Concepts and Transformation - Volume 1, Issue 1, 1996

The article describes the Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania as an organizational innovation designed to mobilize the range of university resources to solve the strategic problem of creating democratic, local cosmopolitan communities. We identify the Center's approach to this problem as helping to develop university-assisted community schools, schools transformed to function as centers and catalysts for community revitalization with ongoing support from an institution of higher education. We argue that communal action research, in which scholarly attention is focused upon the university's local geographic area in a continuous comprehensive partnership with the community studied, is a particularly promising approach for revitalizing communities, advancing knowledge, and integrating the university's missions of research, teaching, and service. We describe the Turner Nutritional Awareness Project (TNAP), which works to alleviate nutrition problems in a university-assisted community school, as an example of communal action research conducted by all participants in a common project. We conclude by describing the structure and operation of the Center for Community Partnerships, claiming that the Center itself is part of a broader organizational change occurring throughout the American academy as urban universities, in particular, respond to severe external crises as well as internal difficulties resulting from the separation of service from teaching and research.

The search conference has come to be regarded as a critical intervention strategy within interorganizational domains. Yet the existing literature focuses more on the search conference as an event and less on what happens after the event. This paper focuses on post-search conference strategies in interorganizational domains. Four follow-up strategies — abort, fizzle-out, sustain, and diffuse and dissipate — emerge in the assessment of two search conference-based interventions in two different industries in Turkey. The paper shows that these strategies are co-produced in two dimensions: dialogue conditions among the stakeholders in the domain and the leadership strength of the referent organization.

The case of Action Research drives a wedge between two opposite views of research methodology: an 'exclusive ' (Platonic/theoretical) one which insists that only objective and quantitative inquiries (as in physics) are genuine scientific research, and an 'inclusive ' (Aristotelian/practical) one that recognizes a need to adapt the research methods of different inquiries to the nature of their problems. The latter approach involves seeing issues of methodology as dependent on half-a-dozen contextual factors, which are crucial to Action Research, yet which the former approach ignores.

The point about a 'Scientific theorY' has traditionally been that it provides a 'guarantee of truth.' While it has, on the one hand, proved difficult to establish such theory within fields like work, organization and leadership, the growing competition and complexity facing most modern organizations makes for an increase in the demand for theory. The purpose of this contribution is to explore what functions theory can play in a context where people are looking for help to unravel complexity, give meaning to experience, make ordered comparisons possible and provide reference points for learning. When these become the primary functions, what happens to 'theory'?

How may we conceive of cognition in practice? What kind of thinking and reflection animate the accomplishment of action? These problems are usually settled by an intellectualist argument: to perform an action is mainly to execute decisions, to carry out plans or intentions, or to follow instructions. According to that view, cognition produces action, but it does not take place in the accomplishment of action itself Such an intellectualist view has been taken up again and developed by recent trends in cognitive science. Why focus on such a view? Because, by its systematizing of current assumptions in most of (he theories of action, it makes the conceptual framework of those theories very clear and allows one to see the inconsistencies of its underpinning. The alternative view outlined in this paper is based on an externalist and pragmatic conception of mind. It considers cognition as a social process and reintegrates it into the performance of situated actions. To do so, it grasps performance as a genuine praxis and specifies the thinking and reflection which animate it in relation to the phenomenon of 'embodied agency.'

Globalization as a new phenomenon is structurally different from internationalization and multinationalization. It takes multiple forms and encompasses several processes. Four new specific features are discussed: (a) the shift from the history of 'the wealth of the nations' to the history of 'the wealth of the world'; (b) the notion that globalization implies the end of 'nation capitalism' and the gradual emergence of a 'global capitalism'; (c) instead of a truly genuine globalization, one sees a process of 'triadization' of the economy on a world level; and (d) the emergence of the enterprise as the most powerful player. The multiplicity of aspects and novelty of globalization means that there is a need for a 'theory' of globalization. To that end a brief systematic assessment of various major implications and consequences of today's globalization is presented. The fundamental weakness of present globalization is the growing dissociation between economic power organized on a world basis by global networks of enterprises and political power which remains organized at the national level.

This interview highlights important features in an improvement used by a Norwegian owned supplier to the international motor vehicle industry. This company sees the road to continuous improvements in terms of customer focusing, broad employee participation and cultivation of dialogues.