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Asking whether we should regard the learning organization as a tautology and, thus, of questionable utility, the purpose of this paper is to assess the ur-definition of the concept furnished by Senge. It seeks to demonstrate, particularly to those unaware of a textual-analytic approach, how claims that have academic authority can have poor explanatory power, with attendant risks.

Using a post-structuralist methodology, by illuminating unarticulated assumptions and questioning bald assertions, this paper exposes sub-textual bias and a lack of rigour characterizing the prescription of the learning organization. This legitimizes alternative and more inclusive narratives.

This paper finds the learning organization furthering a managerialist interest under the guise of enabling the achievement of employee’s and employees’ desires. As such, it is in the tradition of improvement-offering management fashions. In offering the promise of a sort of liberation for employees, it ignores and facilitates systemic dysfunctions, both internal and external.

By introducing the suggestion that the learning organization might be usefully interrogated as a paralogism, this paper encourages a critical appreciation of learning, not as an unalloyed good but as a potentially repressive tool. A fortiori, the learning organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional context of the educator and architects who designed and conceived Woodleigh School in Baxter, Victoria, Australia (1974-1979) and to identify common design threads in a series of schools designed by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker in the 1970s.

The research was derived from academic and professional publications, film footage, interviews, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including formal, planning and morphological analysis, to read building designs for meaning and intent. Books, people and buildings were examined to piece together the design “biography” of Woodleigh School, the identification of which forms the basis of the paper's argument.

Themes of loose fit, indeterminate planning, coupled with concepts of classroom as house, and school as town, and engagement with a landscape environment are drawn together under principal Michael Norman's favoured phrase that adolescents might experience “a slice of life”, preparing them for broader engagement with a world and a community outside school. The themes reflect changing aspirations for teenage education in the 1970s, indicating a free and experimental approach to the design of the school environment.

The paper considers, for the first time, the interconnected role of educator and architect as key protagonists in envisioning connections between space and pedagogy in the 1970s alternative school.

The Spread of Status Value theory describes how new diffuse status characteristics can arise out of the association of initially non-valued characteristics to existing status characteristics that are already well-established in a society. Our objective is to extend this theory so that it describes how still other status elements, which have become of interest to researchers such as “status objects” (Thye, 2000) and “valued roles” (Fişek, Berger, & Norman, 1995), can also be socially created.

Our approach involves reviewing research that is relevant to the Spread of Status Value theory, and in introducing concepts and assumptions that are applicable to status objects and valued roles.

Our major results are an elaborated theory that describes the construction of status objects and valued roles, a graphic representation of one set of conditions in which this creation process is predicted to occur, and a design for a further empirical test of the Spread of Status Value theory. This extension has social implications. It opens up the possibility of creating social interventions that involve status objects and valued roles to ameliorate dysfunctional social situations.

Our elaborated theory enables us to understand for the first time how different types of status valued elements can, under appropriate conditions, be socially created or socially modified as a result of the operation of what are fundamentally similar processes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate readers’ annotations in library books and attitudes towards marginalia among library users. In particular, the study discusses how marginalia function as reader-to-reader communication.

The study used data collected from both public library and university library collections, as well as a user survey conducted among library users. The empirical results are discussed in relation to theories of affordances, in order to understand what characterizes the socio-physical realm within which marginalia exist (RQ1), and what specific conditions make marginalia possible as a communicative act between readers (RQ2).

The study suggests that marginalia in library books are mainly by-products of reading/studying processes. The user survey depicts an overall picture of ambiguous attitudes towards marginalia. It is argued that marginalia seen as communication rely heavily on the proximity of the context and the permanence of the physical medium. Three distinctive categories are proposed for classifying marginalia according to their relationship with the text: embedded; evaluative; extratextual. In spite of being an often unwanted communication, marginalia thus still function as an additional layer to the main message of the primary text.

The findings are indicative pointing to follow-up studies that may further validate them. The study contributes to a referential frame for future studies on the subject.

The study addresses factual and communicative aspects of marginalia less covered in previous research, thus providing a basis for further research also in relation to designing affordances for annotations in e-books.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically profile investors’ personality traits to examine if, and how, those traits are associated with phenomena observed in financial markets. In particular, the paper looks at overconfidence and overreaction in an experimental foreign exchange market.

The paper measures the personality of the subjects using the short form of the NEO-PIR instrument, the NEO-FFI developed by Costa and McRae (1992) which is based on Norman's (1963) “Big Five” personality constructs of negative emotion, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The paper measures psychological gender using questions developed by Bem (1994). Preference for innovation and risk-taking propensity are measured using instruments developed by Jackson (1976). The paper then examines the behavior of the subject who traded interactively in “real time” in an interactive-simulated foreign exchange market where “price discovery” was instantaneous and pricing decisions were made instantaneously as items of news, determined by the researchers, were released.

The paper demonstrates that personality traits are associated with overconfidence and overreaction in financial markets. The paper presents meta-analysis which facilitates the development of a posteriori theories of how particular traits affect investment; there are important roles for risk-taking propensity, negative emotion, extraversion, masculinity, preference for innovation and conscientiousness.

A typical behavioral finance paper might find an empirical regularity in prices and, on the basis of such patterns, infer the underlying psychology motivating the behavior of investors. The approach differs from this caricature of the “typical” behavioral finance paper. The paper does not infer the underlying psychology of investors from patterns in prices. Rather, the paper learns about investors by systematically profiling their personality traits. The paper then demonstrates how those traits are associated with the prices generated by the investors the authors study. In focussing on the role of individual personality, the paper refocusses behavioral finance on the individuals who set prices.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.