Bright Spots Leadership in the Pacific Northwest

The operating environment for nonprofit cultural organizations today is daunting. Demographic shifts, changing participation patterns, evolving technology, increased competition for consumer attention, rising costs of doing business, shifts in the philanthropic sector and public funding, and the lingering recession form a stew of change and uncertainty. Every cultural organization is experiencing a combination of these shifts, each in its own way. Yet, while some organizations are struggling in this changing context, others are managing to stay healthy and dynamic while operating under the same conditions as their peers. These groups are observable exceptions, recognized by their peers as achieving success outside the norm in their artistic program, their engagement of community, and/or their financial stability. These are the "bright spots" of the cultural sector.Who are they? What are they doing differently? What can we learn by studying their behavior?To explore these questions, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation asked Helicon Collaborative to conduct a study of cultural groups in the Pacific Northwest. The project had two goals: 1) to identify "bright spots," defined as cultural organizations that are successfully adapting to their changing circumstances without exceptional resources, and 2) to see if these organizations share characteristics or strategies that can be replicated by others

Animating hatreds: research encounters, organisational secrets, emotional truths

About the book: Feminist research is informed by a history of breaking silences, of demanding that women's voices be heard, recorded and included in wider intellectual genealogies and histories. This has led to an emphasis on voice and speaking out in the research endeavour. Moments of secrecy and silence are less often addressed. This gives rise to a number of questions. What are the silences, secrets, omissions and and political consequences of such moments? What particular dilemmas and constraints do they represent or entail? What are their implications for research praxis? Are such moments always indicative of voicelessness or powerlessness? Or may they also constitute a productive moment in the research encounter? Contributors to this volume were invited to reflect on these questions. The resulting chapters are a fascinating collection of insights into the research process, making an important contribution to theoretical and empirical debates about epistemology, subjectivity and identity in research. Researchers often face difficult dilemmas about who to represent and how, what to omit and what to include. This book explores such questions in an important and timely collection of essays from international scholars

Designing and managing Organizational Interoperability with organizational capabilities and roadmaps

This paper discusses organizational interoperability issues in through the study of two cases. Then it presents a framework which can help to design and manage this interoperability, by driving the development of “organizational capabilities”.Organization learning, Functional interoperability

Experiencing Rare and Unusual Events Richly: The Role of Middle Managers in Animating and Guiding Organizational Interpretation

Organizations have difficulty learning from rare and unusual events because of their inability to interpret these events. Because organizations develop habitual ways of interpreting events—often top down—they can easily miss the novelty of rare and unusual events, which prevents them from experiencing events “richly.” We propose a multilevel, multistaged model of organizational interpretation that highlights the important, but generally unacknowledged, role middle managers can play in helping organizations experience rare and unusual events richly. Our model accounts for the effect of cognitive biases and hierarchical context on organizational interpretation. Because of their proximity to the interpretations of both strategic and front-line managers, middle managers can encourage divergence in interpretations of managers across hierarchical levels during early stages of the interpretation process and can blend and synthesize the divergent interpretations of managers during later stages. In this way middle managers contribute to a dynamic process of organizational interpretation in which multiple filters from throughout the organization help frame and enrich interpretations of rare and unusual events, which enables organizational learning

Networks of Gratitude: Structures of Thanks and User Expectations in Workplace Appreciation Systems

Appreciation systems--platforms for users to exchange thanks and praise--are becoming common in the workplace, where employees share appreciation, managers are notified, and aggregate scores are sometimes made visible. Who do people thank on these systems, and what do they expect from each other and their managers? After introducing the design affordances of 13 appreciation systems, we discuss a system we call Gratia, in use at a large multinational company for over four years. Using logs of 422,000 appreciation messages and user surveys, we explore the social dynamics of use and ask if use of the system addresses the recognition problem. We find that while thanks is mostly exchanged among employees at the same level and different parts of the company, addressing the recognition problem, managers do not always act on that recognition in ways that employees expect.Comment: in Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 201

Organizational Climate as Performance Driver: Health Care Workers’ Perception in a Large Hospital

