Systems Language for e-Democracy: Personal Resource Systems Management (PRSM), a Model and Action Research

In ancient Athens, the Agora was a place for collective decision making about personal and community issues. New Agoras, most recently Internet-enabled ones, now propose to enliven participatory democracy and establish systems by which our institutions can serve us and we can govern ourselves (B. H. Banathy, Guided Evolution of Society: A Systems View, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, New York, 2000). Effective participation in such activity will require a language and consciousness not currently in evidence, and learning beyond current parameters. In this article, high school students from Stephanie Williams' Child Development classes at McDowell High School, Millcreek Township School District, demonstrate use of a new paradigm. This model of Personal Resource Systems Management provides systems language for Agora discourse enabling effective participatory democracy.     

Action Research and the Management and Systems Sciences

In this paper I explore the possibility of a complementary relationship between action research and the management and systems sciences. A range of purposes that action researchers and management and systems scientists pursue is initially set out. The paper then explores whether this diversity of purposes and the ways they recommend people to proceed may come together in a new whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. A potentially useful realization of this for practice is a reflexive process of critique, choice, and action, which is elaborated on. The paper then investigates what view of holism arises from the preceeding discussions.     

Application of Focus Group Interviews for Quality Management: An Action Research Project

Focus groups have the potential to provide rapid and timely collation, integration and assembly of the views of a variety of different types of stakeholders into a plausible theory. This article reflects on a tertiary education institution's utilisation of focus group interviews (FGIs) as a qualitative evaluation instrument, using action research as the methodology. Our results suggest that employing focus groups is a valuable method of gaining more insight into and adding more depth to quantitative findings during quality management. Results from focus groups enable quality assurance practitioners to provide better remedial action plans. A set of guidelines is provided for the effective conducting of focus group interviews as part of an institutional quality assurance system.     

基于智能Agent的群组决策支持系统及其在经营过程管理中的应用

信息时代 ,面向企业经营过程管理的决策活动具有广泛的分布性和重要的协同性 .本文旨在运用分布式人工智能的方法研究群组决策支持系统 ,以支持企业经营过程管理 ,特别是支持对市场环境的灵活应变、新产品的快速开发以及经营过程的动态重组 .该系统采用基于智能 Agent的层次分布式体系结构 ,应用多种信息技术和基于模型的协同技术 .     

Action Research: Its Role in the University/Business Relationship

The Action Research (AR) PhD program at Monash University had its genesis in Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning. This paper discusses the role of the university in AR projects in business and the central role that AR projects can have in a Faculty's strategic positioning. The issues that have emerged in the project to date are discussed.     

Strategic Management in Action

This paper sets out to overview the strategic management process and its alignment with a systemic approach and to briefly review the necessary enablers, namely: the presence and practice of learning at the individual, group, and organizational level, a culture of exploration and innovation, which implies a receptiveness to new ideas, and the space or opportunities to practise the skills putting the learnings into action. Having set the study's theoretical context, the paper then explores some of the realities and implications, both for strategic management and the action researcher, by examining two quite different case scenarios from within a large Australian-based financial services organization, the first, Case Study A, involving a more strategic focus, and the second, Case Study B, an operational one.     

石油危机外交管理决策之整体性系统分析——以苏伊士运河危机中的美国政策为例

危机事件是国际国内事务中的普遍状态,将危机事件转危为机,＂化险为夷＂,并加以利用,将偶然发生的危机纳入日常管理系统化、必然化、常态化的轨道,是当今各国危机管理创新的内容。通过对苏伊士运河石油危机中美国外交政策的研究,本文探讨了美国政府系统化的危机管理政策,其采取的统筹兼顾的系统思维,适时利用了中东石油危机,实现了美国的中东冷战战略目标。形成了一套危机前判断与预测、危机中观望与决策、危机后恢复与预防管理过程,丰富了石油危机管理决策的理论与实践。     

A History of the Action Learning,Action Research,and Process Management Association (ALARPM): From Brisbane (Australia) to the World Through Inclusion and Networks

Action Learning, Action Research, and Process Management Association (ALARPM) is an organization of volunteers dedicated to the international expansion of action learning, action research, and process management, through world congresses. It has existed for over a dozen years now, despite significant stresses and strains, and has successfully conducted five world congresses with a sixth one in 2003. This history of ALARPM shows that a small group can set out to be international and inclusive from the beginning, so long as it also develops processes to sustain itself internally.     

Action Learning and Action Research (ALAR): A Methodological Integration in an Inter-Organizational Setting

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how action learning and action research were used concurrently as a single ALAR methodology in one research project which focused on collaborative improvement in the supply chain. The research in which the ALAR methodology was used was a European Union funded research project called CO-IMPROVE which sought to develop a business model, supported by a web-based software system, and action learning-based implementation guidelines to support the design, implementation and ongoing development of collaborative improvement between partners in Extended Manufacturing Enterprises (EMEs). The article describes how the participating managers worked in an action learning to achieve their commercial objectives and how action research was used by academic researchers to consolidate the action learning processes and to generate actionable knowledge.     

