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HANDBOOK OF TRANSFORMATIVE COOPERATION
HANDBOOK OF TRANSFORMATIVE COOPERATION New Designs and Dynamics
Edited by Sandy Kristin Piderit, Ronald E. Fry, and David L. Cooperrider
STANFORD BUSINESS BOOKS An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California
Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of transformative cooperation: new designs and dynamics I edited by Sandy Kristin Piderit, Ronald E. Fry, and David L. Cooperrider. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5406-4 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Cooperation. I. Piderit, Sandy Kristin, 1969- II. Fry, Ronald E. (Ronald Eugene) Ill. Cooperrider, David L. HD2963.H36 2007 334-dc22 2007001774 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10 x 13.5 Sabon Special discounts for bulk quantities of Stanford Business Books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details and discount information, contact the special sales department of Stanford University Press. Tel: (650) 736-1783, Fax: (650) 736-1784
in memory of Don Wolfe preeminent scholar, humble mentor, loving friend who showed us a way toward transformative cooperation -SKP, RAF, DLC Cleveland, Ohio April2007
Contents
Acknowledgments PART 1
The Call for Transformative Cooperation
An Invitation to the Dance of Transformative Cooperation Sandy Kristin Piderit, Ronald E. Fry, and David L. Cooperrider 2
The Economic Imperative for Revisioning the Rules of the Game: Work, Values, and Caring Riane Eisler
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Twenty-First Century Strategies for Sustainability Hazel Henderson
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Revolutionary Routines: Capturing the Opportunity for Creating a More Inclusive Capitalism Mark B. Milstein, Ted London, and Stuart L. Hart
PART 11
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Relational Dynamics
s The Transformative Potential of Compassion at Work
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]ane Dutton, ]acoba Lilius, and ]ason Kanov 6
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Ego and Identity as Barriers to Transformative Cooperation: Lessons from Feminism and Buddhism Barbara Gray
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Creating Transformative Cooperation Through Positive Emotions Leslie E. Sekerka and Barbara L. Fredrickson
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The Essence of Transformation: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership Arran Caza and Robert E. Quinn
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Contents
PART Ill Cooperation as a Transformative Force
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The World Inquiry: Stories of Business as an Agent of World Benefit Nadya Zhexembayeva
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Learning from Transformative Cooperation Case Studies: Laying Pathways for Future Inquiry Loren R. Dyck and Nigel Strafford
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PART IV Designing Transformative Cooperation 11
Designing Transformative Learning Paul Shrivastava
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The Usefulness of Design Research in Elementary and High Schools for Management Education ]ordi Trullen, Jean M. Bartunek, and Maryellen Harmon
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Unyielding Integrity: The Key to Creating Next-Generation Transformational Partnerships Andrew R. McGill
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PART V 14
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Transformative Cooperation as Generative Possibility
Leadership for World Benefit: New Horizons for Research and Practice ]ames D. Ludema and C. Keith Cox
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Fostering Sustainability Across Many Companies: The Importance of Project Memes Hilary Bradbury
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Cultivating Transformative Collaboration: Actionable Knowledge as Aesthetic Achievement Frank]. Barrett
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New Designs in Transformative Cooperation: The Growing Call and Converging Conversation David L. Cooperrider, Ronald E. Fry, and Sandy Kristin Piderit
Contributors Index
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431 443
Acknowledgments
The origins of this book in seminars with colleagues and students in 1999, 2000, and 2001 ultimately led to the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation (Business as an Agent of World Benefit) conference held September 17-20, 2003, at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio. We are grateful to the more than one hundred conference participants who joined with us in our efforts to locate examples of the phenomenon of transformative cooperation, make sense of its origins and dynamics, and help generate new examples through our actions. We could not have hosted the conference without the support of Bonnie Copes, Guy Hutt, and Patricia Petty, and although the conference participants thanked them effusively for their work to make the experience a pleasant one, we take this opportunity to thank them again for supporting our efforts on this topic. We also acknowledge the support of our colleagues in the Department of Organizational Behavior, especially that of Don Wolfe, who helped create an inviting seminar space in which students could explore their interests in topics related to transformative cooperation. Finally, we especially thank the following colleagues for their contributions to the conference and for the several years of previous preparation they invested during their doctoral studies in the collective exploration of related ideas: David Bright, Carla Carten, Loren Dyck,
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Elizabeth Essex, Lindsey Godwin, Allison Gunderson, Anita Howard, Tracey Messer, Verena Murphy, Mary Grace Neville, Latha Poonemallee, Ned Powley, Mauricio Puerta, Maria Ruiz, Leslie Sekerka, Tim Skaggs, Alka Shrivastava, Nigel Strafford, Elizabeth Stubbs, Bauback Yeganeh, Anastasia White, Danielle Zandee, and Nadya Zhexembayeva.
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An Invitation to the Dance of Transformative Cooperation SANDY KRISTIN PIDERIT, RONALD E. FRY, and DAVID L. COOPERRIDER
We live in an age of pervasive change. Perplexing new challenges-many of them global, transboundary, interconnected, and precarious-signal that we are in the midst of a historic transition. At times it seems as if a new golden era of sustainable abundance is ever nearer the horizon, but simultaneously we hover on a precipice of profound conflict and destruction, which might be triggered through either accident, ignorance, inertia, or senseless acts of aggression. For many, the response to these tremendously divergent views of the future has been the awakening of an immense creative urge, and a desire to unleash our highest capacities as we shoulder our universal responsibility for building a better world. In this book we bring together the contributions of an illustrious group of individuals who joined us at a conference, "New Designs in Transformative Cooperation," in September 2003 in the Peter B. Lewis building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. When we invited people to participate in the conference, we called on them to share their insights on unleashing breakthroughs in transformative cooperation. Our physical space was inspiring, yet the intellectual dilemmas we asked participants to address were challenging. We wanted to understand the role that business schools, businesses, and other organizational forms could play in nudging our global society away from the
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catastrophic VISIOns of the future and toward hopeful VISIOns. We wanted to understand what it would take to transform the world, and we entered with one assumption: that cooperation is potentially transformative and can be designed to maximize that potential. As starting points for discussion, we offered these definitions: The key words are (1) designing, used in much the same sense that James March (1999) talks about-as the skill and understanding embodied in the arts of planning, inventing, making, and doing, where the central concern is "the conception and realization of new things"and (2) transformative cooperation, tentatively defined, following James McGregor Burns (1978) and Barbara Marx Hubbard (1998), as the process that generates a new threshold of cooperative capability and takes people to a higher stage of moral development while serving to build a more sustainable world future.
What does this process-transformative cooperation-look like, how does it feel, and where can we hear it emerging? You might imagine that this process cannot happen in business, because business is primarily associated with competition. You may associate cooperation more with the public and nonprofit sectors, with educational and spiritual endeavors, or perhaps, if we remain grounded in optimism and unshaken by the events of recent years, with the United Nations. Nevertheless, we want to bring these questions into the domains of business so that we might harness the power of corporate resources and practices to address the critical challenges of our time. As we began looking for signs of transformative cooperation in the business world, as we got better at seeking out stories that challenged our assumptions about business competition and managerial self-interest, we found more and more reasons to hope. Hamilton's (2004, pp. 35-36) description of the beginnings of an industry alliance captures some of the flavor of what we were seeking, and beginning to find, in cases of transformative cooperation: It's July 2003, and fifteen top telecom executives have gathered at a small island retreat off the coast of Maine .... For the first two days, the talks are frustrating. Experts take turns trading theories and speculations, but everyone remains guarded .... On the third morning a "dialogue facilitator" is flown in to try to bring the group together. After giving a brief introduction about the importance of listening and suspending assumptions, and a plea to remember the common goal that brought them together, the meeting begins. Already, there is a different
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quality in the room. Around the circle, people seem more relaxed and more attentive to one another. A few minutes into the discussion, the CEO of one of the large wireless providers shares his vision: "I think we need to stop thinking of our work in purely business terms," he states, pausing, groping for words. "What if we began to see one another not simply as competitors for market share, but as partners in uniting the world through technology? If you really think about it, in a sense, isn't our larger mission to create the infrastructure that will make it possible for the Global Village to become a real community?" His openness seems to catch everyone off guard, and for the first time all weekend, there is a brief silence. In this silence, an almost imperceptible, vibrant energy begins to grow in the room. "I'm glad you had the guts to say it," another executive offers. "I think we've all grown tired of just chasing the bottom line." ... The shift in the group is now becoming palpable, and several people comment on it. There is an electricity in the air and a sense of space that seems to envelop everyone. More members join in, and as each individual speaks, it seems to pull the group deeper into a unity, not only of interest but of vision.
Groups that respond positively to such invitations experience a sense of unity and common identity that transcends all the boundaries between individuals that were salient when they first convened; such groups are on their way to an experience of transformative cooperation. Dialogue and Action as a Dance
The challenge in defining transformative cooperation as the process that generates cooperative capability and leads to moral development and a more sustainable world future is that the process and its outcomes are difficult to disentangle. When we describe transformative cooperation in terms of the sustainability, capacity, and morality that we consider its results, we may not convey the story of how those results are generated. We risk focusing on the destination and leaving off of the map any hint of how to reach it. In responding to that challenge, we want to reiterate that transformative cooperation is a process. It involves both dialogue and action. To separate out the essential elements of the process of transformative cooperation from its outcomes, it may help to think of transformative cooperation as a dance with many dancers. The dance may begin in
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any of several different ways, although the root of a dance is always hope-the hope that one can express one's true self, and connect with others who understand and appreciate the potential for good that exists within the self when we connect with others. Out of this sense of hope, one of the possible participants in the process may take some unilateral action-he or she may simply begin to dance, or to sing, or may put some music on and see if anyone else responds to the rhythm and the melody. The dance becomes interactive as soon as others choose to join in. Now the potential for cooperation exists. Dancers may not at first coordinate their movements with each other or with the music smoothly. Responses from dancers to the actions of others might include subtle indications of connection, from an appreciative smile to toe tapping to clapping. Responses might also include more deliberate or noticeable new actions that contribute to the dance, whether in the form of steps that take the form of reinforcing repetition of a theme, or of some contrapuntal innovation, or of a disconnected improvisation. The worst possible outcome of a dance is that the coordination breaks down-one dancer steps on another's toes, the second shoves back in anger, the other dancers move away and take sides in support of one dancer against the other. Then the dance can deteriorate into a fight, and boundaries between different groups of dancers emerge and are reinforced by the pain they inflict on one another (whether intentionally or unintentionally). Anyone who has seen West Side Story has seen this dynamic dramatized. Alternatively, the dancers may move in harmony for a while but then leave the floor if they tire or are reminded of the time and of their obligations elsewhere. The dance may have been cooperative but may have fallen short of a transformative experience. It may not continue to attract new dancers, and the floor may eventually empty and be replaced by stillness. Even if some of the same dancers reconvene at another time, they will not have a shared identity or a shared set of principles they have learned about how to cooperate with one another on which to build, and they will need to return to the beginning of the process as they strive to create a new dance that might become not just cooperative but also transformative. If the dance continues and cooperation is reinforced, the potential for transformation emerges. Dancers may develop a sense of harmony,
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and if that sense is mutually recognized, they will often come to think of themselves as a troupe-as connected to one another, members of a group-even if they had not defined themselves in that way when they began to dance. The harmony and beauty of their dance will continue to attract new dancers, so some can step to the side while others join in; individuals can leave the dance if they must, but the dance itself becomes self-sustaining and goes on and on. If dancers who have left return, they will bring with them an increased capacity to coordinate their movements with those of others, because the transformation they had previously experienced included learning about the process of transformative cooperation. We do not want to substitute this metaphor of transformative cooperation as dancing for a theory, but we offer it as a starting point for theorizing, which can be compared with other starting points offered by the contributors to this volume. We will preview the chapters after explaining why we believe such theorizing is necessary given our perceptions of the changing role of business in global society. The Global Context
How can we harness the process of transformative cooperation to address the critical challenges of our time? Stanford University's Willis Harman, one of the leading thinkers of this transition epoch, made a forecast that for many was quite contrarian: that the most positive and powerful force for change-the sector with the greatest likelihood of helping humanity move through rough and uncharted waters in the most peaceful, free (nontotalitarian) and constructive way-would be business. In his book Creative Work: The Constructive Role of Business in Transforming Society (1990), Harman wrote: Business, the motor of our society, has the opportunity to be the new creative force on the planet, a force which could contribute to the wellbeing of many ... the modern corporation is as adaptable an organizational form as has ever been invented, so that in a time of fundamental change it may be expected to be on the cutting edge.
As professors of organizational behavior within a school of management, we are accustomed to encountering skepticism in response to this notion that business can be an agent for world benefit. Our colleagues
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in accounting walk around with a bitter taste in their mouths after the Enron, WorldCom, and other recent business scandals. In economics, followers of Milton Friedman argue that corporations are acting irresponsibly in pursuing the common good if they cannot identify a tangible benefit for their stockholders. In marketing, our colleagues are challenged by their students to distinguish between effective niche marketing and greenwashing, the "spinning" of social responsibility reports and the like in order to be politically correct and socially desirable as a means to somehow mask the underlying motive of generating shareholder wealth. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that business can be a force for good. For example, the Young Presidents Organization, made up of 8,000 business leaders, held a satellite conference of CEOs from the Middle East in early 2003 and concluded with a resolve to expand the "peace forum" that they had experienced during the event. In his book Good To Great (2001), James Collins talks about "Level 5" business leadership, pointing to companies such as Merck and Nucor as examples. Forbes Magazine singled out lesser-known but future-inspiring leaders such as Green Mountain Coffee Roaster's Robert Stiller, for the tremendous social impact his company is having in poor regions all over the world. Our research team has completed case studies of, among other cooperative efforts, an improbable dialogue and partnership between the Ritz Carlton and indigenous peoples in Hawaii, and a collaborative effort spanning the business, nonprofit, and religious sectors of southern states in the United States to invigorate mathematics education in public schools. While it seemed at first as if we were searching for a phenomenon that has not yet come to life, examples have begun to emerge of the type of cooperative efforts that we believe will transform the intersection of business and society. These rising impulses for positive change must be noticed, understood, and connected-and the logic for studying these phenomena within the field of management is simple. To address critical global challenges, the resources of both large corporations and small businesses will be needed. It is difficult to imagine any one item on the global agenda for change that can be understood without also understanding the emerging leaders and pioneering organizations that are working to address that agenda. Those leaders and organizations will be agents of the kinds of
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transformation that can overcome the remaining barriers to the age-old dream of a world that works for all. In their classic volume Our Common Future (1987), the World Commission on Environment and Development suggested that virtually every item on the global agenda for change can be addressed (at least technically and economically)-"providing that the institutional arrangements permit the constructive interrelations of many intellectual resources and insights involving people from many countries with a myriad of cultures, traditions, languages, aspirations and so on." More than by any other force, the world's direction is being shaped by human organizations. The significance of the relatively small number of decisions made by the leaders of our nation-states pales in comparison to the billions of decisions made every day by the members and leaders of thousands of businesses such as Sony and Mobile Exxon, and private nongovernmental organizations such as World Vision and the Nature Conservancy. For this reason we assert that the key nexus for our future is the intersection of business and society-specifically the search for new designs in which business is going beyond old models. Our first progress reports based on the results of our search are represented by the case studies on transformative cooperation completed by doctoral students between 1999 and 2003 (these are analyzed comparatively in Chapter Ten). The rest of this edited volume represents our second progress report. How a Conference Generated This Book
What allows some groups to come together in such a series of cooperative experiences? Why is the result of those experiences sometimes transformative for those involved and for those with whom they are connected? Why do other groups never get past the distrust and the frustration that are common in early efforts to cooperate? Those were the questions we set out to explore along with the participants in our September 2003 conference. The primary objectives of our conference were to spotlight great efforts toward transformative cooperation that create conditions of greater wholeness and human connection, and to challenge the scholarly community to go beyond old models of charismatic leaders to help us understand the beginnings of such great efforts and the relational processes
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and inquiry methods that are required to generate designs that will allow shared visions for the future of the planet to be put into action. In response to our invitation we received enthusiastic responses from more than sixty managers, consultants, and scholars eager for dialogue about what they each believe can generate transformative cooperation and about what we still need to learn. In the remainder of this chapter we preview some of the threads of that dialogue that are captured in the papers drafted before the conference and revised afterward for inclusion in this handbook. The resulting chapters are organized into five clusters. The first cluster focuses on the reasons why transformative cooperation is needed to face our current global challenges, and on the early signs that it is emerging, particularly with the involvement of the business sector. The second cluster focuses on what it takes at an interpersonal level to open up the possibilities for transformative cooperation, exploring the barriers of ego and identity and the levers of compassion, positive emotions, and transformative leadership. The third cluster highlights some exemplars of transformative cooperation and draws out from those exemplars some additional principles of creating space for this powerful process to emerge. The fourth cluster focuses on design principles, especially in educational contexts, that create the space needed for cooperation and learning to occur. The fifth cluster focuses on the generative capacity of cooperative processes, identifying some initial propositions about the dynamics of transformative cooperation and signaling some promising directions for future research. In the remainder of this introduction we preview the chapters to help readers locate the most logical starting points for exploration of the topic of transformative cooperation at the intersection of business and society.
The Call for Transformative Cooperation
To set the context for our study of transformative cooperation, Riane Eisler spells out why we must go beyond the current rules of business and makes a case that a new vision of work, values, and caring is an economic-not merely a social-imperative. Eisler's chapter highlights the ways in which current economic theories and business practices have devalued caring and caregiving behaviors and made it more difficult to
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recognize, value, and honor care for other humans and for our environment. She identifies actions that have been taken in some societies to redress the devaluing of caring and move toward partnership economics through the use of economic inventions, the development of new economic measurements, the revision of practices to promote gender equity, and seven other steps focusing on research, education, business, and policy. Eisler spells out how partnership-oriented organizations build on a different type of hierarchy that rewards relations based on mutual benefit, respect, caring, and accountability rather than on competitive and fear-dominant relationships. She provides examples of how businesses and societies benefit from organizing around partnerships, and lays out an agenda for the work needed to continue this transition. Hazel Henderson's chapter, which follows Eisler's, reinforces the critique of traditional economics and the ways in which business schools have reinforced economic assumptions, pointing out how that discipline has minimized the cooperative elements of human nature. She spells out the ways in which a focus on competition has highlighted fear and conflict and persisted in political and banking models of economic development. Her chapter details the scientific critiques of economists for engaging in advocacy rather than observation, including the origins in 1969 of the Nobel Memorial Prize and the revolt against the use of the Nobel name in association with the prize in 2004. She also outlines the early successes of the movement to hold businesses accountable for their ethical performance and social impacts, arguing that cooperation for the common good is becoming a condition for our survival, even as human collective behavior evolves toward moral altruism. Continuing her critique, Henderson outlines the ways in which psychologists and neuroscientists are uncovering evidence that challenges fundamental economic assumptions. She also documents recent efforts to account for previously nonmonetized assets by making adjustments to traditional measures like gross domestic product and to properly account for social investments and social assets. Brazil's challenge to the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) accounting rules for public assets is highlighted as an example of how accounting practices should be revised around the globe. Henderson encourages the IMF to expand those revisions so that developing countries can make investments that will help them achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals.
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While the first two chapters discuss the context and challenge for businesses globally, Chapter Three highlights the premium available to individual companies if they build corporate capabilities for a more inclusive capitalism. Mark Milstein, Ted London, and Stuart Hart outline the differences between the kind of evolutionary changes that allow a company to expand its share in an existing market and the revolutionary thinking that is needed for a company to enter a new market. The chapter articulates the ways in which the dominance of evolutionary routines can be counterproductive for companies in the long term, because the emphasis on minimizing risks keeps companies from pursuing the learning that comes from early efforts to enter new markets. Building on the argument of Prahalad and Hart (2002) that today's most significant growth opportunities for business lie in meeting the needs of the world's poor, the chapter outlines the challenges of entering such emerging markets. The need for revolutionary routines that seek variation, cultivate new skills, incubate disruptive innovations, and revise product-market portfolios is articulated in detail. Together the chapters in the first section spell out ways in which old corporate practices and business policies must change if business is to rise to the challenge articulated by Willis Harman, to be the leading creative force in society and thus to benefit the world. They fill out the arguments made at the beginning of this chapter about why such creative change is needed. Most important, they provide hope by demonstrating that the change is already under way. The Relational Dynamics of Transformative Cooperation
In contrast with the opening section, the second cluster of chapters focuses on the dynamics of cooperation at the interpersonal level rather than on the context in which such cooperation may or may not occur. Chapter Five, by Jane Dutton, Jacoba Lilius, and Jason Kanov, explores the factors that contribute to the capability for cooperation within a particular organization. They articulate three mechanisms through which compassion can facilitate cooperation-by building resources, strengthening values and beliefs, and cultivating critical skills. They provide rich examples of the kinds of relational resources that are unleashed when compassion is expressed, allowing individuals to develop trust for one
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another, raise the quality of their connections, and elicit positive emotions, both in those who experience compassion and in those who witness it. Many of their examples of how compassion builds skills are drawn from medical settings, where the ability to focus on and attend to others is especially valuable. Finally, they emphasize the power of small acts when they are amplified through storytelling within an organization. Chapter Six, by Barbara Gray, advances a provocative argument regarding compassion: that expressing compassion requires an essential "loss of self," and it is this selflessness that makes transformation possible in cooperative relationships. Reviewing psychological and sociological approaches to identity, Gray identifies a great irony in pursuing an understanding of cooperation based on identification processes, which imply a division between in-groups and out-groups. She extends this critique by allying with feminist and Buddhist scholars, particularly Donna Haraway and Mark Epstein. While Haraway argues that all self-knowledge is biased and partial, Buddhist thinkers assert that distinctions between individuals are dangerous, a source of suffering, leading away from enlightenment. Gray explores the meaning of compassion within the framework of Buddhist thought, emphasizing the importance of recognizing similarities between self and other to such an extent that the boundary between self and other dissolves. When compassion is extended in this way, the opening that is created between the parties creates an opportunity for transformation. Gray illustrates how mediators can help recognize such opportunities and encourage parties to take advantage of them by reframing disputes or differences in new ways, and how meditation and working within a sangha (community of Buddhist practice) create opportunities to practice compassion. Rather than focusing on compassion, in Chapter Seven Leslie Sekerka and Barbara Fredrickson focus on the larger domain of positive emotions and their role in cooperative change processes. Drawing on Fredrickson's extensive theorizing about positive emotions, the coauthors review research on the connections between emotion and action, and how positive emotional climates can affect performance within organizational contexts. Next the chapter builds on Sekerka's dissertation findings, that appreciative inquiry (AI) can elevate positive
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psychological and physiological measures in participants. The authors outline the ways in which the AI process unleashes positive emotions and generates momentum for change as participants cooperate in generative ways to open up new possibilities for their shared future. In a series of propositions they connect positive emotions with organizational growth and development. In the final chapter in this section, Arran Caza and Robert Quinn focus on the role of leadership in transformative processes. They argue against a traditional focus on leadership behaviors and best practices and advocate instead a focus on leaders' states of being. They expand on Quinn's earlier writing about the contrast between a normal state of being and a fundamental state of leadership. The shift from one state to the other is a shift from choosing comfortable means to focusing on desired outcomes, regardless of whether the means needed to achieve those outcomes are comfortable or familiar. The chapter argues that a person who makes this shift and enters the fundamental state becomes a leader, regardless of position in the organization, by questioning existing practices and inspiring others to do so as well. Because a person in this state is open and attentive to the environment, he or she is able to identify new opportunities and share his or her vision with others. Caza and Quinn conclude by identifying three implications of their view of leadership, suggesting that this state can be held only intermittently. Their arguments have interesting implications in terms of the need for multiple individuals to fill leadership roles during an extended period of transformative cooperation. Cooperation as a Transformative Force: Golden Innovations
The two chapters in this section highlight stories of golden innovations-exemplars of transformative cooperation that have been documented by doctoral students at Case Western Reserve University. Chapter Nine, by Nadya Zhexembayeva, documents the early development of the Innovation Bank in the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit (http://worldbenefit.case.edu). To portray more clearly the desired type of transformation that is the outcome of stories in the Innovation Bank, Zhexembayeva draws together the writing on corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Although those
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streams of thought were originally separate, she identifies the increasing convergence on the triple bottom line and links it to a desire to achieve mutual benefit. To illustrate these concepts and demonstrate the range of stories in the BAWB Innovation Bank, the chapter highlights six stories of organizations engaging in unlikely cooperations that have yielded mutual benefit. Key story lines range from a startup bringing together Arab, Israeli, and other Mediterranean suppliers to manufacture a tomato spread (and along the way building friendships across the divides of the Middle East conflict) to the cooperative development of voluntary principles within the banking industry for ensuring that loan recipients address environmental and social impacts of their newly financed projects. Zhexembayeva concludes her chapter by identifying themes that emerge from the stories she has highlighted, including the implementation of a broadened stakeholder approach, the benefits of multiparty dialogue and partnership, a dedication to the intent of uplifting communities, and relying on the traditional strengths of business. The second chapter in this section also analyzes cases of transformative cooperation, documented more thoroughly than the stories in the Innovation Bank because they were the focus of extensive study by teams of doctoral students. Loren Dyck and Nigel Strafford provide overviews of each of the cases conducted by their colleagues and report results of their grounded theory analyses comparing the cases. Their analyses point out the particular elements of historical context and the personal histories of influential leaders that seem to open up the possibility of cooperation. A second theme they highlight is the careful cultivation of high-quality relationships over time, and a third theme, closely related, deals with the powerful positive emotions that sustained participants as the cooperative efforts unfolded. In cases where fear or conflict emerged, high levels of attention were devoted to healing those rifts. That attention was motivated by a repeated return to the collective vision and organizing principles. Finally, the cases share a theme of using inclusive structures as a way of generating broad engagement in each initiative. The chapter closes with some important open questions about how such cooperative initiatives unfold-including questions about tipping points and unpredictable temporal unfolding.
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Designing Transformative Cooperation
This section of the book moves our academic readers from looking at examples of transformative cooperation around the globe to looking for opportunities to create transformative learning in our own colleges and universities. Paul Shrivastava's chapter outlines the processes that can make learning transformative, with a focus on learning that allows students to connect with others, to connect ideas with their immediate work, to connect with themselves in an integral way, and to connect with the implications of ideas in terms of possibilities for change. He reminds us of the philosophical roots of this process-oriented approach to learning and highlights some of the technologies now available that may help educators meet their objectives. In the heart of Chapter Eleven, Shrivastava focuses on the professional education context as a potential site for additional transformative learning. To maximize this potential, he recommends emphasizing project-based learning, particularly in dealing with meaningful and important problems; being dedicated to a personalized learning process that encourages students to reflect critically on their experiences; intentionally incorporating multiple perspectives to raise up the need for synthesis; and providing appropriately high levels of support for collaboration. As an example of how education might engage students as whole people, Shrivastava describes his course "Managing with Passion," which invites all students to create and participate in a community event-a triathlon race. Clearly the impact of such an experience is not just in what the student knows at the end but what he or she has felt and done. In the final section of this chapter, Shrivastava invites educators to question old assumptions about training formats, learning content, business models, and pedagogical approaches. Chapter Twelve also focuses on cooperation as learning but takes a design perspective on how to create more effective education. The chapter's authors, Jordi Trullen, Jean Bartunek, and Maryellen Harmon, review research on high school math and science interventions that were studied using design-meaning that a particular instructional environment was created and then studied systematically in order to improve learning in that environment and to expand theory about which elements of the intervention were key and why. Their review offers several examples of past research conducted in high schools. In comparing
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the research processes used, their review emphasizes the high level of collaboration between teachers and researchers, which allows the team to develop the iterative refinements that are the hallmark of design research. A section of Chapter Twelve focuses on the development of an ideal type, a key starting point for design-oriented research, and provides some examples of how such ideal types can be developed. The second half of the chapter connects the education research on design with organization studies and suggests ways in which a design approach would be fruitful in management education. In particular, the authors argue that this approach should help business professors to move away from an examination of single interventions in the classroom and toward an overarching vision of the desired educational environment for students of management. By iterating ever closer to this vision, in the systematic way that has been demonstrated in high school design experiments, the potential exists for management scholars to learn from high school educators. While the previous chapters in this section offer some guidance to educators and managers for cultivating transformative cooperation, Andrew McGill's chapter also offers some cautions. In Chapter Thirteen, McGill reviews the literature on difficulties and failures in alliances and identifies common themes. In particular, he warns against haste and selfishness (as Gray does in Chapter Six) when developing an alliance or partnership and suggests that expecting a partnership to manage itself is setting both parties up for failure. Next McGill identifies some key foundational elements of partnerships, including an intense drive to find common ground and an ability to see momentary conflicts in the context of the longer-term potential for partnership benefits. To put such elements into place, McGill argues that both parties must build on mutual trust and unyielding integrity. He outlines how the forces of free-market capitalism, human instincts to survive in competitions by focusing on winning (or to respond to loss in depression), and the natural psychological drive to conform can pull against partners' efforts to build trust and demonstrate integrity. McGill outlines in detail the types of behaviors that allow early alliance participants to build trust in one another, and illustrates through examples how partnerships can help to reduce the waste that can be associated with competition. Additional examples illustrate that partnerships must remain dynamic in
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order to adjust to inequities that may emerge in the way the yield from the partnership is allocated to the different partners, and to connect this principle to the need for partners to remain transparent and uphold the highest standards of integrity. In the final section of his chapter, McGill illustrates how these factors come together to permit the development of robust partnerships by telling the story of a Detroit-based social development organization known as Focus: HOPE. This example illustrates how engaging students in truly meaningful projects can help generate learning for all who are involved. Together these three chapters offer powerful suggestions about how to help individuals develop the capacity to engage in cooperative initiatives and how to encourage them to work through the challenges that such initiatives can create in their early stages. Transformative Cooperation as Generative Possibility
In the fifth and final section of the book our focus is on theoretical development. The authors of the chapters in this cluster connect emerging principles of generating opportunities for transformative cooperation with existing literature on leadership, sustainable organizing, and improvisation. In Chapter Fourteen, Jim Ludema and Keith Cox make explicit the ways in which our models of leadership must change in order to unleash possibilities for transformation in the business sector. The authors identify six opportunities for expanding leadership research based on interviews with fifteen executives who were engaged in an appreciative inquiry into the leadership of socially responsible firms. The six themes they address include the redefinition of the purpose of business, the eocreation of meaning on a large scale, the promotion of cooperation, strategic innovation and change, cross-cultural operations in a global context, and the elevation of ethical practice. Interwoven with their discussion of these themes are several vignettes that tell leadership stories from the perspectives of executives such as Anita Roddick (founder of the Body Shop) and Bob Langert (senior director of social responsibility at McDonald's). In commenting on these vignettes, Ludema and Cox make connections to leadership theory in the arenas of servant leadership, dialogicalleadership, leader-member exchange, relational leader-
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ship and research on high-quality connections, strategic leadership, and cross-cultural leadership. They also link to literature on ethical leadership and advanced change theory. They highlight many rich opportunities for future research on the leadership of initiatives intended to generate transformative cooperation. The Society of Organizational Learning's Sustainability Consortium is the focus of Chapter Fifteen. Hilary Bradbury explores a paradox in one of the consortium's projects, DocuCom, after situating the project in the broader contexts of the sustainability movement and the development of the consortium itself. The paradox of the DocuCom project is that its innovations were embraced more thoroughly outside the company where the new product was developed than within it. Bradbury's chapter traces the impact of three key ideas, or memes, that originated in the product development process and came to influence the action of members of the consortium from many other companies. Bradbury suggests that we must evaluate the impact of innovations beyond their continued success within the company where they originated. She suggests four additional indicators of success: the benefit to multiple organizations, the value of learning as an end in itself, the impact in a longer time horizon, and the tangible benefit of a project on organizational ecology. In closing, she challenges organizational innovators to assess their success beyond the value of their work for their own company in the form of a public balance sheet. In Chapter Sixteen, Frank Barrett takes this expanded notion or criterion of success even further, challenging the dominance of a rationalist focus on the notion that cooperation must benefit each party in an economic sense. He argues that the rationalist focus obscures our understanding of a whole other dimension of cooperative experiencesthe aesthetic dimension, which deals with the sensation and feelings of the moment. Barrett connects the aesthetic with the intentions of painters aiming to capture the wonder with which they perceive light, calor, and texture and reviews philosophical writings on aesthetic knowledge. The heart of the chapter tells three stories of how evoking artistic experiences in organizations affected existing conflicts. The first story illustrates how an intervention in a hotel helped to open up and dissolve a conflict between staff in different departments. The second story focuses on the Public Conversations Project, which was designed
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to bring together members of polarized groups, such as adherents to the pro-choice and pro-life positions regarding abortion, into constructive dialogue. The third focuses on the accomplishments of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Barrett analyzes these stories as four efforts that seem to raise up the aesthetic dimension of experience-surrender, appreciation, wonderment, and forgiveness. He asserts that it is the experience of these aesthetics that leads individuals to transform their beliefs in ways that permit more cooperation, and he articulates several action principles that can create opportunities for the experience of these dimensions. His recommendations remind us that small steps can have large consequences when artfully taken. In conclusion, our final chapter offers a story of the future that illustrates how transformative cooperation offers the promise of addressing one of the most entrenched conflicts of the past millennium. The story allows us to unpack several themes that will guide us as we continue our work in creating instances of transformative cooperation around the world. We hope you will join us in this work!
References
Burns, James McGregor. 1978. Leadership. New York: HarperCollins. Collins, Jim. 2001. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don't. New York: HarperCollins. Hamilton, Craig. 2004. "Come Together." What Is Enlightenment? 25: 35-42. Harman, Willis M., John Hormann, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 1990. Creative Work: The Constructive Role of Business in Transforming Society. Indianapolis: Knowledge Systems. Hubbard, Barbara Marx. 1998. Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential. Novato, CA: New World Library. March, James G. 1999. The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence. Oxford: Blackwell. Prahalad, C. K., and S. L. Hart. 2002. "Business to Four Billion: Raising the Bottom of the Pyramid." Strategy + Business (26): 54-67. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press.
2
The Economic Imperative for Revisioning the Rules of the Game Work, Values, and Caring RIANE EISLER
The most important things about a society are those that are seldom talked about. -Sociologist Louis Wirth
Many of us recognize that we live in one of the most challenging times in the history of our planet-the dislocation of rapid technological and economic change, the worldwide escalation of violence and terrorism, the widening gap between haves and have-nots, the extermination of entire species, and the threats to our natural habitat. Many of us also realize that old economic models are proving incapable of effectively addressing these problems. We share the vision of an economics that gives real value to human life, human development, and human dignity. We realize that to move toward this more sustainable economics, we must collaboratively work for transformative change. Starvation, slavery, and sweatshops are not the result of inevitable economic laws. Homeless children, workers toiling for pennies a day, illiterate and malnourished populations, corrupt and greedy CEOs, and rampant industrial pollution also are not inevitable. Nor are tax breaks for the superrich or cuts in health, education, and welfare programs. They are the result of human-made laws and policies. The move to a more equitable and productive future requires a reexamination of the social and economic assumptions and valuations underlying these laws and policies. We certainly have to look at areas traditionally considered by economists such as government policies, business practices, and measures of productivity. But to shore up a more equitable and truly productive economics, we have to address the whole culture-
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from its economic and political structures to cultural beliefs and social institutions that may at first glance seem unrelated to economics. This chapter looks at a foundational issue that stands in the way of transformative change: the inadequacy of current definitions, measurements, policies, and rules governing what is considered productive work. It proposes that, particularly in our postindustrial age, we need new economic rules, models, policies, and measurements that recognize the value of the most socially essential work: the work of caring for children and the elderly, of keeping our families healthy, of developing and sustaining relationships, and of maintaining a clean and healthy environment. It also proposes that a culture that supports caring is critical for effective organizational capacity building, for creating relational resources through greater trust, felt connection, and positive emotions. And it suggests that if economic and business policies are to be more caring of people and our natural habitat, more visibility and value must be given to caring and caregiving. It further suggests that an appropriate response to the challenges of the postindustrial world requires investment in the development of the high-quality human capital that can meet these challenges, and that this calls for the construction of new rules of the game that give value, training, and support to the essential human work of caring for ourselves, others, and our natural environment. In addition, it suggests some economic inventions that can lead to the higher valuing of caring and caregiving in both the market and nonmarket sectors of the economy, and with this, to less violence; more business productivity, creativity, and environmental sustainability; and greater economic and social equity worldwide. 1 The Alienation of Caring Labor
We are not used to thinking of caring when we think of economics. We decry the lack of caring of many economic policies and business practices. We deplore accounting practices that enable corporate officers to uncaringly, even unlawfully, enrich themselves at the expense of employee benefit plans and shareholder investments. We criticize corporate practices found in businesses such as the petrochemical and fastfood industries that are uncaring of our health and our natural habitat. We recognize that there is something basically wrong with government
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cuts in school lunches for millions of poor children while corporations get million-dollar handouts and the wealthy get tax refunds. And we wonder why empirical evidence that caring promotes greater organizational competence and business success is still largely ignored. But why would we have caring policies and practices when work that entails caring is not really valued in our economic system? Work that involves caring, particularly mothering, is sometimes idealized in rhetoric, as in the American mantra "motherhood and apple pie." But in reality, mothering is not valued. For example, in programs to aid families with dependent children, no economic value whatsoever is given to the work of caregiving. When work that involves caring is paid, it is paid poorly. Professions that involve caregiving, such as child care and elementary school teaching, are typically lower paid than those where caring and caregiving are not integral to the work, such as manufacturing and engineering. Workers in child-care centers often still work for minimum wages, with no benefits. When it is done at home, the work of caring for children, the sick, and the elderly is not even recognized as economically productive. This work is not included in measures of economic productivity such as the gross domestic product (GDP), which instead counts work such as building and using weapons, making and selling cigarettes, and other activities that destroy rather than nurture life. Indeed, a major though still generally undiscussed feature of present economic models and rules-whether capitalist or socialist-is their failure to recognize the economic value of the socially and environmentally essential work of caring and caregiving. In describing the exploitation of agricultural and industrial work, Marx wrote about the alienation of labor. I have in the course of my research come to see that the alienation of caring and caregiving labor is the hidden mass of the iceberg of which many of our global problems are only the tip. The failure of current economic models to give real value to caring and caregiving labor, whether in families or in the larger society, lies behind massive economic inequities and dysfunctions. It lies behind economic theories, rules, measures, and practices that do not recognize caring and caregiving as integral to economic and social health. All this in turn lies behind seemingly insoluble global problems. There is much talk about the need to address the problem of poverty more effectively. But still ignored in the discussion is that worldwide
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the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor are those who do the bulk of the caring work: women. This does not mean that only women are caring; men also are. But stereotypically, caring and caregiving are considered "feminine" rather than "masculine"-and the failure to give economic visibility and value to the work of caring and caregiving stereotypically relegated to women is a major factor in the seemingly intractable nature of poverty worldwide. It lies behind the fact that globally women and children are at the bottom of the economic ladder; that even in a wealthy nation like the United States older women are much poorer as a group than older men; and that woman-headed households worldwide are the poorest families. There is today also much talk about the need to address effectively the problem of violence-from escalating warfare and terrorism to murder, rape, wife battering, and child abuse. This discussion, however, generally ignores that uncaring and abusive childhood experiences are major factors behind this institutionalized violence. Patterns of uncaring and violent treatment of children are heavily implicated in the perpetuation of other culturally transmitted patterns of violence as a means of imposing one's will on others, whether in families or the family of nations. Yet social investment in education for child care, in high-quality child-care centers, and in other measures that could help cut through these cycles of violence are still low priorities. Discussions of learning difficulties, inability to hold jobs, difficulties in relationships, drug addiction, and problems with impulse control also generally fail to connect these problems with the loss of human potential flowing from the social and economic failure to give visibility and support to caring and caregiving. In short, a myriad of socially and economically costly problems flow from an economic paradigm that hides and devalues the work of caring and caregiving. This paradigm also leads to business practices and social policies that fail to care for human development and welfare, even though studies show that people's work performance is greatly enhanced in caring environments. It is considered natural for the government to fund training to teach soldiers how to kill and to provide publicly funded pensions for soldiers. But government-funded training and pensions for those who perform the work of caring for children is still a rarity-even though high-quality caregiving is essential for children's welfare and develop-
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ment and without it there would be no labor force, and even though there is today solid scientific data on what kind of child care fosters or inhibits human development. Some will argue that we cannot have these kinds of policies because we cannot accurately measure the effectiveness of training for caregiving. But we also do not have accurate measures for the effectiveness of combat training, yet we still invest in it. So the issue is actually one of social and economic priorities-and the hidden assumptions that lie behind them. Work and Postindustrial Technology
Today, caring and caregiving are more urgently needed than ever before. There are many reasons for this in a world interconnected not only by instantaneous technologies of communication but also by almost instantaneous technologies of destruction that threaten the stability needed to sustain not only business and commerce but life itself. There are also urgent economic reasons. To begin with, in the postindustrial information-service economy, the most important capital is human capital. The postindustrial economy requires what we today call "high quality human capital"-people able to learn, relate, work in teams, and solve problems flexibly and creatively. This high-quality human capital is not just produced in universities or through job training. Findings from psychology, and more recently neurobiology, show that the quality of human capital is, to a much greater extent than has been recognized, shaped by the quality of child care and early childhood education. It is during the early years of life that neural pathways are laid, influencing such critical matters as whether or not we are venturesome and creative, whether we can work harmoniously with peers or only take orders from above, whether we are flexible or rigid in our responses to challenges, and whether or not we are able to resolve conflicts nonviolently. People can and do change throughout life, but the early years are critical. Therefore, if we are to have an adequate workforce for the postindustrial age, empathic and effective early caregiving must be given much more economic support (see Eisler, 2007). This is particularly important in our globalized economy, where empathic relations with people of other cultures are a large component
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of success. It is also increasingly important at a time when business success largely hinges on good relations with customers, suppliers, coworkers, and communities. Training and support for caregiving that promotes the optimal development of the human capacity to learn, relate, and solve problems flexibly and creatively is an essential investment in our economic and business health. There is a second, equally critical economic issue that requires a reexamination and redefinition of what productive work is. As we move further into the postindustrial economy, the industrial job base will shrink as radically as the agricultural job base shrank earlier, from employing a majority of workers to less than 5 percent today. The consequences, not only in unemployment and underemployment but also in a less financially secure consumer base, are already beginning to be felt. Many wellpaying jobs, such as middle-management positions, are disappearing. "Blue-collar" jobs in factories are being massively cut. The loss of manufacturing jobs, and increasingly also of "white-collar" programming and other high-technology jobs, is in part due to their export to nations with cheaper labor. But it is also due to automation and the resulting huge number of job cuts in major economic sectors such as the automobile and aircraft industries. White collar jobs, such as those of telephone operators and receptionists, are also being phased out by automation. There is a polarization of jobs, with well-paying jobs largely requiring advanced degrees or high technology skills, and masses of people relegated to lowwage jobs that are often part-time and without benefits. As automation and robotics become more commonplace, the number of jobs in both the developed and the developing world will continue to shrink. In light of this, conservative economist Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax to prevent extensive violence and the collapse of social and economic infrastructures. For similar reasons, liberal economist Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income. These measures recognize that much of what has been considered productive work will gradually be phased out by new technologies in both agriculture, manufacturing, and the knowledge economy. However, these measures entail only doling out money and contribute nothing to economic or personal development. They do not give recipients the opportunity to do meaningful work, and they rob them of the feeling that they are doing something of importance. They do nothing
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to encourage productivity and creativity. They fail to reward positive behaviors and do not discourage harmful ones. They do not address the power imbalances that lie behind chronic economic inequity and inefficiency. They do not address uncaring economic policies and business practices. They fail to take into account the damage to our health and our natural habitat of such policies, as well as the loss of human potential they entail. There is a more appropriate response to the challenges of the postindustrial world-one that invests in the development of the high-quality human capital that can meet these challenges. This response calls for the construction of new rules of the game that give value, training, and support to the essential human work of caring for ourselves, others, and our natural environment. Hidden Systems of Valuation
Unrecognized assumptions are dangerous. Moving toward a new economic paradigm begins with a better understanding of the assumptions underlying the current one. We can start with a basic question: Why has the essential work of caring and caregiving been given so little economic value? We would all be dead if it were not for the work of caring for children, the elderly, and the sick. We would be in very bad shape if our day-to-day needs for food, clean clothes, and a habitable place to live were not cared for. There would not even be a labor force to go to their jobs or businesses if it were not for the work of caregiving. The systemic devaluation of the work without which we would not survive has nothing to do with logic. It is our inheritance from a time when our society was oriented far more closely toward what I have called the domination model: a social and economic organization based on rigid top-down rankings of domination ultimately backed up by fear and force. A mainstay of this model, which pervaded relations in families as well as in the family of nations, was the ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half. This led to the automatic valuing of men and anything stereotypically associated with "real" masculinity over women and anything stereotypically considered feminine, including the
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so-called "women's work" of caring and caregiving. In other words, with the subordination of women to men, anything associated with the gender stereotype of men and masculinity was given higher value than anything stereotypically associated with women and the feminine. The results were economic systems-tribal, feudal, capitalist, communistthat give little or no value to the work of caring and caregiving. These stereotypes of masculinity and femininity do not have anything to do with innate male or female traits. Women can do "men's work," be it as welders, politicians, or priests, and sometimes do it better than men. Men can do the "women's work" of caring for children, and some men do so better than some women. That so many men and women are today rejecting old stereotypes is a testimony to their wish and capacity for less constricted gender roles. But according to the belief system we inherited, the work of caring and caregiving is unfit for "real men." It is supposed to be done by women for free in male-controlled households. It is "soft" work that has no visibility and is given no real economic value. This devaluing of traits and activities stereotypically associated with women is a hidden system of valuations deeply embedded in prevailing economic rules and models. In the workplace, the push for "comparable worth" legislation to achieve economic parity in professions such as child care, nursing, and elementary school teaching-professions that entail caring and are primarily female-has achieved only minimal success. At home, despite all the rhetoric, caring and caregiving work is given no real economic value, with one result being that it is even harder to get men to assume equal responsibility for housework and child care than it is for women to get into professions that until recently were exclusive male preserves. Politicians give us catchy slogans like "a more gentle, caring world" and "compassionate conservatism." But when it comes to caring for children, the sick, the elderly, and the homeless, their policies are far from caring. And why would these policies be caring when the devaluation of the "feminine" work of caring and caregiving is deeply embedded not only in our unconscious minds but in the economic rules and models most politicians accept? How realistic is it to talk about a more equitable economic system as long as the indispensable, life-sustaining caring work is given lip service but few if any economic incentives or rewards?