Recently health care (HC) organizations have increasingly embarked on organizational climate (OC) assessment with the intent to improve their efficiency and the quality of the delivered services. This is important; however, it is even if more crucial to ensure that workers engaged in the evaluation process are aware of the importance of their fruitful engagement in this investigation as well as of its potential benefits. From the management viewpoint, this is crucial to plan and implement management initiatives able to create a great place to work. The purpose of this paper is to shed empirical light on how, in effect, HC workers perceive OC for itself and as a performance driver to assess and manage. The study was carried out through an action research (AR) project, which included the use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Key phases of the AR project were some focus groups and a survey. During the focus groups, several methods and approaches were adopted for getting opinions from people and animating discussion. About the survey, a total sample of 560 HC workers was investigated. The AR project has shown that even if HC workers intuitively conceive OC as an important performance driver, the meaning of the construct is not completely clear. Moreover, a good level of awareness among HC workers about how and why OC can improve individual and organizational performance represents a key issue to address in evaluating and managing OC

Promises and Problems: Promoting Deeper Learning in a High-Performing Education System

Today’s American public schools are expected to promote deeper learning and cultivate 21st-century skills in order to achieve equity and excellence for all students. Yet these goals, and the intellectually ambitious instruction they demand, fall far from the status quo of the schools most students attend, particularly in high-poverty school systems where the need for deep, systemic innovation and improvement is often greatest – and the challenges are proportionate to that need. Such work is novel, complex, uncertain, and hard. There are few exemplars in the field, and little empirical research that examines the efforts of schools and systems actively striving for these goals. Despite continual calls for deeper learning, for dramatic improvement in our most struggling school systems, and for equity and excellence in our U.S. school system writ large, we lack the knowledge for how to construct new school models that might achieve these aims. This study tackles this knowledge gap by generating theoretical and practical knowledge about redesigning low-income school systems for deeper learning that advances equity and excellence. I use a mixed-methods, embedded single-case study design to examine the efforts of one charter management organization in constructing, developing, and animating a novel school model to yield deeper learning for all students, and to better grasp the factors that complicate these innovation efforts. My findings indicate three critical factors that complicate attempts at novelty: inherited conditions, such as the inherited understandings of school culture and instruction that individuals and the organization itself bring with them to this work; a learning imperative derived from the uncertainty and complexity of doing novel, innovative work; and the challenges of relying on inherited modes of organizational learning that are ill-suited to meet the learning imperative at hand. The data further suggest that, despite strong dynamics at play that might push a school system toward a dramatic, “greenfield” approach to school improvement, it may be useful to recalibrate (though not lower) expectations for such work and seek alternative ways to manage its inherently complicating features. This dissertation sheds much needed light on the scope and particulars of the challenges that accompany educational innovation, while also offering insight into ways that schools and systems might successfully manage such challenges, and illustrating the promise and importance of these efforts.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162965/1/areinish_1.pd

Post-bureaucracy and reanimating public governance: A discourse and practice of continuity?

Purpose 'Seeks to examine changes in the environment in which public policy and public management operate and the claim that bureaucracy has been replaced by post-bureaucracy as a result of these changes. Design/methodology/approach – It proposes reanimated public governance as a concept that occupies the space between public administration and restructured public governance (including reinvented government and New Public Management (NPM). Rather than accepting the existence of post-bureaucracy, per se, the paper argues that there has been a process of extending bureaucracy that cuts across public and non-public boundaries rather than the development of post-bureaucracy per se. Findings – In examining the claims for post-bureaucracy, we are witnessing a discourse and practice of continuity rather than difference. The need for economies of scale and scope, standardisation and the existence of indivisibilities in public services suggest that public sector reforms and proposals for new governance models establish extended or flexible forms of bureaucracy rather than post-bureaucratic organisational forms. Attempts to introduce ICT-based services and the need for regulatory agencies to oversee the contracts with private and non-profit service providers reinforce these findings. Research limitations/implications – The arguments in this paper are based on marshalling the literature and debates surrounding public sector reform to advance a central thesis. It draws on real world examples but does not advance direct empirical evidence. There is scope for internationally comparative case-studies of different public service functions and discourses and practices in different countries Practical implications – Policy makers and managers should treat the clarion call of post-bureaucracy as a way of liberating public services from a lack of creativity, innovation and accountability with healthy scepticism. In particular, the view that public sector reforms through post-bureaucratic re-organisation will lead to efficiencies is one to be challenged. Reforms in any service driven organisations are not zero-cost and any implied operational cost saving should be considered against increased transaction costs. Originality/value – There have been heroic claims made for post-bureaucracy in many organisations enabled by developments associated with the concepts of information society and knowledge society. By locating public sector reforms under the rubric of 'restructured public governance' a deeper investigation of the implications for the discourses and practices associated with public sector reform is advanced