The aim of this paper is to point to the potential value of an approach to management based on the idea of the common good, as opposed to classical capitalism based on private ownership. Such an approach makes it possible to resist a pursuit of short term oriented gains and a maximization of narrowly defined profits, and, instead, to focus on humanistic values, as to adopt a long term perspective. The much cited notion of the “tragedy of the commons” was based on deficient material and argumentation, but, most of all, it completely disregards of the issue of management. Using a case study developed through a longitudinal action research project in a big service enterprise we call “Soplicex”, we present the strategic process grounded in learning, as well as the building of a strong structure centred on teams. The engagement of the employees was, originally, strongly oriented towards the idea of the common good. The consultants and researchers adopted this principle as the guiding rule in their work with the organization. Even though the process was interrupted by the takeover by a foreign investor, we show how the findings of the study remain relevant for alternative organizing and managing today and in the future. The conclusions of this paper reach further than just being reflections on a historical case study: a model of management is presented, concerned with the care and protection of the common good.

Trends in organisation and in organisational activity, which have resulted in increasing dependence on the discretionary efforts, initiatives and judgements of employees, have left management with the problem of how to ensure that such discretion is exercised appropriately in the service of the organisation. The Human Resource Management approach, relying as it does on strategic integration and underpinned by a value-driven approach seemed to be an ideal mechanism, particularly when designed as encouragement to commitment via social identification and a shared sense of meaning.

If culture is the enacted manifestation of organisational identity, management aspiration is that the 'good' employee is one who will learn the cultural reality and enact it appropriately. Expectations of 'good' employees are that they will exhibit not only the appropriate competence, but will also possess the necessary commitment, via identification and emotional engagement, so that they can be trusted to regulate themselves, take decisions that are in the best interests of the organisation and even go that extra mile for the company and the customer. This paper gives attention to such expectations and explores their implications.

Alors que 2007 a été déclarée année européenne pour l'égalité des chances, un nombre toujours plus important d'entreprises affichent leurs engagements en termes de lutte contre la discrimination et de valorisation de la diversité. Les actions promouvant l'égalité entre les sexes ou l'intégration des personnes handicapés, sont ainsi très largement avancées comme une preuve du caractère responsable des entreprises. Dans le même temps, la prise en compte de la diversité confessionnelle laisse place à un silence pesant. Or, selon une étude de la Commission Européenne réalisée en 20071 , sur l'état des discriminations en Europe, la France est le pays des 25 où l'existence de discrimination liée aux convictions religieuses est le plus fortement ressentie. A travers une approche transdisciplinaire mêlant apports de la sociologie, de l'anthropologie et des sciences de gestion, un travail de déconstruction a, à ce propos, été entrepris. Au plus loin des « effets cosmétiques » des autres actions engagées sous couvert de diversité, la diversité confessionnelle donne lieu à de réelles pratiques, dans les entreprises françaises aujourd'hui. Or, si ces pratiques semblent répondre à un réel besoin des entreprises comme de leurs salariés, elles apparaissent toujours plus ou moins occultées. S'appuyant sur une contextualisation du questionnement actuel sur la diversité confessionnelle en France, une approche itérative associant analyse théorique et expression des acteurs de terrains (responsables de la diversité et responsables de cabinet spécialisés dans la gestion de la diversité), pourra permettre d'éclairer les raisons du silence des organisations vis-à-vis d'une problématique essentielle au tissage d'un lien social durable vis-à-vis d'une population salariale hétérogène.

This article is based on a framework for assessing and working with mental models and utilizing the exploration of ‘dominant’ worldviews to increase individual and organizational competency to identify, assess and shift worldviews to foster social change. The author describes her methodology and results during the data collection, data analysis, data feedback, and intervention phases of a consultation with a client. She reviews literature on white privilege, mental models, power, and cultural competency. The author reflects on implications of the engagement for the client, herself and the discourse on the role of OD as a catalyst for social change.

In an environment where the national government creates deliberate policies to create a blockade and a silence around the stories of uninvited refugees coming to its shores, human rights advocates have a tough time creating conditions to make the stories heard by the policy makers and the general public alike. However, the Australian experience shows that ‘breaking through the sound barrier of silence’ is possible, using creative collaborations with reporters, the tactics of subversion, smart strategies aimed at those setting reporting standards, and through an engagement with the wider audience of human rights advocates around the nation. In this article, five government-created barriers are identified and ingeniously countered.

Amid the disempowerment and marginalization faced by young girls, character development programs are being implemented to change the course for girls by fostering strong and empowered feminine identities. I explore the challenges of implementing one such program through my ethnographic and community engaged research with a character development program designed to equip 3rd through 5th grade girls with the skills and confidence they need to grow into empowered women. Through a qualitative analysis, I empirically demonstrate the importance of community engaged scholarship for uniting theory with practice. My analysis extends research exploring community engaged, empowerment programs by highlighting the ways empowerment is experienced differently by every girl. I point to the tension between empowerment in theory and in practice, specifically addressing the assumptions: 1) of girls’ uniform experience base, 2) about the influence of the GRL message among competing others, and 3) regarding the utility of certain strategies in diverse situations, all of which undermine the process of empowerment. I describe my experience working with the founder of the organization to revise the curriculum and offer a set of practical implications for this and similar organizations to productively respond to the tensions between the theory and practice of empowerment. Finally, I argue for a conceptual shift in the way we theorize empowerment as an ongoing and constantly negotiated state of engagement, rather than an endpoint or stable state of being.

