Systems Convening: A Crucial Form of Leadership for the 21st Century

Social learning across complex landscapes requires a certain kind of leadership, which we have called systems convening. Many people do this kind of work without any label, often unrecognized, and sometimes not even particularly aware that they are doing it. A systems convener or systems convening team sets up spaces for new types of conversations between people who often live on different sides of a boundary. For example, a geographic, cultural, disciplinary, political, class, social boundary. These conveners see a social landscape with all its separate and related practices through a wide-angle lens: they spot opportunities for creating new learning spaces and partnership that will bring different and often unlikely people together to engage in learning across boundaries. A systems convener takes a “landscape view” of wherever they are and what they need to do to increase the learning capability of that entire landscape – rather than simply the capability of the space they are standing in. Importantly, a systems convener is someone who has enough legitimacy in different worlds to be able to convene people in those different worlds into a joint conversation. This book draws on interviews with 40 systems conveners who are using this approach around the world, working on diverse issues ranging from improving government transparency to enhancing cancer care

Developing a Program Community of Practice for Leadership Development

This article outlines how a community of practice can be designed within management education for effective leadership development. Through a qualitative study of a cohort of 25 owner-managers of small businesses, we explore how a program community of practice (PCoP) acts as a pedagogical device for focusing on the development of leadership practice. Drawn from ‘grounded theory’ analysis, we outline a pedagogic heuristic of a PCoP built upon on an emergent rather than a didactic curriculum, shaped by the PCoP members’ own experiences and practices of managing their businesses. Our contribution is to illustrate the significant value of applying communities of practice theory to pedagogic designs in order to advance the development of leadership practice in small businesses. We critically examine this contribution with regard to the scope that designing a PCoP can bring to leadership development and the challenges for educators designing and facilitating an emergent curriculum

Boundaries and boundary objects:An evaluation framework for mixed methods research

While mixed methods research is increasingly established as a methodological approach,researchers still struggle with boundaries arising from commitments to different methods and paradigms, and from attention to social justice. Combining two lines of work - social learning theory and the Imagine Program at the University of Brighton - we present an evaluation framework that was used to integrate the perspectives of multiple stakeholders in the program's social interventions. We explore how this ‘‘value-creation framework'' acts as a boundary object across ‘‘boundaries of practice,'' specifically across quantitative and qualitative methods, philosophical paradigms, and participant perspectives. We argue that the framework's focus on cycles of value creation provided the Imagine Program with a shared language for negotiating interpretation and action across those boundaries

Climate-Smart Agricultural Value Chains: Risks and Perspectives

Extreme weather is causing significant problems for smallholder farmers and others who depend on agricultural value chains in developing countries. Although value-chain analysis can help untangle the complex relationships within agricultural systems, it often has failed to take into account the effects of climate change. Climate-change assessments, meanwhile, often focus on the production node while neglecting other components of the value chain. In response to these shortcomings, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), in collaboration with the Government of Kenya, developed the climate risk profiles (CRP) approach. Using a case study from Nyandarua County in Kenya, we illustrate how this approach (i) supports identification of major climate risks and their impacts on the value chain, (ii) identifies adaptation interventions, and (iii) promotes the mainstreaming of climate-change considerations into development planning at the subnational level. Our results show that the magnitude of a climate risk varies across value chains. At the input and production stage, strategies for supporting climate-smart value chains include the following: improving access to input markets, supporting diversification and value addition, provision of climate-smart production technologies, dissemination of climate information services, and making financial and insurance services available. At the harvesting, processing and marketing stages, useful interventions would include strengthening farmer organization, investing in climate-proofed infrastructure including roads and facilities for storage, processing and improving access to output markets. Finally, climate-change adaptation along the value chain would be improved by strengthening existing institutions, exploring public-private partnerships and adopting coherent local policies

Fashion archive fervour: the critical role of fashion archives in preserving, curating, and narrating fashion

Fashion items and artefacts across the 19th and 20th centuries were once considered unworthy of placement in museums and archives on account of their perishable nature and their association with the shallow pleasures of low culture. The perceived fragile and ephemeral nature of fashion garments and accessories has been reevaluated with material objects now considered worth saving for multiple purposes and uses. Awareness of the high social, cultural, economic, and historic value of physical fashion relics has resulted in the trend for fashion designers, brands, and museums to collate, create, and manage fashion archives. The article analyses the importance for both industry and consumer of preserving and accessing fashion archives in the 21st century in both digital and traditional ways. It highlights the benefits of collating a holistic multi-modal archive by combining material and textual cultural objects in various forms to portray and contextualize the lived social experience. A case study will analyse a selected educational fashion archive based in postcolonial Hong Kong. The contemporary fashion archive’s role is evaluated from the perspective of archivist and user regarding contested issues such as commercialization, curatorial objectivity, or controlled access, while evaluating future directions for the fashion archive as ultimate style repository