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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.

To provide a small overview of genre theory and its associated concepts and to show how genre theory has had its antecedents in certain parts of the social sciences and not in the humanities.

The chapter argues that the explanatory force of genre theory may be explained with its emphasis on everyday genres, de facto genres.

By providing an overview of genre theory, the chapter demonstrates the wealth and richness of forms of explanations in genre theory.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

This article reports on the development and assessment of a customized executive education experience, designed for the managers of a large financial services organization. It was designed to incorporate many of the desirable outcomes of “action learning” such as organizational impact and sustainability, while being more parsimonious in the involvement of senior executives and, in a single‐period design, in the time intensity of participant involvement. A total of 542 managers who participated in the program, over a four year period, were surveyed concerning the effectiveness of the program. Hypotheses are developed and the results examined to determine whether participants believed that the value of their learning diminished over time, the effects of demographic characteristics, and the extent to which the sharing of the learning and support of organizational colleagues affected participants’ perception of the program’s effectiveness. Results reveal less degradation over time than anticipated, and more powerful influence by subordinates, in sustaining learning.

This article presents a framework for the design, development, and delivery of management development seminars devoted to the building of an organizational core capability. The framework presented is the outcome from a number of actual client engagements. A key element in the framework is the participants’ engagement in the iterative, integrated processes of reflection, observation, synthesis, and exchange.

Hasn’t everyone at some point felt as if the universe was conspiring against his or her success? This case narrative tracks the story of Emmett Taylor, an operations manager for a bottling company, as a snow and ice storm bears down on his southeastern U.S. plant. Taylor is already plagued by stress caused by all facets of his life-family, work, and personal health-and this storm is no exception. The story offers an opportunity to discuss time, energy, and priority management; individual behavior from a type-A personality; work-life balance; organizational behavior; and leadership. This case is a suitable substitution for the classic best-selling Darden case “John Wolford” (UVA-OB-0167).

The purpose of this paper is to explore charitable giving and receiving as a site of social class interaction in Croatia today, particularly in relation to the country’s socialist past and capitalist present.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in three charity organisations in Croatia. The reported material is based on participant observation, interviews and informal conversations with organisation members, activists, employees and end users.

The authors find that charity activists and recipients of aid occupy distinct but overlapping moral economies in relation to questions of poverty, charity and the role of the state.

The authors develop a unique perspective on charitable giving and receiving in a context in which memories of socialism shape understandings of the role of the state today vis-à-vis poverty relief.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that charisma is a collective representation, and that charismatic authority is a social status that derives more from the “recognition” of the followers than from the “magnetism” of the leaders. I contend further that a close reading of Max Weber shows that he, too, saw charisma in this light.

I develop my argument by a close reading of many of the most relevant texts on the subject. This includes not only the renowned texts on this subject by Max Weber, but also many books and articles that interpret or criticize Weber’s views.

I pay exceptionally close attention to key arguments and texts, several of which have been overlooked in the past.

Writers for whom charisma is personal magnetism tend to assume that charismatic rule is natural and that the full realization of democratic norms is unlikely. Authority, in this view, emanates from rulers unbound by popular constraint. I argue that, in fact, authority draws both its mandate and its energy from the public, and that rulers depend on the loyalty of their subjects, which is never assured. So charismatic claimants are dependent on popular choice, not vice versa.

I advocate a “culturalist” interpretation of Weber, which runs counter to the dominant “personalist” account. Conventional interpreters, under the sway of theology or mass psychology, misread Weber as a romantic, for whom charisma is primal and undemocratic rule is destiny. This essay offers a counter-reading.

Researchers of the history of women teachers have included fiction, as well as memoirs and history, as an important part of that testimony. The aim of this article is to examine the novel, Anne of Avonlea (1925) by Lucy Maude Montgomery as both a source of information about the working life of a woman teacher and, due to the immense popularity of the book, as a shaper of how women understand and enact teaching. Anne is a young teacher in her first posting consisting of a rural Canadian one‐ teacher school. She struggles to resist using corporal punishment in favour of winning her students respect, stimulating their minds and finding a ‘genius’. However, the local community, fellow teachers and her students have different notions of how teachers should behave. Her beliefs are further undermined when in a fit of anger she succumbs to beating one her students. Her reflections on what drove her actions are realistic and contain warnings for contemporary teachers to appreciate the often fragile hold they have on their espoused educational philosophy. Another danger revealed is the unconscious leaking of the shadow side of the psyche in the necessary close but dangerous relationships between students and teacher thereby providing a complex view of what motivates young women to teach and how they approach their work.