Suchergebnisse

Group support systems (GSS), designed primarily for meeting support, are being increasingly used for learning activities. In this paper action research is applied to explore how a GSS can enrich the training of police officers. A series of five sessions conducted over the course of five months provided substantial data that informed the research methodology, the learning experience of the officers and the relative value of GSS. The use of an AR philosophy enabled the facilitation of the sessions to be tailored so as to meet the on‐going needs of the officers in a precise and focused manner, with the result that their learning effectiveness increased as the sessions proceeded. A candid evaluation of both GSS and AR, as experienced in this context, is offered, while the issue of rigor in AR is examined.

1. Introduction -- 2. Social change and the Officer Corps -- 3. The nineteenth-century Officer Corps -- 4. Threats to professional status -- 5. "Oh, these magicians and necromancers, they are ruining us" : the clash of sailors and engineers -- 6. The reinvention of the Officer Corps -- 7. History as a professional tool -- 8. Journals and staffs : organizational change -- 9. Auxillium ab Alto : the experience of war -- 10. Conclusion.

This book explores the ways that the Edwardian naval arms race forced the Royal Navy to address deep-seated structural problems caused by rapidly changing technology. It charts how an institution organised for three hundred years around sailing ships, faced the challenge of steel and steam, and what that meant for an officer class recruited largely on the basis of its social class rather than technical expertise.

Employee empowerment is commonly a fundamental part of the prescriptions offered to improve business performance. However, business process improvement and many other organisational development and change initiatives tend to encapsulate the values of the societies and organisations in which they were developed – and such values are not universal. The case of a business process re‐engineering project in Hong Kong illustrates an attempt to empower team members that paradoxically resulted in their psychological enslavement. The roles of cultural differences and reward systems in producing unintended consequences are analysed while the implications of the case for both research and practice are considered.