Communities face complex problems that are best addressed by integrating the perspectives of multiple disciplines, yet many forms of engaged scholarship remain disciplinarily specific. Universities struggle to bring together highly disparate disciplines linking knowledge with action to address community problems. Sustainability is an important example of a complex, urgent problem that is best addressed by integrating multiple disciplines. In the United States, a unique multi-year initiative, Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative (SSI), addresses sustainability problems by working across disciplines on engaged research. Scholars, representing multiple disciplines and most of the higher education institutions in the state, working with their community partners, are addressing sustainability problems related to landscape change, specifically urbanization, forest ecosystem management, and climate change. This initiative is composed of over two dozen interdisciplinary, engaged research projects that include diverse stakeholders (e.g., nongovernmental organizations, communities, policy organizations, and governmental leaders) as members of the research teams. Reflecting on the challenges of involving multiple disciplines in research projects, we discuss SSI as an exemplar of interdisciplinary, engaged campus initiatives. The scale and reach of the initiative (on-campus and statewide), the number of disciplines and stakeholders involved in the project, and the conversations around engaged scholarship occurring at the University of Maine capture the challenges and opportunities of moving the scholarship of engagement beyond the isolated work of individual disciplines.

Building on conceptions of democratic engagement, we explicate the epistemological and political commitments of engaged scholarship tied to deliberative democracy that responds to the neutrality challenge of doing impactful political work without advocating for a particular political position. The Colorado State University Center for Public Deliberation (CPD) provides a model of democratic engagement by serving as an impartial resource for its community, in part by training students to be facilitators of public processes. This type of democratic engagement can cultivate mutual benefits for students, professors, universities, community organizations, and citizens. We offer a principle of passionate impartiality for guiding process-design and facilitation. Passionately impartial scholars and students are passionate about their community, democracy, and solving problems but are nonetheless committed to serving a primarily impartial, process-focused role in order to improve local communication practices. Drawing on challenges from critical theory and the academy, we offer a nuanced account of what it means to negotiate the tensions between serving an impartial role while also upholding democratic values of equality and inclusion.

The present study conceptualizes engagement by following Marifran Mattson’s story—from tragic motorcycle accident to community engagement. The authors advance a fivepart conceptualization of engagement and test its usefulness by exploring it in relation to a stage model approach and by contrasting it to Bourdieu’s theory of timidity and habitus in relation to symbolic violence. The community engagement begins with a motorcycle safety campaign and expands to include the development of support groups and public policy regarding health insurance fairness for amputees (a.k.a. prosthetic parity). The analysis draws on critical ethnography and the interpretation draws on alternative perspectives and reflexivity. The findings suggest that the stage model is less useful than Bourdieu’s theory in explaining discursive practices, the role of professional discourses, and the emergence of heroic activism and heroic discourse in community engagement. Overall, the study paints a picture of what Boyer (1996) called the “scholarship of engagement.”

Second Life is the one of strongest currently known type of cultural, collectively negotiated constructions of virtual reality, and despite its old age (12 years), it is still a platform for interactions for a small but consolidated group of residents. In this paper I will make an attempt to discuss how certain Second Life communities remain strong despite the mediums overall decay. I will mainly focus at the relationships of the members of these successful communities with their avatars putting forward two categories: embodiment and engagement. To support my argument I will focus on case-studies of three significant and dynamical and fantasy communities in Second Life: Goreans, Furries and Tinies. As I will try to show, there are several relevant conclusions emerging from the etnographic research conducted for the purpose of this article. First of all, avatars created within such communities also share particular common traits: they possess features that allow for stronger narrative and/or embodied identification. Secondly, „strong” communities usually put a lot of emphasis on managing communication and interaction among their members.

Increasingly, organization and communication scholars are paying critical attention to the materiality work/life. In this vein, this paper explores the connections between job segregation, object relations, and the performance of work belongings. In particular, it speaks into the question: how do object relations constitute segregated job belongings? Drawing on data from a year-long, comparative ethnography of barbers and hairstylists, the analysis focuses on barbershop and hair salon mirrors and the complex relations produced by barbers’ avoidance and hairstylists’ engagement of this common object. Specifically, these object relations were found to not only differentiate job belongings, but also materialize erotics (pains and/or pleasures) in the constitution of job segregation. The paper closes with implications of these findings for studies of materiality, especially in terms of how object relations and pleasures summon and segregate working bodies and jobs.

Dairy Farming is Big Business in New Zealand. The New Zealand Dairy Industry contributes significantly to the manufacture, trade, and consumption of dairy products the world over. This industry is deeply implicated in the intensifying trajectory of globalization, a form of order euphemistically referred to as ‘global development’. Critics attribute significant social and environmental degradation to this trajectory. Stories about corporate responsibility are attractive to those business students willing to include ethical standpoints in their considerations. Through a [re]telling of the influence of dairy-farming on the wellbeing of New Zealanders we suggest that such stories may be better read as channels of influence that perpetuate elite interests. Our analysis is generated from our schooling in Critical Management Studies. From this orientation, dominant stories are often presented as almost totally closed and hegemonic. But they can never be fully so. Paradox and contradictions can always be located within and across such stories. Our essay is a story about dairying that illuminates such paradox and contradiction. It is written to draw our gaze to the dangerous degradations of systemic outcomes on the quality of life for diverse stakeholders. We call for change. Our professional realms of influence include the spheres of management education. It is here we are placing our focus. We invite the telling of more diverse stories that may engender more generative futures than the seemingly entrenched trajectory that intensifies systemic benefits to an elite at the expense to others and exacerbates environmental degradation to the detriment of all. We invite engagement with stories that might place a different bet on the future (Boje, 2014).