Managing Performance in Extension: Redesigning the Performance Evaluation System at Illinois

This article describes the initiative of a large Extension system to improve its performance management system. Information on the utility of the present system was sought from a wide range of stakeholders, and key strengths and weaknesses were identified. The revision focused on updating and simplifying the performance dimensions, creating a single set of requirements for all levels of staff, and moving towards an electronic submission, storage, and retrieval system for evaluative information. The article concludes with implementation and evaluation strategies and lessons learned along the continuous improvement path of performance management at Illinois

Birds of a Feather? The Critique of the North American Business School and its Implications for Educating HRD Practitioners

The recent vehement and highly visible critique of the North American business school curriculum illuminates core tensions in the field of human resource devel-opment (HRD) related to the role and responsibility of the profession in for-profit organizations and the educative process by which future practitioners are pre-pared. If the business school critique, raised by eminent management scholars in the academy, has validity, then an instrumental and functionalist orientation to HRD is not adaptive but, in fact, is counterproductive and shortchanges the needs of business organizations for transformational change and development. Based on a review of the business school critique and research on HRD academic programs in the United States, the author argues for a broader emphasis on sys-temic change and the transformative potential of the profession based on critical human resource development and positive organizational scholarship