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Indeed, how can we seriously talk of more caring communities when caring work-whether preformed by men or women-is not really valued? Learning to value or devalue caring is a basic lesson for life. Learning or not learning skills for giving care is another basic life lesson. Which of these two very different lessons people are taught at home, at work, and in our communities profoundly affects all of our relationships-from intimate to international. It also profoundly affects what we consider valuable, and this in turn is reflected and perpetuated by our economic models, rules, measures, and policies. Economics and Culture
We have been taught to accept the economic devaluation of caring and caregiving work as natural, as just the way things are. But it is not natural. It is cultural. Economic systems do not spring up in a vacuum. They are part of cultures. And economic systems are very different from one another depending on the degree to which a culture orients toward the domination model or the partnership model. The core configuration of the domination model is top-down control in the family and state or tribe; the rigid ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half; a high level of socially condoned violence, ranging from child and wife beating to warfare; and a system of beliefs that presents this way of relating as natural, even moral. Examples of twentieth-century cultures oriented closely toward this model are Nazi Germany, Khomeini's Iran, and Stalin's Soviet Union-cultures that are different in religion, location, and ideology but share these characteristics. The core configuration of the partnership model is a democratic and egalitarian family and social structure; equal partnership between the two halves of humanity; a low degree of violence, because it is not needed to maintain rankings of domination; and beliefs that present this way of relating as normal and moral. Twentieth-century examples of cultures oriented toward the partnership model are the Teduray of the Philippines, the Minangkabau of East Sumatra, and Nordic nations such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland. These cultures too are very different in location, technological development, and religious or secular orientation. But they are cultures
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where caring and caregiving are given greater social and economic value because these cultures orient more toward the partnership than toward the domination model. (For descriptions of these models and the research identifying them, see Eisler, 1987a, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2007.) I want to emphasize that the difference between these two models is not that one has hierarchies and the other does not. As I elaborate later, in the partnership model, instead of hierarchies of domination backed up by fear and force, there are hierarchies of actualization in which leadership and management are nurturing and facilitating rather than controlling and autocratic. I also want to emphasize that the difference is not that the partnership model is cooperative and the domination model is not. People regularly cooperate in cultures that orient toward the domination model, for example, to commit acts of terrorism, invade other nations, and scapegoat socially disempowered groups. I also want to emphasize that these two models have to do with nothing inherent in women or men but rather with two contrasting cultural constructions of gender roles and relations. The centrality of gender issues to these two models stems from the fact that the cultural construction of the primary human relations-between the female and male halves of humanity and between them and their sons and daughters-is foundational to different ways of structuring all relations. The domination model requires the ranking of one half of humanity over the other half, as demonstrated by the historical association of rigid male dominance with authoritarian and chronically warlike societies as well as by the push by modern dictatorships, whether secular or religious, to get women back into their "traditional" place in a "traditional" topdown family. This has been a rallying cry in Hitler's Germany, Khomeini's Iran, the Taliban of Afghanistan, and other authoritarian regimes and would-be regimes. One reason is that when the most fundamental difference in our species-the difference between men and women-is equated with inferiority or superiority and with controlling or being controlled, a model is provided that children learn early on for seeing all rankings of domination as normal and natural. Another reason is that imposing and maintaining rigid rankings-men over women, men over men, race over race, religion over religion, and so forth-requires that stereotypically feminine "soft" values and behaviors, such as caring and nonviolence, be devalued and, along with women, excluded from social governance.
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Over the last centuries, there has been movement toward the partnership model. Gender stereotypes have become less rigid and the roles of men and women have become more flexible, at least in some world regions. At the same time, many social movements have challenged entrenched traditions of domination, from the "divinely ordained" right of kings to rule their "subjects" to the "divinely ordained" right of men to rule the women and children in the "castles" of their homes. The abolitionist, civil rights, women's rights, peace, anticolonial, children's rights, and environmental movements have all challenged traditions of domination ultimately backed up by fear and force. These movements have been met with enormous resistance. They have also been interrupted by periodic regressions, in part because the foundational relations between men and women and between parents and children have not been central in progressive political agendas. But there have nonetheless been important gains, as evidenced by the immense difference between the European Middle Ages and Western society today. There have also been movements challenging traditions of economic domination. But the communist "dictatorship of the proletariat" proved to be another form of the domination model, and attempts at capitalist reform have at best been only partially successful. What is needed is a new economic paradigm that incorporates the best aspects of capitalism, socialism, and anarchism (in the sense of decentralized cooperatives) but goes much further, supporting and rewarding caring and ethical human relations as well as consciousness of and respect for our natural habitat. I call this more caring economics a partnership rather than dominator economics. Partnership Economic Inventions
Economic systems can and do change-witness the economic changes of the last several hundred years. But the challenge is transformational change. This will require economic inventions that give visibility and value to caring and caregiving. The shift to the postindustrial economy will require a fundamental reexamination of what is or is not productive work. This opens a window of opportunity to develop new economic inventions: rules, models, measurements, and policies that recognize that caring for children and
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our environment is the most foundationally productive work, whether it is done by women or men. Economic inventions are like any other human invention. They are created by people who want to achieve certain goals. Everything involved in our economic life is an invention-from stock exchanges and sweatshops to banks and social security. Laws that permitted slavery or male ownership of women's work were economic inventions that served a top-down dominator economic system. Laws prohibiting child labor and giving women property rights serve a partnership economic system. So do workplace safety regulations, unemployment insurance, and laws against workplace discrimination. We already have a few economic inventions that give monetary value to caring and caregiving. In the United States, parental leave for both mothers and fathers, as well as flexible work options, are becoming more prevalent. In the Nordic nations, as well as in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, and other industrialized democracies, there is paid parental leave (see the Organization for Economic and Community Development's 2001 report, Starting Strong, for details). These enlightened developments are partnership economic inventions. Some interesting economic inventions are also emerging on the community level. In Japan, there is a caregiving exchange program between Tokyo and Kyoto. If someone takes care of an elderly person in a retirement or nursing home in one of these cities, that caregiver's parents in the other city can obtain similar services. In other words, economic credit for caring is transferred from one community to another. Local communities that offer free public transportation and other public services to volunteers have invented still another way to give caring work visibility and economic value. The following social and political trends all reflect growing recognition of the value of caring and caregiving for social and environmental health: Most industrialized countries have policies that provide universal health care as an investment in their human capital. Parental leave for both mothers and fathers as well as flexible work options are becoming more prevalent, as are parenting classes, particularly for young parents. Corporations are beginning to take the social and environmental
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concerns of their employees, shareholders, and the communities in which they operate into account in decision-making. Businesses are beginning to recognize that organizational cultures where caring is valued and rewarded lead to greater competence, effective communication, and successful collaboration. Caregiving work is recognized as economically valuable by some local currency systems that a number of communities in the United States and Canada are beginning to use to exchange activities and services (bypassing national monetary systems). The economic value of investing in child care is being recognized; for example, a 2004 study found that investments in high-quality early childhood development programs consistently generate economic benefit-cost ratios of more than three to one, or more than a $3 return for every $1 invested (Lynch, 2004). In the Nordic world, as well as in France, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and other industrialized nations, there has been movement in social policy to recognize the value of caring work, ranging from measures that provide government subsidies for child care (not just tax credits) to paid parental leave and community service job programs for unemployed youths. As reported in the United Nations Annual Human Development Report, the health of communities is beginning to be measured on the basis of the environment, education, maternal and infant mortality, and a host of other factors that are not typically quantified, rather than on GDP, in recognition of the fact that factors such as tax revenue and number of jobs are not the only inputs to quality of life. Steps Toward Partnership Economics
Effectively dealing with our mounting global problems calls for a complex of interrelated changes in economic measurements, institutions, and rules. This will take time. What follows are ten examples of changes we can begin to work on right away: Creating new economic inventions that recognize the value of caring and caregiving Changing economic measurements to include caregiving work
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Revising property laws, customs, and practices that discriminate against women Expanding women's roles in policymaking Supporting gender-specific economic and cultural research Exploring alternative economic paradigms in business and economics schools and classes Expanding the economic vocabulary to include and legitimize canng Involving the responsible business movement and the spirituality and business movement Documenting to government and business leaders the economic and social benefits of policies that support caring and caregiving Establishing groups such as the Alliance for a Caring Economy to promote the development, testing, and dissemination of partnership economic inventions that recognize the value of caring and caregiving New Economic Inventions
The costs of not effectively addressing the challenges and opportunities of this time of rapid technological, social, and environmental changesuch as the huge government and social costs associated with child abuse and neglect, and their frequent corollary, juvenile and, later, adult crime-are enormous. According to the World Health Organization's 2004 report, above and beyond the physical and emotional devastation it causes, violence against children exacts a huge financial toll. Child abuse costs the United States economy as much as $94 billion a year. Unless we creatively intervene, these costs will exponentially increase due to population growth. There will also be enormous costs due to the economic and social dislocations stemming from globalization and the gradual phasing out of much that in agrarian and industrial economies was considered productive work. Similarly, the costs of failing to develop economic instruments that recognize the value of environmental housekeeping will continue to rise exponentially unless we change the rules of the economic game. In simple economic terms, creating an economic system that recognizes the value of caring and caregiving will save many billions of
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dollars. In human terms, the benefits will be much greater. Economic inventions that recognize and reward the most socially essential work will give us the foundations on which a more sustainable, equitable, and humane socioeconomic system can rest. We need a market economy that adequately values the caring professions in which women are largely concentrated. Due to less rigid gender stereotypes, today many men are also interested in doing caring work, but they are discouraged by the low wages and status it is accorded. A key example here is work in child-care centers. There is also the work of counselors; nursery school, kindergarten, and primary school teachers; and others who deal with both children and their parents. It makes no sense that people in the United States pay $60 an hour to plumbers, the people to whom they entrust their pipes, but are only willing to pay a fraction of that to child-care workers, the people to whom they entrust their children. We also need a battery of economic inventions that recognize the value of the socially needed work of caring and caregiving in the nonmarket economy, for example, programs to ensure that women and men train and prepare themselves to care for children effectively. Drawing from what we today know about the kind of child care that supports or inhibits healthy development, this training is essential, if only in light of the scientific evidence of the critical importance of the early years in the production of the human capital essential for today's economy. We can also institute pensions (an economic invention that recognizes and rewards socially valued work) for these activities. In conjunction with strong family planning programs, such economic inventions will not promote childbirth. On the contrary, studies show that parenting classes as well as sex education that includes family planning information reduce teenage pregnancies. Nor have Nordic experiences with child-care allowances led to high birthrates. They have actually promoted lower birthrates. Most important, more caring Nordic social policies have brought greater economic prosperity. Measures such as universal health care and child-care allowances have helped produce the higher quality human capital that has transformed Nordic nations such as Finland, Sweden, and Norway from poor, famine-ridden countries to prosperous, creative economies (Pietila, 2001). Indeed, not only do Nordic nations always rank on the top of the UN Human Development Reports but Finland
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has actually ranked ahead of the much wealthier United States in the World Competitiveness ratings (Porter, Schwab, Sala-1-Martin, and Lopez-Claros, 2004). Another example of policies that give visibility and value to caregiving are changes in educational systems. As I wrote in Tomorrow's Children (2000), early training in the caring arts needs to be a central focus of schooling. This serves multiple purposes-from helping to prevent teen delinquency and pregnancy to promoting teamwork, mutual support, and equity. Again, Finland is a good example, demonstrating the benefits of partnership education. It ranks way ahead of the United States in international ratings of high school literacy and math. But the Finns are not just invested in the old ways of educating children; they are also developing a new quality of education. At the heart of this concept is the individual promotion of children-caring for the youngand the early development of self-learning. Elder schoolmates care for younger ones, students can pursue their own interests, teachers facilitate rather than control. All this means moving toward a new partnership structure of the national educational system. Our educational system must change to ensure that we have the quality of human capital needed for the postindustrial economy. Only by placing greater value on caring can the high-quality human capital needed for the postindustrial economy be assured, because education would be fully supported. The savings would be astronomical. To provide just one example, in the United States alone, a single measure of caring work in the economy-early childhood development programsprovides a 12 percent return on public investment (see Eisler, 2007). Business and government leaders need information that gives them an accurate picture of what is needed for a thriving postindustrial economy, business success, and sustainability. This picture must include the real value of the work of caring and caregiving (see Eisler, 2007). New Economic Measurements
A key element in the move toward partnership economics is a more accurate system of economic bookkeeping. We need economic measurements that include in their assessment of economic productivity the value of caring and caregiving as well as the costs of not valuing this work. What we label productive work is today in large part determined by
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measures such as GDP that do not include the unpaid work primarily performed by women in the "informal" economy, be it in their homes or in their communities as volunteers. This omission has been vigorously critiqued, for example, in Marilyn Waring's groundbreaking book If Women Counted (1989) and in the Center for Partnership Studies' publication Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life (Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard. 1995). There is some movement today toward substituting quality-of-life measures for GDP. One reason is that GDP fails to reflect how the mass of people live in a country, showing only whether the country is rich or poor, without data on distribution. Another reason is that GDP fails to reflect environmental costs. However, new economic measures will not be adequate unless they include gender-specific data and reflect the invisible economic contributions of women. Gender-inclusive quality-oflife measures are needed to make the socially and economically essential "women's work" of caring for children, the sick, and the elderly as well as maintaining a clean and healthy family environment visible in systems of national and international accounting. Fortunately there is already movement in this direction. Both national and international quantifications of this work uniformly show that its monetary value is huge. For example, a 2004 Swiss government survey summarized in the November 11, 2004 edition of the Neue Ziiricher Zeitung showed that the value of unpaid work (most of it performed by women in households) was 250 billion Swiss francs or 190 billion U.S. dollars, the equivalent of 70 percent of the reported Swiss GDP. Clearly changes in accounting are needed for the development of new rules of the game that recognize the value of activities that create highquality human capital and promote environmental health rather than environmental pollution, despoliation, and destruction, which irrationally, along with the costs of repairing this damage, are still included on the plus side of economic measures today (see Eisler, 2007). Property Laws, Customs, and Practices
The United Nations and most governments today state that we must change laws and customs that deprive people of basic economic rights. Laws that deprive members of a society of the right to own property are today recognized as violations of human rights. Nonetheless,
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international human rights agencies have given practically no attention to the fact that in large world regions (for example, much of Africa and Southern Asia) women are by law or custom deprived of the right to own property (see, for example, Bina Agarwal's A Field of One's Own, 1995; and the journal Women's International Network News). This discrimination is sometimes justified on the grounds that men economically provide for women. While this may be the ideal, it is often not the reality. Many studies show that not only is male income often not shared with wives, but men in many world regions allocate less of their earnings than women do to caring for children's needs (Bruce and Lloyd, 1997). In addition, in many world regions discriminatory laws and customs still reflect the devaluation of women's enormous economic contributions. They ignore not only the stereotypically "feminine" work of caring for children, the sick, and the elderly, but also the subsistence farming, hauling firewood and water, and other activities essential to keeping families alive that women traditionally perform in many parts of the world. Because this devaluation of women and "women's work" translates into the devaluation of anything labeled "soft" or feminine, changing discriminatory laws, customs, and practices-by companies and nations-is a prerequisite for a more caring and equitable business and economic system (see Eisler, 2007). Supporting women's groups working for changes in laws (and thus norms and customs) is an important way of supporting economic inventions that recognize the value of caring and caregiving work. An international campaign by progressive nongovernmental organizations, including national and international women's, children's, and human rights organizations, as well as academic institutions, to support this effort would greatly accelerate this process. That the empowerment of women is key to economic development, to a sustainable global population, and to a less violent society has been shown by many studies. The challenge is to transform policies collectively in order to implement these findings in action.
More Balanced Policymaking
To change economic policies in ways that recognize the value of work stereotypically considered women's work, women need to play a greater
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role in the formulation of both government and business policies. It is significant that nations that have moved toward social policies that give higher value to caregiving have a larger representation of women in policymaking positions. In Finland, for example, at this writing the president is a woman, and women have played leading roles in all Nordic governments. It is also significant that women such as Bina Agarwal, Nirmala Banerjee, Barbara Bergmann, Hilary Bradbury, Barbara Brandt, Marianne Ferber, Nancy Folbre, Hazel Henderson, Devaki Jain, Julie Nelson, V. S. Peterson, Hilkka Pietila, Gita Sen, Vandana Sheva, Holly Sklar, Myra Strober, Marilyn Waring, and many others including this author have been strong voices for new economic rules of the game. This is not to say that men have not also played an important part; for example, Herman Daly, Paul Hawken, Takashi Kiuchi, David Korten, Manfred Max-Neef, Robert Reich, Karl-Henrick Robert, and Amartya Sen have been leaders in calling for environmentally responsible and equitable government policies. They recognize that these policies are essential if we are to develop and implement the new economic rules appropriate for partnership economics-for example, new ways of doing business and new criteria for corporate charters that require social and environmental accountability of corporations worldwide. Indeed, an increasing number of mainstream economists (such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros, and Paul Krugman) are beginning to turn away from the orthodoxies of their profession, recognizing that traditional indicators of economic progress such as GDP and gross national product (GNP) do not make correct statements about the state of nations' economies and are often detrimental to effective assessments and any policy decisions that might result from them. However, unless women have an equal say in economic and political decision-making bodies and meetings, the focus will not be on the core component of partnership economics that recognizes the value of the stereotypical women's work of caring and caregiving. As illustrated by the Nordic world, only as women rise in status through entry into positions of social governance do stereotypically feminine qualities such as caring and nonviolence also attain social governance-because men no longer feel that embracing these is an "unmanly" loss of status.
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Gender-Specific Economic and Cultural Research
Matters connected with the roles and relations of the two halves of humanity-women and men-are still generally relegated to the intellectual ghetto of women's, men's, and gender studies. Yet without gendered analyses it is impossible to see the socioeconomic patterns that underlie many contemporary problems. A statistical study I conducted with social psychologist David Loye and sociologist Kari Norgaard compared measures of the status of women with quality-of-life measures. 2 Based on statistics collected by international agencies from eighty-nine nations, it showed that the status of women can be a better predictor of general quality of life than GDP. While economic development tends to go along with movement toward gender equality, societies with the same GDP can have great variations in gender relations-which in turn correlate strongly with a higher or lower general quality of life. For example, Kuwait and France had almost the same levels of per capita GDP. But the infant mortality rates in France and Kuwait were very different. France orients more toward the partnership model. It is a democracy rather than a monarchy, and the status of women in France is higher than in Kuwait. The French infant mortality rate was eight infants per one thousand live births, whereas in Kuwait it was nineteen infants per one thousand live births-more than double the rate of France. Similarly, according to the United Nations Development Program's 1990 Human Development Report, the GDP of Finland and Singapore were almost identical. But the maternal mortality rate in Singapore, where the status of women was much lower than in Finland and civil rights in general were also lower, was more than double that of Finland, a democratic society where, as in other Nordic nations, women have made strong gains. This study, reported in Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life (Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard, 1995), shows that economics cannot be understood or changed, without attention to other core cultural components-and that a central cultural component is the construction of the roles and relations of the female and male halves of humanity. Another study, drawing from measures of beliefs and values rather than from statistical measures of quality of life, came to the same conclusions. The 2000 World Values Survey (Inglehart, 1997), based on data from sixty-five societies representing 80 percent of the world's popula-
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tion, looked at whether there is a relationship among economic development, democratization, and a higher status of women. As lnglehart, Norris, and Welzel (2002) wrote in "Gender Equality and Democracy," the 2000 World Values Survey showed that there is a relationship between economic development and gender equity. They also wrote that the relationship between support for gender equality in politics and the society's level of political rights and civil liberties is remarkably strong. In addition, gender equality is linked with a rising sense of subjective well-being, and other aspects of what Inglehart, Norris, and Welzel call postmodern "self-expression" rather than traditional "survival" values. By contrast, those societies that still emphasize survival values-which include a sense of scarcity, traditional attitudes that rigidly limit women's life options, intolerance toward out-groups, and low interpersonal trust-fall on the lower end of the civil liberties, political rights, and democracy scale. "In advanced industrial societies," Inglehart, Norris, and Welzel write, "authority patterns seem to be shifting from the traditional hierarchical style toward a more collegial style that parallels the differences between stereotypically 'male' and 'female' styles of social interaction" (p. 330). In these leadership styles, they note, supportiveness and cooperation rather than domination and competition are paramount. They further note that these leadership styles are more effective in postindustrial societies, observing that "the cultural changes associated with changing gender roles and the 'feminization' of leadership styles are closely linked with the spread of democratic institutions" (p. 330). These kinds of studies illustrate the value of gender-specific research. Promoting and supporting this research in the academy is an important step in the exploration and development of new economic paradigms. New Economic Paradigms in Business Schools and Economics Courses
Economic theory still focuses on conventional categories such as capitalism and socialism and until recent years ignored the life-support systems of nature. The life-supporting activities relegated to women are still ignored, even though these are essential economic activities. The underlying reason for these limited perspectives is that the curriculum of most business schools is still heavily based on assumptions
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inherited from earlier times. There is fortunately movement toward a new economic paradigm in new master's in business administration (MBA) programs such as the Bainbridge Island Institute in Washington and the Presidio World College in San Francisco, which offer MBAs in sustainable business and management. There is also movement in this direction at a number of more established universities, such as the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Michigan Business School. But by and large they still fail to focus on the hidden system of gendered valuations and remain oriented more closely toward the domination model, in which relations, including economic relations, conform to rigid top-down rankings. Just as current economic theory holds that pure self-interest leads to the greater good for all through the "invisible hand of the market," thereby implicitly justifying ruthless business practices and uncaring economic policies, huge gaps between haves and have-nots, poverty, hunger, and violence are often presented as the result of "evolutionary imperatives" or "human nature." (Although Adam Smith did not advocate pure self-interest, his argument was that under the right circumstances-which for him were free market dynamics-self-interest would result in the greater good. This thesis has yet to be tested because a truly free market is not possible in the context of dominator-oriented cultures.) Passing on through the canon the assumptions that self-interest leads to the greater good and that gaps between haves and have-nots are the result of evolutionary imperatives has the effect of constricting, distorting, and suppressing consciousness of other alternatives. Whether for personal or for economic change, essential ingredients are the belief that there are alternatives and the understanding of what these are. Some early socialists, such as Charles Fourier, saw the connection between the status of women and the character of a society, but their writings are not part of the canon. To the limited extent that feminist research and theory have penetrated the academy, they are still generally relegated to the intellectual ghetto of women's studies. Hence most scholars do not bother reading these works, which they consider irrelevant to "serious" scientific inquiries. Although early childhood relations are recognized by psychologists as formative, the connection between these foundational relations and
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a society's political and economic system is also still generally ignored. One reason is that the early care of children has been seen as "women's work," so it too has been split off from the category of serious social issues and considered merely a personal issue. Because these primary human relations are still viewed as secondary to more "important" issues, little attention has been paid to the social and economic importance of caregiving work. Even those researchers who want to include the primary human relations in studies of social and economic problems have had available no integrative conceptual framework such as the domination and partnership models. So we find economics curricula that fail to include studies about the correlation between the status of women and people's economic welfare such as the study by Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard and the 2000 World Values Survey, discussed previously. Similarly, we find strange dichotomies, such as the splitting off of women's rights and children's rights from the mainstream of human rights theory-even though women and children are the majority of humans. (I proposed an integrated model of human rights that no longer splits off the rights of the majority-women and children-from the mainstream of human rights theory and action in Eisler, 1987b, 1996.) The leadership and organizational development literature is beginning to recognize the greater efficiency of what I call partnership organizations (Eisler, 2002, 2007). But even here there is little on how these more efficient management and organizational styles are part of a larger cultural shift that in turn is connected with changes in gender roles and relations. We hear a great deal today about redefining leadership and management. We are told that the more effective leaders and managers are not cops or controllers whose commands must be unquestioningly obeyed but rather people who facilitate, inspire, and elicit from others their highest productivity and creativity. This is of course a "softer," more stereotypically feminine leadership and management style that models caring rather than coercion. While some leaders-male and femalehave always recognized its effectiveness, it is becoming more prevalent today because of the rising status of women, and thus of qualities and behaviors associated with femininity, such as nurturance and empathy (see Eisler, 1991, 2007).
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We are also told that we need to move from top-down "command" structures to flatter organizational structures. But every organization needs lines of responsibility. As noted earlier, the difference between the partnership and domination models is not that the domination model is hierarchical and the partnership model is hierarchy free. The difference is the distinction between hierarchies of domination and hierarchies of actualization. (For a discussion of this difference, see Eisler, 2002, 2007). Hierarchies of actualization are characteristic of partnershiporiented organizations, where the culture values and rewards relations based on mutual benefit, respect, caring, and accountability rather than on relations in which there must be winners and losers. These actualization hierarchies are more flexible than hierarchies of domination, allowing many people to be leaders in different contexts. They empower rather than disempower workers. They make for greater effectiveness through open lines of communication rather than just one-way orders from above, utilizing everyone's knowledge and input and promoting relational practices that result in greater organizational capacity. In hierarchies of domination, accountability and respect flow only from the bottom up. In hierarchies of actualization, they flow both ways. Hierarchies of domination are imposed and maintained by fear. They are held in place by the kind of power that is idealized as masculine in cultures that orient primarily toward the domination model-the power to dominate. In contrast, hierarchies of actualization are based not on power over but on power to-creative power, the power to help and to nurture that is stereotypically considered feminine-as well as power with-the collective power to accomplish goals together, as in teamwork. Including material on these types of connections in the curricula of business and economics classes not only offers young people new perspectives on economics and business, but it can also inspire them to take leadership in creating a more caring economic and business system. Graduates of economics and business schools are the leaders of tomorrow. Movement toward an economics of caring requires that young people have the opportunity to envision and help create the economic inventions that will facilitate the shift to more efficient and at the same time more equitable and sustainable business practices and economic rules, measurements, and policies.
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Expanding the Economic Vocabulary to Include and Legitimize Caring
Just as traditional economic measures fail to give real value to the essential work of caregiving, the traditional economic vocabulary does not include terms such as caring, caregiving, empathy, and compassion. The absence of these terms reflects the assumption that "soft" feelings and behaviors-that is, feelings and behaviors stereotypically associated with women and "the feminine" -are impediments rather than aids to economic productivity and business success. Today we have empirical evidence that the opposite is actually the case. Books such as Positive Organizational Scholarship (Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn, 2003) and Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field (Fry, Barrett, Seiling, and Whitney, 2002) bring attention to studies that, to borrow the words of Jane Dutton, show that when people feel cared for they become fully alive-with all this implies for business productivity and a more prosperous economy. For example, in their chapter in this volume, Jane Dutton, Jacoba Lilius, and Jason Kanov show that compassion creates relational resources that promote trust, felt connection, and positive emotions-all of which lead to streams of action of great benefit to organizations. They also note that compassion in organizations generates such resources not only in those directly involved but also in thirdparty organizational members who witness or are made aware of these compassionate interactions. Other recent writers note that empathic listening and caring behaviors make for more effective leadership (Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2002), and that appreciative dialogues build enduring collaboration that transforms organizational cultures in positive directions (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Fry, Barrett, Seiling, and Whitney, 2002). Similarly, positive psychologist Alice lsen and her colleagues experimentally show that when people feel good-which they do when they feel cared for-they are more productive, innovative, and better negotiators (Fredrickson, 2003; Isen, 1987). These kinds of studies are becoming widely known among scholars, yet they are still not part of the mainstream of economic and business writings. Therefore, the benefits to economic productivity and business effectiveness flowing from recognizing and rewarding caring, compassion, empathy, and caregiving are not generally known, and these
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terms are not yet integrated into organizational language, policies, and practices. Language changes with changing values. In the Middle Ages the operant terms were fealty, loyalty, and obedience. After the Enlightenment, new terms such as freedom, equality, and democracy began to assume central importance. The shift toward this new vocabulary was a major factor in the historical shift from feudal serfdoms and despotic monarchies to more democratic and egalitarian social and economic structures. Today, further expansions of the normative political and economic vocabulary are needed. Some of these are already happening, as in the increasing use of terms such as compassion and caring in the political vocabulary. Even though these expressions are sometimes used to mask very different agendas, their use reflects important shifts in normative ideals. And because of studies such as the ones noted earlier, terms such as caring, empathy, compassion, and caregiving are also slowly making their way into the economic and business vocabulary. CEOs of successful corporations are also beginning to talk of caring as foundational to business success and corporate responsibility in the twenty-first century. But this process could be greatly accelerated if business school curriculum developers, textbook authors, researchers, instructors, and others writing and speaking in the economic and business domain were to integrate caring, compassion, and empathy into mainstream conversations about effective business and economic policies and practices. Even seemingly small steps, such as encouraging masters and doctoral theses on these topics, could make a difference.
Demonstrating Benefits to Business and Government Leaders
Altering the terms of discourse paves the way for an economics of partnership. The next step is showing business and government leaders that giving real value to caring and caregiving is essential for more effective business operations and economic development in a global economy where good relational practices are foundational to success (see Eisler, 2007).
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There are many entry points for this conversation. An example is the emerging concept of customer care. Today, customer relations is driving the agenda of business more and more. One reason is that many businesses and brands that are essentially the same are proliferating, and this competitive environment makes it important to show that a company delivers more value because it provides not only a better product but also better service. If a company demonstrates that it really cares about its customers, it can build customer loyalty. But for a company to really practice caring, it also has to care for its employees and the larger community and world. It has to model caring, not just put out public relations communications about it. As noted earlier, caring for employees, customers, and the larger community and world is good for business. Companies that really care for their employees do better than those who do not. Livable wages, good health insurance and pension plans, profit sharing, and a caring and mutually respectful workplace climate are incentives to employees to stay and to do good work. Companies that offer child care and in others ways help employees balance life and work have less stressed and more productive employees as well as more loyal ones. The studies and books described in the preceding section on expanding the economic vocabulary to include and legitimize caring offer solid evidence of the business benefits of creating a more caring organizational environment. My 2002 book, The Power of Partnership, and my 2007 book, The Real Wealth of Nations, also give examples of how partnership-oriented business policies translate into success, including better customer relations. Some companies, such as the highly successful kitchen and bath cabinets manufacturer American Woodmark, have even incorporated caring into their management training programs, giving visibility and value to the concept. The equally successful East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans, which ranked number one on Fortune's list of one hundred best companies to work for in 2005, states on its Web site that it offers "a welcoming, caring, diverse workplace that gives all people the opportunity to grow and succeed."
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These companies find that a business culture that gives visibility and value to caring works better in the long run. Their executives also model caring in their behaviors, showing real concern for employee welfare or sick family members, which in turn encourages compassion and helpfulness in others in the company, again contributing to the organization's collective capacity. Because caring and empathy are not typically part of male socialization, company programs teaching active listening skills and other ways of cultivating our human capacity for identifying and feeling with another can be particularly useful for many men. These skills then transfer into better relations across the board-internally as well as externally. All of these methods are steps toward creating business cultures where caring is recognized as basic to increased competence and collaboration. A next step can be to invite enlightened and successful businesses managers to support specific economic inventions that will provide incentives for caring behaviors and policies across the board. For example, tax codes could be changed to give tax credits to companies that operate in environmentally and socially responsible ways. Companies that provide paid parental leave could also be supported by public policy through matching local, state, and federal grants. Companies that provide employees with child care or parenting classes could be assisted in the same way (Eisler, 2007). These are all sound investments in a high-quality future workforce and a healthier, more secure world. The issue is simply one of fiscal priorities, of what is or is not really valued. That these priorities can be changed is dramatically illustrated by what happened in Ontario, Canada, when government leaders were shown the benefits of investing in caring for children. Based on extensive cost-benefit analyses showing the economic and social benefits of supporting good caregiving during a child's early years-from before birth to age six-the Healthy Babies, Healthy Children program was launched in 1998 by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC). The program offers all families with new babies information on parenting and child development and delivers extra help and support, including home visits, to families who can benefit from it. This extensive program to give more visibility and value to caregiving was launched by a fiscally conserva-
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tive government, under Premier Harris, who committed $44 million in annual funding to the program, $27 million for hospitals to provide new mothers with the option of sixty hours of care after childbirth, and $17 million for the Healthy Babies home-visit program. Premier Harris also approved funding for additional neonatal intensive care beds, as well as to encourage more communication among community services, to help make it easier for all families with young children to get the services they want and need. In 2003, a preliminary assessment of the program was reported in the Ontario Hospital Association's Executive Report. The assessment found that almost all families in Ontario with very young children had some contact with Healthy Babies, Healthy Children, regardless of culture or location. On average, families requiring home visits received a one-and-a-half-hour home visit every eighteen days, and community agencies reported that since Healthy Babies, Healthy Children began, there were fewer gaps and less overlap in services, as well as more interagency communication and coordination in referrals and services. The services they recommended were parenting services and programs (32 percent of all referrals); breastfeeding, nutrition, and prenatal and infant health services (24 percent); medical services and child development programs (8 percent); social, economic, and related family supports (5 percent), and "other" services (30 percent). Researchers found that families who received Healthy Babies, Healthy Children home visits had better child and family health than similar families who did not receive home visits (as documented in the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care's 2003 report). Specifically, the 2003 report found that children in home visit families scored higher on most infant development measures, including self-help, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and language development. These are all important indicators of a higher level of human capital development, not to mention of prospects for a brighter future for the children receiving the better care supported by the program. The Canadian program is not alone in recognizing the importance of government investment in caring and caregiving. The French creche programs and the Nordic caregiving programs-which include parenting education in schools-are notable examples that also provide models for forward-thinking leaders. (In the United States, programs
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focusing on young children and their parents have also been instituted in a number of states. But because there is still insufficient recognition of the importance of these programs, the essential services they provide are among the first cut when there are budget shortfalls.) The Social Responsibility in Business and the Spirituality and Business Movements. These important new cultural movements can provide leadership in changing economic rules and government policies to support the movement toward an economics of partnership. Organizations such as Businesses for Social Responsibility, the World Business Academy, and the Social Venture Network are already working on changing rules for businesses by developing and proposing new charters for corporations, social responsibility assessment measures, and other means for moving toward what is sometimes called the triple bottom line. Conferences and seminars on spirituality in the workplace have focused on imbuing work with more spirituality and meaning, and on changing business practices and policies to support more sustainable and equitable ways of doing business. In this sense, spirituality is not something out of this world but very much of this world. Both these movements can contribute to the larger project of changing economic and business rules to give visibility and value to caring and caregiving. They attract not only leaders and managers of progressive businesses but also progressive business consultants and coaches. These business consultants and coaches can, on a one-to-one basis as well as through trainings and workshops, introduce a larger vision and plan into their services. They can start with what is at the core of successful businesses: caring about and for customers. They can show the advantages of more caring policies internally as well as externally. From there they can move to the need for designing systems that invite and support greater caring, and to the need to give more visibility and value to caring and caregiving. Alliance for a Caring Economy. In working for change it is important to network with others who have similar goals. The shift to more partnership-oriented economic and business models and practices can be accelerated by forming alliances. The Center for Partnership Studies is developing plans for an Alliance for a Caring Economy (ACE). ACE's aim is to bring together the metrics, business case, knowledge
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base, and personnel to further the development of a caring economics. ACE is committed to expanding and redefining extant economic models while creating a viable forum for the exchange of ideas and information among academia, government, business, and civil society. ACE's vision is to function as a movement, a network, and a resource so that socioeconomic systems will function more sustainably. ACE will bring together leaders from academia, government, business, and civil society. It will also work with business and economics schools, professors, and graduate students to Collect information on what is already happening to give economic value to caregiving. Catalogue economic inventions to be published, refined, developed, and promoted. Provide a forum for new ideas and initiatives, support pilot projects, and provide a framework for testing and disseminating new programs and policies. Bring together innovative thinkers to conceptualize new economic inventions. Offer education, with a media outreach component. Develop a Web site to provide a central focus point for information and outreach. Organize an Internet conference. Prepare educational booklets (hard copy and Internet versions) to raise awareness about the value of caring and caretaking, including examples of what can be done at the home, community, business, and national levels to recognize and reward this work. Develop an implementation guide to assist organizations to put these examples into practice. In addition, focus groups will bring together small groups of leaders from a variety of backgrounds, including government officials, businesspeople, faculty and graduate students from business and economics schools, sociologists, anthropologists, homemakers, teachers, childcare workers, health professionals, and representatives of civil society such as children's, women's, environmental, and minority political action groups, to brainstorm and network. Members of these groups can then form their own focus groups as centers in their communities
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for disseminating information and education. At a later stage there will be a conference drawing from work in progress by innovative thinkers and real-life experiences with partnership economic inventions in diverse settings.
