Hello Fellow PNPrs,
Here is a call for projects and participation to an interesting PDW.
Thanks,
Neil
Dr. Neil Boyd
Assistant Professor of Management
Lycoming College
Williamsport, PA 17701
CALL FOR WORKING PROJECTS
Sustainable Practice Action Research Community (SPARC) Workshop
Academy of Management, Atlanta, Georgia
August 12, 2006
If you are interested in enriching and adding velocity to a project that you are
(or would like to be) working on, then the Sustainable Practitices Action
Research (SPARC) Community invites you to be involved in our 9th annual
preconference development workshop at the Academy of Management meetings in
Atlanta on August 12 from 8am-5pm.
The SPARC Workshop will be a hands-on, practice-grounded, action-learning venue
that brings together academics from many disciplines and reflective
practitioners from business, government and NGO sectors to collaboratively
learn by working together using action-research processes on real-world
projects at various stages of development. The SPARC workshop is dedicated to
generating collaboration among academics and practitioners and synergy between
theory and practice in the service of organizational and social transformation.
Its intent is to help solve real organizational and cross-organizational
problems of a local and/or global nature while generating deeper learning and
publishable knowledge.
During the day-long workshop, teams of academics and practitioners will
collaboratively apply their expertise in a roundtable format to critique and
develop various applied research projects brought by organization sponsors.
You are invited to propose your own project (details below) or join one of
those being sponsored by others.
Although all types of projects are welcome, we especially encourage projects
that are multi-sector (e.g. business and government/nonprofit) and that have a
social and/or environmental action focus or component. The goal is to help
academic and practitioner attendees apply and test varied concepts and methods
for managing sustainably at the point where the ?rubber meets the road? ? on
actual projects to enhance sustainable management through whole-systems
approaches that both add value to organizations and are beneficial to people
and the planet.
The workshop will leverage the expertise of the Action Research (AR) community
in the service of your project. For us, AR is an approach to organization
development, not a specific technique. Essentially, it attempts to generate
knowledge about an organization as an integral part of the change process. AR
involves repeated cycles of diagnosis, planning, implementing,
collecting/analyzing outcome data and reflections with organization members and
stakeholders, reaching conclusions, and defining new sets of action plans.
Over time, the AR approach becomes part of how the organization attempts to
bring about change. Recent AR evolutions include embracing techniques to
deepen inquiry, address larger-scale global issues of institutional change, and
improve rigor to solidify validity as a social science research methodology.
Although AR and action inquiry are not the only frameworks embraced by our
community, they may be particularly well-suited approaches to solving complex
?multi-domain? problems that exist in the spaces between organizations from
multiple sectors and that require high degrees of inclusion, collaboration and
deep learning (AR often has been applied in many areas of the world for
community development efforts involving organizations from multiple sectors).
For a history of the workshop series, including prior project descriptions,
visit the AOM Practitioner Series at
http://www.chrms.org/
For further inquiry or to submit brief (1-page) proposals for working projects
(start-ups or ongoing) contact Series organizer Neil Boyd,
nxb12@psu.edu,
717-948-6061, fax 717-730-3816, co-organizer Terry Orr,
morr@bnkst.edu,
212-678-3728, fax 212-678-4162, or any member of the PS Steering Committee
listed below.
We will use an organic, developmental review process for your project proposals
that you may initiate with as little as an exploratory call/email. A support
system will be provided to further develop and learn from accepted projects
leading up to the workshop.
SPARC STEERING COMMITTEE
Neil Boyd, Penn State University,
Nxb12@psu.edu
Patricia Braun, U. of Ballarat, Australia,
p.braun@ballarat.edu.au
David Coghlan, U. of Dublin,
dcoghlan@tcd.ie
Rosa Colon, Bristol Meyers Squibb,
rosa.colon@bms.com
John Dooney, Society for Human Resource Management,
jdooney@shrm.org
Olav Eikeland, Work Research Institute, Oslo,
oleik@online.no ,
oe@afi-wri.no
Richard Ennals, Kingston U., UK,
ennals@kingston.ac.uk
Kent Fairfield, Fairleigh Dickinson U.,
fairfield@fdu.edu
Gerard Farias, Institute for Sustainable Enterprise, FDU,
gfarias@fdu.edu
Carol Gorelick, Pace U.,
cgorelick@notes.interliant.com
Joel Harmon, Fairleigh Dickinson U.,
jharmon444@aol.com
Terry Orr, Bank Street College.
morr@bnkst.edu
Thoralf Qvale, Work Research Institute, Oslo,
tq@afi-wri.no
Dan Twomey, Fairleigh Dickinson U.,
Dtwomey@fdu.edu
Jeana Wirtenberg, Institute for Sustainable Enterprise, FDU,
jwirtenberg@optonline.net
Lyle Yorks, Columbia U.
ly84@columbia.edu