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The United States Air Force’s (USAF) unpaid civilian auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) wears USAF uniforms and performs search and rescue missions looking for downed aircraft. After CAP members miswore the USAF uniform (Cheng, 1996), the USAF instituted a top‐down uniform change making the CAP uniform more distinct from the USAF uniform. CAP members, who affirmed that they were to be motivated solely by a desire to perform CAP’s mission, and not motivated by wearing USAF uniforms, quit and withdrew commitment. This participant observation ethnography studies how USAF’s misunderstanding of volunteer motivation and the symbolism of organizational uniforms led to dysfunctional organizational change. An alternative solution that makes positive symbolic change is proposed.

Contrasts the linear narrative of modernity with the process narrative of the ancient Taoists of China. Written in process narrative, provides a narrative based on the metaphor of the spiral rather than the straight arrow of modernity. Presents a premodern Taoist definition of diversity and applies it to the community literature as an alternative to modernist organizational theory based on process narrative.

The Chinese family business (CFB) is one of the most enduring and prolific organizational forms in human history. The CFB is an alternative to a modernistic organization and has been understudied in the post‐modern organizational theory literature. Compares a pre‐modern CFB transplanted to the USA with the modernistic Toyota model of greenfield start‐ups.

Examines a seemingly simple case of gender conflict by analysing the multi‐levelled, intra‐personal, interpersonal‐intergroup, and mass unconsciousness of gender conflict. Both process analysis and psychodynamic analysis are used to show that gender does not stand apart from other demographic diversity factors.

Reviews theories that see gender as a social invention that has produced historically variable sets of norms and expectations that delineate differences and boundaries. Following a relational, constructionist approach, these differences constitute a gender order that delineates a power hierarchy. Reviews four articles in which the authors′ voice challenges the validity of the taken‐for‐granted gender order and proposes agendas for change. Argues that these authors articulate the experience of oppression within structures that marginalize some voices, and propose strategies for change agents who seek to challenge injustice that suggest possible transformations.

EEO and the management of diversity Volume 8 Number 5 of the Journal of Organizational Change Management contains an article by Maria Humphries and Shayne Grice entitled “Equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity: a global discourse of assimilation?”

We can meet the challenge to perceive, appreciate and cherish diversity in the postmodern organization by recognizing that a multitude of persons exist in every organization and in each person. Concepts and practices from Gestalt therapy and archetypal psychology help us to become aware of and learn from our many voices and perspectives. As we accept our own multiplicity we initiate, maintain and appropriately bring to closure contact with others. This changes our socially enacted environment. As change agents we can facilitate others to do the same.

Focuses on the use of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to prioritize different forms of information. Identification of the key information may help better allocation of resources for a construction project. Various forms of information and their associated activities may critically affect the project, which have to be carefully dealt with for enhancing the project performance. Essentially, when some of these forms of information have to be produced and managed by more sophisticated information technology, the more we know about their importance level, the better we could allocate our investment in the construction project. In general, this study reveals that managerial information is equally as important as technical information. This implies that an overall information system should incorporate the technologies and techniques for generating and maintaining both types of information.