Suchergebnisse

Khmer Rouge documents record the arrest, interrogation, torture and murder of 20,000 prisoners at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh

In May, 1980, when the Geneva meeting on Humani tarian Assistance and Relief to the Kampuchean People took place and funds to continue aid were pledged, the food distribution system inside Kampuchea was a sham bles. Rice-laden ships were backed up in the harbors at Kampong Som and Pnompenh, where warehouses were full. Rice, unlike rice seed, was not reaching the villages.There was rare consensus on this point, even among those international organizations and voluntary agencies that had been presenting a generally positive pic ture of developments inside Kampuchea. Relief work ers in Pnompenh took the unprecedented step of jointly warning the Heng Samrin regime that it could not count on continued international aid unless distribu tion improved. Interviews with Khmer peasants treking on foot, by bicycle, and oxcart to the Thai border from several provinces in west and northwest Kampuchea confirmed that food distribution was grossly inadequate if it existed at all. Heng Samrin's own village commit tees, with no rice to give peasants and farmers, were issuing passes to the Thai border that were being hon ored by the Vietnamese soldiers who control much of the access to the relief "land bridge" at Nong Chan.

Rapid social change requires that major institutions adapt. Management professionals who are called in to help presumably know what to do, but in fact their typical ways of working are anachronistic. Many professionals tacitly assume stability and a level of knowledge that no longer exists. They devise change programs that, while consistent with cultural expectations and professional standards, are flawed from the start and may actually reduce institutional capacity to adapt. Their practices and culture were developed for a different time and are ill-suited to fluid and highly interconnected situations. The very people who are relied upon for adaptive solutions are preventing what they should be providing. Weaknesses of four familiar patterns of professional thinking are reviewed. Each puts society at risk: a rational pattern locks in optimal solutions that rapidly become obsolete a focused pattern is blind to reconfiguration options and the influence of external relationships a principled pattern fails to apprehend and develop the unique opportunities of a situation a interested pattern undercuts common interests that are already imperiled An ominous feature of these at-risk patterns is the lack of awareness of limitations or of how the professional is included within the problematic situations to be addressed. A different pattern is described ₆ reflexive practice ₆ that takes turbulence seriously and does not make convenient, traditional, and incorrect assumptions about stability, certainty, and the capacity of the professional for insight, foresight, and separation from the problem. These practitioners promote adaptive strategies appropriate for turbulent situations. Distinguishing features of these strategies include rapid generation and pruning of options, building capacity and readiness for continuous modification and reconfiguration, a greater comprehension of external changes, and reliance on mutual interaction through networks across boundaries. Examples of reflexive practice, and the contrasting failures of at-risk practices, are traced through domains where the need for adaptation is acute ₆ in national security, economics, energy, and environment. Personal characteristics and education of the reflexive practitioner are examined in greater detail. A simple survey of guests on C-SPAN illustrates the prevalence of the various types and their difference. Reflexive practice is the most appropriate pattern for thinking and action for management professionals under current conditions, and in particular when devising responses to global threats. The thinking pattern remains fallible, however, and will often violate standards and appear weak in comparison with other types. This condition will persist until professional cultures themselves become adapted to the times.

AbstractThe concept of an open society is based on the idea that even with imperfect information and knowledge people can still act. We find this preferable to the more common presumption that leaders have special access to the truth and thus should lead. We instead look to the history of science to remind ourselves that, since no one is in possession of the actual truth, it seems better to at least distribute responsibility along with information so individuals can seek their own truths. Standing in the way of this are long‐standing traditions, such as the very important one found in higher education. This tradition is where the faculty, administration and accreditation authorities design curriculum structures for students and create learning environments for universities with a presumption that there is truth, that they know what it is, and that it is sufficiently fixed to be institutionalized. This idea of truth supports and exists within a relatively closed system, and assumes that the actors can also behave as if they are closed. Unfortunately, those that design and administer a university have the most to gain if they can keep the system fixed and closed, and those who are excluded from the management are those with the most to lose if the current managers are wrong. The current system operates with impunity. The administrative emphasis can be on finding and following educational standards that presume stability, not in creating learning environments that can accommodate change. This is consistent with the long‐accepted theory that there is a 'hidden curriculum' behind the explicit curriculum in higher education. It is set up to give strong messages about power, authority, control, obedience, hierarchy and related behaviors.Herein we are concerned with how this reflects upon our current and future society, and how we might experiment with alternative educational systems that can perform better. Within the pessimism there are significant opportunities for creative improvement, but to realize such innovation educational systems need to be able to enhance cooperation and realignment between different disciplines and stakeholders. It is widely accepted that a flexible, customized curriculum that can be dynamic and accept decision‐making involvement by students is desirable. Generally it gets rejected as being too expensive, requiring too much administration and 'being unfair to students'. The tendency is to stay with the tradition of 'standardized and controlled' education. Major organizational changes will be needed within the formal university to be able to address alternative agendas. Accreditation activities could be instrumental in setting the stage for these. They could address the limits in maintaining barriers between various stakeholders, and impediments for change, the ignoring of quality management and the distress of those who have the most to lose from participation in a defective educational system. Accreditation activities should, on the other hand, foster and enhance developmental improvement in higher education. In this light, the paper proposes two models of educational systems with empirical examples from the Finnish higher education system. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.