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The purpose of this paper is to focus on how organisations can benefit from adopting an organic paradigm of management to maximise the benefits of quality and business excellence strategy. Mechanistic approaches do not offer long-term sustainability and do not facilitate learning and innovation. Insights from research on business excellence award-winning organisations show how they embed quality into their culture for long-term sustainability.

This paper provides both a conceptual review of two organisational paradigms and relates this to the findings of a qualitative study of Australian Business Excellence Award winners. Interviews with company managers and case material from the organisations provided the information relating to strategies for sustaining business excellence.

Organisations using a business excellence framework and those who have reached award status have adopted a range of approaches to maintain and sustain their performance. These include measures relating to leadership, processes, people, communication and strategy. Specific strategies focus on embedding, relentless driving values and engagement of people throughout. These support ongoing learning and innovation and fit the organic organisational paradigm.

Insights into how organisations sustain their use of business excellence frameworks show how business excellence principles can be embedded into organisations so that it becomes “the way we do things around here”.

This paper offers insights into key issues faced by organisations that have already achieved high levels of performance on the business excellence frameworks and how they sustain this.

Deals with one of the key human resource (HR) issues in current working life, namely employer‐employee relations. Looks at the process of the development of employer‐employee relations in an organization‐wide change process, more specifically in quality improvement initiative. Presents empirical findings and implications from a qualitative, longitudinal Finnish case study on the implementation of quality management thinking and practices. Suggests leadership‐oriented development strategies for employer‐employee relations and better utilization of HR. Proposes that the progress in the development of labor‐management relations is based on an incremental ideological change which is a leader‐driven learning process. Incremental change in the workplace mentality leads to increasing trust and cooperation. Implies that in the development of labor‐management relations visible leadership and good leadership skills are needed; managers need sensitivity for seeing the right time and knowing the right ways for building mutual trust. Leadership actions, in turn, give support to traditionally more passive human resource management actions.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the future of total quality management (TQM) by determining the scope and depth of the influencing or driving factors that will shape the body of knowledge, known as TQM, into the future. The rapid rate of change in global and niche markets has increased pressure on organisations to become more competitive. TQM is not immune from such changes. Rather, TQM theory and practice must continually adapt to be in the vanguard of such change and potential future changes. The research to determine the influencing/driving factors for the future of TQM involved a panoptic literature review and an inductive grounded theory approach using multiple case studies. Overall, the research indicates that both the mechanistic and organismic aspects of TQM will continue into the future, along with the continual representative development of initiatives to meet current and future organisational change. Furthermore, the TQM discourse will remain a challenging research area for both academics and practitioners.

Starting with the premise that the industrial age has ended, the paper seeks to examine how the underlying principles of sustainability will guide the creation of new economic and educational paradigms.

The paper utilizes classical economics, the principles of sustainability, and social capital as its theoretical framework.

Based on the neoclassical economic concept of free‐market capitalism, it does not make economic sense to invest in economic, environmental, or social renewal. However, social and environmental indicators demonstrate that a neoclassical capitalist model simply is not sustainable. There is a need for a new paradigm for a sustainable future that is based on biological, living systems as opposed to mechanistic systems. The new paradigm will also rely on the principles of classical economics, civic and social responsibility for its foundation. Service‐learning, as an educational model that is intimately integrated with society, is poised to respond to the global transformations that are taking place. It is a responsive and responsible pedagogy that promotes the core values that will be essential for success in the future.

This paper provides guidance on how the principles of sustainability will affect future economic development and will inform education in the field of service‐learning.

Our understanding of leaders and the role they play in organizations and society is changing, which has important implications for leadership education. At the turn of the century, society began to move from a mechanistic understanding of leadership to a more ecological one. The latter, ecological approach to leadership is characterized by collective decision-making, collaboration, shared leadership, and grassroots organization. While leadership educators have acknowledged this shift, more case examples are needed to illuminate practical implications for leadership. This study of county 4-H associations uses an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to explore the relationship between three factors: (a) subjects’ levels of hierarchical and systemic thinking; (b) how their associations engage in leadership and organizational learning; and (c) programmatic success. While no direct relationship emerged between programmatic success and subjects’ levels of hierarchical and systemic thinking, mixed methods results revealed several distinctions between high and low scoring programs’ approaches to leadership. These distinctions support an ecological approach to leadership, which in turn impacts modern approaches to leadership education.

Presents a critical analysis of the “planned change” and “learning organization” approaches to organizational change, and their underlying classical and quantum paradigms. Drawing on a review of the corresponding paradigms in modern physics, concludes that both approaches are incomplete, as they fail to identify a common unifying basis for the organization. Identifies as a unifying basis the “subjective” aspect of the organization, which is accessible in the consciousness of its individual members; then locates a comprehensive framework for organizational change in the worldview of the ancient Vedic tradition of knowledge. The corresponding strategy for organizational development is based on the utilization of systematic, effective techniques for the development consciousness which have been introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Empirical research has shown these techniques to develop the mental, physiological and social capacities of the individual. It is predicted that this consciousness‐based strategy, applied in the organizational context, will simultaneously strengthen the alignment between the organization’s goals, the development of the individual and the needs of the environment.

The paper sets out to apply the concepts of cybernetics and the control of probabilistic systems to the issue of performance measurement within organizations.

Conventional approaches to Performance Measurement have been based on a mechanistic “target‐plan‐variance” model that was introduced into mainstream management practice in the 1950s. It has been subject to criticism from within both the academic and practitioners community over the last 50 years but has proved remarkably resistant to change. Systems ideas, particularly those emanating in the field of cybernetics, have not been successfully applied in this field because, it is argued, the concepts have been misunderstood and falsely blamed for the perceived failings of conventional practice.

The paper identifies the shortcomings in “tradition” approaches to performance measurement in organizations and demonstrates how the application of cybernetics concepts can address these shortcomings.

Contrary to received wisdom in parts of the academic community, cybernetics potentially provides the intellectual building‐blocks for a new paradigm, based on a fundamental appreciation of what is required to manage the interdependencies between an organization and its environment and between its constituent parts. It holds the promise of developing a set of practice that is not only more efficient and effective as a control philosophy, but also more sensitive to the human need for self‐determination in the workplace.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.

Contends that predictions of the end of work as we know it, and a bleak jobless future, as we head into the twenty‐first century, derive from a modernist paradigm of work ‐ a paradigm that has been the prevailing paradigm for the past 100 years. Seeks to provide a more hopeful and humane paradigm for the future of work ‐ a model based on spiritual guidelines and principles. Describes characteristics of each paradigm and then contrasts them on both the individual manager and organization levels. Explores how these principles could be applied to produce power in organizational settings.

For the past ten years the management literature has increasingly discussed the concept of learning organizations. Yet, more that a decade later, few organizations have figured out how to create the structures and processes necessary to assure continuous learning. This article purports that this problem can be attributed to the mental models of those leading contemporary organizations. Learning organizations quite simply cannot be created by those who either consciously or unconsciously operate under the traditional, mechanistic organizational paradigm. If leaders are to create authentic learning organizations, they must adapt a new way of viewing reality – a new paradigm or mental model. The authors suggest that the new science theories of chaos, complexity, and quantum mechanics provide the foundation for a new way of thinking about organizations. They demonstrate the relevance of these theories for those who wish to create learning organizations and present a new‐science‐based skill set that enables twenty‐first‐century leaders to move beyond organizational adaptation to proactive change and continuous learning.