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Every summer since 1957 selected leaders of U.S. industry have convened at a rustic but elegant Vail, Colo., conference facility to take a three‐week “leadership development” seminar from professors of the highly rated University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Often the business school's Center for Continuing Studies' staff has had to turn away would‐be participants, including some very distinguished business leaders. But this year, the course will not be offered—university officials canceled it, citing declining profitability.

Many organizations now utilize action learning, and it is applied increasingly throughout the world. Action learning appears in numerous variants, but generically it is a form of learning through experience, “by doing”, where the task environment is the classroom, and the task the vehicle. Two previous reviews of the action learning literature by Alan Mumford respectively covered the field prior to 1985 and the period 1985‐1994. Both reviews included books as well as journal articles. This current review covers the period 1994‐2000 and is limited to publicly available journal articles. Part 1 of the Review was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning (Vol. 15 No. 2) and included a bibliography and comments. Part 2 extends that introduction with a schema for categorizing action learning articles and with comments on representative articles from the bibliography.

Posits that innovative technology is only as good as the innovative uses to which it is put, particularly in relation to business schools. Claims that business schools have failed to move with the times. They will have to adapt and change the structure of their courses to meet companies’ demands, and in part this means exploring the opportunities offered by information technology.

University‐based executive education is big business, attracting the attention and resources of senior management in organisations. Surprisingly, a limited amount of research has been directed at the attendees themselves and even less research uses theory to understand the activity. This study targets executive attendees (n=245) and applies an action frame of reference to more deeply understand the issues surrounding their attendance at these programmes. Without that clear understanding, it is impossible to know if the time and money for this activity is being properly allocated.