The Role of Action Research (AR) in Environmental Research: Learning from a Local Organic Food and Farming Research Project

We expand on the FMA model of inquiry elucidated by Checkland and Holwell (Syst Pract Act Res 11:9, 1998) and identify three kinds of research: interactive Action Research (AR), extractive participatory research, and traditional science, that were integrated into an interdisciplinary agro-environmental research project involving researchers from eight countries around the Baltic Sea. The research project held the goal of creating scientific understanding of the ecological, economic and social effects of the sustainable development of local food systems, while also having the explicit goal of implementing change in the studied systems. Based on our experience working as action researchers in the project, we highlight the role that normative goals and facilitation process competence play in complex interdisciplinary research projects. Our reflections focus on project design, including the relation between AR and other kinds of research when employed in a single project, and includes reflections on preconditions for stakeholder participation in AR projects.     

面向变化管理的流程建模技术

企业变化管理的对象是流程变革,企业流程建模是流程分析和优化的基础.首先对目前流程建模的方法进行了评述.在此基础上,分析了企业变化管理对流程建模的要求.     

Soft Systems Methodology in Action: The Example of a Private Hospital

The paper dealt with the issues of communication between physicians and patients, health care needs of patients and appointment and documentation systems leading to sub-optimal medical treatment, disorganised files and congestion and improperly stored medical treatment records of patients Two Strands Model of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) revealed and handled at a private hospital in Turkey. SSM helped make changes as recommendations to the hospital. However, the SSM-based enquiry also disclosed some difficulties in the processes of cooperation between the practitioner and the client, arranging democratic group discussions, drawing rich pictures, designating, listing and selecting organisational concerns, designing human activity systems, comparing conceptual models with the problem situation and offering and adopting changes. Thus, the paper proposed possible solutions to these methodological problems through synthesising relevant key conceptions of specific soft and other change methodologies into a framework that attempted to bring robust developmental specifications and order for using SSM.     

Power-Based Arbitrary Decisional Actions in the Resolution of MIS Project Issues: A Project Manager's Action Research Perspective

As a management information systems (MIS) project manager and an action researcher, the author examined, over time, the influence on information system development (ISD) of the informal sociopolitical organizational actions. The paper reports two cases of action research findings concerning the effect on ISD project implementation processes of power-based arbitrary decisional actions in bureaucratic environments. The research focused on the relationship of such unilateral actions to the interconnected subprocesses of deliberate and conscious attempts by the ISD project members to define and resolve system implementation issues. A suggested conceptual framework for the issue-resolution processes (IRP's) and obstacle-coping processes (OCP's) is based on the author's IRP/OCP-related behavioral constructs and theoretical models dealing with soft-systems issues, especially appreciative system theory and soft-systems methodology, and innovative flexible, "complementarist" (Sinn, 1998) or pluralist problem-solving approaches.     

复杂生产系统的平行管理方法与案例

为实现复杂生产系统的综合管理目标,提出了平行管理理论,即构建与生产系统相一致的人工系统,采用计算实验方法对系统规律进行研究,通过实际系统与人工系统的平行运行和交互实现对实际复杂生产系统的管理。结合乙烯生产系统长周期生产管理的应用实例,开发的平行培训系统加强了对员工标准行为的培训,平行评估系统主要侧重于对管理制度的评估,而最终形成的平行管理系统将实现对复杂生产过程的综合管理,全面提升企业的管理水平和综合竞争力。     

Action Research in Management—Ethical Dilemmas

This paper discusses the application of the guiding ethical principles for the conduct of research involving human subjects in an action research project in a membership-based community psychiatric disability organization. Action research is a collaborative process of critical inquiry between the researcher and the people in the situation, in this case the management executive. The relationship between the researcher and manager participants in a long-term action research project gives rise to ethical dilemmas related to participant selection and voluntary participation, informed consent, decision making, anonymity and confidentiality, conflicting and different needs. The process and strategies implemented to address them are discussed.     

Action Research for Emancipation Informed by Habermas and Hierarchy of Systems: Case Study on Environmental Education and Management of Water Resources in Brazil

Technology is used in order to emancipate. Emancipation for social and environmental justice ought to shape the way technology is designed and used. The relationships across action research, action research spiral, and the General Systems Theory was investigated. The case study refers to environmental education activities as part of a participative management approach to water resources on the Hydrographic Basin of the Upper Maranhão River (Brazil). By introducing action research spiral as a search of rationality in social practices, and describing the nature of lower and higher hierarchical level in General Systems Theory, the higher hierarchical level was associated with Habermasian emancipatory interest, whereas lower hierarchic levels were associated with the specific instrumental concern. To conclude, it is said that the articulation between action research spiral and General System Theory can be the means to strengthen the dialectical potential of the action research spiral in order to achieve both individual and collective empowerment.     

Oral and Written Reflection in Practice Management: An Action Research Approach

Reflection in Practice Management (PM) favoured the integrated approach where learners had to critically reflect on the study material, assessments and tasks throughout the year and to integrate their experiences in a meaningful manner that would demonstrate their development and learning over the year. Reflection in the form of portfolios focused on personal development and individual learning rather than on achieving a general set of course outcomes. But assessment of these portfolios revealed no real evidence of reflection or critical thinking. This study suggested that learners be assessed orally so that their reflections could come alive and so that the educator could learn from the assessment to restructure or re-curriculate where necessary. This study found that although the orals were not a preferred form of assessment, they contributed successfully to informing the written critical and reflective thinking in the portfolios. Using an action research approach, enabled us to not only address a fundamental problem that the educators and learners were battling with—how to encourage and indeed teach learners to think critically and to reflect, but it also showed the educators how to solve problems or seek solutions to didactic problems in their own classrooms. The recommendations in this paper may therefore inform courses other than PM that use reflective practice, critical thinking or portfolio assessments.