In the mid-nineties, the New York City Schools Chancellor created a citywide improvement zone to take over a significant proportion of the city's lowest performing schools whose local community school districts had failed to improve them. This "Chancellor's District" defined centralized management, rather than local control, as the…

Learning leadership happens experientially, through involvement in opportunities to practice the skills, experiment with approaches, and try on the roles. For youth leadership development, it means creating opportunities for young people to do more than hear stories of great leadership or participate in skills-building activities. In much of her…

This paper reports upon a two-year, qualitative, case study action research investigation into "learning within a project team". This project team undertook a significant socio-technical redesign project within a major Australian heavy engineering/manufacturing operation. The paper identifies and elaborates upon a number of elements that…

Purpose: The paper aims to investigate the role of educational development centres, and their potential for playing a broader and more central role in quality and organisational development. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on the results of three external evaluations of educational development centres in Denmark and Norway,…

Higher education systems and institutions have used institutional mergers to address a range of different problems, particularly fragmentation amongst non-university institutions, lack of financial and academic viability, pressures for major system restructuring and external competitive threats. While mergers frequently are disruptive, strongly…

Objective: The authors describe the complexity of social processes for implementing technological change. Once a new technology is available, information about its availability and benefits must be made available to the community of users, with opportunities to try the innovations and find them worthwhile, despite organizational resistances.…

This article reviews some of the most influential theories relating to leadership and the management of change, and evaluates their efficacy in explaining the approach taken to leadership and the management of change in a post-1992 university. It notes that appointment practices to senior positions in such institutions appear to be based on…

Action researchers frequently find themselves caught in a tension between the need to generate actionable, useful knowledge as an outcome of publicly funded research and the necessity to recognize that knowledge can only be actionable, and useful in that sense, if it is locally and culturally specific. This paper directly addresses this tension…

This paper examines the authors' experiences as action learning set facilitators within a public sector organisation undergoing change. Our objectives were to assist in the identification of internal and external drivers for change and to work with the set to explore how people's roles and responsibilities might be enhanced and developed in a…

This paper examines the extent to which masculinity played a role in the incorporation of an education college into a university in South Africa. I adopt the theoretical stance that masculinity is not a biological phenomenon that is peculiar to males but the socially constructed behaviour of masculine subjects that is contextually driven, and that…

Five years ago, Robert E. Lee High School was a big school with big problems. Overcrowding at the 3,100-student school forced some students to use air-conditioning units for chairs. Hallway fights broke out daily. At least half the freshmen disappeared from the roll books before reaching 12th grade. The thing to do, school leaders decided, was to…

The critical importance of understanding, selecting, and developing global management talent--management operating within internationally diverse interpersonal and situational contexts--has emerged from the increasing globalization of business and the concomitant high rates of immigration, emigration, and expatriation. With an awareness of this…

The Academy for Educational Development (AED) sent a research team to Montclair State University (MSU) on September 25-26, 2008 to conduct interviews with individuals who play important roles in the university's teacher preparation program. These interviews, along with additional documentation provided by MSU and identified by the AED research…

In response to an increasingly globalized world, universities are engaged in an ambiguous and unclear journey of internationalization for economic and political reasons, and guided by different ideologies. Universities' distinctive nature and unique characteristics give culture a prominent role in mediating the university environment. This study…

The findings of the evaluation of the three-year Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative are presented, describing changes in institutional capacity for community-engaged scholarship, and changes in promotion and tenure policies and processes. The change process in the participating institutions is assessed using the Kotter model of…