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The use of dialogues within and across organizations is on the rise. This increase is a tacit acknowledgement of the relational foundations from which new meaning is created and social innovations emerge. However, coming together for a dialogue doesn’t assure constructive conversation or transformative engagement. Dialogue participants, even when they are asked to “suspend assumptions,” are generally still embedded in the mental models and familiar frameworks that distance them from one another and prevent real generativity and novelty.

This paper proposes Appreciative Inquiry as an approach particularly conducive to creating public dialogues that are generative and transformative. It suggests that a community is best served by inquiry into strengths, assets and past successes. It further proposes that this mode of inquiry tends to produce positive emotional states, which expand the resources and pro-social inclinations of those in the dialogue. It offers five conditions that support generative and transformative public dialogue and explains how Appreciative Inquiry creates these conditions.

Caring is an important component of K-12 teaching and learning. An increasing number of K-12 students are enrolling in online courses. The physical separation of students and teachers in the online medium requires a change in the way caring relationships are formed. In this chapter we examine how teachers worked to develop caring relationships with students at the Open High School of Utah, an online charter high school in the United States. Data collection consisted of 22 interviews with 11 instructors. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using constant comparison coding methods. Findings indicate that teachers were able to implement all aspects of Nodding's model of moral education in ways unique to online contexts, and at times with more depth than experienced in a face-to-face context.

To utilize LGBTQ affirmative theory to inform clinical work which affords queer youth with disabilities agency and authorship in their negotiations of sexuality.

The authors use a case study to explore the use of queer affirmative theory and peer consultation to guide and evaluate an ongoing clinical case of a young gay man with cerebral palsy as he negotiates his developing sexuality amid powerful messages from media, pornography, friends, and parental influence.

This paper finds that a queer affirmative therapy model which explores themes of intersectionality, and utilizes nuanced views of sexual identity, sexual behavior, and gender identity are useful to practitioners to encourage agency and authorship for queer disabled people in their negotiations of ability, sexuality, identity, and behavior.

This paper provides an alternative approach to nurturing queer identity by (1) creating refuge for emerging sexualities; (2) allowing for difficult dialogues where ability, sexuality, and gender can be pragmatically discussed, performed, and negotiated; (3) tolerating the discomfort of these difficult dialogues and pushing through to nurturing the unique queerness that evolves out of these conversations; and finally (4) encouraging transformation of all participants including client and practitioners. The practitioners discuss their own transformation through the co-created dialog with each other and with the client.

Public libraries in the twenty-first century are facing the challenges of being relevant in the face of new technologies, neoliberal cost cutting, and changing social realities. One of the fastest growing and changing social realities is associated with the trans community. We may be able to talk about the transgender tipping point; but in Spain, positive representations, access to information, and dialogue between local communities and the trans collective have traditionally been notable for its absence. In order to address these shortcomings in the public library system in Catalonia (Spain), a group of staff at the Biblioteca Nou Barris in Barcelona created the “Trans Identities and Gender” project.

The project envisioned creating a collection of materials aimed at the trans and gender-variant community as well as to all those who might be interested. In addition to the collection, activities were planned to use the library as a communal meeting point between the local and the trans communities as well as a means of promoting the collection and its use. The chapter focuses on the development of the project, on the growing relationship between the library, trans authors, trans community, and general public, and how new possible futures are being forged.

This chapter develops a conceptual understanding on open strategy through a systematic literature review. With a sample of 148 publications, the authors examine the key debates in the field of open strategy and identify a number of limitations such as an excessive definitional focus and a lack of distinct empirical analysis of research in the field. The author’s analysis clarifies open strategy by classifying its main characteristics and harnessing the different aspects together in a comprehensive definition. In doing so, the authors examine how the underpinnings of open strategy can be conceptualized in order to provide a research agenda for how future empirical investigations into open strategy could progress our understanding of an evolving practice.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.