Conclusion
Transformative change is needed to effectively address the economic, environmental, and social challenges of our time. A prerequisite for transformative change is shifting the focus of economic discourse from conventional categories such as capitalism versus socialism to the new economic models and rules of the game that are needed to move forward. There are unrecognized assumptions that stand in the way of a more equitable and productive economic system that no longer creates and maintains huge gaps between haves and have-nots, chronic warfare and other forms of institutionalized violence, environmental despoliation, and other problems that threaten our future. One highly damaging yet rarely recognized assumption underlying present economic models, rules, practices, and policies is the systematic devaluation of the caring and caregiving work still stereotypically associated with femininity rather than masculinity. This devaluation has always had extremely adverse effects. But it is particularly dysfunctional in the postindustrial world where economic success hinges on highquality human capital. The technological shift to a postindustrial economy offers an opportunity to reexamine and redefine what is productive work. It opens the door to identifying, developing, promoting, and testing economic inventions that recognize and reward the value of caring and caregiving work in both the market and nonmarket sectors of the economy, whether done by women or by men. Economic rules, measures, and policies that recognize the real value of the essential work of caring for children and the elderly, keeping our families healthy, and maintaining a clean and healthy environment are foundational to the construction of an economics that can meet the challenges we face. These economic inventions will lead to the higher valuing of caring and caregiving in our homes, schools, and workplaces,
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as well as to the more caring economic and social policies needed to move toward a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous world.
Notes 1. This chapter is based on Riane Eisler's new book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007). See also http://www.partnershipway.org. 2. The nine measures we used in Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard (1995) to assess the degree of gender equity were the number of literate females for every one hundred literate males, female life expectancy as a percentage of male life expectancy, the number of women for every one hundred men in parliaments and other governing bodies, the number of females in secondary education for every one hundred males, maternal mortality, contraceptive prevalence, access to abortion, and on the basis of measures used by the Population Crisis Committee (now Population Action International), social and economic equality for women. The thirteen measures used to assess quality of life, were overall life expectancy, human rights ratings, access to health care, access to clean water, literacy, infant mortality, number of refugees fleeing the country, the percentage of daily caloric requirements consumed, GDP as a measure of wealth, the percentage of GNP distributed to the poorest 40 percent of households, the ratio of GDP going to the wealthiest versus the poorest 20 percent of the population, and as measures of environmental sensitivity, the percentage of forest habitat remaining and compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. When we explored the relation between the gender equity and quality-of-life variables with descriptive, correlational, factor, and multiple regression analyses, we found a strong systemic correlation between these two measures. These findings were consistent with our hypothesis that increased equity for women is central to a higher quality of life for a country as a whole, and that gender inequity contracts the opportunities and capabilities not only of women but of the entire population. The link between gender equity and quality of life was confirmed at a very high level of statistical significance for correlational analysis. Sixty-one correlations at the .001 level with eighteen additional correlations at the .05 level were found, for a total of seventy-nine significant correlations in the predicted direction. This link was further confirmed by factor analysis. High factor-loadings for gender equity and qualityof-life variables accounted for 87.8 percent of the variance. Regression analysis also yielded significant results. An R-square of .84, with statistical significance at the .0001 level, provided support for the hypothesis that gender equity is a strong indicator of the quality of life.
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References
Agarwal, Bina. 1995. A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bruce, Judith, and Cynthia B. Lloyd. 1997. "Finding the Ties That Bind: Beyond Headship and Household." In Lawrence Haddad, John Hoddinott, and Harold Alderman (eds.), Intrahousehold Resources Allocation in Developing Countries: Methods, Models, and Policy. Baltimore: International Food Policy Research Institute and Johns Hopkins University Press. Cameron, Kim S., Jane E. Dutton, and Robert E. Quinn (eds.). 2003. Positive Organizational Scholarship. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Cooperrider, David L., and Suresh Srivastva. 1987. "Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life." Research in Organizational Change and Development, 1: 129-169. Eisler, Riane. 1987a. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Eisler, Riane. 1987b. "Toward an Integrated Theory of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly, 9(3): 287-308 Eisler, Riane. 1991. "Women, Men, and Management: Redesigning Our Future." Futures, 23(1). Eisler, Riane. 1995. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of Pleasure. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Eisler, Riane. 1996. "Human Rights and Violence: Integrating the Private and Public Spheres." In Lester Kurtz and Jennifer Turpin (eds.), The Web of Violence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Eisler, Riane. 2000. Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the Twenty-First Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Eisler, Riane. 2002. The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life. Novato, CA: New World Library. Eisler, Riane. 2007. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Eisler, Riane, David Loye, and Kari Norgaard. 1995. Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life. Pacific Grove, CA: Center for Partnership Studies. Fredrickson, Barbara. 2003. "Positive Emotions and Upward Spirals in Organizations." In C. Cameron, J. Dutton, and R. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 163-175. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Fry, Ronald, Frank Barrett, Jane Seiling, and Diana Whitney. 2002. Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field. Westport, CT: Quorum Books.
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Goleman, Daniel, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Inglehart, Ronald. 1997. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in Forty-Three Societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald F., Pippa Norris, and Christian Welzel. 2002. "Gender Equality and Democracy," Comparative Sociology, 1(3/4): 321-346. Isen, Alice. 1987. "Positive Affect, Cognitive Processes and Social Behavior." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 20: 203-253. Lynch, Robert G. 2004. Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Ontario Hospital Association. 2003. OHA Executive Report, 11(32). http:// www.health.gov.on.ca/english/public/program/child/child_mn.html. Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. 2003. Healthy Babies, Healthy Children Report Card. http://www.health.gov.on.ca/english/ public/pub/ministry_reports/healthy_babies _report/hbabies _report.html. Organization for Economic and Community Development. 2001. Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education and Care. Paris: OECD. Pietila, Hilkka. 2001. "Nordic Welfare Society-A Strategy to Eradicate Poverty and Build Up Equality: Finland as a Case Study," Journal Cooperation South, 2(2): 79-96. Porter, Michael E., Schwab, Klaus, Sala-I-Martin, Xavier, and Augusto LopezClaros. 2004. The Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005. London: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations Development Program, 1990. United Nations 1990 Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press. Waring, Marilyn. 1989. If Women Counted. New York: Macmillan. World Health Organization. 2004. Violence Creates Huge Economic Cost for Countries. New York: WHO.
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3
Twenty-First Century Strategies for Sustainability HAZEL HENDERSON
The human family, numbering now more than six billion, is clearly the most biologically successful species on planet Earth. We have evolved from our birthplaces on the African continent to colonize every part of Earth, consuming 40 percent of all its primary photosynthetic production-leading to the current and mass extinction of other species. We have conquered the oceans, the moon, and outer space and have now set our sights on Mars. To continue our spectacular technological success and preserve the options for our grandchildren's survival, we must now face ourselves and fearlessly diagnose our major failures: the fragmenting of human knowledge and the persistence of violent conflicts, wars, and poverty. The UN Millennium Development Goals provide an initial agenda. Fulfilling these goals and shifting from fossil fuels to renewable resources and their sustainability can employ every willing man and woman on Earth and expand global prosperity. Reintegrating human knowledge, systems thinking, and multidisciplinary approaches to public and private decisions are widely recognized as necessary to address the human condition in this new century. Reappraisals of the work of Charles Darwin together with new evidence from historians, archeologists, and anthropologists now clearly point to the evolution of human emotional capacity for bonding, cooperation, and altruism. 1 Competition, territoriality, and tribalism, rooted in the fears of our past, served humans well in our early trials and vul-
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nerability. So did cooperation and the ability to trust and bond with one another-influenced in all humans by the hormone oxytocin. Higher levels of this hormone during pregnancy and lactation bonds women to their children over the extended developmental period to maturity (Henderson, 2003b). Today, research by scientists from many fields, including the neurosciences, endocrinology, psychology, physics, thermodynamics, mathematics, and anthropology, have invalidated the core assumptions underlying economic models that dominate public and private decision making in most countries and multilateral agencies, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization. This new research reveals economics as a profession, not a science. Yet today, as privatization and technological evolution speed change and globalization, economists and their general equilibrium models still drive these processes. Although competition remains a key driver in evolution and all human affairs, cooperation and coevolutionary processes are equally important. As illustrated in Figure 3.1, the social sciences study the full range of human behaviorwith the exception of economics, which assumes that competition and self-interest are rooted in human nature. Political economy studies, as they were originally termed, rose to academic prominence after the publishing in 1776 of Adam Smith's great work An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Conflict
Competition
Cooperation
Game Theory
Sharing
-
Psychology - - - - - - - - - . . Sociology Anthropology lnformation/Decision!fheory Systems Theory -Marker Economics-
FIGURE 3.1 .
SOURCE:
Repertoire of Human Behavior.
© Hazel Henderson
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Nations. Invoking the scientific knowledge of the day, Smith related his famous theory of "an invisible hand" that guided competition among self-interested individuals to serve the public good and economic growth. Smith drew parallels ascribing this pattern of human behavior to Sir Isaac Newton's great discovery of the physical laws of motion. These principles of Newtonian physics can still be used to guide spacecrafts to land on distant celestial bodies-most recently, Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Economists of the early industrial revolution based their theories not only on Adam Smith's work but also on Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species. They seized on Darwin's research on the "survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined not by Darwin but by economist Herbert Spencer in The Economist) and the role of competition among species as additional foundations for their classical economics of laissez-faire-the idea that human societies can advance wealth and progress by simply allowing this invisible hand of the market to work its magic. Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1945) and many other studies showed that Britain's nationwide market economy in reality was installed by acts of Parliament. Yet in class-ridden Victorian Britain, economists and upper-class elites espoused theories known as social Darwinism: the belief that laissez-faire competition and inequities in the distribution of land, wealth, and income would nevertheless produce economic growth to trickle down to benefit the less fortunate. The benefits of competition in societies are widely recognized-in spurring innovation and efficiency, and in driving industrialism and economic growth. The role of cooperation in families and communities was unpaid, unrewarded, and invisible in economic models. Cooperation allowed for collective action, taxes, and vital infrastructure for commerce. Charles Darwin also saw the human capacity for bonding, cooperation, and altruism as an essential factor in our successful evolution (Loye, 2000). In retrospect, how otherwise could we have gone from the experience of living for more than 95 percent of our history in roving bands of twenty-five people or less (Tainter, 1988) to today's megacities: Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Jakarta? These improbable metropolises-along with global corporations and governance institutions such as the United Nations and all of its agen-
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cies, and the European Union (EU), now expanded to embrace twentyseven formerly warring countries-could never have emerged without humanity's capacities for bonding, cooperation, and altruism. So as we have evolved into our complex societies, organizations, and technologies of today, we need to reexamine our belief systems and the extent to which they still may be trapped in earlier primitive stages of our development. Why, for example, do we underestimate our genius for bonding, cooperation, and altruism-seemingly stuck in our earlier fears and games of competition and territoriality? Why do we overreward such behavior and still assume in our economic textbooks and business schools that maximizing one's individual self-interest in competition with all others is behavior fundamental to human nature? Why do the neoconservatives who drive most U.S. policies today believe, as Margaret Thatcher proclaimed, that the individual has primacy over community? U.S. society is already highly individualistic, whereas Thatcher sought to rescue individualism from a more socialistic Britain. Scientific research is now revealing excessive individualism as dogma, while systems views, including those of Ken Wilber, Richard Slaughter, Fritjof Capra, Elisabet Sahtouris, Riane Eisler, Jane Jacobs, myself, and many others seek a balance in acknowledging society, culture, and the planet's ecosystems. Why is our equal genius for bonding and cooperative behavioreven altruism-not taught in business schools as the true foundation of all human organizations and our greatest scientific and technological achievements? In reality, as every business executive knows, competition and territoriality are channeled within structures of cooperation and networks of agreements, contracts, laws, and international regulatory regimes that allow airlines, shipping, communications, and other infrastructure to undergird global commerce and finance. This reality is now recognized as "co-opetition" (Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 1996) but has not supplanted the competition model in economic theory (Axelrod, 1984; Henderson, 1996a,b; Moore, 1996; Wright, 2000). Thus the formula for humanity's success has always rested on cooperation while embracing competition and creativity. Yet shocking evidence documents that the very methods and curricula still taught in most business schools encourage managers in the kind of behavior that produced the wave of corporate scandals and crimes at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, Tyco,
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The Call for Transformative Cooperation
and Arthur Andersen ("Bad for Business?," 2005; Goshal, 2005). This debate in academia can be followed by accessing the publications of Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold Foundation (http://www.dhf.uu.se) and of the French movement for "post-autistic economics," covered in Le Monde (French evening newspaper) and at http://www.paecon.net. What do deep, primitive beliefs about the primacy of competition and territoriality have to do with poverty, conflicts, and wars? All are rooted in ancient human fears-of scarcity and attacks by wild animals or other fearful bands of humans. Rooting out these fears-deeply encoded in our us-versus-them political and economic textbooks-is the essential task of our generation. We must move beyond this economics of our early reptilian brains to include the economics of our hearts and forebrains! These old fears underlie today's continuing cycles of oppression, poverty, violence, revenge, and terrorism. Indeed, if we humans do not root out these now-dysfunctional old fears, we will continue to destroy one another. Politicians frequently use fear to manipulate consent. Yet fear can be counterproductive. Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Great Depression in the United States, proclaimed that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Meanwhile, the fantastic potential that humans have created for further successes through pursuing the UN Millennium Development Goals and through building prosperous, equitable, and sustainable human societies is now within our grasp. The new "superpower" of global public opinion is already rejecting the old dysfunctional dogmas: more than ten million people demonstrated peacefully worldwide against the preemptive war on Iraq. Yet as Kuhn (1962) pointed out, old dysfunctional beliefs often persist long after they have been disproved. So it is with today's political and economic textbooks and the entire paradigm underlying the Washington Consensus model of development. We have evidence of its bankruptcy all around us: widening poverty gaps, the digital divide, and unbalanced, unsustainable economies mired in debt-breeding despair and terrorism that are diverting resources from enhancing human life to the proliferation of military weapons. Today even military leaders acknowledge that many problems we face are not susceptible to military approaches. This new awareness reveals not a flaw in human nature but a flaw in the encoding of our past in that set of dysfunctional beliefs that deny humanity's true genius-those coopera-
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tive, bonding, and altruistic skills that have undergirded our progress to date. Dysfunctional beliefs are deeply entrenched in many of the models of economics that dominate our decision and public policies. This malfunctioning source code underlying our economics focused on money circulation is still replicating behaviors and organizational structures that imperil human survival under twenty-first century conditions. The creation of money-from clay tablets to coins to electronic data-was a vital social innovation for tracking transactions beyond barter in early markets. Yet money does not equate to wealth, and today's high-tech electronic barter reminds us that money is merely one form of information-no longer needed in today's transactions (Henderson, 2001). Echoes of obsolete theories are still heard today, propounded in mainstream economic textbooks as theories of "efficient markets," of rational human behavior as "competitive maximizing of individual self-interest," of "natural" rates of unemployment (codified as the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU, rule of central bankers), and as the ubiquitous Washington Consensus formula for economic growth (free trade, open markets, privatization, deregulation, floating currencies, and export-led policies). Lately the U.S. Federal Reserve Board's use of "neutral" interest rates has been exposed by the Levy Institute as convoluted and favoring asset owners above workers' wages (http://www.levy.org). Central banks' theoretical moneycirculation models must be scrutinized because these institutions have won independence from political control and wield enormous power over societies. Monetary policy and money creation are now widely understood as political, not scientific (Leitaer, 2001). Such unaccountable, obscure theories still underpin today's economic and technological globalization and the rules of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, stock markets, and currency exchange as well as central banks. Since the 1980s and the waves of global deregulation and privatization unleashed by Britain's Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, central banks have lobbied for freedom from political control-even by democratically elected governments. Even Britain's labor government under Tony Blair has conceded this autonomy to the Bank of England. In the United States, Daniel Altman's (2004) analysis of the agenda of the neoconservatives and Ravi Batra's Greenspan's Fraud (2005) reveal
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the bankers' intentions to dismantle the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including Social Security, Medicare, laws protecting employee rights, union organizing, abortion, and welfare. This quiet "coup" achieved by central bankers and their advocates among the economics profession illustrates the methods of neoconservatives, such as those currently dominant in the United States. Yet the failures of these economic models in achieving their targets of noninflationary economic growth and fuller employment are evident in the recent history of financial crises, booms, busts, bubbles, unrepayable debt, and unemployment. The policy drumbeats of economists and market players have supported central banks. They have been buttressed by their claims that economics, with its increasing use of mathematical models, has matured into a science, matching the feats of the natural sciences since Newton and Darwin in discovering the laws of nature. Economists' theories from Adam Smith's "invisible hand" to Vilfredo Pareto's "optimality" were elevated from theories to the status of scientific principles. Many debates over categories and indicators derived from such theories involve basic questions of causality. For example, why is education treated as a "cost" rather than an "investment" (Henderson, 2004a)? In 1969, the Central Bank of Sweden put up US$1 million to create a prize to confer scientific status and legitimacy on the academic discipline and widespread policy advocacy of the economics profession. It named its economics prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel" and lobbied this designation onto the Nobel Prize Committee. As Nobel's descendant Peter Nobel put it, "The Bank of Sweden, like a cuckoo, laid its egg in the nest of another very decent bird, infringing on the name and trademark of Nobel." Since 1969, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science has been awarded most often to U.S. economists espousing the Chicago School policies of laissez-faire free markets typical of its most prominent prizewinner, the late Milton Friedman (who is often erroneously described as a Nobellaureate). Peter Nobel added, "These economists use models to speculate in stock markets and options-the very opposite of the humanitarian purposes of Alfred Nobel" (Benderson, 2004b). Chicago School doctrine holds that if individuals and private businesses make money, this process will eventually "lift all boats" in a rising tide of prosperity-thus confusing money with wealth, a
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much broader concept. While controversies have often surrounded Nobel awards, arguably the Bank of Sweden prize should be properly named, because economics is central to public policies in all countries and multilateral agencies. The prizes for peace and literature rarely have impacts on the daily lives of billions of people. Some prizes in peace and science have been controversial and have too often encouraged military research driven by corporate contractors, profit, personal greed, and ego gratification. As a scientific advisor to the U.S. Congress from 1974-80, I found that "intellectual mercenaries" flourish in business, government, and academia. In December 2004 many scientists, including members of the Nobel Committee and Peter Nobel himself, revolted, demanding that the Bank of Sweden's economics prize either be properly labeled and unlinked from the other Nobel prizes or abolished. The reason for this sudden outburst, which had been brewing for some time, was the awarding of the 2004 economics prize to two more Chicago School economists, Edward C. Prescott and Finn E. Kydland, for their 1977 paper purporting to prove by use of a mathematical model that central banks should be freed from the control of politicians-even those elected in democracies. The mathematicians pounced, pointing to the many misuses of their models by Prescott and Kydland and other economists to "dress up" their questionable theories and unscientific assumptions (Dagens Nyheter, 2004). As this news spread around the world (InterPress Service, January 2005; LeMonde Diplomatique, February 2005), the usual heralding of the new economics prize winners in the mainstream financial press was strangely muted. Editors and spokespersons for market fundamentalism fell quiet in their citing of their favorite policies as backed by some "Nobellaureate" in economics. Yet economics, like law, medicine, engineering, architecture, and other such applications of knowledge, is an honorable profession. Lawyers are known as advocates. Economists have always been advocates of various government policies, of regulations and deregulation, and of the interests of their clients (most often bankers, financial firms, and corporations in general). These advocates, whether lawyers, economists, or lobbyists, have legitimate roles in policymaking. Transparency requires policymaking so that the public is fully informed and the issues are argued honestly.
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The globalization of finance and technology and the spread of privatization and deregulated markets have produced a range of unanticipated consequences. For example, today's global Information Age has already become the Age of Truth-where careless corporate actions can destroy a global brand in real time. Business leaders worldwide have responded by embracing the idea of good corporate citizenship, both at home and globally. Three thousand companies (including some six hundred in Brazil) have signed on to the ten principles of global corporate citizenship of the Global Compact, launched by the United Nations in 2000 and covering human rights, workplace safety, justice, and International Labour Organisation (ILO) standards, as well as the environment and anticorruption. Civic groups worldwide now monitor all the companies who have engaged with the Global Compact, to see if they are walking their talk. Backsliders are publicly shown on hundreds of Web sites. The World Social Forum has successfully linked hundreds of thousands of civic activists and organizations and made the beautiful city of Porto Alegre a mecca of innovative thought. My TV series Ethical Markets on U.S. public broadcasting stations benchmarks higher standards, corporate ethical performance, and socially responsible investing worldwide along with my companion book, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2007). In a survey of major corporations by KPMG and the World Economic Forum in 2005, 77 percent of CEOs said that such higher ethical behavior was "vital to profitability." Capitalism's great proponent Adam Smith argued that markets could work efficiently only if all buyers and sellers had equal power and information and if no market transactions harmed others. Smith might hardly recognize today's evolution of global markets or companies moving toward social and environmental responsibility. Similarly, as illustrated in Figure 3.2, such changes in corporate behavior have been driven by trillions of dollars in pension funds and millions of investors who care about their children's future and the state of our planet. The United Nations Principles of Responsible Investing (http://www.unpri.org) have been signed by pension funds representing $6 trillion in assets. Students and prospective employees also ask about companies' performance on human rights and the environment, while new auditing standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) prescribe "triple bottom line" accounting for people, profit, and environment. Six hundred
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Company Performance
Economic
Social
E1wirommmtal
Diversity
Diversification
Employee diversity
Resource-use (renewable or nonrenewable)
Added value
Rerum on capital employed
lnrangible values Knowledge
Reusing
Productivity
Profit Margins
Employee and customer retention rates
Resource-use efficiency
Inregrity
Disclosure of political conrributions
Complaints Lawsuits
l
Health
Rating agencies' reports
Employee injury benefits
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Developmenr
Innovation
Employee education
!
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I
"wastes~
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Environmenral managemenr
Health risks of products, facilities Environmental technologies
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3.2. Ceres Global Reporting Initiative: Accounting for sustainability, sample dimensions and criteria.
FIGURE
SOURCE:©
CERES.org/GRI 1999 "Rating agencies' reports"
global corporations now comply with GRI accounting in their annual reports (http://www.gri.org). Sustainability has become a buzzword and even Wall Street's venerable Dow Jones now has its Sustainability Group Index. The surprise to economists, mainstream financial players, and media is that these new indices-London's FTSE4Good, the U.S. Calvert Social Index and Domini Social 400 Index, as well as Brazil's New Bovespa-regularly outperform the mainstream Dow Jones and Standard and Poors 500 (http://www.ethicalmarkets.com). Are we witnessing an evolution of human collective behavior toward moral sentiments and altruism? Or is cooperation for the common good now a condition of our survival? I submit that both are involved. As illustrated in Figure 3.3, we are also entering the Age of Light (see Figure 3.3). As we humans shape this current global stage in our development, our new awareness of our beautiful planetary home is calling forth an expanded identity, which I explored with Japanese Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai (with some twenty million
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Fiber optics, optical canners, lasers, holography Solar technologies Optical computers, multiprocessor, parallel computer and neural net computers, imaging technologies Biotechnologies Gene machine, D A equencers, ragging and tracking chemicals and genes, nanorechnologies Photons (sunlight) falling on the earth supply enough energy in ten minutes to put our entire population of six billion in orbit!
FIGURE
3.3. The age of light: Emerging lightwave technologies (photonics). © Hazel Henderson
SOURCE:
members worldwide) in our Planetary Citizenship (Henderson and Ikeda, 2004). This larger identity enfolds and gives deeper meaning to our identity with our family, our community and companies, and the country of our birth. We are enriched by the unique expressions of so many other cultures in our world. We savor their art, dance, music, and literature, and especially their cuisine! This human mutual appreciation for diversity is the starting point for planetary citizenship and the necessary transition to global sustainability, as the online global debates of the Global Transition Initiative illustrate (http://www.gti.org). Fundamentally, as shown in Figure 3.4, we humans have three basic resources at our disposal for this transition-information, matter, and energy. Of these, information is primary, because the quality of information drives our use of matter and energy. The history of the social innovation of markets is instructive, because they are now evolving rapidly. Markets were of course created by humans, not by any deity. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was in reality our own human invention, as recognized by historians of science (Nadeau and Kafatos, 1999). Yet this belief in an "invisible hand" persists in many economic textbooks even today, buttressing neoconservative agendas expressed by such philosophers as Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand and her aficionados, including Alan Greenspan, former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Not only are independent central bank policies obscure and
INFORMATION "Cultural DNA" System of Governance Economic System Management of Social, Human, and Ecological Assets Science and Technology Communications Mis-information Ignorance, stagnation, resource depletion
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Knowledge, wisdom
_
/
Efficiency and Effectiveness of Resource utilization
MATTER Land, Minerals, Water, Air, Food Commodities Methods of Agricultural Production and Distribution Infrastructure Urban Design Ecosystem Management Biotechnology/Biomimetics Industrial Ecology
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ENERGY Electromatic Spectrum Fossil Fuels Nuclear Solar, Wind, Biomass Ocean Differentials Hydrogen Climate Conservation Thermodynamic Efficiency © 2001, Hazel Henderson
FIGURE
3.4. Three modes of resources use in national development.
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driven by often obsolete general equilibrium models, central bankers are also politically motivated. For example, Italy's independent central bank president, Antonio Fazio, was removed from his office, accused of cronyism, condoning fraud in the Parmalat scandal, and disregard for ethical standards ("Please Go, Mr. Fazio," 2005). The organization of markets by the British Parliament three centuries ago fostered the rapid evolution of industrialism (Polanyi, 1945). These early markets described by Adam Smith sparked many innovations. The British laws that legitimized markets and protected property rights led to a revolution of individual entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation that spread across the Atlantic Ocean and Europe. This three-hundred-year-old wave of industrialism spread around the world and today is still changing Japan, China, and India and reaching the other ancient cultures of South East Asia, from Vietnam and Cambodia to the Islands of Polynesia (Landes, 1998). Yet industrialism must be reshaped because it is socially and environmentally unsustainable. The early markets of the Industrial Revolution and their business leaders created the infrastructure platforms of concrete, steel, electricity, mechanized production, shipping, roads, and ports that still undergird today's societies. But the market freedoms provided by social legislation limiting companies' liabilities, enforcing property rights, and upholding their patents to their inventions also brought great harm to less fortunate, vulnerable members of society. Who can forget the history book pictures of those early sweatshops: the children chained to spinning machines in textile factories, the women dragging carts of coal on their hands and knees in Britain's coal mines. Industrialism's goal was labor saving via investments in technology. Machinery, property rights, and the enclosure laws drove peasants and small farmers off their ancestral common land and into factories. Then, as factories automated their production lines, workers moved into service sectors. Today, services are being automated. Full-employment promises fall short and unemployment remains an ironic result of industrialism. Today economists are admitting that the flip side of their model of labor productivity is more unemployment. The social costs of disruptive technological change are borne by employees unless governments and taxpayers cushion unemployment and provide retraining. Yet as Chinese analysts rightly observe, markets are good servants but bad masters. If prices correctly
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include all external costs, they can guide resource allocation decisions efficiently. The other main feedback from individuals to decision centers-votes-must be uncorrupted by money, rigged elections, jerrymandering, and other distortions. In every country where industrialism took hold, the "tortoise" of social innovation lagged behind the "hare" of technological innovation. The history of the Industrial Revolution, with all its good and bad news, has included the lagging response of social rules to distribute the fruits of mechanized production and steer technological development and regulations to ameliorate its social costs and environmental damage. The very notion of an "invisible hand" has inhibited broader views and visions of how economic systems could be steered to foster the common good and shared prosperity and protect nature's wealth. In the United States, lawyer Louis 0. Kelso and philosopher Mortimer Adler challenged economists' naive model of "frictionless" technological change. Kelso recognized that if a machine took over a worker's job, the worker would need to own a piece of that machine. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) now exist in eleven thousand U.S. employee-owned companies (Rosen, Case, and Staubus, 2005). A few industrialists evolved from their single-minded accumulation of money and material goods into philanthropists promoting wider access to education, health, and other global public goods. Schumpeter (1942) best described these processes of "creative destruction" that also drove this greatest period of technological innovation in human history. The Information Age superseded industrialism in the mid-twentieth century. This new wave of innovation has produced all the good and bad news of today's globalization of markets and technology. In Politics of the Solar Age (Henderson, 1981) I documented the ideological biases of neoclassical economics and the unreality of many of the inaccurate assumptions underlying even today's economics textbooks. The new chorus of scientists in physics, mathematics, neurosciences, and ecology joined their Swedish colleagues, as discussed earlier, in calling for the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics to be broadened, properly labeled, and disassociated from the Nobel prizes, or simply abolished. The objections from scientists who study the natural world and whose research findings are therefore subject to verification or refutation included scores of ecologists, biologists, natural resource experts,
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engineers, and thermodynamicists. My book documented their critiques of economics. Even the growing number of hybrid professions (so-called ecological economics, natural resource economics, and others) cannot escape the fundamental errors of economics. Many critics liken the postulates of economics to religious beliefs. For example, I showed that the Pareto optimality principle ignored prior distribution of wealth, power, and information and could lead to unfair social outcomes. Dressing up such concepts in fancy mathematics tends to disguise their underlying ideologies. Robert Nadeau, a distinguished historian of science at George Mason University, examined such flaws in economics in his recent book, The Wealth of Nature (2003), and challenged economics faculties to engage in public debates. The temptation to mathematize concepts and faulty assumptions in economics is understandable, because it obscures these value-laden biases. It conceals public issues as too technical for the public or even legislators to understand. Thus economists can gain influence with central banks and other wealthy and powerful institutions in society. Economists also have not been held to the same standards of accountability as other professions. If a doctor makes a patient sick, a malpractice suit can be filed. Economists' bad advice can make whole countries sick-with impunity, as, for example, when IMF economists' advice worsened Indonesia's economic woes in 1997. Today economists from the IMF and central banks to those serving financial firms all bemoan the trend toward spending rather than saving. They refuse to acknowledge that this behavior is shaped by advertising, credit cards, and the constant barrage of consumerism on global mass media ("The Shift Away from Thrift," 2005). Neuroscientists, biochemists and those studying the role of hormones, as well as psychologists, anthropologists, behavioral scientists, and evolutionary biologists, are now dealing death blows to the most enduring error of economics. This error lies in its model of "human nature" as the "rational economic man" who competes against all others to maximize his own self-interest. This fear-and-scarcity-based model is that of the early reptilian brain and the territoriality of our primitive past. Indeed, we now know from brain science why people are susceptible to behavior change via mass media, advertising, and other forms of persuasion and lures to instant gratification. Opportunistic economists
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are now teaming up with brain researchers using magnetic resonance imaging to explore how the "reptilian" portions of the human brain (associated with the limbic system) are susceptible to irrational urges, instant gratification, and short-sightedness. The discovery of "mirror" brain cells that enable humans to empathize with one another also accounts for human suggestibility and the power of persuasion in mass media and advertising. Now that economists' competitive self-interest models of human behavior are under attack by such brain research, this field is being colonized as neuroeconomics or behavioral economics in the same way that economists captured other disciplines as ecological economics and environmental economics. This tendency to colonize other disciplines with false claims of universality was due to the power and financial advantages of economists as apologists for the powerful interests of business and finance. It remained for honest reporters to explain: Coy (2005), in "Why Logic Often Takes a Back Seat," in Business Week, and Fox (2005), in "Why Johnny Can't Save for Retirement" in Fortune, point out that humans are always of two minds about the signals in their lives and environments. They shift back and forth between their prefrontal cortex (the seat of rational decision making) and their reptilian, limbic brain. As yet, few have focused on the implications of this new brain research for the crucial role and responsibility of the advertising and commercial media industries. More than $400 billion is spent annually on advertising and the sophisticated manipulation of our senses and limbic brains to override our rational prefrontal cortex and its long-term decisions to "save for a rainy day" and tempt us to run up credit card debts by buying goods on impulse. Advertising in the United States is a pretax cost for companies, to promote mass consumption. Today, mass consumption of goods as an engine of economic growth is unsustainable (Henderson and Kay, 1998). The critique of economics by mathematicians is that people do not behave like atoms, golf balls, or guinea pigs. Unlike the economists' "rational economic man," people are often irrational and their motivations are complex, and many, especially women, enjoy caring, sharing, and cooperating, often as unpaid volunteers. Chaos theorist Ralph Abraham believes that economics may one day become a science. Abraham is researching with the Santa Fe Institute the new mathematics employed by some economists who program "agents" in computer models that
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are supposed to mimic human behavior. Abraham adds, " The so-called 'Nobel Memorial' prize in economics should be broadened in line with the full spectrum of social sciences to which it belongs and it should be distanced from the Nobel awards, like the Fields Medals in mathematics" (Henderson, 2007, p. 15). Meanwhile, Peter Nobel maintains that economics is not a science. Riane Eisler, systems scientist and author of the best-seller The Chalice and the Blade (1987) agrees. The agent-based computerized efforts to make economics more scientific may pay off in the future. One recent model, "Sugarscape," funded by gullible foundations, simply recreated poverty gaps and trade wars. Clearly, if half of the model's "agents" had been programmed with the behavior that females so often exhibit (by choice or involuntarily in patriarchal societies), it might have produced different results. Economics is patriarchal to its core, which accounts for the rise of feminist economics (Henderson, 2005). Today all economies are still mixtures of public and private sectors, two sides of the same coin, with markets created by human rules and laws-a major social innovation, illustrated in Figure 3.5. The two top layers of the "cake" of total productivity, the private and public sectors, rest on two lower layers ignored by economists: the love economy of unpaid work and the nature's productive layer. Mass communications and the Internet have enlarged the new Third Sector-the citizen nonprofit groups, charities, and foundations of global civic society. The World Social Forum, launched in Porta Alegre in 2000, has focused the GNP " private" sector GNP-Monetized Top two layers
Rests on
" Private" Secror GNP "public" sector "Public" Sector
Non-Monetized Lower two layers
Rests on
Social cooperative Love economy Rests on
Nature's layer
FIGURE
3.5. Total productive system of an industrial society: Layer cake with icing. © Hazel Henderson
SOURCE:
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global debate about new paths to sustainable human development. The "cultural DNA" of societies always determines the size and scope of the public, private, and civic society sectors, on the basis of their unique history, values, and goals and the beliefs that energize their people. The onesize-fits-all economic theories of development, such as the Washington Consensus, have been discredited as they have encountered the realities of the unpaid love economy, informal sectors, diverse cultures, topography, climate, agriculture, and the basic productivity of ecosystems. Cultural DNA still drives development in all societies, even though these human, social, and cultural assets (and sometimes liabilities) are overlooked in economic textbooks, theories, and the statistics they generate. Economic models still based on the Newtonian "clockwork" ideas of general equilibrium are now more than a hundred years out-of-date. Thus they are also blind even to the dynamic change and technological evolution engendered by the very markets and industrialism which economists claim to focus on and interpret. These dynamic changes are now mapped by other disciplines: chaos theory, system dynamics, physical and behavioral sciences, and game theory. Today economists are beginning to focus on this colossal error and are awakening to the fact that general equilibrium economic models cannot be used to guide macroeconomic policy in rapidly evolving technological societies. Chaos models, such as those created by two economists who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the collapsed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and other models used by firms trying to beat stock markets, fail because they rely too much on historical trends and patterns. Economists' colonizing tendencies have expanded to "capture for our profession" (as a UK-based economics society put it; Henderson, 1996) the issues of global warming and climate change, with their dubious use of emission permits trading. Economists trump other disciplines in academia because their departments and business schools receive the lion's share of funds, research contracts, power, and prestige. Economics is politics in disguise. Cost-benefit analysis or a carefully crafted economic impact statement can squelch any government reform or new social or environmental initiative. Such analyses emphasize the costs of change to existing interests, while ignoring or downplaying the current costs of the status quo to other actors, the environment, or future generations. Examples include the 2005 energy, transportation, and drug subsidy
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laws in the United States. Cost-benefit analyses fail to estimate the future benefits of alternative policies, and they average out costs and benefits so as to obscure who are the winners and who are the losers of a proposed policy. All this confuses the general public into believing that the issues are "technical" rather than political, documented in many examples of policy manipulation in Priceless, which analyzes recent policies in the United States (Ackerman and Heinzerling, 2004). Today the chinks in economists' armor are becoming widely evident-including the game of preempting work done in other disciplines. Psychologists won recent Bank of Sweden Memorial Prizes in Economics for challenging simplistic economic models of human behavior. Even Harvard University may soon allow a new course in its economics department that challenges the orthodoxies still undergirding the policies of the IMF and the decisions of Wall Street and the world's bourses. A few economists, borrowing from psychologists and real-world observation, now admit that we humans are not always competitively maximizing our own self-interest-the standard view of homo economicus. Many people enjoy giving as well as receiving, and care about what kind of world we are leaving our children-irrational behavior to an economist. No wonder economics is called "dismal." This rethink undermines orthodoxy in such major policy areas as free trade, taxes, and school vouchers, as well as globalization and the environment. Journalist Robert Lee Hotz (2005) describes a recent experiment at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where two women were observed, using a $2.5 million brain scanner, as they interacted in a game involving financial and investing behavior. The brain researcher's goal was to test and, it was hoped, to discover the secret of trust, the crucial human behavior that makes markets possible, and the variable missing from the mathematics used by economists in their models. Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of New York University explained that "we have started looking for pieces of economic theory in the brain." After monitoring the many moves between the two young women, it turned out that, contrary to economic theory and many game theorists, these two female players trusted each other. Economics and traditional game theory predict that lack of trust on the part of both players would cause both to lose (the "prisoner's dilemma"). The outcome of the women's game was that both won. Such optimal outcomes are termed
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win-win games as opposed to the win-lose games of economic theory and the lose-lose outcome of the prisoner's dilemma game. This outcome also challenges game theorist John Nash's famous equilibrium, for which he won a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics and which "predicts" that in economic transactions between strangers predicting each other's responses, the optimal level of trust is zero. Economics is based on patriarchal values-devaluing the work of women in child rearing, caring for the old, and community volunteering as "uneconomic" in the gross national product (GNP) . Economics missed the rise of socially responsible investing (now at $2.2 trillion in the United States alone, according to the Social Investment Forum (http://www. socialinvest.org), and textbooks still imply that trusting, caring, sharing, volunteering, and cooperating are irrational unless self-serving. Perkins (2004) documents the misuse of economics to overestimate gross domestic product (GDP) growth projections to justify the huge World Bank and IMF loans to many developing countries in the 1980s that ensnared them into unrepayable debt. The best-known economists in the United States, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jeffrey Sachs, are admitting these and other errors schematized in Figure 3.6. Unsung women economists have revealed the patriarchal
• "Gross" GNP growth v. "Net" GNP, growth? • GNP measures prices only of those goods and services traded in the market-ignores all other valuable production services and amenities • GNP adds in all social costs as if they were desireable, valuable product!
