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Many occupations require people to draw on their experience to make decisions based on intuition and subjective judgement; this includes craft‐ and skill‐based tasks, and the more cognitive tasks associated with strategic decision‐making by senior managers. Discussion of the processes involved tends to regard them as somehow inappropriate or illegitimate, excessively subjective because not open to scrutiny. The repertory grid is a powerful and precise way of making tacit knowledge explicit; moreover, it rests on a detailed and epistemologically convincing theory of knowledge, personal construct psychology. Both have been used in a great variety of occupations, and this paper will sample some of them, concentrating on the identification of the intuitive factors involved in bank commercial lending, and venture capital investment, decision processes. The willingness of financial institutions to support, and their reluctance to adopt, this particular approach to the identification of tacit knowledge will also be examined.

The police organisation receives much media attention regarding its record on Equal Opportunities. Research suggests that the organisational culture in police organisations plays a major role in impeding the progress of women. Using repertory grid technique, the culture of a police force, conceptualised at the level of performance value judgements or recipe knowledge was investigated. It is argued that rank, rather than gender has the greatest influence on the content of performance value judgements and that this is attributable to the way that hierarchy influences the way in which the grass‐roots role is constructed. We argue that women’s progression is impeded not because of dominant constructions of the role per se, but by the way such constructions intersect with broader socio‐cultural constructions of women’s domestic roles.

As occupational applications of repertory grid technique continue to grow, there is a need for a method of analysis which can be carried out as conveniently by hand as by computer, particularly in the field of human resource development. This article describes such a method, a cluster analysis called “Focus”, and outlines some applications in personnel and training work by means of an annotated algorithm.

The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.

Our preoccupation with the Repertory Grid Technique has left little time and attention to the core ideas articulated in Kelly’s (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. After more than 20 years engaging with the method, I have (re)discovered his theorizing about man’s quest for knowing, to be the most insightful. This chapter shares my reflections/reflexions about the crucial role he placed on the notion of “anticipation.” I position this importance within the context of the challenges of our times and advocate that his “psychology of the unknown” is just as important today as it was 62 years ago.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.