunteer labor face benefits and costs of their actions, yet these costs and benefits almost always remain unarticulated, perhaps because the common perception of…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to analyse the evolution of the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization and propose guidelines for the future. Design/methodology/approach: The evolution of organizational learning and the learning organization is analysed in the light of the three-stage model of the evolution of…

This paper shows the implementation of "5S"--a Japanese concept of housekeeping--through action research methodology. The organisational issue it tackles is the cultural inhibition among the Indian population against cleaning. It uses soft systems methodology (SSM), action science and Schein's idea of clinical enquiry to bring about an…

This article provides a historiographical analysis of major leadership and organizational development theories that have shaped our thinking about how we lead and administrate academic libraries. Drawing from behavioral, cognitive, systems, and complexity theories, this article discusses major theorists and research studies appearing over the past…

This conceptual paper explores the notion of higher education (HE) internationalization and its potential to lead to transformational institutional change. Internationalization is generally regarded as a process that involves increasing the range of international activities within universities and between universities and other educational…

The study is situated within a national youth organisation called the Australian Air League Inc (Air League). We examine the recent progress of the Air League in South Australia, starting as a loose network of volunteers engaged in a sporadic array of activities, to become a learning community that worked collaboratively and then developed further…