et G P
1900 FIGURE
1925
1950
3.6. Gross national product problems. © Hazel Henderson
SOURCE:
1975
2000
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bias of economic theories and led the way in pinpointing these and other errors. They have devised more realistic models-from Sweden's Alva Myrdal, India's Devaki Jain, and Denmark's Esther Boserup to Argentina's Graciela Chichilnisky, Brasil's Aspasia Camargo and futurist Rosa Alegria, Germany's lnge Kaul, New Zealand's Marilyn Waring, myself, and many others in the United States and other countries. Statistical revisions, including those made to overhaul GNP and GDP national accounts, were pledged by 170 governments at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. They were also recommended by the largest-ever global convening of statisticians of sustainable development and quality of life (International Conference on New Indicators of Sustainability and Quality of Life, or ICONS) in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2003 (Henderson, 2003b). Such statisticians have also repeatedly recommended that the GNP and GDP record national assets: the value of public infrastructure investments in roads, public health facilities, sewage-treatment facilities, ports, airports, and schools and universities that underpin the productivity of modern economies. In too many countries these asset accounts, which properly balance the public debts undertaken to construct such vital infrastructure, are not recorded. Such public works, buildings, and facilities are immensely valuable and should be amortized over their lifetime of use-often over a hundred years. Try running a company in this way-where your balance sheet could not include the value of your factories and capital assets! The United States made some of these needed corrections in January 1996, and these "stroke of the pen" corrections accounted for one third of the budget surplus of the Clinton administration. Canada followed suit in 1999 and went from a deficit to a $50 billion budget surplus (Henderson, 1999). The investments called for in the Millennium Development Goals, the Monterrey Consensus, and other proposals such as the Global Marshall Plan, must be properly accounted as assets, because they will also produce dividends for societies as they transition to sustainability. Today, in our Information Age, we acknowledge the value of investments in research and development, management education, and employee training programs. Accountants are learning to account for intangible assets, goodwill, brands, and other reputational risks and benefits (Allee, 2003). Risk-analysis models, such as those of Innovest
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Strategic Value Advisors, Inc. (New York, London, Toronto, and Hong Kong), now calculate the social and environmental risks overhanging a company's balance sheet-which if not recorded can be overlooked and lead to sudden loss of shareholder value. Multibillion-dollar U.S. public pension funds now require companies to disclose in their portfolios their plans to mitigate risks of climate change. Similar disclosures are mandatory in the EU. Another area getting attention is corporate advertising, which is coming under increasing public criticism. I founded the nonprofit EthicMark Institute, to recognize advertising campaigns that inspire and enhance the human spirit with EthicMark certification. The World Bank has been catching up with all of these statistical innovations-going beyond macroeconomic models to multidisciplinary systems approaches-using the multiple metrics beyond money to map these diverse aspects of human development and progress. This progress may easily revert to the neoconservative agenda and laissez-faire models of the past. My partner, the Calvert Group of socially responsible mutual funds, and I use the multidisciplinary approach in the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. World Bank staffing has also been going multidisciplinary-replacing some of its macroeconomists with sociologists, anthropologists, epidemiologists, educators, and even civic society representatives. Under the neoconservative management of President Paul Wolfowitz, these policy innovations may be reversed. In its 1995 report on the Wealth of Nations, the bank acknowledged that 60 percent of this wealth comprises human capital and 20 percent comprises ecological capital. Financial and built capital (factories and monetary assets) represent only 20 percent. For fifty years the bank focused most of its attention on "economic" growth of this 20 percent of countries' wealth. Now the Bank is shifting its focus to that 60 percent of human capital with more health and education investments, recently citing the education of girls as a country's best investment. Yet the bank has not, so far, campaigned to add even public asset accounts to the GNP and GDP. Neither the World Bank nor the IMF require the addition of asset accounts, even for infrastructure assets, let alone for education and health-the most vital investments to maintain that 60 percent of the human capital that constitutes the wealth of nations. These accounting corrections will shift statistical focus to long-term and sustainable investments. Brazil is helping the IMF correct its GNP and GDP accounting. In
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April 2004, the IMF agreed with Brazil that its vital backlog of infrastructure investments for basic sanitation and other public facilities in rapidly growing urban areas should not be accounted for in ways that would increase the public debt. However, the IMF agreed to the correct accounting for these public assets only as a "pilot project," an intellectually absurd position. The IMF is still resisting adoption of these corrections due to pressure from Wall Street bond holders, banks, and other financial special interests that benefit from high interest rates. This issue can be advanced at the WTO by the Group of 20 and the Group of 77, the two most influential groups of developing countries. The appointment by President Bush of neoconservative John Bolton to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations impeded such overhauls of the GNP and GDP national accounts, as well as other reforms. I and other critics of the IMF's many mistakes over the past decades are now calling for the permanent overhaul of its GNP and GDP and all other macroeconomic models. The IMF should not only set up proper accrual accounting of assets for all investments in public infrastructure, but should also recategorize education and public health from "consumption" to "investment" in human capital. The World Bank and the UN System of National Accounts should make similar corrections and add nations' public investments in education and public health to these asset accounts and amortize them over twenty years-the time it takes to raise a child into a healthy, well-educated, productive adult. It is these accounting corrections that can reveal the opportunities for long-term financial and social returns in the Millennium Development Goals (Sachs, 2005). As these statistical innovations reflect the technological changes in our information-based societies and are reported in mass media, citizens in all democratic societies will align with these evolving values. New business school curricula now cover all these new issues and indicators. Preeminent is Brazil's Amana-Key Desinvolvimento & Educacao in Sao Paulo. Others include the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, which offers an MBA in sustainable business, and the Center for Business as Agent of World Benefit at Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio. Citizens will understand and consider education and self-development as the best investment individuals, companies, and societies can make in a better future for all. Even neoconservative eco-
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nomics recognizes that education is a "public good," a positive externality in economic jargon, that is, activities that individuals and private business are unlikely to fund adequately since they cannot capture the full returns to such private investments. Economists still need to clarify the difference between markets ruled by competition and commons, which require cooperative rules, as I have argued (Henderson, 1995). Educators and public health professionals and the majority of citizens can support adequate taxes so crucial to their children's futures. In light of the new brain research, the current practices in U.S. public schools of commercial sponsorship of television news, sports, and events; product advertising; junk-food vending machines; and curricula prepared by corporate public relations departments-all to supplement budgets-may be ruled illegal. Research shows that children and adolescents have not yet developed forebrain capabilities to override such influences. Teachers can be better paid and schools will no longer have to fight to be included in annual local government budgeting along with other expenditures for needed police, fire protection, and other public services, and in national budgets along with military weapons. As all such new scorecards of real wealth and human progress are implemented, societies and companies will be able to steer themselves on sounder paths toward order and prosperity. Companies will hire firms like Truecost, to identify avoidable costs in full-cost pricing and life-cycle costing, and Innovest, to perform social and environmental risk-analyses, while fully crediting their intangible assets and investments in research and development. For big companies, these changes will be less arduous than for smaller companies. So it is important also to recognize the efforts of small and medium-size enterprises and encourage their progress. The new GNP and GDP asset accounts will end today's egregious overstating of public debts and the excuses it has offered for excessive interest rates, sovereign bond yields, and currency speculation. Developing countries in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries group are already being relieved of some unrepayable, often odious debt under formulas agreed to at the July 2005 G-8 summit in Scotland. Former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff suggested many reforms in his July 24, 2004, article for The Economist, "The Sisters at 60." I moderated five television debates on reforming international finance between Rogoff; John B. Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004);
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and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, lead author of the UN's Human Development Report. 2 Even before the G-8 summit, the IMF's new president, Rodrigo Rato, accepted the need to change many of IMF's socially disastrous policies and to write off more unrepayable debt, largely in response to global civic society and public opinion. In this new century, long-held ideas are changing. The European Union is a new model of integration of formerly warring countries. Despite the no votes in France and Holland over the proposed EU constitution and recent budget squabbles, negotiation, cooperation, and multilateral agreements are the way forward. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have revealed the many problems that even politicians and military leaders now admit require diplomatic solutions. New approaches to terrorism now favor funding education and building schools in countries where poor parents have no choice but to send their children to fundamentalist madrassahs, where they are taught the ways of jihad and suicidal martyrdom to kill others in the name of God. Societies that pandered excessively to individual immigrants' rights to retain their own culture and language (multiculturalism) are rebalancing toward the needs of societies for inclusive, shared values; languages; and the "melting pot." Meanwhile, the search for balance between the rights of individuals and society continues. In our age of weapons of mass destruction, wars are the most dangerous and ineffective options. We see already in the twenty-first century that the new weapons of choice are currencies as well as better diplomacy, intelligence, and widely shared information. Investments geared toward the Global Marshall Plan can help guide the reprioritizing needed to steer societies toward equitable resource use and reduction of conflicts (Radermacher, 2004). Insurance policies for peacekeeping forces can reduce military budgets for countries wishing to follow Costa Rica, which abolished its army in 1947. The proposed United Nations Security Insurance Agency, 3 a partnership of the Security Council and insurance companies, would assess country risks and collect premiums that would be pooled to train standing UN peacekeeping and humanitarian forces (Henderson,1995). Reforming and expanding the Security Council is now on the UN's agenda. The UN General Assembly should take up all the alternative financing mechanisms, including those of the 2002 UN Monterrey Consensus and the Global Marshall Plan, so as to
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implement the Millennium Development Goals. The time has come for global taxes on arms sales, currency trading, airline tickets, and e-mail to provide global public goods: education, health care, sounder international financial architecture, and peacekeeping. These human skills have now laid before us a rich array of potentials for astounding, widespread, shared prosperity and peace, and for restoring our planet's ecosystems. These new visions and values are represented in the UN Millennium Development Goals, the UN Global Compact, the Prague Declaration on Humanizing Globalization, the Global Marshall Plan, the ILO's Report on the Commission on the Human Dimensions of Globalization, and the sixteen principles of the Earth Charter, now ratified by hundreds of municipalities and companies and thousands of NGOs in more than one hundred countries. The way forward and the transition to peaceful sustainable societies is possible. Notes
1. http://www.thedarwinproject.com. 2. The debates are available on DVD from http://www.ethicalmarkets.com. 3. See http://www.hazelhenderson.com; click on UNSIA.
References
Ackerman, Frank, and Lisa Heinzerling. 2004. Priceless. New York: New Press. Allee, Verna. 2003. The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity Through Value Networks. Oxford: Butterworth-Heineman. Altman, Daniel. 2004. Neoconomy. New York: Public Affairs. Axelrod, Robert. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. "Bad for Business?" 2005. The Economist, February 17. Batra, Ravi. 2005. Greenspan's Fraud. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan. Brandenburger, Adam M., and Barry J. Nalebuff. 1996. Co-opetition. New York: Bantam Doubleday. Coy, Peter. 2005. "Why Logic Takes a Backseat." Business Week, March 28: 94. Dagens Nyheter (Swedish daily newspaper), 2004. Stockholm: December 10. Eisler, Riane. 1987. The Chalice and the Blade. New York: Harper & Row. Fox, Justin. 2005. "Why Johnny Can't Save for Retirement." Fortune, March 21. Goshal, Sumantra. 2005. "Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices." Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4(1): 75-91.
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Henderson, Hazel. 1981, 1988. Politics of the Solar Age. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday; New York: Toes Books. Henderson, Hazel, Harlan Cleveland, and Inge Kaul (eds.). 1995. "The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives." FUTURES. Oxford, UK: Elsevier. Henderson, Hazel. 1996a. Building a Win- Win World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Henderson, Hazel. 1996b. Creating Alternative Futures. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. (Originally published 1978.) Henderson, Hazel. 1999. Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Henderson, Hazel. 2001. "Information: The Great Leveler." World Affairs, 5(2): 48-58. Henderson, Hazel. 2003a. "G-8 Economists in Retreat." Montevideo, NY; Rome: InterPress Service, June. Henderson, Hazel. 2003b. "Statisticians of the World Unite." Rome: InterPress Service. Henderson, Hazel. 2004a. "Education: Key Investments in the Wealth of Nations." Boston Research Center Newsletter, 23(Fall-Winter). Henderson, Hazel. 2004b. Interview with Peter No bel, quoted in "Abolish the 'Nobel' in Economics?" Rome; Montevideo, NY; Washington, DC: InterPress Service, December. Henderson, Hazel. 2005. "L'imposture." Le Monde Diplomatique, February. Henderson, Hazel. 2007. Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Books. Henderson, Hazel, and Daisaku Ikeda. 2004. Planetary Citizenship. Los Angeles: Middleway Press. Henderson, Hazel, and Alan F. Kay. 1998. Human Development Report: Proposal for a Truth in Advertising Assurance Set-Aside. New York: United Nations Development Program. Hotz, Robert Lee. 2005. "Anatomy of Give and Take," Los Angeles Times, March 18. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton Press. Leitaer, Bernard. 2001. The Future of Money. London: Random House. Loye, David. 2000. Darwin's Lost Theory of Love. San Jose, CA: ToExcel Press. Moore, James F. 1996. The Death of Competition. New York: Harper-Collins.
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Nadeau, Robert. 2003. The Wealth of Nature. New York: Columbia University Press. Nadeau, Robert, and Menas Kafatos, 1999. The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perkins, John B. 2004. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. "Please Go, Mr. Fazio." 2005. The Economist, August 13. Polanyi, Karl. 1945. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Radermacher, Franz Josef. 2004. Global Marshall Plan: A Planetary Contract. Hamburg, Germany: Global Marshall Plan Foundation. Rogoff, Kenneth. 2004. "The Sisters at 60." The Economist, July 24. Rosen, Corey, John Case, and Martin Staubus. 2005. Equity. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Sachs, Jeffrey. 2005. The End of Poverty. London: Penguin Books. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. "The Shift Away from Thrift." 2005. The Economist, April 7. Tainter, Joseph. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Robert. 2000. Non-Zero. New York: Pantheon.
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Revolutionary Routines Capturing the Opportunity for Creating a More Inclusive Capitalism MARK B. MILSTEIN, TED LONDON, and STUART L. HART
In their efforts to innovate and grow, few companies seize the opportunities associated with maximizing diversity, encouraging nonlinear experimentation, and decreasing control and reliability to enhance creativity within the firm. Furthermore, the voices of those who are unfamiliar to the firm or frustrated by gaps in the globalization process are seen as adversaries and obstructions to new growth opportunities who should be avoided or managed. As a result, most growth experiments, regardless of how well intentioned, tend to become incremental extensions of the existing business model and rarely achieve goals to claim underserved market space. In this chapter we posit that a good deal of the problem rests in the fact that certain reliability-enhancing and control-maximizing activities-or evolutionary routines-predispose companies to implement projects that promise increased efficiencies and reduced risks. This linear approach can leave firms blind to prospects of nontraditional, nonlinear growth opportunities. Innovating and competitively repositioning a firm to address unmet market needs is difficult to do using evolutionary routines. Instead, companies ought to exert more effort to develop what we refer to as revolutionary routines, which emphasize the search for diversity and variety, the development of new skills, the incubation of disruptive innovations, and the shedding of obsolete businesses over time to create new product-market portfolios. In this chapter we specifically argue that
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serving low-income markets-especially the four billion people routinely excluded from the formal global economy-and in turn building a more inclusive capitalism that meets the needs of latent yet overlooked markets will require firms to develop these revolutionary routines. Who Benefits from Capitalism?
The majority of corporate activities and routines have evolved to deliver products and services to customers representing a mere 15 percent of the global population and 56 percent of global gross national product (GNP) measured in constant terms (World Bank, 2001). In economic terms, businesses have targeted the consumers with the largest incomes, from whom they are most likely to appropriate the largest economic rents. This focus on the economic low-hanging fruit, however, has resulted in a global capitalist system that routinely ignores at least 86 percent of the population and effectively leaves half of global GNP on the table. Although most products and services are priced well above anything that most of humanity can afford, the increase in telecommunications and information access over the past decade has served only to heighten aspirations. Television images of wealthy lifestyles are beamed to remote corners of the globe, causing people in all socioeconomic classes to form very strong desires about the kind of consumer-oriented life they would prefer to live. Discontent with the global capitalist system is rising (Stiglitz, 2000). This discontent is further exacerbated by economic institutions in the developed world, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, that are seen as promoting policies that favor their wealthy patron nations over the very developing countries the organizations are meant to assist (Stiglitz, 2000; Korten, 1995). Compounding the problem are subsidies, trade barriers, and tariffs that are seen by many in the developing world as unfair and repressive. The highest tariff rates are levied on developing-country industries that depend on low-skilled labor-such as textiles and agriculturemaking them uncompetitive in the global economy. The rates are higher than those that developed nations put on one another. The result is the protection of a remnant workforce in sunset industries (those that are
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fading) in developed nations and the suppression of trade and employment that leverages the vast low-skilled workforces of developing countries (Gresser, 2002). Products and services offered in today's global marketplace in large part meet many of the desires of wealthy consumers but completely fail to address the needs and aspirations of the majority of the world's population, particularly the four billion people at the base of the economic pyramid (Prahalad and Hart, 2002). Millions of public and private dollars support research and development on next-generation materials, agricultural products, and pharmaceuticals to further extend a comparatively high quality of life (Sachs, 1999). Meanwhile, solutions to a cornucopia of problems encountered by billions worldwide (but not necessarily those in wealthy nations)-lack of shelter, food, clean water, and health care-receive negligible attention. Once again, the result is a perception that the economic engine innovates and creates for those with access to the levers of power. In sum, these dynamics fuel perceptions that the phenomenal economic and technological achievements in the world today are enjoyed by the few, while the vast majority are excluded. And although there is evidence that income gaps and poverty may be falling at a global level (Dollar and Kraay, 2002), there are many people who feel that the system rewards winners with more winnings and losers with more losses (Frank and Cook, 1996). Capitalism's Wake
Over the past decade there has been a growing discontent over the increasing gap between the world's rich and poor. These feelings of disenfranchisement and aggravation with the perceived injustice of the globalization process have boiled over, for example, in Seattle, Davos, and Genoa. Furthermore, links between the current global economic system and poverty, unemployment, and inequality are used as justification for violent acts that shake the very foundations of global economic prosperity. Managers can view and respond to peoples' increased frustrations and desires for a bigger voice in the development of global capitalism in three distinct ways. First, they can ignore these trends and hope that
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they amount to merely idiosyncratic events. Critical opinions are neither directly challenged nor given due consideration. In this case, it is considered more appropriate to focus on the essentials for running an individual business. Links that may exist between these complex issues and a firm's value proposition are viewed as distant and weak. Second, managers can entrench and fight what they see as the enemies of capitalism as they attempt to barricade themselves from their critics. They can erect barriers, hire lobbyists, and call on an army of scientists and public relations specialists to defend managerial decisions. This position guarantees that neither side ever understands the concerns of the other and that the gap between them continues to grow over time. Finally, managers can choose to understand the underlying causes of the issues at hand and consider transforming their businesses in hopes of achieving competitive advantage. Here the links that are either ignored or opposed by others are seen as potentially connecting directly to the competitive future of the company. Instead of adhering to conventional wisdom and trying to manage or ignore a threat, some firms are trying to adopt a new perspective that views the dissatisfaction with capitalism as a business challenge that offers potentially large growth opportunities. In fact, a growing number of companies are exploring the possibility of forging a more inclusive capitalism that creates economic opportunities for the more than half of the world's population that has been bypassed by globalization and has many unmet needs. By understanding these needs and the aspirations of this huge yet overlooked population, firms can approach a very contentious set of issues as opportunities to build new capabilities and create new markets (London, 2005). Most organizational routines, while highly valuable in a conventional setting, are evolutionary, geared toward incremental adaptation and focused on minimizing diversity and change. These evolutionary routines are less helpful for companies approaching potential new market opportunities and pursuing competitive repositioning. As a result, despite the possibility of new opportunities emerging from the challenges posed to businesses today, companies are hampered by stale business models and ineffective strategies (Pearlstein, 2003). Due to the dominance of evolutionary routines, many organizational experiments to innovate
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and change are actually incremental extensions of the existing business model. These evolutionary routines predispose companies to implement projects that primarily increase efficiencies, reduce exposure to risk, and maintain the organization's right to operate (Hart and Milstein, 2003). Due to the emphasis on control and standardization with reliance on familiar partners and stakeholders, such activities rarely achieve stated goals to leapfrog existing competitors or enter underserved markets. More often than not, companies focus on the futile attempt to catch up with industry leaders (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Due to the way they are structured, many business process initiatives meant to prompt innovation succeed in doing just the opposite-stifling the kind of exploratory innovation that creates new market opportunities for the future (Benner and Tushman, 2002). No matter how well-intentioned, incremental innovations do not help firms claim underserved market space. Instead, they help to intensify competition in the established market space and its immediate extensions. This chapter explores what we call revolutionary routines-a set of processes and problem-solving approaches that enable transformative change in the competitive marketplace. To create a more inclusive capitalism and capture some of the value that can emerge by serving low-income markets, firms must develop routines that purposely set out to disrupt the status quo, helping the company innovate and reposition over time and create a shared vision of growth (Hart, 2005). Specifically, firms have to be able consistently to seek out variation, develop new skills, incubate disruptive innovations, and shed obsolete businesses. Opportunities and Challenges for an Inclusive Capitalism
Interestingly, those most vocal and active about their frustration with the current state of affairs are not always the same as those who bear the brunt of the system's inequalities. Indeed, protesters often are not the poor but are actually the comfortable wealthy consumers who claim to represent them. At the extreme, even terrorists such as the 9/11 hijackers and their supporters do not necessarily come from the ranks of the economically disaffected but from the aggravated upper and middle classes. This creates three challenges-and opportunities-that could significantly affect organizations in the future. First, those who are most
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likely to act out on their concerns regarding injustice and unfairness can emerge from the corporations' current customer base. This means that anxiety over capitalism and globalization is not tangential to business issues but instead strikes right at the foundation of a firm's value proposition. Firms that fail to respond to these tensions risk alienating existing customers. However, firms that can demonstrate real concern for these issues may be able to convert this threat into an opportunity to strengthen their base of loyal customers. Second, companies' biggest growth prospects might not actually be in the ultracompetitive high-end markets, as is often assumed, but in the development of innovative products and services that meet the unmet needs of the world's poorest inhabitants (Prahalad and Hart, 2002). This growth opportunity can be significant because poverty represents unmet needs and unmet needs are the cornerstone of value creation. Without an unmet need, there is no profit opportunity. The poor may not always offer high-margin opportunities but their sheer numbers represent a significant high-volume business proposition. The poor do have some income. They currently depend on their ingenuity and complex informal mechanisms to meet their needs by spending limited resources on inferior, expensive options (Prahalad and Hammond, 2002). The rapid rate of technological change means that emerging economies need not follow the same development path as today's mature markets did (Arnold and Quelch, 1998). Utilizing cutting-edge, clean technologies to deliver products and services to low-income markets provides a means for development catalyzed by leapfrog innovations. Firms able to meet the unmet needs of these markets with products that are functional and affordable could face considerable revenue growth opportunities (Hart and Christensen, 2002), as well as address some of the challenges associated with global poverty (Prahalad, 2005). Third, poor markets represent competitive space with few existing competitors (Prahalad and Hart, 2002). They offer a chance for successful firms to benefit greatly from first-mover returns associated with a positive reputation and a willingness and dedication to expand the economic pie. By focusing time and attention on serving previously ignored markets, companies can lay the groundwork for the development of more inclusive economies that can raise the fortunes of many,
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not just a few. As more people are able to participate in the economy, perceptions of injustice and unfairness will fall by the wayside, as will the threats to the global economic system. Time and energy now put into unproductive uses can be better channeled to increase economic activity further and incorporate more of those now ignored. However, ignored markets represent significantly different contexts from those in which most companies are used to operating. Needs, suppliers, customers, technologies, product requirements, service demands, distributions channels, marketing approaches, manufacturing realities, sourcing, and production methods will all differ from the known and familiar. What is clear is that current business models are likely not to be applicable; otherwise they would have been applied long ago and the current slate of issues discussed here would not exist (London and Hart, 2004; London, 2005). Because the context of serving poor markets is so alien for many firms, we argue that to be successful, companies have to focus on the development of new, revolutionary routines that enable fundamental organizational innovation and change. Routine Solutions
Exploration, experimentation, flexibility, and disruption are crucial to economic vitality and corporate success, especially when firms are exploring or responding to nonlinear change (Schumpeter, 1934, 1942; March, 1991; Hamel, 2000). Nonetheless, most organizations assume very defensive postures that protect and nurture that which has served them well in the past, even in the face of change (Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997; Christensen, 1997). In trying to serve poor, neglected markets, companies must seek to avoid the tendency to rely on evolutionary routines that encourage transfer of the business models and capabilities they have built and protected to serve the world's wealthy minority (London and Hart, 2004). The very routines that have served firms so well in these up-markets will prevent them from developing the capabilities for serving the underserved. These routines, which focus on increasing efficiency, reducing costs, lowering risks, increasing legitimacy, and building corporate reputation, are evolutionary because they remove variance from organizational activities, minimize diversity, and increase standardization,
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predictability, and reliability (see Figure 4.1). The goal is to minimize change and to ensure that the change that does occur happens in a controlled and predictable manner-an approach that is highly effective in markets dominated by efficiency-oriented competitors, cost-sensitive customers, and a stable set of stakeholders. Increasing efficiency means raising the productivity of assets. In practical terms, efficiency routines take the form of total quality management initiatives, Deming principles, ISO 9000, ISO 14000, and so on. The goal of these initiatives is to squeeze waste from all processes in the hopes of increasing output of existing products and services with fewer inputs. Such goals can be realized only by concentrating on incremental changes to existing products, processes, and services that are well-known and understood. Such activities can lead to innovation and change for the organization, but only along preexisting knowledge pathways that sustain the foundation of a firm's previous successes (Christensen, 1997). The components of the system change but the architecture of the system remains intact (Henderson and Clark, 1990; McDonough and Braungart, 1998). Firms that develop expertise in increasing efficiency ensure themselves of extremely productive assets for serving familiar customers and markets. Similarly, efforts to reduce costs are also evolutionary. Cost cutting focuses on creating more value from the firm's existing asset stock. Failure to keep costs in line will suppress profitability, ultimately affecting a Increase productivity
I Lower costs
Disseminate information
~
Reduce risk
I
Maintain right to operate
I
I
Incremental change
FIGURE
4.1. Evolutionary routines.
~
Establish reputation
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company's market value. In this environment, developing radically new products, processes, and services may be deemed inappropriate as the expected returns are unpredictable and uncontrollable. This approach does not generate the revolutionary changes needed to tackle the failings of global capitalism as it is currently practiced. Routines that help evaluate and lower risk over time help reduce gaps between supply and demand, preventing over- and under-capacity that can plague firm profitability. Risk-management activities are typically directed at achieving increased clarity related to existing businesses where the elements that affect volatility are fairly well-known. Yet these efforts are clearly focused on improving what the firm currently does and not on innovation and change. Routines centered on increasing legitimacy and corporate reputation are also evolutionary because they are typically used to communicate to stakeholders why what the firm is doing is appropriate and desirable (Hart and Milstein, 2003). Communication behaviors aimed at seeking favorable publicity or media attention, disseminating company information, and garnering support from important stakeholders are all meant to justify a firm's position and approach without having to change the behavior of the organization (Sutcliffe, 2000). They are meant not to be conduits for new ideas and critical voices, but to convince an audience of the reasonableness of the firm's perspective. Routines focused on issues such as efficiency, cost cutting, risk reduction, and the building of legitimacy and reputation increase short-term profitability by protecting existing asset investments (Hart and Milstein, 2003). These homogeneity-inducing routines are valuable in familiar environments because they represent gradual, predictable change to both internal and external stakeholders. Evolutionary routines protect the status quo, they do not challenge it. Such routines cannot be relied on as catalysts for future-oriented experimentation, discovery, and innovation that must occur if firms are to realize growth opportunities in low-income markets. The apparent paradox of the interaction between routines (or repeatable actions that can be initiated without conscious consideration) and the goal of encouraging variability and unpredictability can be resolved if firms consider that routines can also be used to maximize diversity and encourage nonlinear thinking. The challenge for firms, then, is
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whether they can use routines to create revolutionary-not just evolutionary-change. There seems to be little reason to believe that they cannot. Managers can choose to meet regularly with familiar colleagues, or they can make efforts to establish ties with unfamiliar stakeholders (Hart and Sharma, 2004; London, Rondinelli, and O'Neill, 2005). Rather than frequenting business conferences, managers can regularly attend nonprofit forums. Instead of traveling solely to their subsidiary offices, managers can consistently explore geographic regions that the company is not currently serving. The difference between these activities is that some are variance maximizing while others maximize diversity. The latter are examples of revolutionary routines. Revolutionary Routines
Revolutionary routines are meant to achieve the long-term goals of innovation and competitive repositioning built around a shared vision for growth and change. These routines, which focus on innovation, repositioning, developing a broad shared vision, and establishing a growth trajectory for the firm, are revolutionary because they increase variance in organizational activities, maximize diversity, and minimize standardization, predictability, and reliability (see Figure 4.2). The goal is to capitalize on change by managing it in a way that does not simply yield an abundance of ideas that have no commercial value (March, 1991). Increase discovery
Share information
I
I
Innovate
~
Develop a shared vision
Reposition
l
Radical change
FIGURE
4.2. Revolutionary routines.
~
Establish growth trajectory
I
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Serving low-income markets will require experimentation and creativity to create value for communities plagued by minimal competition and limited choices among expensive, shoddy goods and services. The objective of employing revolutionary routines is to generate a cycle of discovery that includes the search for diversity and variety, the cultivation of new skills, the incubation of disruptive innovations, and changes to product-market portfolios to competitively reposition the firm over time (see Figure 4.3).
Seek Variation
Tomorrow's biggest growth markets are populated by unfamiliar customers who have different needs and problems than today's business leaders are used to serving (Doering and others, 2002). The constraints under which business competition will take place even ten years from now will be vastly different from those in which today's leading companies have grown accustomed to dealing. Creating new business models and novel technologies that rewrite the rules of competition cannot be achieved through incremental processes. Managers need to move beyond standard operating procedures and find new ways to construct and apply knowledge. To guide activities, managers need routines that encourage more
Work with Unconventional partners
Commercialize imaginative technologies Grow new markets
Cross organizational and technical boundaries
Shed obsolete business
Scrutinize novel perspectives
Invest in small-scale experiments
Incubate disruptive
Conduct nonlinear pilot programss
Test hybrid ownership structures
Nurture local economic capacity
Analyze distributed control mechanisms
Facilitate generation of new knowledge
FIGURE
4.3.
Discovery cycle.
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inclusive and participatory conversations about future trends and what their firm's role will be in shaping that future (Hart and Milstein, 2003). Two-way communication processes that flush out broad needs and interests increase the variety of perspectives available to a manager (Sutcliffe, 2000). Creating a more inclusive vision of the future depends on the ability of managers to engage in routines that do more than just support openness and transparency. Failure to integrate distinct voices and perspectives can leave organizations vulnerable to unanticipated shifts in the marketplace. Companies employing routines that absorb-almost exclusively-the opinions of familiar stakeholders (such as investors, suppliers, and customers) into business planning often miss much of what is important in unfamiliar environments. These routines tend to overemphasize the importance of economic issues and underestimate the importance of cultural, social, technical, political, and environmental trends. Doing so makes it difficult to identify emerging challenges early enough to allow managers to evaluate how their organizations may recombine assets and knowledge to innovate and reposition over time. Instead, a genuine enthusiasm for listening to diverse viewpoints about the world at large can enable managers to gain access to invaluable knowledge about the emerging trends and opinions that will shape tomorrow's competitive marketplace. Constructive dialogue that challenges assumptions about key issues and the role of various stakeholders can lead to intellectual, and thus strategic, growth (Rondinelli and London, 2003). Pursuing meaningful relationships with stakeholders who are at the fringe of current business operations can create a context for firms to discover previously unknown springs of knowledge (Hart and Sharma, 2004). Routines that encourage the crossing of both organizational and technological boundaries enable firms to create value by exposing it to new paradigms (Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001), and they facilitate the injection of new information that will present challenges to well-worn sets of heuristics and biases (Schwenk, 1984). Revolutionary routines break down arrogant self-assurance that the business world is known and understood. Exploration for new data that disconfirms preexisting notions of the way the world is structured and how different problems can be addressed can form the cornerstone of successful innovation (Leonard-Barton, 1992).
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The ability to address the different needs of those not yet served by global capitalism is unlikely to emerge from activities that merely sustain and safeguard an existing competitive advantage. Developing a more inclusive capitalism requires firms actually to build new markets from the ground up, not simply to extend the geographical reach of their existing products. Firms seeking to serv~ low-income markets need to address more basic market needs and the unique attributes and aspirations of those not yet served by well-developed business models. They will find it difficult to do this if they pursue a path of least resistance by extending the product-technology combina.tions that were designed to meet the needs of significantly wealthy consumers.
Cultivate New Skills
Low-income markets lack products, services, and infrastructure. They are characterized by informal relationships and improvised associations that depend on whatever resources might be available at the time. Routines that cultivate the development of new skills-both internally and externally-will create an environment conducive to new business and value creation. Low-income markets at the base of the economic pyramid are challenging because unmet market needs are not necessarily met by linear extrapolations of existing skill sets within firms or within the low-income communities themselves. Within companies, financial and political dynamics are strong forces that prefer to build on what already exists. Managerial incentives and tools favor initiatives in which a quick ramp-up can be followed by a short payback period. Low income markets have challenging opportunities awash in ambiguity that will often yield apparent dead-ends. Yet unanticipated benefits and learning from failure are hallmarks of innovation (Sitkin, 1992). Serendipitous consequences-both positive and negative-await even the most careful of planners (Leifer and others, 2000). Firms with routines that enable the design and implementation of stand-alone pilot programs that deliver a set of outcomes not necessarily tied directly to economic results may be in a better position to discover new ways of dealing with both familiar and unfamiliar problems. The cultivation of new skills is not limited to the boundaries of
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the firm. Within low-income markets there is much opportunity for improvement by the individuals and communities already there. Often residents know what resources they lack and the most efficient manner in which they could increase their productivity. What they lack is understanding of and access to knowledge related to those resources. Routines that help firms transfer knowledge that is not critical to competitive advantage can have a deep impact on the growth of infrastructure and economic capacity in low-income markets, making those markets more favorable for business growth. Routines that facilitate the generation of new knowledge are another manner in which new skills can be cultivated for companies and communities alike. The ability to listen to what already works in low-income markets, and to why it works, is critical to identifying new ways to operate in unfamiliar markets (Hart and London, 2005). Top managers are not immune from the need to learn new skills. These managers often make erroneous assumptions about low-income markets on the basis of their own limited experience in such markets. Indeed, their career tracks have provided them with substantial knowledge about their current products, services, processes, markets, and technologies, on which they are often justifiably viewed as experts. However, a career spent developing products and services geared toward wealthy markets-including those in emerging economies-does not necessarily translate into knowledge about the lives and needs of those who have been systematically left out of the economy. In fundamentally different markets, such as the base of the pyramid, the real knowledge is in the field, where the struggle to address unmet needs is played out every day. Thus firms that become adept in enabling bottom-up leadership and knowledge flow and that support training that creates routines geared toward accessing this new source of information will be the ones that produce decision makers better able to understand the needs and opportunities presented in low-income markets.
Incubate Disruptive Innovations
Typically managers pursue investments in large-scale projects that can have significant near-term impacts on their company's bottom line. It is not uncommon for large multinational firms to search relentlessly for
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the next $1 billion business, considering revenues under $200 million too small to warrant resources and attention. The paradox is that not only do large, fast paybacks require very large investments, but also most large businesses grew from modest beginnings. Figuring out how to serve unmet market needs does not have to require huge, up-front outlays of cash. Quite the opposite: routines that encourage local entrepreneurship (both within and outside of the firm) combined with routines that encourage distributed ownership and control can result in the development of a diversity of small-scale initiatives around new businesses and technologies. Managers often insist on strict control of innovation initiatives in efforts to minimize risk and costs. The irony, of course, is that such control can push the innovation right out of a project as executives become anxious about costs and time before experimentation has had a chance to yield results, data have been analyzed, and new !earnings can occur. Routines that rely on standard operating procedures can hold radical innovative activity hostage to unrealistic and unproductive standards. The organizational tools and processes used to measure and judge success or failure of investments are often standardized even though the process itself is stochastic. Successful investments can be expanded in different ways to enable the firm to probe new, unfamiliar areas and provide a foundation on which nonlinear experimentation processes can occur (McGrath, 1997). Unsuccessful initiatives can be modified on the basis of experiential learning, or abandoned altogether. Firms developing revolutionary routines find it can be easier to justify a set of those small-scale investments to organizational decision makers because the processes involved make it easier to reverse a losing course of action in favor of a more productive one (Brockner, 1992). Concerns about property rights and rent appropriation are fitting for conditions in established markets. However, this approach is often an inappropriate way to create value when developing an opportunity in a low-income market where the legal system is not developed and is unlikely to be enforced. Learning how to forgo some ownership of a venture up front can be a helpful mechanism for firms to push innovative initiatives forward (Stringer, 2000). Some degree of local ownership by those on the ground who have a vested interest in seeing their
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unmet needs met can provide a source of valuable knowledge about any gaps and opportunities in the system. Furthermore, local ownership can increase success in the field as users most familiar with the unmet needs will be the first to understand whether or not their needs are being met (Christensen, 1997). These dynamics serve to ensure a more productive use of limited time and resources. In meeting unmet needs, however, firms lack understanding of the customers and markets that have been regularly ignored. Attempts to standardize any aspects of a business model, including its technology, financing, marketing, and distribution, are often premature. It is a firm's ability to customize solutions for local idiosyncrasies that enables it to develop the innovations necessary for building and capitalizing on new market opportunities (Kotha, 1995). Applying evolutionary routines to generate revolutionary change ignores the fact that incremental and racial innovation have inherently different characteristics that require distinct managerial skill sets (McGrath, 1997). Routines that enable distributed control allow those closest to the problem to assume responsibility for evaluating a project's success or failure (von Hippel, 1994 ), particularly when traditional assessment methods are unable to account for tangential returns that can develop over time in novel contexts.
Change Product-Market Portfolio
Innovation is the driver of economic vitality. This vitality springs from the ability of companies to transform the product-market portfolio over time. Revolutionary routines enable a firm to examine its productmarket portfolio systematically to determine not only which new technologies to commercialize and which new markets to develop but also which businesses no longer retain strategic value-let alone economic value-for the firm. A comparatively good deal of effort is spent thinking about when to get into a new area, yet firms have precious little success commercializing new technologies and growing new markets. Most patents and technologies never see the light of the marketplace. Some technologies are not adopted because they offer no clear method for better serving existing customers. Other technologies languish because their latent potential for undermining an installed asset base invokes adoption resistance.
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Routines that permit a firm to move a technology from the lab to the field to the market are neither well understood nor widely practiced. Commercializing nascent technologies and growing new markets requires routines that allow for the creative application of skills in unfamiliar markets to address unfamiliar needs (Hart and Christensen, 2002). At the same time, firms spend much less time trying to understand when to get out of a business. Some companies resist changing their portfolios out of fear of cannibalizing their own sources of reliable profits by developing ventures. What many fail to see is that retention of the former can actually preclude the full development and growth of the latter. Discouraging competencies that forge new economic directions can leave a company stuck in an evolutionary growth pattern in a competitive environment that will require revolutionary change at some point in time. The need for revolutionary routines around cultivation of the new and divestment of the old are critical to the discovery and business growth processes. Conclusion
Firms can cultivate revolutionary routines to seek diversity, cultivate new skills, incubate disruptive innovations, and change product-market portfolios over time. Serving low-income markets can create new growth opportunities for firms while helping defuse a growing discontent with global capitalism, thereby playing a crucial role in creating a more inclusive capitalism. Few firms are able to innovate consistently over time. We would argue that this inability stems in part from an overreliance on evolutionary routines that relegate most growth experiments to incremental extensions of the existing business approaches, making it difficult to claim underserved market space. To address this problem, we suggest that firms need to develop revolutionary routines that enhance diversity and learning. Managers who are quick to transplant what has worked well in mature markets into underserved, low-income markets are likely in for a rough lesson. While efficiency may rule in the former, the ability to experiment, innovate, and learn over time will determine success in the latter. Companies that try to apply evolutionary routines that reduce
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variation in the marketplace may actually help to stamp out the flames of economic growth. Conversely, firms that try to serve previously ignored market spaces and in turn transform the nature and outcome of capitalism will have to invest in developing a host of revolutionary routines meant to kindle innovation and change. References
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The Transformative Potential of Compassion at Work JANE DUTTON, jACOBA LILIUS, and JASON KANOV
Cooperation can only strengthen mankind, because it helps us recognize that the most secure foundation for the new world order is not simply broader political and economic alliances, but rather each individual's genuine practice of love and compassion. For a better, happier, more stable and civilized future, each of us must develop a sincere, warmhearted feeling of brother- and sisterhood.
-The Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama suggests that individuals are the primary architects of human society. He believes that society can be transformed in a positive way through individual expressions of love and compassion. This chapter takes this idea to heart by exploring how seemingly small interpersonal acts can have big, systemwide effects. By argument and example, we hope to reveal the ways that daily instances and expressions of compassion among individuals within a social system, particularly work organizations, can contribute to an organization's capability for cooperation (OCC}. 1 By OCC we refer to an organization's collective ability to cooperate. Capability is defined by the organization's ability both to increase its cooperation and to improve its competence in cooperating. Consistent with the theme of this book, we define cooperation as voluntary acts of working with others for shared advantage (Smith, Carroll, and Ashford, 1995). Our definition follows from research by social dilemma theorists We thank David Cooperrider, Martha Feldman, Ran Fry, Andy McGill, Sandy Piderit, and Ned Powley for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank the attendees of the Transformative Potential of Cooperation session on September 17, 2003. We are indebted to the ongoing collaboration between the three of us and other members of the Compassionlab (http:/lwww.compassionlab.com), the late Peter Frost, Sally Maitlis, and Monica Worline. Our research collaboration has been an inspiration for and testimony to many of the ideas presented in this chapter. We also thank Cindy Schipani and Tim Fort for asking us to give the talk on compassion and peacemaking that seeded these ideas.
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who see cooperation in decisions where joint interest is maximized (Kopelman, Weber, and Messick, 2002). The definition goes beyond the idea of cooperation as a simple contribution of effort to the completion of interdependent jobs that has been described by researchers in economics, social psychology, and business in their investigations of phenomena such as social loafing and free riding in groups (Latane, Williams, and Harkins, 1979; Wagner, 1995). Cooperation is often achieved by collaboration, defined as joint decision making by key stakeholders about the future in a particular problem domain (Gray, 1989). In accord with the thesis of this book, our argument is that greater levels of organizational and interorganizational capability for cooperation contribute to positive global change and human prosperity (Cooperrider and Dutton, 1999). An organization's greater capability for cooperation shows up in many ways. It may be manifest in an organization's higher rate and greater success in partnering, particularly in partnering that is integrative and mutual (Austin, 2000; Eisler, 2003; McGill, 2007). It may show up in more extensive and effective coordination processes. For example, Gittell (2003) argues that firms vary in their capacity to do complex coordination of interdependent tasks and that greater relational competence is largely responsible for higher coordination effectiveness. In her studies of coordination in both the airline industry and hospitals, a capacity to coordinate well depends on a willingness and competence in cooperating across diverse and interdependent parts of an organization. An increased capability for cooperation at the organizational level may also show up in less dramatic and costly ways such as more prosocial behavior between members in the organization (Batson and Shaw, 1991) or increased levels of interpersonal helping (Settoon and Mossholder, 2002). It may also be manifest in the everyday language of organizational members. The language of "we," of care, of help, and of enabling reflect and affirm the existence of a higher capability for cooperation and for connection more generally (see, for example, Dutton, 2003; Wondolleck and Yaffee, 2000). It may also be manifest in the everyday conduct of meetings, gatherings, and programs where an attitude of cooperation permeates these micro-occasions, and people both see and act on the potential of mutual gains available from working together for shared goals. Where OCC is greater, there is an increased likelihood that cooperation will occur and be more varied, and the organization will be better at enabling and supporting cooperation.
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Our aim in this chapter is to develop an understanding of the mechanisms through which compassion among members of an organization generates resources, shared values and beliefs, and skills, all of which help to build the organization's cooperation capacity. Resources are the materials in use that facilitate cooperation, or what people draw on and use when they cooperate (Feldman, 2004). Shared values and beliefs provide a sense of direction and motivation. They are what guides cooperation, and they help people (both individuals and groups) understand why they should cooperate (that is, for what purpose) and how they should approach cooperation. Finally, the skills are the means by which people cooperate; they are the know-how that informs how people actually do cooperate. Taken together, these three effects of compassion contribute to an organization's capability for cooperation. We argue that interpersonal acts of compassion build resources, strengthen values and beliefs, and cultivate critical skills, thus building OCC. A visual depiction of the three mechanisms through which compassion affects OCC is presented in Figure 5.1. We use a pillar metaphor to suggest that an organization's capability for cooperation rests on three pillar features: resources, values and beliefs, and skills.
