Suchergebnisse

Organizational learning is widely seen as a particularly valuable form of change, driven by professionals closest to the work of the agency and all its challenges. However, the growing literature on this process identifies a large and varied set of requisites for learning. The object here is to survey these requisites and show how they are the many guises of a few basic learning processes, and in doing so distinguish the conditions that stimulate or initiate learning from those that support it. Although all of the paths to learning can be encouraged, the stimuli have been less appreciated for their particular role.

Images of shuttle launches and earthrise over the rim of the moon are iconic representations of American strength, technical capacity, and the future of humankind. Yet, the agency responsible for these images, NASA, finds itself chronically underfunded, buffeted by changes in externally defined direction, and currently without a clear next mission. This raises questions about the place of the agency in American space science and engineering. Here NASA's relations with its aerospace contractors are explored to uncover its changing roles vis-à-vis industry, from directive to adaptive to facilitative, and the impact of these contracting relations on agency program definition.

Telework is an increasingly common feature of government agencies. Long a practice in the private sector, telework is credited with a range of advantages from increased productivity to reduced environmental costs to society. These advantages may not accrue to all employees, however. Large-sample federal government surveys of employees reveal support for many of the claimed advantages of telework, but taken together they also raise significant questions about the seldom-discussed costs of telework: The impact on those barred from telework. In particular, the results reveal what may be disaffection among those whose jobs may be eligible for teleworking under new Office of Personnel Management guidelines, but whose managers have not allowed them to telework. The findings also raise questions about the consequences of expanding telework to larger populations of government workers and suggest the need for further research on the possibility of an emerging telework divide.

Examines how the organizational learning approach can utilize the organizational culture of government agencies as a positive force for interpretation of situations and experiences that could prompt learning and construction of effective solutions. The organizational learning approach examines how agency members apply experience and information to entrenched routines, attribute causes to problems faced, and create remedies for those problems.

The interest in organizational culture has led to collecting and cataloging the themes in stories from many organizations. Here stories and other accounts of organizational life are interpreted on the basis of the resemblance of symbolic elements in the stories to a classic myth archetype. Taking this interpretative approach further suggest that some widely told stories can themselves be considered as myths. It is argued that even though stories can use symbolic elements from many sources, the archetypal myth themes are widely known conventions and are a plausible and rich source of highly expressive symbolism.