The Revolution is 50, Raúl has succeeded Fidel, and many dissidents who participated in the 2002 Varela Project initiative are in jail. What hope for “cambio” (change) in Cuba? Legal dissent – constitutional proposals, a legislative agenda, and grassroots civil rights organizing – may be the key. The Movimiento Cristiano Liberación (MCL), led by the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Oswaldo Payá, presents the strongest challenge to the power of Cuba's 50-year-old Revolutionary government. This dissident group is at the heart of the development of the 2002 Varela Project and forms the core of the leaders arrested in the 2003 Cuban Spring crackdown. This paper traces the history of MCL's “legal dissent” strategy, from the evolution of the Varela Project to their development of an entire legislative agenda, crafted with nation-wide grassroots participation over the last six years since the crackdown. Using data from international NGO surveys conducted within Cuba, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the MCL's proposal vis-à-vis the political and economic concerns and interests of the broader population. Cuba's government seeks to consolidate its rule through its institutions, specifically, through the Cuban Communist Party. It remains to be seen whether the MCL's legal dissent strategy can successfully mobilize a broad segment of the Cuban population, and channel the political aspirations of reformers whose interests are not served under one-party rule.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the cleanup and closing of the nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats (RF), Colorado, United States, which was completed 60 years ahead of schedule and $30 billion under budget. We demonstrate how the events leading to the successful completion of the project was an instance of generativity made possible by the Appreciative Intelligence of the project leaders and participants. At the end of the Cold War, production at RF was terminated and experts considered cleaning up of the dangerous facility technically impossible, risky, and impractical. Yet, working in collaboration with contractors, local officials, and community leaders, the RF team achieved extraordinary results. After the unprecedented cleanup, 4,000 acres were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and became a national wildlife refuge. Generativity is an approach to life that directs our actions toward positive outcomes. For generativity to happen, stakeholders in the RF project had to care about the environment around them for innovative solutions to emerge. Instead of stagnation or blind acceptance of circumstances, they chose to reframe and find new ways to perceive situations facing them. This case study shows that individuals with high Appreciative Intelligent acknowledge present circumstances, choose to reframe, see possibilities for the future, and take the necessary actions to achieve them. They also expand their Appreciative Intelligence beyond their personal lives. At RF, despite the imminent closing of the plant, stakeholders generated socially responsible solutions and transformed a public liability into a community asset.

Our purpose in this chapter is to examine the implementation of a set of lesson frameworks to set conditions for teachers to deal with the complex challenges related to writing instruction in a high-stakes testing environment. These lessons provided a flexible framework for teachers to use in tutorials and in summer writing camps for students who struggle to pass the state-mandated tests, but they also build shared understandings about writing as a complex adaptive system.

We look to two sources for our theoretical framework: the study of complex adaptive systems and research-based writing instruction. In the chapter we summarize insights from these sources as a list of patterns that we want to see in powerful writing instruction. The analysis presented here is based on open-ended interviews of 17 teachers in one of the partner districts. The results of an inductive analysis of these transcripts is combined with a summary of 9th and 10th grade test results to inform the next iteration of this work.

Our findings suggest a shift toward patterns that imply shared understandings that writing and writing instruction require dialogue, inquiry, adaptability, and authenticity. These lesson frameworks, rather than limiting teacher’s flexibility and responsiveness, provide just enough structure to encourage flexibility in writing instruction. Using these frameworks, teachers can respond to their students’ needs to support powerful writing.

This set of lesson frameworks and the accompanying professional development hold the potential to build coherence in writing instruction across a campus or district, as it builds shared understandings and practices. We look forward to further implementation, adaptation, and documentation in diverse contexts.

In the post-industrial society, demand escalation for travels and tours led to the mobility of travellers and tourists en masse from cross sections of the society and caused tourism's dramatic growth making enormous makeovers in the national income of many states. Tourism, then, could be perceived by travel mobility paradigm. Increasing tourist mobility contributed to the growth of overtourism phenomenon at different destinations. Overtourism sets to be in opposition to responsible and sustainable tourism. Contradictory approaches towards carrying capacity, commodification and commoditisation set overtourism to be positioned so. The way of establishing control on cultural, natural and spatial capitals overlooking hosts' traditional interests, priorities and intentions like destination's economic development and sustenance also made overtourism placed in contrary to the responsible tourism. Contradictions do exist between overtourism and its counter-reactions and within the reactions. Consumerism and control over host capital in the counter-practices continue differently but in contradicting manners with the same magnitude of profit progression. Instead of mass consumerism, elite consumerism appears turning the mobility of organised mass tour packages to the tailor-made alternative tour packages. The contradictions within paradigms of overtourism's nature, aspects, causes and consequences were thus likely. Contradictions also prevail between uncontrolled or limitless and controlled or within limit mobility and activity; goals and means; growth and effect; control of entrepreneurs on tourism capital and local community involvement, etc. It defines parallel subsistence or continuation of contradictory forces. The dialectical nature of history led to make a synthesis of the existing and newly emerging mobility phenomenon. This chapter will locate how control and decontrol or delimiting and limiting of overtourism co-exist in contradiction and reconcile the contradiction to synthesis.