Organizational Capability for Cooperation
mrmrmr
Creates Renewable Resources
Strengthens Shared Values and Beliefs
Cultivates Critical Relational Skills
• Trust
• Dignity and respect
• Emotional attunement
• Felt connection
• Value of the common good
• Enabling skills
• Positive emotions
• Interdependence
lllilllillli Compassion at Work
5.1. Core arguments linking compassion at work to cooperation capability of an organization.
FIGURE
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Starting Assumptions About Compassion
Our arguments are based on an assumption that experiences of pain and compassion are fundamental to being human. As human institutions, organizations are sites that inevitably harbor the emotional pain and suffering of their individual members (Dutton and others, 2002; Frost and Robinson, 1999; Frost, Dutton, Worline, and Wilson, 2000). Moreover, the presence of pain in work organizations has serious financial, psychological, and social costs for organizations and their members (Frost, 2003). As the "heart's response to suffering" (Kornfield, 1993), compassion plays an important role in organizational life through its ability to lessen or alleviate pain. Compassion is a relational process that involves noticing another person's pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to his or her pain, and acting in some way to help ease or alleviate the pain (Frost and others, 2006; Kanov and others, 2004). Consistent with the Buddhist argument, compassion suggests no self as it implies no boundary between the self and the other (Gray, 2003). Compassion is a form of caregiving that is typically invisible or devalued in work organizations (Eisler, 2003; Kahn, 1993). Organizations enable or disable compassion by facilitating or hindering the noticing, feeling, and responding to pain of their members, processes that we argue contribute to the creation of resources, the strengthening of certain shared beliefs and values, and the cultivation of key relational skills (Dutton, Worline, Frost, and Lilius, 2006). Our understanding of the healing power of compassion is rooted in the medical and nursing literatures, where scholars and practitioners emphasize the importance of attending to patients' emotional anguish as well as their physical health (Cassell, 2002; Reich, 1989). Compassion enables medical practitioners to achieve a deeper level of healing in their patients because it connects them more fully with their patients and allows them to treat the whole person rather than just illnesses and injuries (Brody, 1992; Cassell, 2002). While the healing potential of compassion plays an important role in organizations, compassion also contributes in important ways to organizations' social fabric. By social fabric we mean the overall pattern in the quality of relationships between people in an organization. As suggested in the medical and nursing literatures, compassion heals by and through the relationship it helps to create between health care providers and their patients (Reich, 1989). Historical, philosophical, and theologi-
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cal sources also recognize the ability of compassion to create, strengthen, and sustain human connection and community (Clark, 1997; Dalai Lama, 1995; Glaser, 2005; Wuthnow, 1991). In general, compassion is widely regarded as a basic social force that builds and reinforces connections between people. We argue that in the context of work organizations compassion has particularly important social and relational effects. Namely, compassion among organizational members builds, strengthens, and sustains the cooperation capability of those organizations. While we discuss cooperation capability as building from within organizations, consistent with the theme of this book, we also see it as critical in order to create the conditions by which organizations can be a powerful force for change in a broader sense (Harman and Horman, 1990). We now turn our attention to the mechanisms through which compassion achieves these ends. The core claim of our chapter is that small acts of compassion are generative-they produce vital and renewable resources, generate and strengthen critical values and beliefs, and develop critical relational skills. We illustrate these claims with stories we have gathered from two studies of experienced compassion at work (Frost et al., 2006; Lilius, Worline, Maitlis, Kanov, Dutton, and Frost, 2007). Together these three products cultivate an organizational social fabric that strengthens an organization's cooperation capability both by improving the collective competence of the whole and by increasing the load capacity of the whole for doing cooperative work. We first develop foundational arguments linking compassion to these resources and then propose a process through which this cooperation capability is enacted. Three Pillars in Building the Compassion-to-Cooperation link Compassion Creates Resources
Compassion in organizations creates critical resources that are useful for creating and sustaining system-level relational capacities. By resources we mean relational outcomes or assets that can be drawn on in use (Feldman, 2004) to facilitate cooperative or collaborative action between people. Specifically, we argue that compassion between organizational members increases trust and felt connections between members and generates positive emotions, both of which increase the potential for OCC. Within an organization, compassion not only generates such
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resources in those directly involved in a compassionate interaction, but also generates resources in third-party organizational members who witness or are made aware of these compassionate interactions. Trust. Compassion between individuals increases levels of interpersonal trust, or the degree of confidence that one has and one's willingness to act on the basis of the words, actions, and decisions of others (McAllister, 1995). When someone experiences compassion directly or witnesses its occurrence, they feel greater trust that, should they be faced with a difficult time in their own lives, they can count on those around them. An employee at Midwestern Health System (MHS) describes the impact of seeing the capacity for compassion in his coworkers: A coworker with seven children needed immediate bypass surgery. His disability insurance only gave his family two-thirds of his normal incomewe knew that wasn't enough. I set up a tax-free trust fund and ended up getting a little over $5,800-more than enough to cover his losses of being off work for the extended period of time. I couldn't believe that our lab of seventy-five came up with that much money in less than one week. It still means a lot to me-to know I work with such caring people.
The person telling this story conveys amazement at the sheer amount of financial support shown by his coworkers, and through his characterization of them as "caring people" he suggests his impression of them as people who can be trusted or counted on to act with similar compassion in the future. This trust allows people to suspend a self-focus and develop an understanding that they will not be taken advantage of (Porter, Lawler, and Hackman, 1975), thus creating conditions in which they are more open to finding areas of mutual interest and shared advantage, making cooperation more likely and more effective. Quality of connection. In a closely related way, compassion alters the felt connection between people, increasing the quality of the connection. In high-quality connections there is more engagement and a heightened sense of give and take (Dutton and Heaphy, 2003). Some people actually verbalize a bond that is formed with those who have provided compassion. One MHS employee describes the connection she felt with the people who had helped her through a difficult period in her own life: For six months I tried to hold down my job while attending to my critically ill mother's needs. Daily I was asked how she was doing, how
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I was doing, and what can we do to help. Very often there was not anything they could do to help, but knowing that they cared and were willing was a wonderful boost to my spirit. The bond you develop with coworkers after an experience like this is irreplaceable!
This story demonstrates the increase in quality of connection that can be created between compassion receivers and compassion givers. Acts of compassion can also strengthen bonds between those who work together to provide compassion to someone in pain. Another employee from MHS describes a time when her supervisor's pet was diagnosed with cancer and eventually died. During this time, she and her coworkers showed great compassion for their supervisor: As each day passed, my supervisor shared more details and past happy stories about her pet. We all listened every day, sympathizing with her every day-until the day came when she called in to work telling us she would be in late because Tooter finally passed away. Just knowing how much her pet meant to her, we all decided to chip in and send her family some flowers in honor of Tooter. We all shared a moving experience. It brought us all closer-not just as coworkers, but as friends.
This example shows clearly the change in the quality and strength of the connection felt between coworkers as a result of their collective expression of compassion. This effect is not limited to those who actually participate in the compassionate episode; in some instances, being witness to compassion may alter the quality of connection between people. In a study of academics and their experience of compassion at work, we heard this effect expressed in many ways. As one person describes the experience, "After someone has been compassionate, they loom as an important person in my life" (Frost, Dutton, Worline, and Wilson, 2000, p. 37). In another story an art professor told of a time a student was sharing artwork that embodied her partner's suicide. When she described how she reacted with compassion, she also provided testimony to how people at all levels of involvement in this compassion episode felt a change in connection and in the kinds of reactions that were called forth: We have all been touched by death, if not suicide, in some way.... So I just talked about that .... None of us could understand the pain she had experienced ... and that it was incredibly valuable for all of us to have her share it with us, what it meant and how her life would be
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forever affected. The other students were deeply affected. They were so supportive of her and thanked her and talked about it. Some of them opened up and said things about deaths that had affected them." [Frost, Dutton, Worline, and Wilson, 2000, p. 37]
Here, bearing witness to an act of compassion between the professor and her student brought everyone in the classroom closer together. The change in the quality of classmates' connections to one another and to their professor is reflected in their increased comfort with revealing more intimate details about their experiences with death. Dutton (2003) suggests an association between improving the quality of connections between people and the minimization of the flexing of power in power-imbalanced relationships. Thus it seems that highquality connections involve less abuse of power and this is associated with increased cooperation (Kopelman, Weber, and Messick, 2002). Positive emotions. Finally, the experience of compassion builds enduring resources through the increase in positive emotions that often result from a compassionate episode. Positive emotions are more than just feeling good in the moment; as argued by Fredrickson (1998, 2000), positive emotions actually lead to enduring change in functioning at both the individual and organizational levels. This claim is based on the broaden-and-build model of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998), which describes positive emotions as both broadening people's thoughtaction repertoire and building their physical, intellectual, and social resources. As seen in the examples that follow, compassion elicits positive emotions in both those who receive and those who witness it. Consistent with Sekerka and Fredrickson (2007), we argue that the experience of positive emotion builds relational capacities of the whole (in this case, OCC) by increasing people's willingness to help one another (Isen, 1987). This helping spawns further positive emotions, which increases the desire to help even more. Thus positive emotions create positive spirals of helping and interpersonal cooperation that generate even more positive emotion (Fredrickson, 2003). For the person who is in pain, experienced compassion can lead to a sense of gratitude. An employee at MHS who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis describes her coworkers as being there for her during "the darkest time of my life." She says, "My coworkers showed me more love and compassion than I would have ever imagined. Do I wish that
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I didn't have MS? Of course. But would I give up this opportunity to witness and be on the receiving end of so much love? No way." She feels deep gratitude for the compassion her coworkers showed her, which Emmons (2003) argues creates an important social resource in that it increases the likelihood of future prosocial behaviors. For those who witness acts of compassion occurring around them, experienced compassion may lead to a sense of pride. In MHS, compassion is expressed not only between coworkers, but toward patients and their families as well. Although compassion may often be taken for granted as "part of the job description" for health care workers, it is clear from the following story that this form of compassion has a significant impact on those who witness it: When an extremely obese patient's kidneys shut down, due to the fact that his family had no money and he weighed over seven hundred pounds when he died, no funeral home would accept his body. Our chaplin arranged to have a funeral service in the chapel, and several nurses from critical care donated money for flowers. Within four hours time they had over twenty family members present for a viewing and farewell ceremony. The case management department also found a funeral home to cremate the body free of charge. I was so impressed by the love and compassion I saw demonstrated for a family of no reputation. I was proud to work at MHS.
The person who shared this story with us was able to verbalize the pride she felt in her coworkers and her organization as a whole as a result of the compassion she observed. A sense of pride, argues Fredrickson (2000), creates the urge to share with others the source of this sense of pride, and to continue to act in ways that will maintain or enhance it. We argue, then, that the pride felt after being involved in a compassionate episode is an important social resource because by sharing the story of compassion with others, the characterization of the whole as a compassionate system is strengthened, and people are more likely to act in ways that are aligned with this characterization. In addition, bearing witness to such an act also inspires people to act in ways that benefit the greater good (Haidt, 2003), thus prompting further acts of compassion. In sum, important social resources are created by the increase in trust, quality connections, and positive emotion that accompany experienced compassion.
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Compassion Strengthens Shared Values and Beliefs
Compassion transforms the social context in which it occurs by strengthening certain values and beliefs by making them more visible and actionable. First, compassion as symbolic action affirms the values of dignity and mutual respect. Compassion as expressed human connection is a living testimony to the value that human beings have for each other. An employee at MHS describes the treatment of a homeless woman who had repeatedly trespassed in their office tower and had observable psychiatric disturbance. Building management called the hospital's behavioral health staff to obtain information about community resources and then, on behalf of the woman, contacted those agencies, which then intervened to assist the woman. Says the employee, "Given a choice between an expedient 'taking care of a problem' and trying to go the extra mile to help an individual, staff chose the compassionate route." Witnessing the dignity and respect evident in the building management's actions may have served to affirm the value of the whole. Compassion also affirms the value of the common good. Acts of compassion provide evidence of a sense of commitment that a community of people have to one another. Compassion in organizations is behavior that is other-focused at its core. It dissipates self-interest and center stages other-interest, affirming the existence of common ground and common good and strengthening the social whole (Wuthnow, 1991). Blum (1980) argues that compassion carries with it a sense of shared humanity, and this promotes the experience of equality. It transcends social boundaries and connects people to one another in a more fundamental way-at the level of their basic humanity. A story from another employee at MHS describes how even as a temporary employee she experienced compassion from a coworker: At a point in my life when I was struggling to recover from a bad stretch of underemployment and debt pressure, I was employed here as a temporary employee, with no benefits. Not being very talkative, I was surprised to find myself "unloading" on a coworker and sharing with her my concern over lack of health benefits for my kids. A day or so after this, when I'd forgotten all about the conversation, the coworker came up to me with a brochure for a low-cost health program for which I might qualify. I was touched and impressed. I felt this person's act to be
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representative of organizational values, and this was a material factor in accepting my permanent position here.
This example demonstrates beautifully how small acts of compassion can have large effects. This relatively small action both affirmed for the person telling the story her place as an equal and strengthened what she believed to be important organizational values. Beyond the personal meaning this had for her, it made her want to become a more permanent part of the community. Finally, compassion in organizations reminds people of their interdependence with one another, strengthening this as a shared belief. It reminds them of their own importance in the lives of others, and affirms that they can rely on one another, especially during difficult times. An employee at MHS tells of a time when a coworker found out that both of her parents had cancer: She needed to take a leave to care for her parents. Our department donated vacation hours and personal hours and was able to present her with a check for over $1,000. We also donated meals that we delivered to her and spent time sitting with her or for her so she could run errands or rest. Ultimately her father passed away and now her mom resides with her and her family. My friend is back to work, but as her mom's cancer progresses I'm sure she'll need to take off again and we'll all be there to help again. What comes around goes around. We have to be here for each other.
In sum, compassion in organizations is interpersonal behavior that cultivates a culture where people recognize and value their interconnectedness, contributing to a more heightened sense of community and collective identity. It increases OCC by affirming joint interests and shared fate, while at the same time helping people to feel safe and valued through mutual respect and the honoring of each person's humanity. Compassion Cultivates Critical Skills
Although people are born with a capacity to be compassionate (Nussbaum, 1996), in many institutions-whether families, schools, or work organizations-that "natural" capacity is dulled and sometimes erased. Thus when people are compassionate or witness others being compassionate, it awakens certain innate skills and deepens people's capacity to
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exercise them as well. A story from MHS exemplifies how after experiencing compassion during a difficult time in one's own life, people are more likely to act with compassion themselves: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 1999. I did not realize that I worked with so many caring, giving, wonderful people. I was flooded with hugs, prayers, gifts, and tons of support throughout my various surgeries and chemotherapy. I was so overwhelmed when food was delivered to my house to feed my family of six by this group of very caring people. I have never felt so loved. This experience has given me a deeper commitment to my coworkers .... I find myself contributing to all other calls for sharing and giving. In addition, compassion improves peoples' emotional attunement or their sense of being able to gauge the emotional state of another person. This is one of the reasons that compassion has become a behavior and value the medical profession is trying to foster (Brody, 1992; Cassell, 2002; von Dietze and Orb, 2000). For example, Patricia Benner and her colleagues have shown through their study of expert nurses the importance of emotional attunement, or sensing and adapting one's emotional awareness to the emotional state of another, as central to the provision of quality care (Benner, Tanner, and Chesla, 1996). In a study of compassion at work in university contexts, we found that people did sense changes in the degree to which other people attuned to one another as a result of experiencing compassion. One study participant explained that her friend Jenny had become more attuned to her through episodes of compasswn: Like the times when Jenny asks me if I'm okay, I know that someone cares about me .... There's no rhyme or reason for when she asks me, but when she asks me I need to be asked. She knows that somehow.... We feel the life of each other ... and it means so much to me and I know she knows that. [Frost, Dutton, Worline, and Wilson, 2000, p. 33] Compassion may enhance emotional attunement by improving listening skills or other forms of interpersonal connecting. For example, in one study of how peer supporters with multiple sclerosis provided care and support to people with the same disease, a significant shift in listening skills resulted from this form of compassion. As one person put it: There is a quietness when I'm talking to someone, and I'm listening to them; I have to make an effort not to try to top them. It's gotten
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easier. And I can listen, and I become quite interested in what he's talking about. That's a change. There's quietness in the soul because of it. [Schwartz and Sendor, 1999, p. 1572] The mode of connecting in compassion is one of being other-focused, resulting in a fine-tuning of one's receptors to the changed emotional and cognitive states of another person. Compassion also develops and strengthens enabling skills. By enabling skills we mean the set of behaviors of one person that allow others to be more successful at what they are doing (Dutton, 2003). People learn through the expression of compassion that small acts of caring enable another person to carry on in the face of his or her pain or grief. Thus, compassion opens the door to responding with one's presence, one's attention, one's touch-simple moves that communicate a "being with" the other person. This type of awareness expands people's repertories of how they can enable others-often moving people from thinking that they have to enable with grand gestures (as implied, for example, by extensive mentoring programs or buddy systems) to the realization that small expressions of their own humanity can be important enabling moves. This expansion of response repertories echoes what Miller and Stiver (1997) argue happens when people act in mutuality with one another. Here compassion in organizations cultivates skills that allow people to focus on and attend to others. When people are overly self-focused, they often exhibit a decrease in prosocial behavior (Gibbons and Wicklund, 1982). Instances of compassion, however, create conditions in which the condition of others becomes more salient and people are able to suspend their own self-interest and put the needs of others ahead of their own. Compassion thus cultivates skills that lead to collectivist behavior, where the well-being of the group takes precedence over personal interests, and this leads to increased levels of cooperation (Wagner, 1995).
Building OCC Through Individual Acts of Compassion
In the preceding sections we identified three sets of ingredients that are foundations for building an organization's collective capability for cooperation. The goal of this section is to provide a theoretical sketch of
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how interpersonal acts of compassion among organizational members, through the generation of essential resources, values and beliefs, and skills, contribute to the cooperative capability of the whole organization. To this point we have shown that interpersonal acts of compassion generate relational resources, shared values and beliefs, and critical interpersonal skills, all of which increase individuals' capabilities for cooperation. Now we develop a framework for understanding how such acts among individuals build and contribute to a system-level capability for cooperation, and how this capability in turn influences the actual doing of cooperation among individual organizational members. Interpersonal acts of compassion among individuals can develop into a system-level capability for cooperation as members of the organization develop a shared awareness of the acts. The generation of resources, the promotion and reinforcement of values and beliefs, and the cultivation of critical skills occur when organizational members become increasingly aware of compassionate acts, just as they do when members witness these acts directly. One way that awareness can spread throughout an organization is through informal storytelling. When acts of compassion occur within an organization, members, particularly those directly involved and those who witness the acts, may share the story of what happened with their coworkers during informal interactions and conversations. As organizational members communicate with one another and spread the word about compassionate acts, they move toward a shared understanding of the events as well as of the meaning and significance of the events. In seeing that others in the organization are responded to with compassion, those who hear stories of compassion often develop a sense that they too, as fellow organizational members, would be taken care of in a difficult time. As a result, the trust, the deepened sense of connection to others, and the positive emotions that compassionate acts generate will be able to spread. The sharing of stories is also how organizational members come to develop an idea of "how things work around here," and this increases the likelihood that the values and beliefs reflected in the acts will come to be shared by those who hear and tell the stories. Telling stories of compassionate acts is also instructive in that it teaches others about how to be compassionate and act compassionately. In this way, stories also help to cultivate the critical skills.
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Storytelling can also occur in organizations via more formal channels. For instance, MHS used to distribute a monthly newsletter called Caring Times to the hospital's entire staff. This newsletter was composed of stories about hospital employees engaging in caring and compassionate acts. Practices such as this serve two important functions. First, they encourage hospital employees to look for instances of compassion and tell stories about what they see. Second, they legitimize the stories and spread them throughout the organization in a way that articulates not only what happened but also the storyteller's experience of what happened. Thus the sharing and propagation of these stories communicates the relational resources, values, beliefs, and skills to others throughout the organization. By making this type of storytelling an institutionalized practice, organizations can increase the likelihood that individual members will regard these important products as being characteristic of the organization as a whole. For instance, to the extent that any one story reflects the values of mutual respect and dignity, it is likely that people will develop a sense that such values are endorsed and shared by the organization as a whole rather than see them as the exclusive values of the storyteller. It is important, however, for organizations to use caution when attempting to formalize or institutionalize compassion. If an organization's rhetoric about the value of compassion is not consistent with the way the organization does business, formal mechanisms for spreading the word about compassion may come across as insincere and manipulative, thus undermining their intended effects. Organizational leaders can play important roles in increasing awareness of compassionate acts throughout their organizations by acknowledging the acts of others and by modeling compassion in their own actions (Boyatzis, Smith, and Tresser, 2003; Dutton and others, 2002). Being that leaders typically are highly public figures in their organizations, these practices serve to spread the word about compassion in ways that are analogous to formal storytelling. Also, to the extent that leaders embody the organizational whole, these practices endorse and legitimize compassionate action on behalf of the organization (Frost, 2003). Leadership practices and formal and informal storytelling help to spread the relational resources, values and beliefs, and critical skills that compassionate acts generate throughout a social system, thus building the system's collective capability for cooperation. To the extent that
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such a capability is present in an organization, individual members will be able to act more cooperatively (the load factor) and to do so more effectively (the competence factor). The relational resources serve as the basic raw materials on which individuals can draw in their daily actions so that they will act in ways that reflect a heightened sense of trust, a deepened sense of connection with others, and positive feelings of gratitude and pride. Thus individuals will be well-equipped to cooperate. Additionally, when individuals collectively value dignity, respect, and the common good, and when they believe in interdependence, they will be more likely to take a cooperative approach to their work. These shared values and beliefs will also improve people's cooperative competence because they will help people align their actions with those of others in the organization. Finally, the critical skills that compassionate acts generate serve as means for acting cooperatively, thus improving people's cooperative competence. The Importance of Bridging Compassion and OCC
This chapter has developed our understanding of how daily expressions of compassion among members of work organizations build and enable an organization's capability for cooperation as a whole through three mechanisms. Compassion among members of organizations generates renewable resources, strengthens values and beliefs, and cultivates skills. In describing how the seemingly trivial actions and expressions of individuals can have big, systemwide effects, this theoretical framework bridges microlevel processes and system-level properties. By looking at organizations through a lens of compassion, we can see how seemingly small interpersonal actions can have big, systemwide effects. First, the expression of compassion is a relational process that creates renewable resources of trust, quality connections, and positive emotions. Second, acts of compassion express and reaffirm the shared values of dignity, mutual respect, the common good, and interdependence by making the values visible and actionable to members throughout an organization. Finally, acts of compassion, as interpersonal exercises of noticing, feeling, and responding to others' emotional states, strengthen members' compassion skills and cultivate their ability to attune emotionally to and enable one another. Through each of these three mecha-
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nisms, interpersonal acts of compassion build a system's capability for cooperation. In closing, we return to the Dalai Lama (2007): A mind committed to compassion is like an overflowing reservoir-a constant source of energy, determination and kindness. This mind is like a seed; when cultivated, it gives rise to many other good qualities, such as forgiveness, tolerance, inner strength and the confidence to overcome fear and insecurity ... we should not limit our expressions of love and compassion to our family and friends. Nor is compassion only the responsibility of clergy, health care, and social workers. It is the necessary business of every part of the human community.
Note
1. The majority of our examples come from a survey of the employees of a Midwestern health system (referred to as Midwestern Health System) and from a study of academic staff and faculty.
References
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Dutton, J. E. 2003. Energize Your Workplace: How to Build and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Dutton, J. E., P. J. Frost, M. C. Worline, J. M. Lilius, and J. M. Kanov. 2002. "Leading in Times of Trauma." Harvard Business Review, 80: 54-61. Dutton, J. E., and E. Heaphy. 2003. "The Power of High Quality Connections at Work." InK. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 263-278. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Dutton, ]. E., M. Worline, P. Frost, and J. Lilius. 2006. "Explaining Compassion Organizing." Administrative Science Quarterly, 51: 59-96. Eisler, R. 2003. The Power of Partnership. Novata, CA: New World Library. Emmons, R. A. 2003. "Acts of Gratitude in Organizations." InK. S. Cameron, ]. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 81-93. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Feldman, M. 2004. "Resources in Emerging Structures and Processes of Change." Organization Science, 15: 295-309. Fredrickson, B. L. 1998. "What Good Are Positive Emotions?" Review of General Psychology, 2: 300-319. Fredrickson, B. L. 2000. "Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being." Prevention and Treatment, 3. Available at http:// journals.apa.org/prevention. Fredrickson, B. L. 2003. "Positive Emotions and Upward Spirals in Organizations." InK. Cameron, J. Dutton, and R. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 163-175. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Frost, P. J. 2003. Toxic Emotions at Work: How Compassionate Managers Handle Pain and Conflict. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Frost, P. ]., ]. E. Dutton, S. Maitlis, J. M. Lilius, J. M. Kanov, and M. C. Worline. 2006. "Seeing Organizations Differently: Three Lenses on Compassion." InS. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence, and W. Nord (eds.), Handbook of Organization Studies, 843-866. London: Sage. Frost, P. ]., J. E. Dutton, M. C. Worline, and A. Wilson. 2000. "Narratives of Compassion in Organizations." InS. Fineman (ed.), Emotions in Organizations, 25-45. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Frost, P., and S. Robinson. 1999. "The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero and Casualty. Harvard Business Review, 77(July-August): 96-104. Gibbons, F. X., and R. A. Wicklund. 1982. "Self-Focused Attention and Helping Behavior. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 43: 462-474. Gittell, J. H. 2003. "A Theory of Relational Coordination." InK. Cameron, J. Dutton, and R. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 279-295. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Glaser, A. 2005. A Call to Compassion. Berwick, Maine: Nicolas-Hays.
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Gray, B. 1989. Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Gray, B. 2007. "Ego and Identity as Barriers to Transformative Cooperation: Lessons from Feminism and Buddhism." InS. K. Piderit, R. E. Fry, and D. L. Cooperrider (eds.), Handbook ofTransformative Cooperation, 127150. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haidt, J. 2003. "Elevation and the Positive Psychology of Morality." In C. Keyes and J. Haidt (eds.), Flourishing: The Positive Person and the Good Life, 275-289. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Harman, W. W., and John Horman. 1990. Creative Work: The Constructive Role of Business in Transforming Society. Indianapolis, IN: Knowledge Systems. Isen, A. M. 1987. "Positive Affect, Cognitive Processes and Social Behavior." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 20: 203-253. Kahn, W. A. 1993. "Caring for the Caregivers: Patterns of Organizational Caregiving." Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 539-563. Kanov, ]. M., S. Maitlis, M. C. Worline, J. E. Dutton, P. ]. Frost, and]. M. Lilius. 2004. "Compassion in Organizational Life." American Behavioral Scientist, 47: 808-827. Kopelman, S., M.]. Weber, and D. M. Messick. 2002. "Factors Influencing Cooperation in Commons Dilemmas: A Review of Experimental Psychological Research." In E. Ostrom, T. Dietz, N. Dolsak, P.C. Stern, S. Stonich, and E. U. Weber (eds.), The Drama of the Commons, 113-155. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Kornfield]. 1993. A Path with Heart. New York: Bantam Books. Latane, B., K. Williams, and S. Harkins. 1979. "Many Hands Make Light the Work: The Causes and Consequences of Social Loafing." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37: 822-832. Lilius,]. M., M. C. Worline, S. Maitlis, J. M. Kanov.]. E. Dutton, and P. ]. Frost. 2007. "The Contours and Consequences of Compassion at Work." Working paper, Queen's University. McAllister, D.]. 1995. "Affect- and Cognition-Based Trust as Foundations for Interpersonal Cooperation in Organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 38: 24-59. McGill, A. R. 2007. "Unyielding Integrity: The Key to Crafting Next Generational Transformative Partnerships." InS. K. Piderit, R. E. Fry, and D. L. Cooper rider (eds.), Handbook of Transformative Cooperation, 290-332. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miller,]. B., and I. Stiver. 1997. The Healing Connection. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Nussbaum, M. C. 1996. "Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion." Social Philosophy and Policy, 13: 27-58. Porter, L. W., E. E. Lawler, and J. R. Hackman. 1975. Behavior in Organizations. New York: McGraw-Hill. Reich, W. T. 1989. "Speaking of Suffering: A Moral Account of Compassion." Soundings, 72: 83-108. Schwartz, C. E., and M. Sendor. 1999. "Helping Others Help Oneself: Response Shift Effects in Peer Support. Social Science & Medicine, 48: 1563-1575. Sekerka, L., and B. Fredrickson. 2007. "Creating Transformative Cooperation Through Positive Emotions." InS. K. Piderit, R. E. Fry, and D. L Cooperrider (eds.), Handbook of Transformative Cooperation: New Designs and Dynamics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Settoon, R. P., and K. W. Mossholder. 2002. "Relationship Quality and Relationship Context as Antecedents of Person- and Task-Focused Interpersonal Citizenship Behavior." Journal of Applied Psychology, 87: 255-267. Smith, K. G., S.]. Carroll, and S.]. Ashford. 1995. "Intra- and Interorganizational Cooperation: Toward a Research Agenda." Academy of Management Journal, 38: 7-23. von Dietze, E., and A. Orb. 2000. "Compassionate Care: A Moral Dimension of Nursing." Nursing Inquiry, 7: 166-174. Wagner, J. A., Ill. 1995. "Studies of Individualism-Collectivism: Effects on Cooperation in Groups." Academy of Management Journal, 38: 152-172. Wondolleck, ]. M, and S. L. Yaffee. 2000. Making Collaboration Work: Lessons from Innovation in Natural Resource Management. Washington, DC: Island Press. Wuthnow, R. 1991. Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
6
Ego and Identity as Barriers to Transformative Cooperation Lessons from Feminism and Buddhism BARBARA GRAY
If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. -Kenneth Burke (1969) If I am not I, who will I be? -Henry David Thoreau, Walden To study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be awakened by all things; to be enlightened by all things is to realize no-barrier between self and others. --Eihei Dogen, Shobogenzo
"No striving." These words stung me and were followed by an onslaught of tears, a tremendous release, as if floodgates had been opened. I experienced something breaking loose from its moorings, a fundamental letting go, a purging, a cleansing. But a letting go of what? What had accumulated to the point of rupture? What had created such a mounting pressure that it begged for escape? What had been released from the prison within me? The self-interrogation that following this catharsis was as intense as the original experience. The catharsis occurred on a sunny October morning almost six years ago as I listened to Reverend Shokaku The author thanks Susan Squier for her initial encouragement as well as for her comments on early drafts of this chapter. She also thanks Dai En Bennage, Gregg Eiden, Ron Fry, and Mark Kriger for their helpful comments, and the Sangha at Mt. Equity Zendo for their support and teachings.
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Okumura deliver his Dharma talk during a weeklong sesshin (Zen Buddhist retreat). "What does he mean, no striving?" I asked myself. I couldn't imagine a state devoid of pursuit or effort. And yet, simultaneously, on hearing those words I felt a great sense of relief as I entertained the possibility of such relinquishment. The thought of dispensing with achieving, and substituting in its place an overwhelming sense of sufficiency with what is, was both incomprehensible and immensely tantalizing. As I continued to ponder the notion of no striving, I came to a profound realization. No striving seems to be anathema to my professional self and to life in academe as I know it. For more than twenty-five years I have resided in a milieu premised on self-achievement, productivity, and accomplishment, where performance is externally motivatedmetered by the frequency with which my name appears in print (but only in particular publication outlets for particular audiences) and by the approval of those I seek to enlighten in the classroom, and periodically by a trial of my peers who brand me "adequate" (or not) to continue these pursuits-thereby "blessing" the striving and encouraging its reproduction. Furthermore, this "blessing" or anointing must be conducted judiciously lest others subsequently conclude that the judges themselves had erred in their conclusion about me and, consequently, in their very capacity to perform the judicial role. Hearing the words no striving momentarily called these last twentyfive years into question in a way I could not ignore. More importantly, it incited an ongoing query within me: Exactly who might I be if I could actually unburden myself of this incessant need to achieve? My search for some answers to this query over the last three years has been embedded in a deepening Zen Buddhist practice. I am continuing to seek answers to this question with the help of many "teachers." In this chapter I explore some of the partial answers that are emerging for me, particularly those that help me understand the meaning of transformative cooperation. The core of my argument is that a necessary component of transformative cooperation is compassion and that such transformation cannot transpire without an essential "loss of self." My exploration of the notions of self (and identity) and loss of self is informed by the interplay among three bodies of work: (1) social psychological articulation of self
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as shaped by identity group membership; (2) poststructuralist, feminist analyses that problematize socially constructed notions of self and expose the ironic consequences of identity politics designed to emancipate the selves of social disadvantage; and (3) Buddhist teachings and practice that eschew the very notion of the self. After establishing the fundamental premises of each of these approaches to self, I speculate on the implications of each for the construction of transformative cooperation. In this chapter I begin to articulate what loss of self implies, both personally and organizationally, and what is involved in developing a "practice of selfless compassion." Psychological and Sociological Approaches to Self and Identity
Psychologists have long wrestled with conceptions of the self and of individual and social identity. According to Burke (1969, p. 21), identity is "uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unity having its own particular structure." From Freud's early identification of the individual ego to more recent conceptualizations of social identity groups (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), the notion of a distinctive "self" has been central to Western psychological thought. While I cannot provide an adequate review of all of these approaches here, I will highlight a few that have left their footprint on the field of organizational behavior (see Gecas, 1982, for an extensive review). For Freud and others in the psychoanalytic tradition, identity construction begins early in childhood with the struggles of the ego to curtail the id from pursuing its sexual and aggressive tendencies. This regulatory function of the ego forms the bedrock of the psychotherapeutic approach to the self. More recent psychotherapeutic practice is designed to identify and relieve individuals of the pain they experience from narcissistic cravings and neuroses acquired during childhood. According to Epstein (1995, p. 6), psychotherapy replaces a "restless and insecure self" with a sense of self-satisfaction and freedom from cravings. Hence the aim of psychotherapy is to substitute a "satisfying feeling of self" for individual suffering. According to the symbolic interactionists, identity construction is not only shaped by early childhood experiences (and is not necessarily repressive) but also undergoes continual elaboration and revision as we
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interact with others. Not only are different aspects of the "self" presented in different interactions, but we also revise ourselves through a reflexive process of comparing others' conceptions of who we are with our own (Mead, 1934). By adopting the same conceptions as generalized others, we come to develop a complete self and experience unity with a community of others. Cooley (1902, p. 195) argues that selfishness occurs when individuals assert themselves in a position different from someone else's; nonetheless, he invokes Thoreau ("If I am not I, who will I be?") in arguing that every productive mind must have intense self-feeling. Implicit in this stream of work is an inherent tension between acting for oneself and acting in concert with the views of others. Thus maintenance of the self is a continually reflexive process that oscillates between selfishness and unity-both of which are necessary. More recent conceptualizations of identity cast identity formation in more structural terms. One's identity derives from and is enhanced by membership in distinct social groupings. This approach focuses on individuals' social rather than individual identities, emphasizing internal and external identification with a particular group as a central component of identity construction. "Individuals define themselves and are defined by others as members of a group" (Tajfel and Turner, 1986, p. 15). Three premises of this conceptualization of identity are central to this inquiry. First, identification processes involve relationships and comparisons between groups. "They define the individual as similar to or different from, as 'better' or 'worse' than, members of other groups" (Burke, 1969; Tajfel and Turner, p. 16). Second, through social comparison of their own group with other groups, individuals seek to derive positive self-esteem and groups attempt to gain or maintain high status relative to other groups. Prestige is garnered through obtaining positively discrepant comparisons between one's in-group and socially relevant out-groups (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Third, because group members strive to enhance their own status relative to members of other groups through intergroup differentiation, identification processes are essentially competitive in nature and give rise to intergroup conflict (Tajfel and Turner, 1986; Rothman, 1997). Initial experiments by Tajfel and Turner revealed that minimal identification with an in-group (such as simply labeling one group as red and another as green) was sufficient to produce in-group versus out-
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group bias (compare Tajfel and Turner, 1986). While these minimal manipulations generated more favorable treatment of in-group than of out-group members, even stronger within-group identification processes (and more adversarial reactions toward out-group members) occur when consciousness-raising processes are employed to mobilize disadvantaged groups (Benford and Snow, 2000) or when in-group members experience threats to their group's identity (Rothman, 1997; Elsbach and Kramer, 1996). Under those circumstances, without intervention or contextual changes, divisions and distinctions deepen and become institutionalized over time, and the ensuing conflicts become particularly resistant to resolution (Rothman, 1997; Gray, 2003). Conflicts of this sort (and their underlying in-group versus out-group distinctions) lie at the heart of identity-group politics. Social movement theorists have written extensively about the central role of identity construction in mobilization processes. Social movement leaders highlight members' victimization at the hands of other groups (Gamson, 1995) and offer an alternative conceptualization that justifies and motivates social movement action (Benford & Snow, 2000). "Identity construction processes are thus central to the translation of structural inequality into subjective discontent" (Buechler, 2000, p. 190). To counter the power discrepancy, individuals must reject the current circumstances, estrange themselves from the discourse that formed their subjectivity (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), give up their previous identity, and embrace a new identity as part of the emancipatory process. Freire (1971) refers to this process as "conscienticization." One could argue that it is possible to learn much about transformative cooperation by studying the processes by which group identification is constructed within in-groups and applying this to transforming relations between in-groups and out-groups. Because identification enables in-group members to experience solidarity and consubstantiality with one another and creates motivation for cooperative actions, efforts to decipher areas of common identification or to establish more inclusive identification processes (that encompass fundamental identifications the disputants may share) have been attempted to reduce hostility and incite cooperation (Kelman, 1999). These efforts are described more fully later in the discussion of transformative cooperation. Others, however, have pointed to the fundamental ironies of
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employing the concept of identification at all to discuss cooperation or emancipation. One view of the ultimate ironic consequence of in-group cooperation has been masterfully articulated by Burke (1969, p. 22): Because to begin with "identification" is, by the same token ... to confront the implications of division. And so, in the end, men are brought to that most tragically ironic of all divisions, or conflicts, wherein millions of cooperative acts go into the preparation for one single destructive act. We refer to that ultimate disease of cooperation: war.
