Leadership theories and stories: An open-space exploration

Members of ISSS are being invited to participate in an interactive workshop to be held at the 55 th ISSS Meeting being held at the University of Hull, UK in August 2011 to explore four emerging Western leadership theories - authentic leadership, servant leadership, spiritual leadership and relational leadership with stories and narratives from non-Western cultures to build connections between these traditions. The workshop will be facilitated using an Open Space Technology Meeting format to initiate dialogue between participants to explore these connections and move from passion to action. The theme for the open space meeting is leadership research in not-for-profit charitable or church-based organizations in which the facilitator is deeply involved. The facilitator will briefly introduce the four leadership theories being discussed. He will then describe the Open Space Technology process and its four principles and one law. Participants will then announce discussion topics at the village marketplace that will be created during the workshop where storytelling is encouraged. Reflection and dialogue will take place in the open space (a circle of chairs with a space within) after these discussions. Summaries of discussions held at the marketplace will be collected and posted to all participants after the workshop. This is the first of a series of similar workshops that are being planned. The workshop at Hull will be followed by a similar workshop at an action research conference in Brisbane, Australia in September 2011 and a workshop being planned in the US in October 2011. The themes captured from these workshops will form the basis of a paper to be published in the Proceeding of the 55 th ISSS meeting in 2012

Achieving synergy through combining action learning and action research

This is why Ortrun is a vital energy in shaping the evolution of the 'Action' family of scholarship, now including PALAR and LAL (Lifelong Action Learning)

Child Welfare\u27s Scarlet Letter: How a Prior Termination of Parental Rights can Permanently Brand a Parent as Unfit

In many jurisdictions, once a parent has her rights terminated to one child, the State can use that decision to justify the termination of parental rights to another child. The State can do so regardless of whether the parent is fit to parent the second child. This article explores this practice, examines its origins, and discusses its constitutional inadequacies

Agile Project Management for IT Projects in SMEs: A Framework of Success Factors

Project management methods have been developed from industry practices and international standards to ensure a higher rate of success for information technology projects. These have been widely used in large organisationseffectively. However, when projects are implemented in a small or medium-sized enterprise environment, there is often a lack of an established method of project management or skilled project implementers who can use methods used in large organisations. As project workers find themselves pressured to become more responsive to business demands, it is becoming commonplace for smaller organisations to forgo formal project management practices. This is often due to the fact that small projects are viewed as simple to deploy, suffer from a lack of resources, or are given low prioritisation by the organisation. Additionally, the current project management standards are frequently perceived by SMEs as complicated and overly bureaucratic, something undesirable in regards to timeconstrained or low-budget projects. Agile development is one solution to the problem of overly complex methods that has recently been adopted in the field of software production, and has gained considerable popularity with smaller organisations. Through action research conducted in two closely-related SMEs in Austria, a final agileproject management framework was produced in the end of the study. The developed framework consists of fourphases of initiating phase (addressing objectives), planning phase (focusing on project backlog), executing and controlling phase (looking at iterative project cycles), and closing phase (working on project deliverables). Meanwhile some suggestions associated with the success of the developed agile project management framework are presented as well

Linking theory and practice in using action-oriented methods

We felt that there is a great opportunity for PM researchers to use dialectical approaches such as action research, action learning and action science to link theory and practice. The aim of this chapter to provide doctoral students a practical way to use action-oriented methods – action research, action learning and action science – to carry out research in and about projects while making a theoretical contribution to the field. After briefly explaining each of these methods the chapter discusses ways in which these methods can be combined to provide synergy. The chapter discusses some common data collection strategies used with these methods, also pointing out that other methods of data collection are welcome if the research project requires such data. Action research is often criticised for not being scientific and therefore a discussion on how it can be made rigorous and valid at both data collection and data analysis stages is discussed. Action researchers often do not write up their research using the conventions used in conventional quantitative and qualitative research theses or dissertations. A section is therefore devoted to discussing how to write up action research in novel ways. The chapter includes several reflective exercises to guide the reader (student or researcher) as well as some tips for supervisors of action research projects. At the end of this chapter, the reader can: • understand the basics of action-oriented methods and how they can be used in a research project; • justify adequately why action-oriented methods are applicable to your research project; • establish a model/process to carry out your research applying action-oriented methods

Overcoming barriers to knowledge management: Visiting the dark side of the organization

Like many organisational endeavours, the success of knowledge management praxis is subject to the vagaries of human nature. There are many reasons, most of which are underpinned by the need for power, why people might choose to hoard, distort and manipulate information. Recent studies undertaken by the authors have demonstrated the way in which knowledge management processes can also be manipulated to impede the distribution of power. This dark side of organisational behaviour is usually subversive, can be unconscious or conscious and always acts against the interests of the group or part of the group. It is important for those involved in knowledge management practice to be acutely aware of the dynamics of the dark side and how they may interfere with their best intentions. As well as describing this phenomenon, this paper also suggests a number of ways in which the dark side might be overcome. Chiefly, drawing on general systems theory, we suggest some techniques that facilitate both open communication and open process

Green forms and the arithmetic Siegel–Weil formula

We construct natural Green forms for special cycles in orthogonal and unitary Shimura varieties, in all codimensions, and, for compact Shimura varieties of type O(p, 2) and U(p, 1), we show that the resulting local archimedean height pairings are related to special values of derivatives of Siegel Eisentein series. A conjecture put forward by Kudla relates these derivatives to arithmetic intersections of special cycles, and our results settle the part of his conjecture involving local archimedean heights