Beyond an island experience: towards an archipelago of collaborative learning

This paper constitutes an autoethnographic account of one’s delegate’s inner process post participation in the September 2016 Art of Management and Organisation Conference (AoMO) in Bled, Slovenia. This account troubles issues concerning the persistence of learning and social connection post the ‘island’ experience of a conference itself. It charts the ‘call and response’ patterns of written exchange between the autoethnographer and his respondents, relating the effects of this reflexive ‘call and response’ on both parties sense of self and sense of professional direction. The paper suggests that through this written exchange the conference experience ceases to be a nostalgia infused island and instead becomes a generative archipelago that clusters learning and propulsive action towards itself

Who put the cult in culture?

This paper subjects the management blockbuster 'Built to Last' (Collins & Porras 1992) to paradigmic analysis through the medium of the Burrell & Morgan (1979) framework. The interest is to explore the extent to which such a popular text could equally appeal to both populist and evidence-based business academic audiences, and to explore how the authors' have engineered this dual appeal. The authors are explicit as to the research aims and research design underlying their inquiry, and are not reticent in making claims for the intellectual robustness and practical transferability of findings derived from their innovative research approach. This clarity of research purpose greatly facilitates the process of assessing the extent to which the authors satisfy their own criteria - an assessment which the authors themselves challenge the reader to engage with in their opening ‘methods’ chapter

Covert repertoires: ecotage in the UK

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires

The evolution of one practitioner's coach approach: taking the coaching turn

This largely autoethnographic paper explores the early trajectory of one consultant’s career through the seventies and eighties, seeking to detect the point at which this practice took the ‘coaching turn’. The purpose of conducting this piece of personal exploration is to discover what the core of a ‘coach approach’ might have comprised before coaching become professionalized and codified; and perhaps to ask what of the original inspiration behind the coaching impulse might have been lost in the process of professionalization. Comparisons are then drawn between this historical evolution of coaching practice and the choices facing coaches currently setting out to establish their practice in a contemporary setting; and to ask what they might take from this history

Taking the C out of CVMFS

The Cern Virtual Machine File System is most well known as a distribution mechanism for the WLCG VOs@@ experiment software; as a result, almost all the existing expertise is in installing clients mount the central Cern repositories. We report the results of an initial experiment in using the cvmfs server packages to provide Glasgow-based repository aimed at software provisioning for small UK-local VOs. In general, although the documentation is sparse, server configuration is reasonably easy, with some experimentation. We discuss the advantages of local CVMFS repositories for sites, with some examples from our test VOs, vo.optics.ac.uk and neiss.org.uk

Explaining the fuel protests

We describe and analyse the fuel protests in the UK in September and November 2000. We draw on theories of social movements to explain the success of the first of these protests and the failure of the second. We show how the loose, network forms of organisation contributed to the success in September, and the attempts to impose more formal organisations helped to cause the failure in November. We also show how the success of the protests depended on the articulation of the aims of the protestors with dominant social forces in British politics, in particular the oil companies, the police, and the mass media