Thus reliance on an understanding of cooperation founded on "identification" processes is fundamentally flawed because of the implied divisions that go hand in hand with identification processes. Interestingly, this perspective argued by Burke finds its echo in the work of some recent feminist scholars. I turn to this topic in the next section. Feminist, Postmodernist Views on Self and Identity Before specifically presenting a feminist critique of identity politics, I briefly review feminist views on the notion of self. Poststructuralist feminists take issue with the concept of an objective self because it denies the fact that any description of self is always situated in space and time. Consequently, the self is not constructed independently of the discursive practices and power distribution unique to that specific location in history (Haraway, 1991). Instead, selves are normalized and identity is constructed "by comparing, differentiating, hierarchizing, homogenizing and excluding" (Collinson, 2003, p. 528). Any notion of self is therefore only a temporary construction crafted to fit the specific time and circumstances. Any vision of self we or others construct cannot be grasped without understanding that it is mediated by the historical locale of our body and has no enduring character (that is, cannot be transposed to other circumstances). Haraway (1991) argues instead for situated knowledge that contests objective, scientific knowledge precisely because the latter is disembodied and disassociated from (male, powerful, often military) genres in which it is constructed. From this feminist perspective, the "selves" who are asserting what is objective are hidden from view. Situated knowledge would take these "selves" into account and expose their location as one of privilege and hegemony, in
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which the denial of self (via claims to objectivity) serves to advance the very interests that are denied. A related challenge to identity and to identity politics is posed by Wendy Brown in States of Injury (1998). Also arguing from a postmodern tradition, Brown explores the ironic consequences of identity and, in particular, of identity-based politics. She perspicaciously tackles a fundamental problem rooted in the very concept of identity politics. As noted earlier, affiliation with an identity group affords the identifier with a critical sense of selfhood, self-esteem, and well-being. One's self esteem derives both from belonging to a specific group and from being distinct from (and ideally, superior to) certain other groups. To define oneself as belonging to a body of others overcomes the fundamental problem of anomie and its attendant consequences of despair, paralysis, or even suicide (Slater, 1970; Collinson, 2003). As I have intimated, not only does involvement in identity politics reportedly enhance an individuals' self-esteem, but a more important consequence (at least for sociologists and political scientists and community organizers) is the liberating potential that accrues from joining ranks to fight off an oppressor. Social movement theorists, for example, argue that through collective identification as an injured or victimized group, the generation of a concomitant plan of action to correct the wrongs, and collective action toward reforms, a disadvantaged group participates in its own liberation. Paulo Freire (1971, p. 52) describes the liberation process in this way: "At all stages of their liberation, the oppressed must see themselves as men [sic] engaged in the ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human." Mobilization processes not only help to construct individual identities but also frame a group's sense of entitlement-that is, their formulation of how they deserve to be treated and the level of respect they should garner (Winslade and Monk, 2000). Thus, from a liberal perspective, identity group formation and action not only help to enlarge personal identities and liberate them from the plight of being powerless, but they serve to advance entitlements at a group level as well. Critics of social identity theory and attendant identity politics point to the corrosive effects that identity constructions, particularly constructions of "achieved selves," can have on one's sense of prosperity. Inherent in these formulations of self is the problem of status anxiety (Berger
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and Luckman, 1966)-a fundamental sense of insecurity that causes us continually to question our place and undermines a sense of well-being. To overcome this conflict, we adopt and become attached to a particular conception of self, one that places us in either a dominant or a subordinate role with respect to others (Knights and Wilmot, 1989). Brown (1998) also questions the liberal agenda and the validity of the emancipatory claims of identity politics, arguing that the identity process itself is problematic. Because the concept of identity contains or requires its opposite to exist-in order to define (and distinguish) the self-and because it strives for the very ideal against which it rebels, it consequently unwittingly upholds and idealizes that which it is trying to overcome-namely, hegemonic power. According to Brown (1998, p. 65), "Political identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, in so far as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it, for their continuing existence as identities." Brown argues that it is precisely this reflection of a group's identity in the mirror of the ideal out-group that keeps the group's members from being able to realize the differentiated identity for which they are striving. Embracing one's own identity cannot be done without implicating the other. The consequences of this trap, according to Brown, include what Nietzsche has termed ressentiment. Ressentiment is the suffering associated with the failure to achieve independence from a discourse from which it is assumed one can extricate oneself (Brown, 1998, p. 67). To avenge the failure and ameliorate the pain, the sufferer must either externalize the blame or implicate him- or herself, thereby doubling the pain. In either case, identity participates in its own subjection. But in its attempt to displace its suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection. This investment lies not only in its discovery of a site of blame for its hurt will, not only in its acquisition of recognition through its history of subjection (a recognition predicated on injury, now righteously revalued), but also in the satisfactions of revenge, which ceaselessly reenact even as they redistribute the injuries of marginalization and subordination in a liberal discursive order that alternatively denies the very possibility of these things and blames those who experience them for their own condition. Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverse without subverting this blaming structure. [Brown, 1998, p. 70]
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There is no escape, in Brown's view, from the double bind imposed by the pursuit of identity politics. The inability of self-identity and identity politics to offer a promising source of vision or action has also been argued by Donna Haraway. In addition to repudiating identity as a source of knowledge because it too is blind to itself, Haraway (1991) offers an alternative to self or identity group knowledge that she describes as "partial, locatable, critical knowledge" (p. 191). 1 She refers to this type of knowledge as "a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing" (pp. 191-2). Three components of this conceptualization are especially pertinent to our discussion of transformative cooperation. The first is Haraway's reference to objectivity as a practice, which generally connotes something that must be repeated over and over again in order to develop proficiency. Second is the notion of passionate construction that Haraway describes as seeking "perspective from those points of view that can never be known in advance" in order to access "knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination" (p. 192). The third is the hope for transformation that she linked to maintaining a partial self. "The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original: It is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another" (p. 193). This vision of self offers a nice segue into exploring Buddhist conceptions of selflessness, which we take up next. Then we will return to each of Haraway's three points of critical knowledge and show their relationship to transformative cooperation. Buddhist Conceptions of Self and Selflessness
A useful point of departure for contrasting psychological notions of self with conceptions of the self in Buddhist philosophy can be found in Mark Epstein's Thoughts without a Thinker (1995). Epstein makes several arguments that are pertinent to our discussion here. First, he notes that psychotherapy has evolved from its early mission of dealing with conflicts over sexual and aggressive strivings to its more recent purpose-explaining patients' troubles in terms of their discomfort
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with themselves. Helping patients to overcome or reduce their selfdeprecation is a goal of successful therapy. Epstein notes a similar premise in Buddhist thought-that is, the elimination of dukkha, or suffering, which arises from self-imposed, self-focused, and self-limiting thoughts. Epstein explains: Buddhist psychology, after all, takes this core sense of identity confusion as its starting point and further claims that all the unusual efforts to achieve solidarity, certainty or security are ultimately doomed. It not only describes the struggles to find a "true self" in terms that have impressed Western psychologists for decades ... , but also offers a method of analytic inquiry unavailable in the Western tradition. [p. 6]
For Buddhists, the ego or self and its attendant desires are the fundamental causes of human suffering. Buddhism teaches that these desires are insatiable, referring to them as the "hungry ghosts" (Dogen, 1975). Attempts to satisfy the ego's desires can lead only to futility, pain, and emptiness. In place of these, the Buddha taught selflessness-no selfwhich is not the denial of one's being but the absence of distinctions between ourselves and everyone else. There are no boundaries between sentient beings. According to Epstein (1995), "the participant dissolves into the experience of pleasure, merging with the beloved and temporarily eradicating the ego boundaries ... a whole new self is created and the self temporarily dissolves" (p. 31). It is unfortunate that Epstein suggests that "a whole new self is created" because this language implies a transformation to another self when in fact a more accurate description is dissolution of the notion of a self. For the Buddhist, the way to eliminate suffering is known as the Middle Path because the practitioner navigates between two extremesself-indulgence and self-mortification (Epstein, 1995, p. 91). Enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition lies in the realization that the self is only a construction of the mind and thus in reality does not exist. Abandoning this construction of self leaves the mind empty because without the self there is nothing with which to cling and consequently no suffering. Let me try to explain this a bit further. Clinging refers to holding onto an idea in our mind or to a way of thinking even if it brings us grief. The Buddha taught that we are the source of our own suffering because we create in our minds a separate self that is always comparing itself toothers. For me those comparisons might sound like, "She is lucky to have
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brothers and sisters while I am an only child," "He is more facile on his feet than 1," or "If only I had gone to an Ivy League school." We academics are also prone to what a Penn State colleague, Tony D'Augelli, once labeled "vita envy." These kinds of comparisons draw a boundary between ourselves and others. Moreover, if we are honest with ourselves, we find they inevitably leave us feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. The more we can unhinge from this comparing mind and see others as similar to rather than distinct from ourselves, the more we approach selflessness and the less suffering we foist upon ourselves. In Buddhism, this kind of detachment is "true self," as Dogen Zenji paradoxically outlined in his masterwork, the Shobogenzo, cited at the beginning of this chapter: To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to realize no-barrier between self and others. Lest I fall into the same trap for which I earlier criticized Epstein (that is, describing the transformation from the vantage point of the self), we need to examine the Buddhist conceptions of ego and selflessness more deeply. Epstein (1995, p. 94) identifies the critical role for ego in the pursuit of selflessness during meditation: "Thus, meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using ego to observe and tame its own manifestations." But this too is problematic, because it still avers a separate self that participates in its own transformation. Hence, we still need to dig deeper. Another misconstrual of selflessness derives from likening the meditative state to what psychologists refer to as the confluence experience-abandoning oneself to sheer bliss, the oceanic sense of infantile merger with the mother (as in breastfeeding). However, loss of self in Buddhism is neither this supreme bliss nor subjugation to an external higher power from whom one recovers one's lost self. Nor is there a temporal sequence to the Buddhist notion of selflessness-an ego that first exists in order to be abandoned. "Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming nonexistent. Rather, this sort of 'self' is something that never did exist. What is needed is to identify as nonexistent something that always was nonexistent" (Epstein, p. 98).
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An important distinction needs to be made at this juncture, however. As in the earlier feminist critique, the danger of pursuing this approach lies in the potential for reification. For example, to the extent that a meditator focuses on the disavowal of the self, he or she fails to achieve selflessness because the very act of disavowal implies there is a disavower, a "self," and something to disavow-the thoughts and feelings attributed to the self. Critical to this process is the fundamental awareness of the insubstantiality of one's own thoughts and feelings (Epstein, 1995). The difficulty of grasping no self and the insubstantiality of one's own thoughts and feelings is enormous. The Zen practitioner can easily slip into the trap of intentionally trying to disavow one's feelings, and in so doing, acting as if they actually exist. Dogen (1975, p. 1) says, "When people begin to seek the Dharma [outside themselves] they are immediately far removed from its true location." Buddhism seeks to draw us back to our essential nature, which is the actualization of emptiness. For the Soto Zen practitioner, the only pathway to beginning to comprehend "no self" is through the practice of shikantaza, or meditative practice. 2 The role of meditation is paramount to achieving selflessness, for as Ayya Khema (1997, pp. 93-4) puts it, "during meditation, the person we think we are is not available. Space is there, consciousness is there, but although there is an observer, there is no person to be found." Again, quoting Dogen (1975, p. 2), "If you have right practice and return to your origin then you will clearly see that all things have no permanent self." Pema Chodrun (2001) offers us a wonderful metaphor for selflessness, that of a swinging door. She writes, "What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves, that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing; no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door." Selflessness and Compassion It is now time to return to our quest for understanding the path of transformative cooperation and how abandonment of identity politics and the pursuit of selflessness are related to this quest. The fundamental argument from Buddhism is straightforward. Only when we abandon our notion of "self" can we begin to develop compassion. I will also
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argue that compassion is essential to achieving transformative cooperation. Let us look more closely at each of these premises-first, that selflessness is essential to generating compassion. The virtue of compassion is hardly unique to Buddhist thought. A good friend who read an early version of this chapter commented, Compassion has been the essential virtue of Christianity, which banned infanticide, created orphanages, invested the hospital, created a new order (Deacons) to care for widows and orphans, invented welfare, and so on. Usually compassion is talked about in discussions of Agape, which occur in every book of the New Testament. Perhaps the most astounding demand of Jesus Christ is to love one's enemy-compassion to the Nth. 3 Frankly, I have always thought of myself as a fairly compassionate person. For me, growing up Catholic and a child of the 1960s, Christian compassion often translated into a strong social action orientation. Being compassionate manifested itself then (and does so now) as trying to change structures of oppression within society-by supporting education and self-help programs for the disadvantaged; through social protest of gendered, racist, and homophobic practices; and through war. Yet while Jesus' admonitions to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "love thine enemy" have served as mantras for me since adolescence, wrestling with the Buddhist notion of "no-self" has opened a new avenue for compassion within me. Whereas before I believe my efforts were motivated by a sense of loving-kindness and directed toward eradicating greed and hatred and the suffering they inflict on others, compassion involves a different level of awareness. Because of my Zen practice, I can now glimpse my own complicity in creating suffering, beginning with my own. By squarely confronting my own capacity to create suffering (through the construction of a separate self), I begin to see my own and others' suffering in a new light. Tara Brach (2003) refers to this as "radical acceptance"-seeing one's sufferings or the sufferings of others as part of the flow of life. "Accepting them in this way actually enables us to recognize that experience is impersonal and frees us from the trap of identifying ourselves as a deficient and limited self" (p. 41). It becomes more possible to generate compassion for others only if you can first generate it for yourself-by tolerating your own imperfections. Selflessness is critical here.
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Let me illustrate with a story of my own. In my eagerness to be a good Zen student, I volunteered to serve as Ino for our morning chanting. The Ino leads the chanting and must do so with impeccable pronunciation of both English and Japanese words, precise timing of vocal and instrumental sounds, and a deep, resonant voice emanating from the hara (or belly). Despite my fascination with this task, I found the required coordination mind-boggling and the learning curve steep. Yet I had committed to this public role in my practice community (sangha). Contrary to my best intentions, I suffered from extreme performance anxiety, made countless mistakes each time I served as Ino, and berated myself profusely afterward. One time, after several such attempts, I realized I could not remain a separate self riddled with performance anxiety and also be Ino. Being Ino meant I had to be one with the voices of the sangha. Suddenly there was no "self" left to make any mistakes. By comprehending my role as indistinct from and conjunctive with the community, the fallible "I" gave way to and became submerged in the totality of the whole. This relinquishment of the self to whole (or the other) is the foundation of compassion, but it too is only the beginning. To grasp the Buddhist meaning of compassion, it is useful to envision Shakyamuni Buddha's conception of Kannon, the Boddhisatva of Compassion. Kannon is often depicted as a figure with myriad arms. In the Shobogenzo, Dogen (1975, p. 15) explains: In order to clarify this point we must consider why Daihi Bodhisattva 4 is hands and eyes. It can be said that this Bodhisattva is hands and eyes. How does he use his hands and eyes? Kannon's hands and eyes are not in opposition to his other attributes; rather, he uses them freely, as if he is completely hands and eyes. It is easy to see why we say that the entire body of Kannon is hand and eyes-and they are not limited to any ideas of self.... Kannon Bodhisattva is always using his hands to embrace everyone without discrimination.
However, when Dogen refers to discrimination, he does not merely mean being without prejudice (as we currently interpret discrimination). The meaning he intends is more fundamental-without boundaries or distinctions between ourselves and others. Hence, a truly compassionate "self" can see, feel, and understand as if he or she were anyone else, and as if everyone else were not separate from himself or herself. The fun-
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damental elements of compassion are fu, ri, and shin. Fu ri shin means never separated from the heart. Let us explore what these words really mean. Compassion is often described as feeling another's pain. I contend that this definition is fallacious (or at least incomplete) because it implies that we can magnanimously extend ourselves to others when they are needy. But this places us in a superior position because they are needy and we are not. As Chodrun (2001, p. 50) notes. "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals .... Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity." Chodrun's view of compassion is compelling. She argues that compassion poses a greater emotional challenge than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to be vulnerable to our own pain. If we are truly practicing compassion, she says, we can expect to encounter our own fear of pain. "Compassionate practice ... involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us .... Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others" (pp. 49-50). While I have begun to loosen the grip of my fear of performing poorly, other fears are more tenacious, such as my fear of losing my sight or being alone and abandoned. How then can I muster true compassion for blind or homeless people while I cling to these fears? I clearly have more work to do here. And when we find ourselves numb or indifferent toward others, we may need to look deeply at ways in which we have constructed ourselves to wall off our own pain and suffering. Toward Transformative Cooperation The Need for Compassion
Finally, I come to the anchor point of this chapter: that compassion is essential to achieving transformative cooperation. Presumably transformative cooperation implies a fundamental, positive shift in the parties, the nature of their relationship, or the circumstances in which they exist. Circumstances in need of transformative cooperation can include intractable conflicts in which stalemates or outright hostility have prevailed for an extended time (Putnam and Wondolleck, 2003); situations characterized by suffering, hopelessness, and apathy in which
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fundamental human dignity is in jeopardy; or even ordinary, taken-forgranted contexts awaiting new visions. While there are many steps to achieving cooperation in such contexts, I focus here on the role of compassion in fostering transformation of intractable conflicts. Why is compassion necessary for transformation? The fundamental argument is this: When compassion is extended in a relationship, it transcends a barrier and creates an opening where none existed previously. Parties in conflict typically frame the issues and adopt a negotiating stance that precludes discovery of a positive bargaining zone (Lax and Sebenius, 1986; Lewicki, Gray, and Elliott, 2003). Identity-based frames and negative characterizations that threaten opponents' identities only tighten the juggernaut and reduce the potential for resolution (Rothman, 1997; Lewicki, Gray, and Elliott, 2003). However, when their counterparts operate from a stance of compassion (that is, extending a willingness to see and hear the other from the other's perspective and to reveal their own anguish and pain), the conflict shifts. In conflicted relationships, we do not even expect the other to listen to us, let alone extend compassion. Yet when compassion is extended, the receiver typically softens his or her resistant stance and often finds his or her own heart opening in response. For example, workshops in which Arabs and Israelis engaged in deep listening and acknowledgment of each other's struggles for identity preservation fundamentally altered the disputants' animosity toward each other. Members of each group were able to hear and understand the suffering of the other, and this compassionate dialogue increased their ability to envision resolution of the larger conflict (Rothman, 1997; Kelman, 1999). Similar principles are fostered in narrative mediation in which the mediators "listen for the ways that disputants speak themselves into positions (or are allocated such positions by someone else's speaking)" (Winslade and Monk, 2000, p. 46). They then proceed to help the parties realize that they can adopt different conceptions of themselves that keep them from "being positioned in places of limitation or diminishment" (p. 134). In this way the mediators exhibit a kind of Buddhist compassion and put into practice Haraway's (1991) notions of passionate construction and partial selves. Narrative mediators help parties to reframe assumptions "such as those that ascribe deficits to individuals, those that claim that a person can be summed up in any single description ... ," and instead search
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"for possibilities that lie beyond the realistic or the known, always seeking the potential for people to step into neglected knowledges or understandings, and seeking to capitalize on such potentials" (p. 134). In this way, they open space and transform conflicts into agreements. So transformative cooperation means, first and foremost, transformation of the self-relinquishing notions of the self as separate and distinct. This kind of opening makes room for the others' experience to penetrate our own and for an awareness that perceived limitations and suffering are mutable. When both parties can loosen the strictures of their self-conceptions, transformative potential can be unleashed. Second, it means extending compassion to others-to hear and resonate with their pain or sense of loss because you too are open to such pain.
Developing a Provisional "No Self"
For me, navigating between striving and compassion is both a treacherous and joyous journey. But to call it a journey is also misleading because in Buddhism no one is going anywhere. The place to be is here and now with an open heart and no self. The practice is to embody such compassion in the face of other conflicting feelings. These are easy words to say, but how does one begin to really translate the words into practice? A recent paper by Herminia Ibarra (1999) offers some useful insight for me. Examining the process of transitions from professional to senior positions within organizations, Ibarra inquired how these fledgling top managers handled this identity shift. Her answer involved their adoption of provisional selves. I would like to borrow this concept and modify it to provisional adoption of "no self," for it seems that the magnitude of the transformation that Buddhism invites us to embrace can be comprehended only in small doses, in provisional ways, in fits and starts. Developing a "provisional no-self" is consistent with the Soto Zen Buddhist notion of practice. Finding one's true self in Soto Zen occurs through a process of gradual unfolding supported by a persistent meditative practice. At least that is my experience. I find it immensely hard to trust this concept of no self. The fear of loss associated with such relinquishment is palpable and often holds me tightly. Even now I am not always free of performance anxiety when I assume the role of Ino. Yet some aspects
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of practice help to break this tight grip of fear. For example, recently my teacher offered a short mnemonic for times when we experience a strong emotional reaction (such as anger, jealousy, desire, or condescension) toward another person. 5 She suggested saying "just like me" or "everyone." Adopting these phrases has a profound effect-neutralizing the self-other distinctions, helping me to realize I am just as capable as another of behaving in the way they have that provoked my emotional response. The dissolution of my reaction is palpable-although not necessarily immediate. So the path to transformative cooperation for me means harnessing my own compassion-toward myself and toward others. Khema (1997) explains that when judgments and feelings arise that set up barriers between ourselves and others, we need to stop our minds as soon as we recognize that we have attached a label-before we construct the full notion of a differentiated self. She refers to such practice as "guarding the sense-doors": Guarding the sense-doors is one of the most important things we can do, if we want to lead a peaceful, harmonious life, untroubled by wanting what we do not have, or not wanting what we do have. These are the only two causes for dukkha; there are no others. If we watch our sense-contacts and do not go past the labeling, we have a very good chance of being at ease. [p. 18]
Khema stresses the importance of repeated practice, and this means finding and continually reaffirming an alternative to our accustomed practice of conceiving of ourselves as separate beings-setting ourselves apart. "Anything we practice, we become better at, so if we practice discontent, we become highly proficient at being discontented" (p. 23). Developing Compassion Through the Sangha
One very concrete opportunity to practice selflessness lies in the community of practitioners, or the sangha. The term refers to the community that lives in harmony and awareness. We become aware of the sangha whenever we meditate or engage in activities with other practitioners. For Buddhists, this community of practitioners is a place to which we can turn as a source of wisdom, strength, and support. The "Three Refuges" chant highlights the importance of Sangha: "I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma [the teachings]. I take refuge in Sangha
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[the community]." According to Khema (1997, p. 150), "Taking refuge is a way of expressing commitment to the practice, love and devotion to the teaching, and is also a way of finding a mental/emotional shelter, which can result in great happiness." However, sangha is not a one-way street. By relying on sangha we are not only getting support, we are offering refuge to others as well. Thus, the sangha provides a palpable reminder of what it means to relinquish our selves and actually practice selflessness and compassion. We learn this again and again during retreats when many practitioners are living in close proximity and it is critical to be aware of how your own actions intertwine with those of others. Stepping softly so as not to disturb others and paying attention to whatever needs to be done (not just what you have been assigned) are palpable manifestations of sangha. In fact, there are countless ways to practice selflessness in a close community. For example, when someone does something or says something that does not square with your views, selflessness requires really listening to them anyway and taking account of their perspective rather than pushing for your own (egoistic) perspective. An example may drive home this point. Last year our Sangha was preparing to hold a garage sale. I was eagerly engaged in moving this forward and came up with a pricing system that involved using multiple colored dots. I thought the system was such a good idea that I had used it to price all my own items before arriving at the zendo. While working with another person to price other donations, I became annoyed when she seemed flustered by and reluctant to use the colored dots. I explained the system again and persisted to use it to price items. Our teacher too expressed some concern that the dots would be confusing for customers. It took some time, but eventually I could see the confusion, swallowed my pride, and conceded that the dots had to go. We now laugh about my ego-attachment to the dots. This incident underscores the importance of the sangha for its members, a point that Thich Nhat Hanh (1999, p. 164) illustrates with this powerful story: "When a tiger leaves his mountain and goes to the lowlands, he will be caught by humans and killed. When a practitioner leaves her Sangha, she may abandon her practice and die as a practitioner." One way to understand sangha is to consider the notion of "interbeing" that is discussed in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Thich Nhat Hanh
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(1987) explains that "interbeing" has a compound meaning that includes mutuality and being, indicative of the fact that we are not distinct from any other person or aspect of nature. Thus, committing to Sangha means being aware of this connectedness or this seamlessness of all things. Our sangha experienced this seamless quality of selflessness while a handful of us planted ten arbor vitae trees on the zendo property. Holes were dug, trees were set, soil was mixed with nutrients and replaced, and a bucket brigade watered the trees, all within an hour, with no visible leader coordinating the activity. It was as though twenty hands (including those of two young children) were connected to a single body. This imagery brings us back again to the image of the Bodhisattva, Kannon, which Dogen links to compassion for the whole world in this quote from the Shobogenzo: If we study this dialogue closely perhaps we can learn to utilize our own hands and eyes properly-what their function is, how they work, what they experience, etc .... Kannon Bodhisattva is always using his hands to embrace everyone without discrimination .... It is easy to see why we say that the entire body of Kannon is hands and eyes-and they are not limited to any ideas of self, mountains and rivers, sunfaced Buddha and moonfaced Buddha, or that our mind is the Buddha. [p. 65; italics added]
Thus sangha provides a constant source of training in compassion, for each and every moment affords an opportunity to transform our selforiented activities into service for the wider community. Further, the Kannon imagery reminds us that the sangha does not stop at the edge of the zendo; it does not include only other Buddhists. Instead, sangha embraces all sentient beings.
Practicing Selfless Compassion
Developing compassion for others can also be stimulated through individual practice. Several guided meditations have been written with this intent in mind. These meditations stretch the limits of our compassion as they progress from reciting aspirations to awaken self-compassion to awakening compassion for friends to awakening compassion for someone who is difficult or even our enemy to a plea to remove suffering throughout the universe. Another meditation from Tibetan Buddhism is called dzogchen ("the great perfection"), in which the practitioner que-
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ries him- or herself about who is thinking and who is compassionate as various thoughts and emotions arise. A more advanced practice, the Tibetan practice of tonglen, which means taking and sending out, is also designed to cultivate compassion. In this practice, the practitioner tries to envision and embody the suffering of various others by drawing it in with each in-breathe and releasing it with each out-breath. In Soto Zen, daily shikantaza practice also supports the cultivation of selfless compassion. As for my own practice, not labeling the daily practices I undertake as "struggle" is an important step that often feels monumental. But there are those moments (albeit fleeting) in my meditative practice when I am willing to let go of clinging to myself, when I suspend judgment and glimpse a self without borders, a diffuse, unmeasured alignment with all that is. As Burke (1969, p. 25) has observed, "In pure identification [here I read "compassion"] there would be no strife." Instead, the sense of release (and relief) is palpable and joyous.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have suggested that in order to develop transformative cooperation we need to understand the role that the ego plays in limiting our capacities for developing compassion toward others. Using arguments from both feminist theory and Zen Buddhism, I have shown how the ego and its manifestation in various forms of identity dynamics inhibits the development of transformative cooperation. In contrast to identity, I have introduced the notion of selflessness and proposed that through the practice of selflessness we can cultivate compassionan essential component of transformative cooperation. Transformation implies that "something genuinely new has come into being" (Beck, 1993, p. 202). Beck exhorts, however, that "true transformation implies that even the aim of the 'I' that wants to be happy is transformed" (p. 202). Abandoning the pursuit of what we want for ourselves only opens us to the possibility of what we can achieve together. Such transformation also enables us to realize that we are not separate from those with whom we intend to cooperate. As Thich Naht Hanh (1999, p. 168) writes in a version of the Three Refuges, "Taking refuge in the Sangha in myself, I aspire to help all people build fourfold communities and encourage the transformation of all beings."
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Notes
1. Haraway's argument begins from a different place. She is critiquing universal rationality and notions of technoscientific knowledge, which she describes as disembodied, and arguing instead for situated knowledge. Her discussion of the limitations of identity-based knowledge is intended to counter other feminists who claim that knowledge of the subordinated is superior to that of the powerful. See pages 192-3 for this discussion. 2. Soto is one of several Zen traditions-one that stresses meditation or shikantaza. 3. I am indebted to Gregg Eiden for this reflection. 4. Daihi Bodhisattva (Great Compassion Bodhisattva) is another name for Kannon. 5. I practice under the guidance of Rev. Dai En at Mt. Equity Zendo in Pennsdale, Pennsylvania.
References
Alvesson, M., and H. Wilmot. 1992. "On the Idea of Emancipation in Management and Organization Studies." Academy ol Management Review, 17: 432-464. Beck, C. J. 1993. Nothing Special: Living Zen. New York: HarperCollins. Benford, R. D., and Snow, D. A. 2000. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review ol Sociology, 26: 611-639. Berger, P. L., and T. Luckman. 1966. The Social Construction ol Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Available at http://www.sociosite.net/topics/ texts/berger_luckman.php Brach, T. 2003. Radical Acceptance. New York: Bantam. Brown, W. 1998. States ol Injury. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buechler, S. M. 2000. Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Burke, K. 1969. A Rhetoric ol Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chodrun, P. 2001. The Places That Scare You. Boston: Shambala. Cooley, C. H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's. Collinson, D. L. 2003. "Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work." Organization, 10(3): 527-547. Dogen, E. 1975. Shobogenzo, Vol. 1. K. Nishiyama and J. Stevens (trans.). Sendai, Japan: Daihokkaikaku.
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Elsbach, K. D., and Kramer, R. M. 1996. "Members' Responses to Organizational Identity Threat: Encountering and Countering the Business Week Rankings." Administrative Science Quarterly, 41: 442-476. Epstein, M. 1995. Thoughts Without a Thinker. New York: Basic Books. Freire, P. 1971. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder & Herder. Gamson, W. 1995. "Constructing Social Protest." In H. Johnston and B. Klandermans (eds.), Social Movements and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gecas, V. 1982. "The Self-Concept." Annual Review of Sociology, 8: 1-33. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Gray, B. 2003. "Framing of Environmental Disputes." In R. Lewicki, B. Gray, and M. Elliott (eds.), Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts and Cases, 11-34. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hanh, T. N. 1987. Being Peace. Berkeley, CA: Paralax Press. Hanh, T. N. 1999. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. New York: Broadway Books. Haraway, D.]. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Ibarra, H. 1999. "Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation." Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4): 764-791. Kelman, H. 1999. "The Role of Social Identity in Conflict Resolution: Experiences from Israeli-Palestinian Problem-Solving Workshops." Paper presented at the Twelfth Conference of the International Association for Conflict Management in San Sebastian-Donostia, Spain, June 22, 1999. Khema, A. 1997. Who Is My Self? A Guide to Buddhist Mediation. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Knights, D., and H. Wilmot. 1989. "Power and Subjectivity at Work: From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations." Sociology, 23(4): 535-558. Lax, D., and J. Sebenius. 1986. The Manager as Negotiator. New York: Free Press. Lewicki, R., B. Gray, and M. Elliott (eds.). 2003. Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts and Cases. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Putnam, L., and J. Wondolleck. 2003. "Intractability: Definitions, Dimensions, and Distinctions." In R. Lewicki, B. Gray, and M. Elliott (eds.), Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts and Cases, 35-59. Washington, DC: Island Press.
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Rothman, J. 1997. Resolving Identity- Based Conflict. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Slater, P. 1970. The Pursuit of Loneliness. Boston: Beacon Press. Tajfel, H., and Turner, J. C. 1986. "The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior." InS. Worchel and W. G. Austin (eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 7-24. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Winslade, J., and G. Monk. 2000. Narrative Mediation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
7
Creating Transformative Cooperation Through Positive Emotions LESLIE E. SEKERKA and BARBARA L. FREDRICKSON
This chapter describes how positive emotions can be influential in generating transformative cooperation in organizations. With prominent contributions from positive psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), academics and practitioners across scholarly disciplines have turned their attention toward the emotional dimensions of workplace enterprise. Emotions, as an integral part of the human design, are inextricably linked to social interactions. We therefore look at the impact that positive emotions can have on people's daily life experiences in a variety of ways, including how people relate to others and create new relationships. The essence of our argument is that transformative cooperation can be created through the broadening and building capacities of positive emotions as organizations undergo attempts to instill positive change. Our discussion considers how organizations can use Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987), fueled by positive emotions, to evoke positive change. To do so we use research that supports the broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2000a)-actions that lead to the creation of new designs in transformative cooperation-to help explain the process. Defining Our Starting Point
As people engage in organizational change, they may observe new designs or forms of organizing. We address a rather distinctive form
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of transformation, one that is seemingly different from those set forth in existing typologies (for example, Bartunek and Mock, 1987; Golembiewski, 1976). This new form, referred to herein as transformative cooperation, emerges when efforts to infuse organizational rejuvenation are employed. Transformative cooperation appears to be unique in that it is a collaborative process marked by the continuous flow of growth and the ongoing development of new and dynamic organizational forms. Descriptions of organizational transformation have previously been referenced as second-order, radical, or gamma change (for example, Golembiewski, Billingsely, and Yeager, 1979), and in general, transformation is portrayed as a fundamental shift in how people view, understand, interpret, or make sense of their organization and job role. We also consider transformative cooperation as second-order change, which contributes to a shift in how people see their organization and their function within it. But unlike prior descriptions, we see transformative cooperation as ongoing and sustained movement. The dynamic nature of this process is manifest in the establishment of new relationships and social connections that create these new organizational forms, which continue to progress over time. This movement has been observed in organizations as individuals gather and focus on what they value most, directing their attentions toward what gives life to their organization. The progression of this type of collective inquiry is frequently accompanied by positive emotions such as enthusiasm, appreciation, joy, interest, and curiosity, and what emerges from this process is of form of sustained growth and development. As people work together to discover what they value most, they build on their shared strengths to create more strength. The effort promotes valuing and capacity building, which ultimately seem to expand the enterprise. As with the theory of positive organizational change, the technique known as AI is a way to generate the process. This change technology is used to evoke transformative cooperation, and it evolves over the course of several stages. The process commences with the elevation of inquiry, moves to a fusion of strengths, and finally, activates positive energy and the creation of additional capacity within the organization (Cooperrider and Sekerka, 2003). Each stage is triggered by increased inquiry into what is most valued and seems to result in an expansion of relationships. For us to understand how this pro-
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cess works and how positive emotions may be the influential drivers, we begin with an explication of our theme. What does transformative cooperation mean? Transformative Cooperation
To design or create something, individuals must apply their knowledge, skills, and passion to the art of conceptualizing something novel. If we endeavor to create a new organizational form through transformation, events must be generated that signal a major shift from existing processes to alter the nature and function of behaviors. As implied, this activity must be performed in concert with others. Operari, the Latin root word for cooperation, suggests that we must act and work together (Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, 1996). The meaning, however, goes further in that these shared actions establish mutual benefit. Thus cooperation starts with a simple act of working together in relation but results in shared advantages for all involved. Given this framework, we see new designs in transformative cooperation as processes that bring organizational members together to create innovative forms of social interaction that benefit all who participate. With this as our starting point, we now describe how positive emotions influence and contribute to the process, setting forth propositions to illustrate our argument. To show how this process occurs in organizations, we use AI (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987) as a method to create transformational change (Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros, 2003). More specifically, we describe how the positive emotions that can be generated in this type of activity have useful cognitive and social capabilities. Relying on the research that demonstrates the benefits of positive emotions, we argue that their presence helps to engender transformative cooperation in organizations by building relational strength, adding capacity and expansion at both the individual and organizational levels. Benefits of Positive Emotions
Emotions are generally associated with action tendencies (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991; Levenson, 1994). Fredrickson (2000a) describes how positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action
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repertoires, which widen the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind. For example, enjoyment creates the urge to have fun and push the limits; interest, the urge to inquire and probe; gratitude, the urge to help others; and so on. Emotions provide us with inputs and ideas about ways to behave, and also serve as internal guides to suggest possible courses of action. Typically these sets of behavioral options narrow as we create a path toward action. We tend to choose or move to adopt, consciously or unconsciously, specific responses as a result of the emotions we experience. Central to this thesis is that action tendencies are what make emotions evolutionarily adaptive. That is, certain actions have proved effective in the preservation of life-our survival. While negative tendencies and responses have been well researched, the benefits associated with positive emotions have generally received less scholarly attention. When Fredrickson first asked, "What good are positive emotions?" she introduced the broaden-and-build theory (1998, 2000a). Her theory and subsequent research have provided the catalyst for organizational scholars to develop an enhanced or revised understanding of organizational change. Rather than focusing on the influences of negative reactions and how to alter them, researchers began to demonstrate the power behind positive emotions, finding that their adaptive benefits go beyond survival mechanisms. Specifically, positive emotions can broaden peoples' capacity to generate ideas, increase their alternatives for action, and contribute to their overall well-being. Because of these features, positive emotions also have the ability to build enduring personal resources (Fredrickson and Joiner, 2002; Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, and Larkin, 2003). Important for transformative cooperation, research has shown how positive emotions signal both present-moment (Diener, Sandvik, and Pavot, 1991) and long-term optimal functioning (Fredrickson, 1998, 2000a). Emotions have the potential to contribute to daily optimal functioning and, perhaps more important, to support us on an ongoing basis as we work with, interact, and relate to others. Because most of us spend many of our waking hours engaged in work-related activities, the benefits of positive emotions can extend well beyond simply feeling good at any given moment. We know that positive actions often associated with positive emotions are not simply end-states; they can in turn stimulate individual and organizational growth and performance.
