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...

Purpose: This paper aims to locate its appreciation of the life and work of Arie de Geus within the context of developments in approaches to management practice, education and learning since the Second World War. It emphasizes the important influence of top management-led applications of social...

A review in depth of Policy Studies Issue 13:1 considering the progress made to date by the Training and Enterprise Councils in the UK. It provides an informed and valuable backdrop to the varied and interesting papers which go to make up this special issue. The papers consider the TECs from a...

Outlines some of the questions raised during the course of a qualitative research inquiry into the personal consequences of organisational change for directors who are “drivers” of such change. Links these questions to more general issues and trends in the organisation of work (Handy) and...

The use of self‐development activities as alternatives to traditional course‐based training and management development is discussed. The author describes one company's experiment in support of self‐development, drawing on prior experiences with taskforces, project groups, MBO, assessment...

The term “transformation” is much used in the practice and literature of management and organizations. We are curious as to why there has been little challenge to or questioning of usage of the term. In this paper we identify a number of dimensions on which usage of ‘transformation’...

This article describes the application of principles applied in the development of a Masters programme in Public Administration in the Netherlands fifteen years ago to the design of a very different programme for senior managers in a UK public bureaucracy. Both programmes placed heavy emphasis...