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‘Eight per cent of students still unemployed six months after graduating.’

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.

Suggests that action learning is made up of three important elements: an underpinning philosophy, two end‐products, and specific procedures. If any of these is missing, what is undertaken is not, strictly speaking, action learning, and leaves participants, and the programme, short‐changed.

Suggests that as we begin to drown in information, technology is not the only way to resolve the resulting stress. Argues that as people become less able to absorb, let alone process, all the information and knowledge that is around, we need to consider other ways of working. Being crammed full of information may not be the solution. Rather we need to give ourselves permission to not know, and then work together, to share, and to allow ourselves time and space to consider what we really do need to know. For that we have to be asking the right questions. Concludes that sharing, co‐operating, applying action learning and open space conferencing approaches are just some of the ways forward.

Looks at some possible pitfalls in introducing and operating a programme of action learning by drawing on the authors’ own experiences and those of their friends and colleagues.

All attempts to improve corporate performance since World War II have led to nought. Managers are still calling for change. One new school of thought holds that development programmes should emphasize learning not teaching, action not theory and business results not classroom results. Total quality management (TQM) and action learning (AL) are two development programmes which directly address business results. While focusing on different objectives, the two programmes experience common difficulties, the most crucial of which is gaining the commitment and participation of top management in implementing real change. Discusses some of the methods of TQM and AL. It also includes details of the first formal academic AL programme: the Belgian Inter‐University Programme in 1968. The authors believe that AL offers what is missing in those methods which emphasize productivity, such as TQM. Proof of the pudding will be found in AL and TQM combined and fully supported by top management.

The current interest in involving all members of the health care team in the evaluation and improvement of care has grown to include patients and recipients of care. Although much is written about how important it is to involve patients there is less information available about how this might be achieved. Even the term ‘involvement’ is itself open to various interpretations and this may result in involving patients in quality improvement remaining in the realms of rhetoric rather than reality. In this article we outline the benefits obtained from the active collaboration of patients with health care professionals in making decisions about their care. We examine ways in which patients’ views about the quality of the care that they receive can be heard and suggest that clinical guidelines might be one way of bridging the knowledge gap between health care professionals and patients so that joint decision‐making becomes more effective.