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Although the empirical evidence is still limited (Fineman, 1993, 1996), scholars have established a link among positive emotions, work achievement, and high-quality social environments (Staw, Sutton, and Pelled, 1994). Positive emotions help employees obtain favorable outcomes at work in multiple ways, contributing to greater persistence, favorable reactions to others, and helping actions (Haidt, 2000). These features have been associated with greater work achievement and a high-quality social milieu. Such positive emotional climates are also known to contribute to enhanced performance, with studies showing how their presence increases customers and company sales (George, 1998). If positive emotions are the means to achieve organizational performance-related outcomes, we see that their capacity to broaden and build may also be influential in creating transformative cooperation. Evidence from studies examining individual transformation also depict the vital role of positive emotions in the process of change. Researchers describe how affective markers signal the operation of healing and transformational processes (Fosha, 2004). Given that positive emotions are associated with change, well-being, and both organizational and individual effectiveness, we consider how participation in AI draws on positive emotions as favorable influencers to instill transformative cooperation. Organizational Transformation
Looking at emotions in organizations, Dehler and Welsch (1994) describe work itself-simply engaging in one's task-as an emotional experience. Yet management theorists typically neglect the impact of emotions, moods, and feelings in their analyses, with cognitive perspectives dominating much of the social sciences (Tichy and Sherman, 1993)-that is, until recently. In the past decade, the study of emotions has emerged as a legitimate topic of inquiry (Kemper, 1990). A pronounced focus on positive emotions has surfaced, especially with the advent of the positive psychology movement in the late 1990s (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). As Fineman (1993, p. 1) remarked, once we remove the "facade of rationality" from organizational goals, purposes, tasks, and objectives, we can find a "veritable explosion of emotional tones." And as organizational behavior scholars continue to take
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liberties to extend their work beyond the scientific management paradigm, our ability to understand new designs in organizational dynamics expands. Similarly, efforts to impose organizational change that previously relied on scientific management-based programs, such as the use of restructuring as the standard response to competitive pressures, has also continued to evolve. With studies showing that downsizing and reengineering have not improved organizational performance (Dehler and Welsch, 1994), many have continued to press on for deeper levels of change. Consequently, we have learned that structural approaches to changing organizations represent only part of a solution to the complex challenge of transformation. The role that emotions play in the process of transformation may serve as the missing link between rational and nonrational dimensions of human change behavior. We view both of these features as integral components in the process of successfully accepting, implementing, and sustaining transformative cooperation, but we specifically address how emotions energize this activity. We believe that if transformative cooperation is desired, the power to fuel such endeavors resides in the emotional side of the workplace enterprise. Recent research has deepened our understanding of emotions in the workplace, providing clues as to how positive emotions may contribute to new designs in transformative cooperation. We know that positive emotions are related to individuals' ability to establish positive meaning in their work (Wrzesniewski and Dutton, 2001). Moreover, positive emotions can be cultivated and drawn from experiences of competence, achievement, involvement, significance, and social connection (Folkman, 1997; Fredrickson, 2000a; Ryff and Singer, 1998). When individuals help others seek positive meaning in their daily work experiences using AI, emotions such as gratitude, appreciation, and joy emerge (Sekerka and Goosby Smith, 2003). Therefore, one way to instill positive meaning, worth, and value in organizations is through strength-based approaches to transformation. The most prevalent strategies still tend to employ functional and structural solutions. But as suggested, they have come up short, never fully achieving their projections of optimal efficiency or effectiveness (Miles, Snow, and Sharfman, 1993). Given that first-order functional changes are not sufficient for establishing transformational behavioral changes,
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second-order processes are necessary to establish a shift in how the organization and work are perceived, construed, or understood (Bartunek and Moch, 1987). But even when transformation has been achieved, rarely do researchers examine how these initiatives are sustained. What appears to have been omitted from the transformation change equation is the notion of sustainability. How are these processes to create ongoing growth continued? How can a transformation become ongoing, selfdirected, and internally perpetuated so that growth and development are nurtured and can continue after the initial shift occurs? We believe that this sort of sustained transformational movement requires the impacts derived from individual and collective positive affective responses. Empirical research on the use of AI has been limited (Bushe, 1998; Bushe and Kassam, 2005). There is some evidence, however, that engagement in AI, one of the most prevalent strength-based techniques, elevates positive psychophysiological outcomes (Sekerka, 2002; Sekerka and McCraty, 2004). Specifically, as organizational members discover what they mutually value, they begin to work together in new ways, which can help establish renewed meaning in their work. An objective of the process is to help members collaboratively highlight, observe, and define their organization's positive core. To do so, throughout an AI the participants engage in activities within pairs, in small groups, and in full stakeholder forums. This approach is designed to help members collectively identify what they value most from their organizational experiences (Ludema, Whitney, Mohr, and Griffin, 2004). Through a variety of collaborative exercises, participants share positive memories and stories with one another and discuss what they appreciate about their shared work life. As participants focus on these collective strengths, assets, and what is most valued, they cooperatively create new strategies to design their organization's future. Building on the organization's existing positive core, members begin a process of self-directed organizing (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2001). People literally move to align themselves in new ways by forming groups that agree to take on new functions. They rally around their shared strengths, which generates enthusiasm, appreciation, hope, and interest. As a result of this movement, new relationships and new forms of organizational relating emerge. Moreover, this action of working collaboratively, using positive experiences as levers
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for change, supports the creative thinking necessary for envisioning the future. This process is explicit and establishes joint ownership of the activities from the onset, and it actually commences the act of transformational cooperation. Cooperrider (2001) explains that this effort is triggered by the complementing duality of positive images followed by positive action. It starts with an experience of elevating the positive, fostered by mutual inquiry into what participants collectively value. It continues with the process of extension, as people expand their relatedness to others. We describe this work in a theory of positive organizational change (Cooperrider and Sekerka, 2003), edifying it by showing how positive emotions may act as initiators of transformative cooperation. Because many positive emotions have distinctive social origins, people generally experience them when interacting with others (Watson, Clark, Mclntyre, and Hamaker, 1992). It is no surprise, then, that participants involved in an AI feel good as a result of their engagement. We believe, however, that positive emotions contribute to the movement and sustainability of the process because of their enduring and expansive qualities. This is visible during later phases of AI, when groups propose positive questions derived from the stories they have shared during the initial discovery phase. By sharing these high moments with others in their organization, participants use the inquiry as a springboard for conversation, dialogue, and increased participation. Moreover, as selfidentified groups begin to emerge around shared interests, the dialogue continues and new roles begin to emerge. As workers recall their own experiences and use them to create their organization's future, the process affirms, empowers, and encourages self-efficacy and the valuing of self and others. The conversation can instill energy in action (Quinn and Dutton, 2005) because members recall when they were most effective, and they all share in the creation and ownership of their collective future. This evokes enthusiasm, joy, interest, and hope (Sekerka and Goosby Smith, 2003). But these emotions are not static. The positive emotions can spread throughout the organization-a cascading impact-similar to the phenomenon of emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1993, 1994). Here, positive emotions move throughout the organization via chains of events that carry positive meaning for others. These conversations and
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this interactive work continue and are sustained long after the actual AI process ends. Taken together, this information leads us to expect the following:
Proposition 1: Participants engaged in an AI are likely to experience positive emotions, which contribute to a more positive organizational emotional climate. Cognitive Broadening
Positive emotions broaden our scope of attention (Fredrickson and Branigan, 2005) and broaden our habitual modes of thinking and acting (Isen, 1987). This can influence how we see ourselves, giving us a broader scope of self-perception. In this way, positive emotions help people come together and grow closer, and as this occurs, the line between the self and others can become blurred and harder to delineate (Waugh and Fredrickson, 2005). To the extent that people view coworkers or their organization as part of themselves, resource allocation can be perceived as shared ownership, and the differences between self and others can become less pronounced. As this happens, people can to some extent adopt the characteristics of others internally and begin to view those characteristics as their own. The inclusion of others in how we see ourselves has the potential to give us a wider perspective and, when we focus on others appreciatively, can put people at ease in social contexts. Conversely, when we focus on organizational problems, negative emotions may be elevated and an us versus them mind-set can be promulgated (Gilmore, Shea, and Useem, 1997). This is often followed by blaming and finger-pointing as people try to target the causes of problems (Sekerka and Goosby Smith, 2003). A positive approach using AI helps facilitate a reframing process (Bolman and Deal, 1997), which is necessary for prompting the shift required for transformation. In short, it helps alter the way members currently see their organization and helps them to recast the roles they previously assumed in a meaningful and favorable light. For example, those who may currently use a. political frame, in which resources are scarce and generate competition, can shift perceptual understanding by engendering different assumptions. Beliefs that were once associated with competition can shift to alternative views,
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now based on assumptions that see achievements as providing benefits to all involved. The cognitive broadening that positive emotions trigger may contribute to this process, bringing a wider view into focus, one that is more inclusive and represents a more cooperative stance. This can also be a turning point, with the organization moving from a more reactive stance-where problem solving and a functional orientation are directed toward survival-to a more generative one. Positive emotions coupled with collaborative values can help an organization thrive, in that its members are motivated to create new organizational forms that benefit both the individuals and their organizations. As positive emotions widen self-perspectives, they may also motivate people to enter and maintain relationships, thus promoting their inclusion of resources, attitudes, and characteristics of others into their repertoire of self. We suggest that the appreciative process and the changes that members experience in association with positive emotions may petition or induce cognitive broadening to include an increase in organizational identity. Dutton and her colleagues found that when people adopt the attributes of their organization into their self-concept, the connection is defined as organizational identification (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Dutton, Dukerich, and Harquail, 1994). Given that positive emotions contribute to an expansion of self, this shift may be linked to people increasing their identification with the organization and their coworkers. This expectation is expressed by the following proposition:
Proposition 2: A positive emotional organizational climate will contribute to increases in organizational identification. This increased organizational identification may be a catalyst that helps to extend relational support in the workplace, which we now describe. Relationship Building
As positive emotions help broaden the mind-set of workers, they may also affect interactions and ultimately contribute to cooperative transformation through increases in relational strength. During an AI, this transformation is visible in the creation of self-organized project teams, coalitions, and opportunity circles, all of which cultivate new ideas and learning (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1999). Broadened mind-sets
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obviously carry short-term benefits, but they also instill indirect and long-term adaptive benefits. We propose that the act of cognitive broadening actually helps to build enduring relational resources. Research supports the notion that the resources accrued during positive emotional states are durable and outlast the transient state that led to their acquisition (Fredrickson, 2000b). Consequently, the incidental effects of positive emotional experiences serve to increase relational resources. Individuals can then draw from these enduring resources in subsequent moments and while in different emotional states. This provides further support for the link between positive emotions and their known role in helping to transform individuals to become more creative, knowledgeable, resilient, socially integrated, and healthy. Individuals who regularly experience positive emotions are not stagnant. Instead they continually grow toward further optimal functioning (Fredrickson, 1998, 2003; Fredrickson and Joiner, 2002). We suggest that this same principle holds true when using strength-based approaches to instill cooperative efforts to establish transformative cooperation. For example, evidence from social psychological experiments have shown that people induced to feel positive emotions become more helpful to others than those in neutral emotional states (Isen, 1987). Building on this research, organizational studies have demonstrated that salespeople who experience more positive emotions at work are more helpful to their customers (George, 1998). This outcome occurs because salespeople experiencing positive emotions are more flexible, creative, empathic, and respectful. Interestingly, being helpful not only springs from positive emotional states but can also produce them. For example, people who give help may feel proud of their actions, and this experience of pride not only creates a momentary boost in self-esteem but can also prompt people to envision more significant future achievements in similar domains (Fredrickson, 2000b). Thus, to the extent that helping others instills positive emotions, it may motivate people to help again in the future. Just as the person who gives help will experience positive emotions, the person who receives help is also likely to feel the complementary positive emotion of gratitude. Gratitude not only feels good but also produces a myriad of beneficial social outcomes (McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, and Larson, 2001). Gratitude, according to McCullough
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and his colleagues, reflects, motivates, and reinforces moral social actions in both the giver and the receiver of help. The feeling of gratitude identifies moral action because it surfaces when individuals acknowledge that another person has been helpful to them. It motivates moral action because grateful people often feel the urge to repay those who have helped them. Finally, gratitude reinforces moral behavior because giving thanks or acknowledgment rewards help-givers, making them feel appreciated and more likely to help others in the future. This result reflects a robust association between positive emotions and social support, which serves to build social and relational strength. This expectation is expressed by the following proposition:
Proposition 3: A positive emotional organizational climate will contribute to increases in organizational relational strength. The scenario on helping also illustrates how positive emotions can spread throughout organizations and among members and customers, and how the effects of positive emotions can accumulate, compound, and add value to the collective. Add to this rich picture the further studies that point to how positive emotions help to curb organizational conflict by promoting constructive interpersonal engagement and you see their capacity-building qualities (Baron, 1992). Importantly, positive emotions propagate within organizations not simply because smiles are contagious (that is, through facial mimicry) but because these emotions stem from and create meaningful interpersonal encounters. Accordingly, the broaden-and-build theory predicts that positive emotions at work serve to support both individuals and organizations in their ability to function at higher levels. Thus positive emotions are both an individual and a collective resource that can act as reinforcement to promote social interaction, instill responsibility, and advance achievement. Losada's work, in concert with Fredrickson's theory, uses nonlinear dynamics to depict a model of team performance, finding that a ratio of positive to negative affect at or above 2.9 characterizes flourishing mental health (Losada and Heaphy, 2004; Losada and Fredrickson, 2005). These findings suggest that there are principles to describe the relations between positive affect and individual and organizational flourishing. These principles relate to the movement toward optimal organizational functioning in that positive emotions fuel individuals to contribute to
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the effectiveness of their organization (Fredrickson, 2000b). A range of empirical evidence supports this prediction, albeit indirectly. For instance, researchers at the Gallup Organization frequently examine links between employee engagement and favorable business outcomes, such as employee turnover, customer loyalty, net sales, and financial revenues (Fleming, 2000a, 2000b; Harter, 2000). These studies suggest that employee engagement is associated with positive emotional experiences. We believe that there is a connection between positive emotions in the workplace and relational strength in the organization. In this respect, positive emotions add value to the organization by increasing relational expansion, which produces increases to social capital. The presence of this resource can contribute to growth and favorable performance outcomes. Because positive emotions are influential in creating relational strength, we see them as the antecedent for organizational effectiveness, as expressed in the following proposition:
Proposition 4: Increases in organizational relational strength will contribute to organizational growth and performance. Building a Better Community
An underlying assumption in our work is that organizations are uniquely positioned to help build a better society. At present we view their role and associated contribution, previously known as corporate responsibility, as going through a transformation of its own. We see movement away from a problem-centric approach as the motivational driver for corporate social action. Our contention is that this transformation is fueled by the positive emotional climates of organizations where transformative cooperation has extended outward to include the greater community. The frames that previously drove organizational change looked at resources as scarce commodities. But today's strength-based approaches to change use corporate relational assets as levers for creating more value and capacity, and the edification of new resources. It is therefore expected that when organizations set aside their former win-lose survivalist modalities for a more dynamic, collective capacity-building focus, strengths can be leveraged ubiquitously and limitations can become outdated social constructs. This transformation moves the corporation beyond viewing itself as a fixed, concrete, and finite organizational
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entity where self-preservation is the reality. It shifts the prior underlying assumptions, altering the view to depict the workers and the organization as images of the greater good-the larger whole. In short, organizational identities are broadened to a unified collective that extends beyond the confines of traditional organizational boundaries. No longer is social action based on the need to resolve issues and problems; rather, it is based on actions resulting from the view that the community is part of the organization and vice versa. With this expansion comes the creation of a reality in which everyone is viewed as a part of the larger whole (Barros and Cooperrider, 2000). It is a picture that continually evolves through sustained rejuvenation. We propose that this evolution is fueled in part by the resources generated by positive emotions, which energize a more holistic stance through acts of kindness, compassion, giving, and helping others. It is sustained by renewed belief, focus, and trust in the goodness of the universal infinite whole. We believe that as this cycle-one of continuous value creation-is established, individuals, organizations, institutions, and governments can be transformed into more compassionate and harmonious environments, as reflected in new designs of transformative cooperation. The benefits of positive emotions and their association with expansion of relational capacities may be boundless. This is the very essence of creating new designs in transformative cooperation: positive emotions provide the foundation for optimal organizational functioning, which may have unlimited potential to extend outward to society. The expansion of relatedness is not bound by the confines of an organization. It is a capacity unconstrained by time or space. Our contention is that new designs in transformative cooperation are energized by positive emotions, which set the stage for unlimited potential for growth and development that moves outward into the community and society at large. Thus, our final proposition to express this idea is
Proposition 5: Increases in organizational relational strength will contribute to the community's growth and development. Taken together our propositions build on the theory of positive organizational change by further explicating how positive emotions serve as the cornerstone for transformative cooperation.
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Conclusion
In this chapter we have described how transformative cooperation can be created through AI, which serves to stimulate, generate, and benefit from positive emotions. As members work together to seek out value within their organization, their efforts contribute to the presence of a positive emotional climate. These positive emotions serve to broaden cognitive resources, as represented by members' expansion of self. We have considered how expression of this expansion may contribute to a broadened organizational identity, which can help extend thoughts and actions that serve to build relational strength. Such positive environments are conducive to the social support, social connections, and social capital that can contribute to sustained organizational effectiveness. Resources derived from positive emotions can add value to organizations by contributing to their improved functioning and performance over time. Thus positive emotions serve as links between the momentary experiences of organizational members and the long-range indicators of optimal organizational functioning. As this cycle continues, we expect that positive emotional experiences may generate outcomes that are boundaryless and that reverberate outward, beyond the confines of the organization. Thus the impacts on optimal individual and organizational functioning can ultimately contribute to building a stronger community. In conclusion, we see how transformative cooperation has the capacity to emerge and extend outward, into the lives of others, with perhaps unlimited capacity to serve and benefit the greater whole. References
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The Essence of Transformation Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership ARRAN CAZA and ROBERT E. QUINN
Occasionally we find organizations in which people are cooperating at a level beyond normal expectations. We often call these high performance organizations. We begin this chapter with an account of several researchers visiting one such organization. The account that follows, drawn from Quinn (2004), offers insight into such settings and introduces the topic of this chapter. We went with the director of nursing at a large hospital to visit one of her most outstanding units. As always happens when we visit these kinds of settings, we were inspired by deeply committed human beings performing well beyond normal expectations. We asked some questions about the unit's culture of success and the staff spent a half hour describing the innovative practices that had developed in the unit. These practices were unique and very impressive. It would have been tempting to believe that the practices were the explanation. Eventually the director of nursing shook her head. She said, "Don't be fooled by these practices. They are important, but they are a consequence, not the cause." The other people in the room nodded. They all knew what she was talking about. One of them began to speak of the woman who had been running this wonderful unit for more than a decade. They spoke of her in reverent tones. We posed probing questions, asking them to describe specific incidents. In doing so, some of the respondents spoke through tears as they shared the ways this woman had changed their organization and their lives.
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Afterward the director told us that of her sixty managers, she had five or six like the woman about whom we had just heard. No matter where she assigned them, they built units that achieve extraordinary performance. One of my colleagues asked, "What do they do?" There was a long silence. Finally the director said, "That is the wrong question. It is not what they do, because each one of them is unique in how they pull it off. It is not about what they do; it is about who they are."
Taking an Alternative Perspective
In most studies of transformational leadership, researchers focus on people in positions of formal authority and examine the personal traits and behaviors that contribute to improved organizational functioning (see, for example, Eagly and Johnson, 1990; Hogg, 2001; Yukl, Gordon, and Taber, 2002). They note, however, that formal positions, traits, and behaviors do a relatively poor job of accounting for organizational success and the effect of leadership, suggesting that something more is required to understand the phenomenon (Kerr and Jermier, 1978). In response, we suggest that a new perspective may be helpful. Instead of taking a static view of the leader and assuming that she or he has a particular set of traits or behaviors that give rise to organizational transformation, we suggest focusing on the observations in the opening description. We suggest that transformational leadership can be best understood by examining an individual's state of being rather than personality traits or actions. The researchers described earlier were drawn to the innovative practices that differentiated outstanding hospital units. Researchers often assume that if they can identify such practices, they can transfer them to other organizations. This is the assumption of best practices: organizations need only implement the innovative practices to improve their functioning. The director of nursing in the example, however, was suspicious of the best-practice logic. She suggested that the key to success lay not in the innovative practices per se but in the leadership that resulted in the generation of innovative practices appropriate to a particular context. Similarly, when the director indicated that she had a small minority of managers who produce transformational outcomes, the researchers
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asked the typical follow-up question: "What do they do?" Again, the assumption was that transformational leaders share some set of behaviors. If one could identify these behaviors, the nature of transformational leadership would be explained. Most models of transformational leadership share this functional assumption. Moreover, when researchers use this assumption to guide their inquiry, they are very likely to find behaviors that seem important (Nisbett and Ross, 1980). They tend to identify behaviors shared by leaders and to build these into their models of transformational leadership. The nursing director challenged this traditional view of leadership. "It is not about what they do; it is about who they are," she said. Because her transformational managers engaged in a variety of behavior patterns, she reasoned that looking for behavioral commonalities would miss the important element. We agree with her insight and argue that the essence of transformation is to be found not in behaviors but in a state of being shared by transformational leaders. Consistent with this view, Quinn (2004) examines the cases of managers who reported making changes in their organizations by first making changes in their personal state of being. He describes these changes by contrasting two states of being, which he calls the normal state and the fundamental state of leadership. Quinn (2004, 2005) describes the normal state as a reactive one in which the individual strives to preserve equilibrium and deny change. He suggests that most people are usually in this normal state. Over time the normal state leads to a loss of alignment with the changing external world. As the gap widens, people lose energy and motivation. Yet rather than make the changes necessary to realign themselves, they tend to persevere in denial and suffer the consequences of personal decline. This mode of operating becomes a vicious cycle, engendering negative emotions and dysfunctional behaviors. The normal state of slow decline is contrasted with a more extraordinary one that Quinn (2004, 2005) calls the fundamental state of leadership. In this state, the individual accepts the need for change and focuses on sincere pursuit of outcomes rather than personal comfort. This state is more proactive and creative. Upon entering it, individuals tend to experience positive emotions and thoughts, to engage in experiential learning, to have creative insights, to engage in new behaviors,
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and to have more positive effect on others. This individual transformation may give rise to a contagious collective process and result in organizational transformation. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the idea of transformation by embedding Quinn's notions in the existing literature, providing a fuller explanation of these two states of being and their influence on behavior. The first section of the chapter discusses routine behavior and the normal state in which most people spend the majority of their lives. This state is shown to be one of gradual decline because of resistance to change. The next section describes the fundamental state of leadership, which is a different state of being and an alternative to the typical pattern of decline. After considering the transformational potential of this state and contrasting that transformational potential with traditional theories of leadership, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this new perspective. Routine Behavior and the Normal State of Being
To respond to a changing environment, individuals and organizations must alter their behavior, and the more dynamic the environment is, the greater is the necessary alteration (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Schein, 1980). This situation suggests a relatively straightforward process for responding to environmental change. As a simple example, imagine an individual walking to work in the winter. She wears a heavy coat because of the cold temperature. When the season changes to spring and the temperature rises, her coat will become too warm. The gap between her behavior and environmental conditions will increase as it gets warmer. The widening gap will signal the need for a change; she will feel hot and uncomfortable, and realize that she needs a lighter coat. Switching coats addresses the gap, eliminating the discomfort that signaled the need for change. Figure 8.1 is a graphic representation of the process just describeda feedback pattern known as a balancing loop (Sterman, 2000). The environment is treated as an exogenous influence and the individual responds to its demands (such as by wearing clothes to match the weather). Assuming that the system begins at equilibrium, it will continue as it is until a change occurs in the environment (for example, she will
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wear the heavy coat as long as it is cold). Environmental change will demand a different response and create a gap between current and optimal behavior (for example, warmer temperatures will make the heavy coat too warm for comfort). As the gap grows, declining performance will signal the need for change. These signals will accumulate over time, ultimately leading to recognition that there is a gap to be addressed. Making the necessary changes will eliminate the behavior gap. This pattern is called a balancing loop because it is equilibrium seeking. It will adjust behavior until it has reached the target set by the exogenous environmental demands, and then continue in that state until another environmental change occurs. This simple, idealized model depicts change as a straightforward
Environmental change
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'
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~
FIGURE
Gap recognized
8.1 . Simplified dynamic model of responsive change.
Solid lines indicate a positive or "same direction" relationship (that is, as the magnitude of the behavior gap increases, the strength and frequency of signals for change also increase), while broken lines indicate a negative, "opposite direction" relationship (that is, a greater responsive change leads to a smaller behavior gap). The B in the center of the figure is a loop identifier and indicates that this is a balancing loop. The feedback inherent in this loop will produce equilibrium-seeking dynamics; the levels of all variables will adjust to a goal level set by the degree of environmental change. SOURCE: Sterman, 2000. NOTE:
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process. In reality, however, experience and research both show that change is often quite hard and rarely proceeds so smoothly (Dawes, 1998; Miller, 1993). In fact, individuals often resist change. They prefer habit, which leads to inertia. By refusing to respond to change, they fall ever further from alignment with environmental demands. This failing alignment depletes their motivation and energy, further reducing the likelihood of effective change. The result is a downward spiral (Masuch, 1985) that has been referred to as the slow death phenomenon (Quinn, 1996). Quinn uses slow death to refer to individuals' and collectives' tendency toward declining motivation and reduced energy. By refusing to change, a person gradually falls out of alignment with the dynamic environment. Ongoing change makes old behaviors increasingly less effective, leading to a growing behavior gap. Resistance to change introduces a second loop into the model of change, a loop that is reinforcing rather than balancing (see Figure 8.2). When the behavior gap signals the need for change, the individual denies those signals. The stronger the signal is, the more the individual resists. This resistance is typically faster and stronger than an individual's willingness to recognize his or her own deficient behavior, so the resistance loop tends to overpower the corrective response loop, leading to a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The speed and strength of change resistance arises from two powerful and interrelated sources. The first source is habit. People are generally risk averse and seek the familiar (Ellsberg, 1961; Heath and Tversky, 1991), so much of life is governed by nonconscious, automatic responses that duplicate prior behaviors (Bargh and Chartrand, 1999). Extensive evidence has shown that individuals are biased in favor of the things they recognize easily and know well (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). All other things being equal, people prefer the familiar (Betsch, Hoffman, Hoffrage, and Plessner, 2003). Moreover, studies have shown that the familiarity bias even extends to novel situations; people tend to interpret new situations as variations of familiar ones (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986; Wiley, 2003). The power of habit and familiarity is further increased by the tendency to adjust goals to match behavior. That is, rather than change behavior as needed to achieve a fixed goal, people are more likely to adjust their aspirations to match what they have done in the past, reinforcing reliance on familiar behaviors (Cyert and
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March, 1963). The result is a strong preference for familiar responses, a reluctance to try new approaches, and a high probability of failing to recognize that a change is necessary. The second source of resistance to change is the individual's sense of identity and desire for control. One of humanity's most basic needs is to maintain an efficacious self-image; people want to feel effective and in control (Baumeister, 1998; Pittman, 1998). As a result, individuals may avoid uncertainty because the lack of predictability threatens their sense of efficacy (Depret and Fiske, 1993). Therefore, when the environment demands a change, individuals are likely to perceive this demand as a threat to their control. It is very hard to let go of familiar ways of act-
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L~--------~
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8.2. Dynamic model of responsive change, with resistance to change.
Rl indicates a reinforcing feedback loop. A reinforcing loop builds on itself, leading to escalating behavior or outcomes. Solid lines indicate a positive or "same direction" relationship (that is, as the magnitude of the behavior gap increases, the strength and frequency of signals for change also increase), while broken lines indicate a negative, "opposite direction" relationship (that is, a greater responsive change leads to a smaller behavior gap). SOURCE: Sterman, 2000. NOTE:
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ing and being; in fact, people have gone as far as risking death to retain a cherished self-concept (Weick, 1993). For this reason, it often seems preferable to deny the need for a change. The cumulative effect of these tendencies is powerful inertia. In a dynamic environment, people typically miss or deny signals for change. Instead, they follow the path of least resistance and do what is familiar (Fritz, 1989). In terms of the model of change, the reinforcing loop of change resistance (R1) will typically overpower the balancing loop, leading to the gradual decline that Quinn (1996) calls slow death. Despite a growing behavior gap and mounting signals for change, the individual practices denial, perpetuates routine, and falls ever further out of alignment. Such resistance can rarely continue indefinitely, however. In extreme cases, resistance may lead to fatal outcomes (see, for example, Weick, 1993), but in most situations of significant environmental change, the demand for a response will eventually overwhelm the individual's resistance; the person will be compelled to make some sort of concession. However, given the nature and strength of the forces creating resistance, such change is likely to be grudging and incomplete. Rather than a sweeping reform, change is likely to be an incremental variation on some familiar response (Cyert and March, 1963). This sort of small, compelled accommodation will slightly reduce the behavior gap, with a concomitant effect on signals for change. This result will decrease the pressure for change just enough to allow resistance to resume; having made a small, grudging change, the individual can slip back into habit and routine. Being pushed toward change when the individual feels unprepared to make a change is likely to result in feelings of helplessness and victimization (Depret and Fiske, 1993). The individual will see him- or herself as subject to the demands of the environment, a perception associated with depressive symptoms (Brown, 1986). Moreover, if the demands of the environment overwhelm one's resistance, illusions of control can be threatened, leading to feelings of powerlessness, lack of motivation, and low energy (Deci, Koestner, and Ryan, 1999; Depret and Fiske, 1993; Pittman, 1998). This energy depletion introduces a second reinforcing loop to the change process, a loop resulting from the recognition of a behavioral
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gap (shown in Figure 8.3). Confronting the gap between current and optimal behavior has two effects on an individual: it spurs change, but it also reduces energy and motivation. When the gap is relatively small, the positive effect is likely to predominate; the individual will see a manageable problem and generate a solution. However, as the gap grows, the negative effect on energy will become more influential; faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, an individual may become defeatist and wonder why she or he should even bother trying. In this way, recognition of the behavioral gap has a nonlinear effect on responsive change, increasing it initially and then reducing it in response to ever-larger gaps. The smaller the required change is, the more likely it is that the individual will believe that she or he can
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8.3. Dynamic model of responsive change.
R1 Solid lines indicate a positive or "same direction" relationship (that is, as the magnitude of the behavior gap increases, the strength and frequency of signals for change also increase), while broken lines indicate a negative, "opposite direction" relationship (that is, a greater responsive change leads to a smaller behavior gap). NOTE:
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handle it; the larger the change is, the more likely it is that she or he will feel overwhelmed. The model thus shows the process of slow death (Quinn, 1996). If an individual were immediately to recognize and accept the need for change, the necessary response would likely be relatively small and feasible. However, habit, comfort seeking, and ego defense typically prevent a timely response; the individual denies the need for change. This denial triggers the first downward spiral of slow death-inertia. As the environment continues to change, the unchanging individual falls further and further out of alignment. Eventually the misalignment becomes so severe that the individual can no longer ignore it, but by this time the behavioral gap is likely to be so large that the second downward spiral, felt helplessness, is triggered. Faced with the need for an enormous change, the individual feels unequal to the challenge; the task seems too large. As a result, energy and motivation wane, making change less likely. Left unchecked, the twin spirals of inertia and felt helplessness will produce further dissipation of energy and motivation.
The Fundamental State of leadership
Most people spend much of their time in the subtle decline of slow death, clinging to comfortable ways and denying the changes around them (Fritz, 1989). This state produces periods of unthinking routine punctuated by halting, reactive change. Between the constant denial and the compelled change, individuals in a state of slow death feel as though they are constantly struggling, working as hard as possible yet never seeming to make a difference. The phrase fire fighting has been applied to this phenomenon (see, for example, Repenning, 2001). A lack of proactive response allows problems to accumulate to the point of being emergencies. The individual is then forced to deal with one emergency after another; a string of "fires" needs to be put out. The result is that all efforts are directed to fire fighting (that is, denial and reactive change) and none to preparation or development. In considering how to address the problems of inertia, fire fighting, and slow death, an anchor serves as a useful analogy. In nautical terms, an anchor is a heavy object carried on board a ship. It is attached to the ship with heavy rope or cable and cast overboard to prevent the ship from
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moving. In this way, a ship is able to hold itself in place despite having no contact with solid ground. However, the anchor may become a liability, and even a danger, in some situations. The crew of a ship at anchor may have to scramble to cut it away if a sudden and acute storm hits. Familiar self-concepts function like anchors for individuals and collectives; they serve as important foundations for stability and performance (Weick, 1995). As a result, it may seem impossible, even inconceivable, to embrace a change that challenges one's self-concept (Weick, 1993). Accepting change often requires letting go of familiar routines and roles; it requires relinquishing control and confronting the unknown. To do this, the individual must overcome his or her natural resistance to change. Doing so is a difficult but potentially transformational action, as when sailors cut the anchor free from a ship. Referring back to the model of change (Figure 8.3), with the removal of the resistance-to-change loop (R1), the individual is able to respond to the environment. The downward spirals are not triggered. In fact, eliminating resistance to change transforms the entire cycle of personal decline. Without the downward spiral of inertia, the behavior gap can be recognized and addressed while it is still manageable. The balancing loop of corrective response will guide behavior. Moreover, with responsive change under way, both of the reinforcing feedback patterns shift from downward spirals to supportive processes; reinforcing loops can move in positive directions as well. By making a responsive change, the individual reduces the behavior gap. This process triggers a sequence of positive effects. Responding proactively and effectively to the demands of the environment displays the individual's efficacy and strengthens feelings of control (Brown, 1986; Dweck and Leggett, 1988; Pittman, 1998). In addition, the positive emotions associated with this success contribute to broadened thinking and greater resources for future action, making further proactive change more likely (Fredrickson, 2003). Moreover, as the changes accumulate and the gap decreases, alignment with the environment improves and the signals for change decrease. This reduction leads to less resistance, consequently reducing the effort needed to overcome it, and further supports the process of responsive change; inertia becomes momentum. It should be noted that the underlying processes are the same in both slow death and responsive change. In a static environment, people will
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continue as they always have, without difficulty. However, when the environment changes, individuals face a tipping point. Accepting and acting on the need for change creates momentum and energy through the processes just described. In contrast, denying change and clinging to comfort drains energy and creates inertia through the same processes. The mechanism is identical in both cases; the difference lies in how the individual responds to the change. Making a significant change to realign with a dynamic environment rather than resisting has been called deep change (Quinn, 1996). The change is deep because it involves a fundamental shift in attitudes and perceptions. Making the change requires abandoning comfort-seeking habits. The individual's focus must shift from traditional action to value rationality (Weber, 1978). Instead of asking, "What do I want to do?" the individual must ask, "what result do I need to create?" Quinn (2004) discusses a series of behaviors that facilitate this change, but our focus here is on the consequences rather than the causes of deep change. As the comparison of these two questions suggests, the key difference is in the focus of attention. The individual embracing change is no longer concentrating on familiarity and personal comfort. A preoccupation with comfort leads to conservatism, as the means become ends in themselves; the comfort-seeker uses familiar routines because they are predictable, not because they are optimal. In contrast, by accepting change and abandoning the familiar, an individual focuses on achieving the desired outcome; attention shifts from being comfort centered to being purpose centered. Rather than thinking about what outcome will be produced by taking an action, the individual considers which action must be taken to achieve the desired result. To make this shift in focus is to enter the fundamental state of leadership. By attending to what must be done to achieve outcomes rather than to what can be done to maintain comfort, the individual becomes more internally directed, more results centered, and more open to the environment (Quinn, 2004). In the process, the individual sees him- or herself, and others, more positively and accurately. People who undergo such a personal transformation tend to become more empowered and tend to be more naturally empowering to others (Campbell, 1972). Entering the fundamental state of leadership creates new possibilities for the individual (Quinn, 1996, 2004). The shift in focus provides
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a different perspective. The individual sees things she or he could not see before, and attempts that which she or he would not attempt before. This shift happens because accepting change requires ceding control. As the sailors cut away the anchor and accept being blown to unknown destinations by storm winds, the individual in the fundamental state of leadership has abandoned the anchor of familiarity. The person explores, learns, and changes. Like the ship running before the storm, individuals in the fundamental state of leadership open themselves to the changing environment, creating actions as they take them instead of following routines. Being willing to do what one has never done before requires not knowing in advance what one will be doing. Action and understanding will no longer be distinct; the knowing will be in the doing (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996; Orlikowski, 2000). Paradoxically, entering the fundamental state of leadership involves simultaneously taking control of one's life and letting control slip away. It is a state of leadership because the person has taken responsibility for his or her life and for creating a desired result rather than reacting to the buffets of a changing environment. At the same time, because the environment is changing and the individual is engaging in new behaviors, the person does not have control in the sense of predictability. The individual has initiated self-change but cannot know in advance what that change will entail. The person is creating his or her life in interaction with the environment, shaping but not wholly determining the outcome. The result will be a joint creation of the individual and the environment. Such emergent eo-creation means that the result can be more than the individual is capable of alone; the individual's abilities combine with the force of environmental change. In the fundamental state of leadership, the individual can literally do more than what would otherwise be possible, because the individual is open to the resources of the dynamic environment rather than remaining trapped in familiar responses. leadership and Interaction
Resistance to change is automatic and natural. Overcoming it is difficult, which makes the fundamental state of leadership relatively rare. As a result, social systems tend to recapitulate the inertia and slow death of individuals (Quinn, 1996). Like the people who comprise them, orga-
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nizations of all kinds are inclined to repeat past performances, and thereby to resist change (Cyert and March, 1963; Miller, 1993). Moreover, society expects reliable performances and products from organizations (Baum, 1996; Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), leading them to focus on routines and standardized processes (Crossan, Lane, and White, 1999). Organizations favor stability (Baum, 1996; Hannan and Freeman, 1977) and thereby reinforce their individual members' inclinations toward denial and inertia. The organizational tendency toward inertia highlights the potential impact of the fundamental state of leadership. Beyond the personal leadership inherent in the change, the shift in focus and possibility also holds the potential to change those around the individual. In the fundamental state of leadership, the individual sees and behaves differently. Rather than being another contributor to slow death in the organization, the person becomes a challenge to the routine, potentially enabling others to change as well. The individual's new behaviors and expanded possibilities can alter relationships and transform the social systems in which they are embedded. This potential for change emphasizes the difference between conceptualizations of managers and leaders, and suggests the importance of a state-based perspective on leadership. Managers are concerned with stability and the preservation of predictability, while leaders challenge the status quo and create change (Zaleznik, 1970). As a result, it is hardly surprising that positional authority is a poor predictor of leadership (Kerr and Jermier, 1978). From our perspective, leadership should not be understood as a function of position or authority. Rather, it is more likely to come from those who enter the fundamental state of leadership, regardless of their formal role. A person in this state abandons the familiar in pursuit of a desired outcome; the person becomes a leader in the practical sense of getting done what is needed but is not occurring (Hackman and Walton, 1986). At a minimum, this behavioral change will affect the way others are acting and the resources with which they act. The individual in the fundamental state of leadership will likely challenge norms, which may lead others to question them as well, and ultimately create change in the organization (Nemeth and Staw, 1989; Worline and R. W. Quinn, 2003). By escaping the routine and questioning what is usually taken for
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granted, the individual in the fundamental state of leadership can set an example. The person may inspire others to follow suit. The expanded possibilities recognized by an individual in the fundamental state of leadership foster a broadened scope of vision. Creating a vision for others, setting inspiring goals, is one of the key functions associated with leadership (Cameron and Caza, 2002; Yukl, Gordon, and Taber, 2002). In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that conveying a vision is what leadership actually is: A leader is one who alters or guides the manner in which his followers "mind" the world .... A leader at work is one who gives others a sense of the meaning of that which they do by recreating it in a different form ... gives those who follow him a different way of "seeing"-and therefore saying and doing and knowing in the world. A leader does not tell it "as it is;" he tells it as it might be.... The leader always embodies the possibilities of escape from what might otherwise appear to us to be a chaotic, indifferent, or incorrigible world-one over which we have no ultimate control. [Thayer, 1988, p. 250]
The individual in the fundamental state of leadership embodies the escape from an uncontrolled world by having made the shift from reactive to proactive living, by joining in dynamic eo-creation with the environment. She or he has a different way of knowing and doing, and the new vision that comes with it. This is the vision that marks a leader. In addition to having such a vision, individuals in the fundamental state of leadership are also more likely to be able to communicate it to others. Because they have shifted their focus beyond narrow self-interest and personal comfort, they are open to their environment, and therefore to the people in it. Typical organizational practices pay little attention to the demands of relationships (Fletcher, 1999), in part because of the fearful denial of the environment that is part of the normal state. In contrast, an individual in the fundamental state of leadership is not in denial and therefore not closed to others. The individual's proactive stance, willingness to take risks, and externally focused attention will produce a different style of interacting. Instead of being narrowly concerned with his or her own comfort, the individual is engaged with the environment, and can see what others need and offer. These differences can contribute to improved interpersonal connections (Dutton and Heaphy, 2003). Individuals in the fundamental state of leadership are
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in a better position to influence the environment because they are open and attending to it. Further enhancing this influence is the potential to share the fundamental state of leadership, to help others join in it. Emotions are contagious among group members (Bartd and Saavedra, 2000), so the high energy and motivation of the fundamental state of leadership may be transmitted to others. Moreover, the individual's willingness to risk and sacrifice for the achievement of an important outcome may also spread, acting as an inspiration to others (Cameron and Caza, 2002). Having accepted the change in the environment, and thereby seen new possibilities, the individual in the fundamental state of leadership challenges others to do the same. She or he will see their potential even if they do not, and may motivate them toward its realization. As a result, the differences of attitude and perception involved in the fundamental state of leadership involve leading in all senses of the word. The individual has taken proactive charge of his or her own life, leading it rather than reacting to imposed demands. In addition, the person has the potential, through example, vision, connection, and inspiration, to affect others, leading them to new possibilities. The result is transformation on several levels. The person transforms perspective, action, interaction, and relations. For this reason, leadership is best understood as a state, a way of being in the world, rather than as a product of position, behavior, or personality. Clearly position does not provide leadership (Kerr and Jermier, 1978). While organizations may aspire to promote leaders, receiving a promotion will hardly make a person into a leader. Leadership may predict hierarchical position, but the position is not the source of the leadership. Similarly, behavior does not define leadership. Research has recognized the contingent nature of leadership behavior for decades (see Schein, 1980, for a useful review). While leaders are distinguished by their willingness to take the action that is necessary, it is recognizing the action and having the initiative to take it, not the acting itself, that marks effective leadership (Hackman and Walton, 1986). Leadership is also not solely a product of fixed personality traits. Because the specific leadership required at any given time depends on the combination of context, task, and followers involved (Hackman and Walton, 1986; Schein, 1980), any fixed trait cannot always be
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right; a constant trait will be useful in some situations and not in others. Moreover, leadership is necessarily intermittent; it is not possible to be continuously leading. Challenging and transforming at all times will eventually lead to burnout (Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Spreitzer and Caza, 2002), and benefiting from a transformation depends on a period of consolidation in which new capabilities can be refined and developed (March, 1991). Because leadership is a consequence of entering the fundamental state of leadership, there is no "leadership personality." Certain traits may make achieving the fundamental state more or less likely (see, for example, Neuberg and Newsom, 1993), but the outcome-focused value rationality of leadership is potentially available to anyone. Implications and Conclusion
In this chapter we have outlined a different way of understanding leadership. While traditional descriptions locate leadership in positions, behaviors, or traits, we have suggested that leadership is best understood as a state of being. This fundamental state of leadership is a repudiation of resistance to change. A leader is able to lead because she or he recognizes the need for change, eschews comfort in favor of purpose, and is proactively open to the environment. The traditional functions of leadership, vision, connection, and inspiration follow from the fundamental state of leadership. As such, it seems most useful to understand leadership as a way of being. Leading involves overt actions that have been extensively documented (Yukl, Gordon, and Taber, 2002), but each of these behaviors depends on an internal change to make them possible. That is, the behaviors and outcomes traditionally called leadership are consequences of entering the fundamental state of leadership. By entering this state, an individual gains the capability to lead and to transform the systems of which she or he is a part. Seeing leadership as a state has three important implications for the study and practice of leadership. The most basic of these is that anyone may be a leader. Authority does not predict leadership; the fundamental state of leadership is not a product of tangible resources or titles. By accepting change, by focusing on outcomes rather than comfort, and by attempting the unknown, any individual can enter the fundamen-
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tal state of leadership. This realization has clear implications for future research. Resistance to change is well documented, but the conditions that lead to the embrace of change are less well understood. Future work should explore the organizational and contextual conditions that make entrance into the fundamental state of leadership more or less likely. For practice, the realization that anyone may be a leader stresses the need for communication and empowerment. Leadership may emerge at unexpected times and places. Anyone, at any level of authority, could enter the fundamental state of leadership and thereby be poised to advance the organization. Organizational systems should be open and flexible enough to support, or at least not prevent, such sudden inspiration. One person's entrance into the fundamental state of leadership can spread to others and transform an organization if it is enabled to flourish. The second implication of a state-based view of leadership is the crucial need to balance the competing demands of creativity and control. As the anchor analogy highlights, habit and predictability have advantages as well as drawbacks. The art of effectiveness lies in balancing these factors. In most cases, balance is likely to require an emphasis on creativity and change. The powerful forces fueling resistance to change are natural and automatic, so personal and organizational systems are probably needed to counterbalance them by supporting the recognition and acceptance of change. These supports would be of two general sorts, corresponding to the two basic sources of resistance to change. The first support would involve intentionally embracing change to avoid denial and conscious resistance. The second support would need to offset the nonconscious tendency to overlook change and see the familiar. Counterfactual audits, in which individuals intentionally consider how things might be different, would be useful in this regard, helping individuals to overcome their automatic responses and accustomed perspectives. The final and perhaps least intuitive implication of a state theory of leadership is that leadership must be intermittent. It is not possible to be perpetually in the fundamental state of leadership. The dynamism of the fundamental state of leadership needs to be followed by a period of consolidation. New possibilities are realized and enabled in the fundamental state of leadership, but a time of management must follow so that those possibilities can be regularized and refined. An individual, or
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an organization, will thus advance through a series of plateaus; entering the fundamental state of leadership will expand behaviors and create new resources, and then be followed by a stable period in which those resources are utilized. No one can lead, in the true sense of the word, all the time, nor should they be expected to. This clearly has implications for the assessment and evaluation of leaders, as well as for performance planning. As this discussion suggests, understanding leadership as a state has significant implications. In particular, it calls into question the traditional approaches to instilling leadership by emphasizing tactics and methods for influencing others. Changing others is a consequence of leadership, but it is not the source of it. Leadership truly begins with self-change. Leadership is a change in the individual's perspective and attention. It involves a shift from habit and routine to value-guided action, a shift to focusing on outcomes rather than comfort. While such shifts may not be as easy to teach as the tools of influence, they are a source of leadership that is potentially available to everyone, because transformational leadership is a way of being. References
Bargh, J. A., and T. L. Chartrand. 1999. "The Unbearable Automaticity of Being." American Psychologist, 54(7), 462-479. Bartel, C. A., and R. Saavedra. 2000. "The Collective Construction of Work Group Moods." Administrative Science Quarterly, 45, 197-231. Baum, J.A.C. 1996. "Organizational Ecology." InS. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, and W. R. Nord (eds.), Handbook of Organization Studies, 77-114. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Baumeister, R. F. 1998. "The Self." In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey (eds.). Handbook of Social Psychology, 680-740. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Betsch, T., K. Hoffman, U. Hoffrage, and H. Plessner. 2003. "Intuition Beyond Recognition: When Less Familiar Events Are Liked More." Experimental Psychology, 50(1), 49-54. Brown, R. 1986. "Attribution Theory." Social Psychology, 131-194. New York: Free Press. Cameron, K. S., and A. Caza. 2002. "Organizational and Leadership Virtues and the Role of Forgiveness." Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 9(1), 33-48.
