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One thing is to get a project organization in place. Another thing is to bring it alive. This is the subject of this chapter. Most project work is teamwork, in the core teams and work groups, and also in the steering committee, reference groups, and focus groups.

Because projects are temporary, it is a challenge quickly to establish effective cooperation in the groups and teams of the project organization, internal as well as external with surrounding organizations. Five elements of cooperation in the project team will be presented, including collaboration, coordination, communication, coalition, and control. Different work patterns will be discussed, and methods for carrying out project work will be presented, e.g., coping with limited rationality and handling project complexity.

A section will deal with work patterns in the steering committee, and a section will discuss cooperation with interested parties (stakeholders). Also, the maturity of the project organization will be treated.

A final section will discuss learning in the project organization.

Conflict resolution theory and practice have often neglected the contributions of women in peacebuilding. To obtain a more balanced perspective, the work of women's movements, peace movements, and other social movements have attempted to highlight the importance of women's roles in society and their active participation in peacemaking activities throughout the world. This study hopes to contribute to recognizing gender in conflict resolution by examining the rituals of conflict resolution in Laos and the legacy of women working for peace. Through this gender lens, it highlights the importance of Lao women's work in the soukhouan ceremony, a conflict resolution ritual that is integral to Lao culture. The soukhouan ritual demonstrates characteristics that are vital to any peacebuilding effort, specifically how women are actively working to repair harm, restore relationships, and organize support networks that are essential for reconciliation in communities experiencing conflict. This research adds to conflict resolution literature that validates how women are playing a vital role in all stages of peacebuilding.

This chapter introduces a new tool, termed the Communication Agreement, for enhancing communication in the library workplace. The chapter defines the communication agreement, provides discussion questions for forming a communication agreement, provides examples of how communication agreements are beneficial to a diverse library workforce, and provides strategies to informally assess communication agreements’ effectiveness. Communication problems in diverse library workplaces can lead to, or exacerbate, conflict between employees. Generational, cross-cultural, gender, and other differences can lead to misunderstandings and conflict between employees. The communication agreement provides library managers with a tool to bridge differences in communication styles between employees, enable employees to engage in more effective communication, assist employees in developing better understandings and respect for colleagues of different backgrounds, and raise employees’ emotional intelligences. Numerous resources and publications provide generalized approaches to communicating with others in a heterogeneous workplace or team, but the communication agreement provides a new approach for developing effective communication between people in a diverse library workplace. The chapter lays out informal assessment strategies for the communication agreement, but formal assessment methods and metrics still need to be developed.

This chapter reviews research on group conflict from three perspectives. First, a development perspective of group conflict understands conflict as a natural part of group history. This view emphasizes progress through conflict as a precondition for group growth and productivity. Second, an instrumental perspective of group conflict differentiates between functional and dysfunctional conflict. Research in this area focuses on the preconditions for functional conflict while reducing the likelihood of dysfunctional conflict. Finally, a political perspective situates conflict as tension between advantaged and disadvantaged social groups. The focus of this view is on empowering marginalized voices in groups. After examining these three perspectives, the chapter highlights how each might approach conflict in potentially nuanced contexts such as intergroup conflict, virtual teams, and third-party resolutions.

A number of multinational corporations are striving to implement the sustainable development goals (SDGs) framework, aiming at addressing social, environmental, and economic goals. However, integrating the three aspects of sustainability across the 17 goals is very complex; multiple conflicts and tensions might arise when aiming at addressing such diverse elements at once, which in turn might prevent firms to effectively reach sustainability outcomes. Understanding the nature of such tensions and how to overcome them is therefore a key goal to ensure achieving the SDGs effectively. Given their very nature, multinational corporations are even more likely to experience such tensions on a daily basis than other firms – current international business (IB) literature, however, have overlooked the study of how sustainability-related tensions are experienced and overcome by multinationals. With the aim to address this gap, the authors propose how IB literature can be informed by paradox theory, which in recent years has become an established lens through which to investigate and theorize how sustainability tensions, conflicts, and contradictions are experienced and managed by multinationals. Accordingly, this chapter aims to advance the IB literature by suggesting how paradox theory can be adapted as a theoretical lens to examine the SDGs-related tensions present in multinational enterprises (MNEs) in order to foster the understanding of how multinational corporations address the current major challenges that undermine societal sustainability and how they can act to support a transition to a more sustainable economy.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has provoked considerable debate. Initial expressions of CSR can be traced back to the seventeenth century. However, the ideal of socially responsible business was most evident after the depression of the 1930s and the post-war period in the 1950s. CSR was, by then, mainly influenced by values of philanthropy and principles of the welfare state, and mostly centred on corporations’ charitable donations which provided social welfare for materially deprived families and individuals. In the 1980s, there was a marked shift to the neoliberal ideals of profit maximisation and free regulation in corporate activities and this fed through into CSR practices. We argue that these conflicting ideals of CSR create divergent discourses where corporations on the one hand proclaim a lack of self-interest and a duty of care towards host societies, and on the other hand legitimise corporation’s self-interested preoccupation with profit. Divergent care versus profit discourses influence how legislators, CSR experts, corporations and NGOs understand and practise CSR in host societies. In this chapter, we examine how welfare and neoliberal ideologies contribute to divergent discourses of duty of care and profit, and how these discourses influence corporations’ decision-making about their social responsibility. The chapter concludes by proposing alternative ways for rethinking political and economic relationships between communities and corporations, in order to move beyond the limits of the current discourses of duty of care and profit.