An economic development model was formulated to foster and strengthen commerce and industry retention and expansion in the state of Illinois. The main thrust of the model was on increasing productivity, decreasing business failures, encouraging entrepreneurship, and creating a favorable business climate through community support. To meet these…

With support from National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Goddard Space Flight Center, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) has developed educational materials that incorporate information and data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint satellite mission between the United States and Japan.…

The human resource development (HRD) profession needs to continue to develop its core theories and to integrate new theories into the body of knowledge. Creating new knowledge is of essential importance to both HRD practitioners and researchers. As an emerging field, HRD is in the process of defining itself as a discipline. Currently, there are…

This document contains three papers from a symposium on learning at the top that was conducted as part of a conference on human resource development (HRD). "Learning at the Top: An Investigation of Nonprofit CEOs' (Chief Executive Officers') Learning Experiences" (John J. Sherlock) reports on a study that used Mezirow's theory of adult…

In this report, learning conditions in Norwegian workplaces were examined to identify ways of making workplaces more conducive to learning. Data were collected through interviews in 11 firms and a questionnaire survey of 1,300 private sector and 200 public sector employees. Opportunities to learn through work varied widely. Older women with little…

This ethnographic study investigated why so few women become scientists or mathematicians. The study followed the lives of two groups of women, one black and one white, all with strong academic records, who were attending two southern U.S. universities, one predominantly black and the other predominantly white. The study was initiated in 1979 when…

The extent of coordination and integration of welfare and work force development systems was examined in a study that involved site visits to 12 localities in 6 states. The following factors were found to promote coordination: a previous history of coordination; a strong local economy and low unemployment; access to technology; greater financial…

The concept of the free agent learner, which has roots in self-directed and informal learning theory, has recently emerged as a factor important to attracting, developing, and keeping knowledge workers. The literature on free agent learning holds important lessons for today's free agent learners, human resource developers, and work organizations.…

A study examined whether Australia's technical and further education (TAFE) institutes are currently learning organizations or on the road to becoming learning organizations. Data were collected through a literature review and a questionnaire administered to staff at two dual-sector universities, two metropolitan TAFE institutes, and two…

The purpose of "Focus" is to provide coverage of poverty-related research, events, and issues, and to acquaint a large audience with the work of the Institute for Research on Poverty by means of short essays on selected pieces of research. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Changing poverty and changing antipoverty policies…

Three magnet middle schools which were established as part of a voluntary desegregation plan in a school system in a large, American city are described in this report. The schools are examined as organizations that differed in their innovative educational approaches to bring about desegregation. One school offered a system of open education, in…

A distinction is made between management for research and management of research. The former refers to the provision of a nourishing climate, sound policies supporting services of various kinds, financial systems, and organizational arrangements that will help research to flourish in a university. It exists to support the management of research, a…

The impact of state funding of higher education and corrections on African American men was studied by analyzing the National Association of State Budget Officers' annual state expenditure reports for the 15-year period from 1985 to 2000. To ensure proper scale, all 1985 figures were converted to 2000-year dollars by using the Bureau of Labor…

The question of why some employers opt to lay off current workers and hire new workers with different skills while other employers retrain and retain their workers was examined. First, the literature on employer-provided training and the role of social capital in the workplace was reviewed. Next, data from a 1994 national employers survey of firms…

This paper reviews Iceland's performance in skills accumulation against the backdrop of a rapidly changing economic environment and discusses directions for further improvements. Since the late 1990s, the government has considerably raised expenditure on education, which is now among the highest in the OECD relative to GDP. Nonetheless, Iceland…