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Campbell, J. 1972. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chaiklin, S., and J. Lave (eds.). 1996. Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. Crossan, M. M., H. W. Lane, and R. E. White. 1999. "An Organizational Learning Framework: From Intuition to Institution." Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 522-537. Cyert, R. M., and J. G. March. 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Dawes, R. M. 1998. "Behavioral Decision Making and Judgment." In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology, 497-548. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Deci, E. L., R. Koestner, and R. M. Ryan. 1999. "A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation." Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627-668. Depret, E., and S. T. Fiske. 1993. "Social Cognition and Power: Some Cognitive Consequences of Social Structure as a Source of Control Deprivation." In G. Weary, F. Oleicher, and R. Marsh (eds.), Control Motivation and Social Cognition, 176-202. New York: Springer-Verlag. Dreyfus, H. L., and S. E. Dreyfus. 1986. Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: Free Press. Dutton, J. E., and E. D. Heaphy. 2003. "The Power of High-Quality Connections." InK. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 263-278. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Dweck, C. S., and E. L. Leggett. 1988. "A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality." Psychological Review, 95(2), 256-273. Eagly, A. H., and B. T. Johnson. 1990. "Gender and Leadership Style: A MetaAnalysis." Psychological Bulletin, 108(2): 233-256. Ellsberg, D. 1961. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 75(4), 643-669. Fletcher, J. 1999. Disappearing Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fredrickson, B. L. 2003. "Positive Emotions and Upward Spirals in Organizations." InK. S. Cameron,]. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 163-175. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Fritz, R. 1989. The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Hackman, ]. R., and R. E. Walton. 1986. "Leading Groups in Organizations." In P. S. Goodman (ed.), Designing Effective Work Groups, 72-119. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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Hannan, M. T., and J. Freeman. 1977. "The Population Ecology of Organizations." American Journal of Sociology, 82, 929-964. Hargadon, A. B., and R. I. Sutton. 1997. "Technology Brokering and Innovation in a Product Development Firm." Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 716-749. Heath, C., and A. Tversky. 1991. "Preference and Belief: Ambiguity and Competence in Choice Under Uncertainty." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 4, 5-28. Hogg, M. A. 2001. "Social Identification, Group Prototypicality, and Emergent Leadership." In M. A. Hogg and D. J. Terry (eds.), Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts, 197-212. Ann Arbor, MI: Psychology Press. Kerr, S., and J. M. Jermier. 1978. "Substitutes for Leadership: Their Meaning and Measurement." Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 22, 375-403. March, J. G. 1991. "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning." Organization Science, 2(1), 71-87. Masuch, M. 1985. "Viscous Circles in Organizations." Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 14-33. Miller, D. 1993. "The Architecture of Simplicity." Academy of Management Review, 18(1), 116-138. Nelson, R. R., and S. G. Winter. 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Nemeth, C. J., and B. M. Staw. 1989. "The Tradeoffs of Social Control and Innovation in Groups and Organizations." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 175-210. Neuberg, S. L., and J. T. Newsom. 1993. "Personal Need for Structure: Individual Differences in the Desire for Simple Structure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 113-131. Nisbett, R., and L. Ross. 1980. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Orlikowski, W. J. 2000. "Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations." Organization Science, 11(4), 404-428. Pfeffer, J., and G. R. Salancik. 1978. The External Control of Organizations, New York: Harper & Row. Pittman, T. S. 1998. "Motivation." In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey (eds.), 549-590. Handbook of Social Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Quinn, R. E. 1996. Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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Quinn, R. E. 2004. Building the Bridge as You Walk on It: A Guide to Leading Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Quinn, R. E. 2005. "Moments of Greatness: Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership." Harvard Business Review, July-August, 74-83. Repenning, N. P. 2001. "Understanding Fire Fighting in New Product Development." Journal of Product Innovation Management, 18, 285-300. Schein, E. H. 1980. Organizational Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Spreitzer, G. M., and A. Caza. 2002. "Energizing Action in Crisis." Paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Denver, CO. Sterman, J. D. 2000. Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill. Thayer, L. 1988. "Leadership/Communication: A Critical Review and a Modest Proposal." In G. M. Goldhaber and G. A. Barnett (eds.), Handbook of Organizational Communication, 231-263. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. 1974. "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." Science, 185(September), 1124-1131. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weick, K. E. 1993. "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster." Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628-652. Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wiley, J. 2003. "Expertise Out of Context: Getting Experts Out of Mental Ruts." Paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making, Pensacola Beach, FL. Worline, M. C., and R. W. Quinn. 2003. "Courageous Principled Action." In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 138-157. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Yukl, G., A. Gordon, and T. Taber. 2002. "A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Leadership Behavior: Integrating a Half Century of Behavior Research." Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 9(1), 15-31. Zaleznik, A. 1970. "Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?" Harvard Business Review, 55(5), 67-78.
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The World Inquiry Stories of Business as an Agent of World Benefit NADYA ZHEXEMBAYEVA
I have always been a strong believer in the power of narrative. After all, I am a daughter of the Kazakh steppes, a region of the world that has sustained itself for thousands of years by the power of stories, and that developed its own alphabet only in the twentieth century. The story of my search for possibilities at the intersection of business and society, and for the meaning of transformative cooperation, is told in this chapter. It is also a story of the emergence of the Innovation Bank at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB). In Search of Meaning: Transformative Cooperation Understood
It was just after noon on a sunny September day in 2003. I arrived for a conference at Case Western Reserve's Weatherhead School of Management feeling a mix of excitement and reservation. On the one hand, I had been part of the conference planning team, deeply engaged in conversations of purpose and design, for quite a few months. On the other hand, I was still struggling with the very foundation of the conference, its central theme: "Business as an Agent of World Benefit: New Designs in Transformative Cooperation." Transformative cooperation-these were the words giving me trouble. My Russian-speaking mind was failing to put the two concepts
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together in any meaningful way. Going beyond the words to the suggested definition, my applied-research-driven mind was failing to see the real-life reflections of "the process that generates a new threshold of cooperative capability and takes people to a higher stage of moral development, while serving to build a more sustainable world future" (Cooperrider, Fry, and Piderit, 2002). So I registered, gave a few hugs to the out-of-town guests and colleagues, and settled into a chair just a second before the welcoming remarks. As the presentations progressed, my questions grew stronger, and more wonder appeared around the elusive concept of transformative cooperation. On my lap in a small envelope hid the photos from the first sonogram of my unborn baby girl, taken a few hours earlier. Five months later the conference was long over, my questions were still strong, and baby Lila was born. As the first postpartum weeks of excitement and confusion went by, our days settled into steady routines of feedings, readings, and bathings. The lives of two adults-my husband's and my own-were soon dedicated to the survival and sustenance of one particularly bright-eyed human system. One diaper at a time, we were becoming Lila's parents-not legally or biologically but relationally. At the same time as Lila was launching into this world, I continued my work as part of a team of caregivers for another human system that was growing and developing: the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at the Weatherhead School of Management of Case Western Reserve University. In January 2004 the center hosted its first event-the International Online Conference-with more than eight hundred participants from more than fifty countries. The conference served as an extension of the center's main project at that time, the "World Inquiry into Business as an Agent of World Benefit," which was "a global search for the many ways dynamic leaders in the business sector are putting their people, imagination and assets to work to benefit the earth, from its ecosystem to the needs of its vast, diverse population" (Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 2005a). The conference aimed to highlight the most interesting examples of businesses serving as agents of world benefit, and to create a space for dialogue and reflection on the role of business in society. Hundreds of postings and chats later, it became apparent that the breakthrough
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stories that emerged during the conference needed to be shared with a world in a more deliberate way; an online public library of sorts was necessary to host all the innovative ways in which business acts as an agent of the world at large. In the months that followed, six of us, members of the newly created editorial team of what eventually became the BAWB Innovation Bank, deliberated over the purpose, criteria, and principles of the new online publication. It was there, among many heated debates and profound questions, that my own discovery of the meaning behind the puzzling concept of transformative cooperation emerged-when the team agreed to feature only innovations that transform the relationship between business and the rest of society. At the level of abstraction, I was able to make out a definition: transformative cooperation is the kind of cooperation that transforms the nature of relationships among the parties involved. At the level of application, I could identify an example of this definition: right before my eyes, the tending and patient cooperation between my husband and I was allowing us to transform from two independent adults into two interdependent parents. The conceptual framework was now clear, and I began inquiring into the ways that transformative cooperation works at the intersection of business and society. The Starting Point: Transformative Cooperation at the Intersection of Business and Society
To consider transformative cooperation within the context of relationships between business and the rest of society, I must first define what is the relationship to be transformed-and what is the possible end point to be imagined of such transformation. In recent years the conversation about the role of business in society has become a hip topic in business and media. On the one hand, the public and private sectors alike pose high demands on (and present high opportunities for) corporations to engage in the ever-growing needs of society (Margolis and Walsh, 2003; Prahalad, 2005), calling for a new set of rules for economic value creation (Freeman, 1994; Jackson and Nelson, 2004; Laszlo, 2003). On the other hand, short-term profit maximization remains the dogma of the business world (for example, see the
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passionate words of Crook, 2005, in the 2005 corporate responsibility survey by the Economist), and many academics continue the legacy of Levitt (1958) and Friedman (1970) by advancing unequivocally the view that increased shareholder wealth is the only social responsibility of business (see, for example, the strong opinions of Easterbrook and Fischel, 1991; Sternberg, 1997; and Jensen, 2002). In other words, to consider any kind of transformative process for the intersection of business and the rest of society, the starting point is a relationship of exchange whereby society provides resources and business ensures the most profitable utilization of those resources in the short term. Any broadening of the responsibilities of business represents movement in the direction of transformation. The Finish Line: What Are We Transforming Into?
The business-in-society arena offers a wide range of possible end points for the troubled relationship between the private sector and the rest of the world. Corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, corporate citizenship, corporate social performance, business citizenship, corporate citizenship, business ethics, sustainable enterprise, stakeholder management, relationships, and engagement-the list of concepts and theoretical frameworks around possible ideals grows everyday, reflecting the maturity of the thirty-five-year-old field. The range of possibilities for the transformation of the relationship becomes even wider when we consider the semantic wars surrounding each term. Sandra Waddock (2004, p. 5) writes pointedly of the "parallel universes" in which academics and practitioners seem to exist: Physicists now believe that the universe may be only one of many parallel universes, existing simultaneously, and yet conceivably quite different from each other and from the day-to-day world we know. So too, academic- and practice-based thinking about corporate citizenship (corporate responsibility) and stakeholder thinking seem to have evolved in parallel, sometimes overlapping but sometimes universes apart.
The field does not have one widely accepted view of what corporate responsibility or sustainability actually means; all of the players use their own preferred definitions.
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Waddock (2004, p. 10) defines corporate responsibility as "the degree of (ir)responsibility manifested in a company's strategies and operating practices as they impact stakeholders and the natural environment day to day." Freeman (1984) offers a popular alternative to the corporate responsibility concept-the stakeholder approach to management, which suggests that a company's ability to add value goes beyond pure shareholder interest and rests on its relationships with a wide range of stakeholders (such as employees, the natural environment, suppliers, and so on). Corporate social responsibility as defined by the Social Economic Council (2001) incorporates both of the preceding definitions, suggesting that CSR incorporates sufficient focus by the company on (a) its contribution to public prosperity in the long term, and (b) its relationships with its stakeholders and society as a whole. Sustainability (or sustainable development), first defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 (p. 43) as "the ability to meet needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs," is later elaborated by SustainAbility's "triple bottom line" concept as a business model that rests its success equally on the three pillars of profit, people, and planet (SustainAbility, 2005). The Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (2005) define corporate sustainability as a "business approach to creating longterm shareholder value by embracing opportunities and risks deriving from economic, environmental, and social developments." A few definitions combine the responsibility and stakeholder notions of the CSR with the profit-people-planet notions of sustainability. CSRWire, the highly regarded Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire Service, suggests that "Corporate Social Responsibility ... aligns business operations with social values ... integrates the interests of stakeholders-all of those affected by a company's conduct-into the company's business policies and actions [and] ... focuses on the social, environmental, and financial success of a company-the triple bottom line, with the goal being to positively impact society while achieving business success" (CSRWire, 2005). Business for Social Responsibility, a global organization that unites business, academia, and the nonprofit sector around the business-in-society issues, follows the same integrative path, defining CSR as "achieving commercial success in ways that
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honor ethical values and respect people, communities, and the natural environment" (Business for Social Responsibility, 2005). While both of these definitions depict CSR and sustainability as a highly integrated business model or alternative approach to business, the world of business practitioners does not give corporate social responsibility and sustainability such merits. The KPMG International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting (2005) finds that 129 (or 52 percent) of Fortune 250 companies issue public nonfinancial reports (generally known as sustainability, CSR, or corporate citizenship reports); while the survey celebrates the rise of this number in the past years and denotes it as "good news," I see it as particularly ironic that, even at its best, the corporate responsibility and sustainability activities of business remain in a separate and "on the side" domain of action. Although I find the conflicting arguments fascinating and stimulating, I am not eager to participate in defining the norms for the role of business in society, preferring to leave the question of what it ought to be to others. Rather, I accept the invitation of positive organizational scholarship to go beyond normality toward excellence (Bright, 2005) by wondering about what the role of business can be-in the best possible world-and what it can become as a result of transformative cooperation between the many entities of business and the rest of the world. What is the best possible role that private enterprise can play in the realm of human history and progress? What can the most mutually beneficial business model look like? What would the most integrated economic and social agency look like? Of course this direction itself is not spared the normative stance, and my interest, as expressed through these overarching questions, reflects at least one particular set of rules and norms: the rules of what constitutes the "best"-and by default, the "worst." Naturally, what we see as the best is tightly linked to our overall philosophies, beliefs, and assumptions; hence I too am bound to define the best in accordance with my personal preferences. So what is my personal "best possible world" to which we can arrive at the end of the transformative cooperative process between business and the rest of society?
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The Best Possible World: Mutual Benefit
Two years after my first encounter with the image of transformative cooperation, I was still trying to figure it out. At least two leads were left for me to follow by the original conference hosts: in the 2002 call for papers on transformative cooperation, Cooperrider, Fry, and Piderit mentioned "a higher stage of moral development" and "a more sustainable world future" as the markers for the possible result of transformative cooperation (p. 1). And on a particularly gloomy September day I found myself in a conversation with none other that David Cooperrider himself, to ponder the best possible world for us all. He responded to my quest for the ideal transformation within the business-in-society realm with the following quote from Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1993, p. 234): Man is appealed to, to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conception; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support-not mutual struggle-has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.
This quote-with its intense convictions and uplifting visionsstrikes a particular chord. The notion of the consciousness of oneness-wholeness, interconnectedness-has been front and present for me for quite some time now, and transferring this notion into the realm of business-in-society is only a natural extension of my previous work around gift cultures and economies (Zhexembayeva, 2004). If there is one thing I have learned from successful economies built on the principles of gift-as opposed to contractual-exchange, it is that abundance and generosity for all (here goes my embedded definition of best) stem from realization of the interconnectedness of all beings. Bring it up a notch to the level of a planet and the question of interconnectedness stands before business-which is, after all, both an economic and a social entity (Freeman, 1994). I hope that the concept of mutual benefit as a possible ideal into which the business-in-society relationship will be transformed echoes the convictions of many scholars in the field, portraying business and society as "interwoven entities" (Wood, 1991),
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speaking to the "holism of business-society interface" (Lunheim, 2003), and calling for business, the core "organ of society," to (even for its own sake) direct its action toward the overall strength, stability, and harmony of the society (Drucker, 1954). Transformative Cooperation: The Way to Move Forward?
To this point I have been considering the transformative aspect of the nature of transformative cooperation within the business-in-society realm. Yet it is in the notion of cooperation that, I believe, one possible answer to the question of mutual benefit for business and the rest of society is hidden-for it is the quality of cooperation that defines cooperation's ability to transform the relationship between the private sector and the rest of the world into a sustainable win-win relationship. When it comes to exploration of the qualities and features that make a cooperative process truly transformative, I have a particular advantage: I am embedded in the organization that makes discovery of new ways in which business can relate to the world its daily bread. So I have decided to work with data I have on hand via the BAWB Innovation Bank-an online outlet of the World Inquiry into Business as an Agent of World Benefit. The World Inquiry is an action research project that allows any person around the globe to discover and share stories of business serving as a positive force in society. Using a few stories shared by the World Inquiry participants that appear particularly congruent with the concept of transformative cooperation, I analyze the characteristics of cooperation to understand its transformative capacity. Now, to the choice of stories: The BAWB Innovation Bank profiles innovative ways that business serves as an agent of world benefit. Rather than focusing on a company or an organization, the Bank publishes profiles of particular innovations-such as a product, a process, a business model, or a partnership-that within their specific social, political, cultural, and economical contexts constitute novel ways for business to make positive impacts on the rest of society (Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 2005b). As of November 2005, the BAWB Innovation Bank contained fifty-seven published stories; each story has been reviewed by six members of the editorial team and rated on three individual scales. The business-in-society innovation
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scale carries the most essential requirement of the team, the focus on business innovation for societal benefit; the evidence of positive impact scale provides the basis to assess the scope and consequence of the innovation; and the elevated motivation or purpose scale addresses the issue of intent behind a particular innovation (Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 2005a). While the scales or criteria were greatly developed over the scope of the first twelve months of the editorial work, the team still finds itself in heated debates and passionate arguments on a regular basis. It is precisely this commitment to tough questions and grey waters that gives me great confidence in each story we have accepted into publication. While none of the stories show definitively how to build a mutually beneficial world for business and the rest of society, each one of them does provide an example of transformation to play with and learn from. For this chapter I have selected six stories to summarize; each is a story of interorganizational cooperation as opposed to intraorganizational partnership. After presenting the details of each story, the final section of the chapter uncovers some common characteristics of the stories. Story 1: Peaceworks-Delivering Food, Building Bridges
"My parents taught me about building bridges of understanding across communities, as well as about preventing injustice to any human being," says Daniel Lubetzky (PeaceWorks, 2005). Lubetzky founded PeaceWorks as a U.S.-based "not-only-for-profit" company in 1994. After years of writing legislative proposals addressing effective ways to promote peace through business, it was a zesty sun-dried-tomato spread in Israel that moved Lubetzky to put his theories and ideals to the test. The plan was simple: break down cultural stereotypes by facilitating business partnerships that bring together people with a history of conflict. He found the manufacturer of the tomato spread, Yoel Benesh, an Israeli Jew, and convinced him to purchase the glass jars from Egypt rather than Portugal, the sun-dried tomatoes from Turkey instead of Italy, and the olives from Palestinian farmers. With increased economic benefits to Yoel Benesh's company, and a new peacemaking product on hand, Lubetzky then returned to the United States to market the spread. A committed board of eleven members, including Ben & Jerry's
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cofounder Ben Cohen, offered support to get the concept off the ground. The same concept that first brought Arabs, Egyptians, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Turks together in the Middle East making tomato spread later lead to snack chips made by blacks and whites in South Africa and curry made by Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist women in a factory in Indonesia. PeaceWorks' nationwide brands, Meditalia and Bali Spice, are the drivers behind the company's success, and after an initial investment of $10 thousand dollars, PeaceWorks attained an estimated $5 million in sales by 2005. The company's partners also share the economic benefit of the project; Yoel Benesh, Peaceworks' first trading partner, grew its factory from ten workers to seventy as a result of this unique cooperation. As Abdullah Ghanim, Benesh's Arab supplier, puts it, "First it's a business. Second, it helps the peace. Because if we work together, we become friends, we visit each others' houses." Story 2: Pure Water and the Promise of ProfitP&G Makes Development a Priority
A water-purification treatment system developed by Procter & Gamble (P&G) in partnership with the International Council of Nurses and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is saving many lives by providing clean drinking water to the "bottom of the economic pyramid" (Prahalad, 2005)-those 4 billion people who live on $2 a day or less. The new low-cost ($0.01 per liter) water purification product, appropriately called PuR, is beautiful in its simplicity: mixing the contents of one small sachet in a container of water removes bacteria, viruses, and parasites, so dirt and other contaminants are separated within minutes. Filtering the water through a cloth, PuR provides clean and safe drinking water. The sachets can be easily stored and used in virtually any household. The public-private partnership allowed for an extensive five-year development and two-year testing process, which has taken place in the Philippines, Guatemala, Morocco, and Pakistan, resulting in more than twenty million liters of clean drinking water delivered to consumers in 2002-2003. Furthermore, to explore the long-term solutions for the water issue, P&G partnered with the U.S. Agency for International
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Development, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs, CARE, and Population Services International "to leverage their respective expertise and resources to better understand the behaviors and motivations for choosing particular technologies for treating household water, share the knowledge gained, and identify opportunities for scaling up successful efforts to ensure safe drinking water" (Safe Drinking Water Alliance, 2004). The alliance has allowed P&G to introduce PuR in Uganda and Haiti, two of the poorest countries in the world. The company has set several ambitious goals. For example, in Uganda it hopes to increase the proportion of the population that has access to safe water from 3 percent to 75 percent by 2010. PuR has also alleviated suffering in several emergency situations. For example, in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, P&G sent six million packets of PuR to affected areas.
Story 3: On-Demand, Computer Power Grid Drives World Research Efforts
Millions of personal computers (PCs) sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide, but what if they could be linked into a power grid to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems? IBM asked this question in light of the research reports indicating that computer users use only 10 to 15 percent of the calculating power on their computers, and answered the question in 2004 by creating the World Community Grid. Launched as a network of forty-three dedicated partners, the grid is a global humanitarian effort to harness the unused computing power of individual and business computers and direct that power toward research designed to help unlock humanity's largest problems. IBM donated the hardware, software, technical services, and expertise to build this infrastructure and provides free hosting, maintenance, and support. Anyone can donate the idle and unused time on a computer by downloading the World Community Grid's free software and registering to participate. The free, safe, and small software program instructs an idle PC to request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server; it then performs computations on this data, sends the results back to the server, and asks the server for a new piece of work.
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Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a large system that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers. It establishes a permanent, flexible infrastructure that provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power to apply on a global scale to very large and complex problems for the benefit of humanity. Each computation performed by the computer provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research. The World Community Grid is addressing global humanitarian issues, such as new and existing infectious disease research for cures to HIV and AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, malaria, and other diseases; genomic and disease research such as the Human Proteome Folding Project, which seeks to identify the functions of the proteins that are coded by human genes; and natural disasters and hunger, helping researchers and scientists predict earthquakes, improve crop yields, and evaluate the supply of critical natural resources such as water. "We're taking IBM's innovative, on-demand grid technology-the same technology we share with customers-and applying it to humanitarian issues about which the world cares," said Stanley S. Litow, vice president of IBM Corporate Community Relations and president of the IBM International Foundation. In the first month of the World Community Grid initiative, IBM reported that more than forty thousand individuals had joined as members, and by March 2005 more than ninety-one thousand devices were part of the grid. The computer cycle time that participants have donated now exceeds the processing power of a single computer running continuously for six millennia.
Story 4: The Equator PrinciplesFinancing Collaboration Produces Global Benefits
The June 2003 announcement regarding adoption of the Equator Principles by ten major banks in seven countries highlighted the collaborative efforts of competitors to connect social and environmental aspirations with the financial markets. The Equator Principles are an innovative set of guidelines for assessing and managing environmental and social risks in the area of project financing. They provide clear policies and procedures for financing projects costing more than $50 million. In order
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for a firm to obtain project funding from an "Equator bank," it must conduct a comprehensive environmental assessment and address issues such as sustainable development, socioeconomic impact, land acquisition, involuntary resettlement, and pollution prevention. By April 2004, twenty-nine banks had adopted the Equator Principles. At that point, those banks controlled approximately 75 percent of global project financing resources. Working collaboratively, the banks have been able to raise standards and ensure the long-term sustainability of their projects and clients. The Principles create a "safety net" for the participating banks, addressing negative social response and costly litigation that can result from the absence of environmentally and socially responsible project financing. The Equator Principles have a farreaching impact, cutting globally across a spectrum of industries including finance, health care, education, infrastructure, manufacturing, and extraction. Adoption of the Equator Principles has been a catalyst for change that has required banks to rewrite credit procedures, educate and train staff, and adopt new internal audit procedures.
Story 5: From the Business of Building to the Business of Human Habitat-Noisette Development of Sustainable Communities
Noisette, a property development company committed to triple bottomline principles (people, planet, and profit), uses an integrated approach to engage community members in its development projects. The company sees a clear link between many of the social problems in America, such as violent crime, and poor urban development and planning, and this perspective is best summed up in the words of CEO John L. Knott Jr.: "We are not in the building business, we are in the human habitat business" (Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 2005c). Noisette's uncompromising focus on the triple bottom line allows the company to deliver projects with efficiency, durability, comfort, and health, in contrast to typical development projects that focus on shortterm economic gain and often involve the displacement of existing residents. Thus, Noisette's sustainable development model includes integrated natural systems land planning, storm hazard design standards, conservation protection, wildlife management systems, educational systems, and natural landscape design.
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As a foundation for an entire project, the company seeks full community participation in the design of new developments. This process, known as the community involvement model, involves intense dialogue about the culture, history, and values of the community. This approach led to the development of Dewees Island, one of the first fully sustainable environmental communities. The site incorporates integrated natural systems land planning, conservation protection, wildlife management, and education systems. Currently Noisette is implementing its approach in South Carolina, where it is developing a sustainable community in a partnership with local government, community residents, and industry partners. The company's plan will incorporate a mixeduse development of residential and commercial space.
Story 6: Partners, Products, and Possibilities-Fair Trade Success As the oldest and largest for-profit fair-trade company in the United States, Equal Exchange trades directly with twenty-eight democratically run farmer co-ops located in fourteen countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Its mission is to build long-term partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relations between farmers and consumers, and to demonstrate the viability of worker cooperatives and fair trade. A worker-owned organization, Equal Exchange provides farmers with advanced credit for crop production, pays farmers a guaranteed minimum price that assures a stable source of income as well as improved social services, provides customers with high-quality food products, and supports sustainable farming practices. Half of the Equal Exchange staff, as well as representatives of consumer cooperatives, supermarkets, cafes, and restaurants, have been on client tours to visit growers and meet with local nongovernmental organizations. Much of the company's success comes from close partnerships with food co-ops and faith-based alliances, as well as cafes, supermarkets, and natural food stores. Its interfaith program includes the American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Relief Services, the Church of the Brethren, Lutheran World Relief, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief. In 2003, a
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first-of-its-kind collaboration with Progressive Asset Management was developed to help lead Equal Exchange to many new investors and was responsible for a significant portion of the new equity raised that year. In 2004, Equal Exchange grew sales from $13 million to $16.5 million, with profits at $358,000 after worker-owner patronage and charitable contributions. Coffee sales grew by 550,000 pounds to more than 2,500,000 pounds-1,250 tons-the largest growth in the company's history. In addition to coffee, Equal Exchange fairly trades organic chocolate bars, hot cocoa and baking cocoa, teas from India, and sugar packets. The company also had unprecedented success when it raised $776,000 of equity from Class B investor-supporters, the most equity raised in any year in its history. Equal Exchange believes that partners, products, and possibilities cut to the heart of Fair Trade and represent tangible underpinnings to the company's mission and guiding principles. As a result, it has reached fifteen million people through the media, with about two-thirds of the various media pieces originating from its many alliances. One example of the company's cooperation framework is the 2004 90-Ton Challenge, a year-long campaign led by Lutheran World Relief, Women of the ELCA, and Equal Exchange to double the amount of fair-trade coffee purchased through the Lutheran World Relief Coffee Project. The 90-Ton Challenge ended in fall 2004 and exceeded the goal: Lutheran congregations and individuals bought more than ninety-nine tons of fair-trade coffee. lessons learned
I have read these six stories many times, and as I have reviewed all the pages of material that went into developing the stories-the interviews with the stories' heroes, the catchy phrases from news articles, the harsh comments of the BAWB Innovation Bank editorial team, and early drafts by the BAWB staff writer who put together these summaries-they have become even more familiar. Still, they never fail to amaze me. Right before my eyes human history is taking a new turn. For decades profit maximization has been the cornerstone of the relationship between business and the rest of society. Such a relationship was a natural fit for the world of the past: local business deeply embedded in a community, serving as the
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distributor of wealth within its realm. Business of the twenty-first century has a different face: global operations, loose ties to any community, and large-scale transfers of wealth from one locality to another. Newly emerging cooperative business practices are responding to these shifts in the economic landscape, fundamentally transforming the relationship between business and the rest of society. Whether it is the formerly competing global banks coming together to transform themselves into the trustees of the environment and society via the Equator Principles, or formerly hostile Palestinian and Israeli manufacturers signing a contract to transform themselves into agents of peace via PeaceWorks, business with all its facets and methods is redefining its place in the larger schema of the world through cooperation and partnership. Several themes bridge these six examples, allowing each one to serve as a catalyst for transforming the nature of the relationships of the parties involved. 7. Expanding the Horizon: A Stakeholder Approach
Cooperative business practices that lead to the relationships among all involved parties being transformed toward a more mutually beneficial stance are characterized by a shift from a shareholder approach to what Freeman (1984) calls a stakeholder approach. The broadened stakeholder view suggests that a company's ability to add value goes beyond pure shareholder interest and rests on its relationships with a wide range of stakeholders. Although this characteristic emerges in all six stories, it is particularly striking in the Equal Exchange story, in which the company's view of the suppliers and employees as stakeholders created partnerships that define Equal Exchange's core identity and business model. The stakeholder perspective is also strong in the Procter & Gamble safe-water story, in which the company went beyond the short-term constraints of shareholder wealth maximization and considered the interests of a particular stakeholder group-the local community. This shift in perspective brought about mutual benefits as the local community got access to pure water and P&G developed, tested, and brought to market a new product that also provides a viable foundation for the overall sales of the company in the region, because safe water is a required ingredient for many of the company's products.
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2. Doing it Together: Multiparty Partnership and Dialogue
Traditional business relationships thrive on the notion of boundaries and exclusion. When signing a supply contract, most companies do not engage in deep dialogue and eo-creation of the object or material in question; rather, each party performs within its own boundaries, and then outcomes are exchanged as defined by the contract. For cooperation to be transformative in a business-in-society setting, the boundaries of responsibility have to be shifted, if not illuminated, to give space to eo-creation. Dialogue, joint design, and eo-execution are the marks of such cooperation. This characteristic stands out the most in the Noisette story about a new model of land development, in which community dialogue penetrates every aspect of the project and serves as a foundation for every decision made throughout the process. The notions of dialogue and eo-creation are also at the core of the Equator Principles story, in which competitors have come together for a lengthy dialogic process to draft a joint document that provides guidelines for the whole industry to follow.
3. Elevating the Intent: World Benefit Agency
Each of the six stories suggests that for cooperation to be transformative, it has to be executed with an explicit intent to benefit the world. For business as a cooperating party, this characteristic is particularly striking, because it requires stepping outside the previously defined group of beneficiaries, the shareholders, to act as an agent of benefit for a larger constituency. The new intent then becomes the main organizing principle for cooperation, and results in transformation of the parties involved, often erasing the differences between the benefactors and the beneficiaries. This characteristic is most vividly illustrated by the PeaceWorks story, in which the intent to facilitate understanding and cooperation between conflicting parties led to a successful line of products, the unique positioning of which is the foundation of the company's financial success. The Equal Exchange story also provides insight into the notion of intentionality in the world-benefit agenda, whereby the company's product line was developed with a desire to uplift the living conditions of a large population of farmers and suppliers. This conscious
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choice led to a stable, successful business model and to thousands of sustained communities worldwide.
4. Using What Business Knows Best: Tools, Practices, Spirit
The six examples from the business-in-society domain suggest that successful transformative cooperation relies on the existing strength of the parties involved, and especially on the strengths of business. Business is not required to invent a new product or a process; rather, it is invited to invent a new way to use what it has or knows best. Whether it is a business method, a particular technical innovation, a research and development protocol, or an entrepreneurial ingenuity, when applied in a new environment and to a new agenda of world benefit, it yields significant results and transforms the nature of relationship between the business entity and the rest of the parties involved. IBM's World Community Grid story perfectly illustrates the notion of using what business knows best, because utilization of existing technology allowed IBM to create a living, expanding partnership addressing the world's most daunting problems. Another great example is PeaceWorks, which used a traditional business model coupled with innovative supply-chain development and product positioning to allow the company to create deep understanding and dialogue among formerly conflicting and even warring sides while providing sustainable profit to all involved. I am sure there are many more characteristics and specialties that create conditions for cooperation to serve as a transformative force for business-in-society relationships. Yet even this timid experiment with the stories of innovative ways in which business serves as an agent of world benefit yielded more discoveries than I had imagined. New and emergent cooperative business practices are transforming the world, allowing business to take new roles to foster peace, health, sustenance, ecological flourishing, and economic opportunity for all of the earth. The more we make the stories known, the more they shape the reality surrounding us. The next big thing destined to teach the world the transformative power of cooperation is right around the corner. As I type these very words, somewhere across the globe a partnership is being born ....
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References
Bright, D. 2005. "Forgiveness and Change: Proactive Employee Responses to Discomfiture in a Unionized Tracking Company." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Business for Social Responsibility. 2005. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Retrieved September 12, 2005, from http://www.bsr.org/AdvisoryServices/ CSR.cfm. Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. 2005a. About World Inquiry. Retrieved October 2, 2005, from http://worldbenefit.case.edu/inquiry. Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. 2005b. About Innovation Bank. Retrieved October 2, 2005, from http://worldbenefit.case.edu/ innovation/default.cfm. Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 2005c. From the Business of Building to the Business of Human Habitat: Noisette Development of Sustainable Communities. Retrieved October 2, 2005, from http://worldbenefit.cwru.edu/innovation/bankinnovationView. cfm?idArchive=235. Cooperrider, D. L., R. Fry, and S. K. Piderit. 2002. Conference Call: New Designs in Transformative Cooperation. Retrieved September 29, 2005 from http://wsomfaculty.cwru.edu/piderit/Confcall.htm. Crook, C. 2005. "The Good Company: A Survey of Corporate Social Responsibility." Economist, January 22-28, 1-21. CSRWire. 2005. What Is CSR? Retrieved September 12, 2005, from http:// www.csrwire.com/page.cgi/intro.html. Dow ]ones Sustainability Indexes. 2005. Corporate Sustainability. Retrieved June 11, 2005, from http://www.sustainability-indexes.com/htmle/sustainability/corpsustainability.html. Drucker, P. F. 1954. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper Perennial. Easterbrook, F. H., and D. R. Fischel. 1991. The Economic Structure of Corporate Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freeman, R. E. 1984. Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman. Freeman, R. E. 1994. "The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions." Business Ethic Quarterly, 4: 409-422. Friedman, M. 1970. "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." New York Times Magazine, September 13: 32-33, 122, 124, 126. Jackson, I. A., and Nelson,]. 2004. Profits with Principles: Seven Strategies for Delivering Value with Values. New York: Currency/Doubleday.
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Jensen, M. 2002. "Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function." Business Ethics Quarterly, 12: 235-256. KPMG International. 2005. KPMG International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting 2005. Retrieved September 12, 2005, from http:// www.kpmg.ca/en/industries/enr/energy/globalSustainabilityReports.html Kropotkin, P. 1993. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: Freedom Press. Laszlo, C. 2003. The Sustainable Company. Washington, DC: Island Press. Levitt, T. 1958. "The Dangers of Social Responsibility." Harvard Business Review, 36(5): 41-50. Lunheim, R. 2003. "Operationalising Corporate Social Responsibility." In M. Mclntosh (ed.), Visions of Ethical Business, 14-17. London: FT PrenticeHall with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Margolis, J. D., and J. P. Walsh. 2003. "Misery Loves Companies: Rethinking Social Initiatives by Business." Administrative Science Quarterly, 48: 268-305. PeaceWorks. 2005. Press. Retrieved October 13, 2005, from http://www. peaceworks.com/press/index.html. Prahalad, C. K. 2005. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Philadelphia: Wharton School. Safe Drinking Water Alliance. 2004. The Safe Drinking Water Alliance: Uniting Forces to Ensure Safe Water. Retrieved October 2, 2005, from http://www. jhuccp.org!topics/safe_water/safe_drinking_ 04-15-04. pdf. Social Economic Council. 2001. Corporate Social Responsibility: A Dutch Approach. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Sternberg, E. 1997. "The Defects of Stakeholder Theory." Corporate Governance, 5(1): 3-10. SustainAbility. 2005. Overview. Retrieved April2, 2005, from http://www. sustainability.com/about/overview.asp. Waddock, S. 2004. "Parallel Universes: Companies, Academics, and the Progress of Corporate Citizenship." Business and Society Review, 109:1, 5-42. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, D. 1991. "Corporate Social Performance Revisited." Academy of Management Review, 16(4), 691-718. Zhexembayeva, N. T. 2004. "When Group Becomes a Gift." Unpublished manuscript, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
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Learning from Transformative Cooperation Case Studies Laying Pathways for Future Inquiry LOREN R. DYCK and NIGEL STRAFFORD
Life in today's globalized world often seems engulfed in chaos, paradox, fragmentation, and threat. It is as if our world is hurtling itself from one catastrophe to another. In this challenging environment it is important to explore new forms of cooperation among seemingly improbable partners: business and society, management and unions, and cooperators across national and ethnic divides. The term transformative cooperation gives name and shape to these new forms of cooperation. We view transformative cooperation as a special form of cooperation that transforms human experience and relationships through engagement in improbable cross-boundary interaction and innovation. Historically it was natural and intuitive for those who shared a primary identity to cooperate with one another. In-group members shared tacit modes and norms of cooperation; their shared historical, cultural, and geographical histories made cooperation possible. Now, in our postmodern world, people increasingly diversify their organizational affiliations and identities, thereby making the effort to integrate them into a life of healthy citizenship that is often stressful and difficult to accomplish given the multiple tensions that result along their boundaries. However, as our summarized cases of transformative cooperation show, previously antagonistic groups can learn from one another and transform their identities and relationships into more inclusive and sustainable ecologies.
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Our intent in this chapter is to open the doors to high-quality scholarship on transformative cooperation. We want to showcase exemplars in transformative cooperation, document and share their experiences, articulate our insights, and explore new epistemological approaches to studying this phenomenon. We hope to serve a network of scholars passionate about research on transformative cooperation. This chapter presents insights from a multiyear case study research project on transformative cooperation and explores possible pathways for future inquiry. The first section describes the development of the project and offers a summary of findings from eight individual case studies. The second section outlines our research methodology and is followed by a third section on the themes and elements of transformative cooperation that were common in the case studies. We present transformative cooperation as a change process that engages multiple ways of relating, feeling, knowing, and doing. Propositions based on our analysis of the data are also presented. Emergent theoretical issues suggested by our findings are raised in the fourth section. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of next steps and research possibilities. Evolution of the Project on Transformative Cooperation
Social Innovations in Global Management (SIGMA) is a research program that was established in 1989 by a group of faculty members and doctoral students at the Weatherhead School of Management (WSOM) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). In eo-sponsorship with the Academy of Management, the SIGMA researchers convened a 1995 conference entitled "The Organizational Dimensions of Global Change: No Limits to Cooperation." The overarching purpose of the event was to involve management scholars in shared discourse and research on emerging dynamics of global change. More than ninety papers were presented, culminating in the publication of two special journal issues and a conference-titled book (Cooperrider and Dutton, 1999) that currently supports a master's in business administration elective at WSOM. Out of that project, another wave of research grew. In 2003, SIGMA researchers organized a second conference entitled "New Designs in Transformative Cooperation" (NDTC). Building on the research contributions of the first conference, the second conference explored the
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dynamics of transformative cooperation at the dawn of the twenty-first century and its role in creating new possibilities and sustainable change. As the NDTC conference call letter stated, a prime aim of the conference was "to spotlight great efforts toward transformative cooperation which create conditions of greater wholeness and human connection, drawing together efforts from different economic sectors, ethnic groups, socioeconomic strata, national cultures, and spiritual traditions, in a way that transcends such boundaries." Framed by this charge, the SIGMA case study research reconsidered the conventional notion of leadercentric decision making, collaboration, and cooperation by examining the ways in which all actors in a cooperative endeavor work to enable transformative change. We think this approach offers a promising new lens through which to view the transforming effects of cooperation. Summary of the Eight Case Studies
The cases summarized in this chapter were written by eight doctoral students from the Department of Organizational Behavior at CWRU and were presented during the "Showcase Reception: Images, Stories, and Ideas of Transformative Cooperation" at the NDTC conference. All contributors participated in the transformative cooperation project voluntarily, most for three years or more. A subgroup then undertook a meta-analysis of the eight case studies to carry the research forward. We believe that these case studies bring with them spectacular diversity. They feature unique locations from around the world, including Brazil, Germany, Hawaii, India, Panama, and mainland United States. They feature diverse cultures and societies, and they examine many different forms of cooperative enterprise. The eight case studies tell stories about the following events and situations: Improbable pairing of antagonists over an ancient Hawaiian burial site Reclamation of waterways using traditional water management methods in India Delivery of a path-breaking math literacy program serving youngsters in poor and working-class African American communities across the U.S. South
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Stories and models of transformative cooperation recounted by Houston community leaders Discovery of human pathways of learning in the migratory patterns of cardinals in the parks of Panama and Cleveland, Ohio Creation of community resources and services in a favela that is home for some of Brazil's most economically poor eo-creation of artistic dance routines among the international members of a dance troupe in Germany Development of harmony between the union and management at a Midwest U.S. transportation company An introduction to each of the eight cases follows. Each section includes the title, the author, and an overview of the respective study. A synopsis of findings from each case study is also offered to ground the reader in our case study meta-narrative (Bal, 1985).
Honokahua: Evolutionary Moments of Transformative Cooperation
Loren R. Dyck Honokahua is the location of an ancient Hawaiian burial site encompassing more than thirteen acres within the resort of Kapalua on the island of Maui in Hawai'i. In the late 1980s, the Honokahua Burial Site became the subject of intense controversy between supporters wishing to protect native Hawaiian bones buried at the site and various businesspeople wanting to develop a $200 million five-diamond Ritz-Carlton resort complex on it. The controversy gained international attention, as witnessed by travelers from around the world, and served as a lightning rod to galvanize the local native Hawaiian community against the developers. Extreme passion and awakenings of ancestral ties erupted within native Hawaiians and sympathetic non-Hawaiian supporters. This case study presents a chronological interweaving of stories ranging from those of native Hawaiian Kama'aina (local residents of Hawai'i) to those of landowners into a broader historical context covering more than a thousand years. It tries to include all of the perspectives the researcher was able to uncover. It is a story of cooperation that recognizes a better way of coexisting on the isolated and idyllic land. The improbable pairing of long-term antagonists is described. The reverberations resulting from Honokahua's story transcend the one tropical land-
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mass and have impacts on the ancestral burial rights of other native populations. The researcher's hope in writing this story is to create a greater sense of awareness and understanding about the process of transformative cooperation that grew out of the Honokahua controversy.
Transforming Realities: Making the Improbable Possible Through Cooperation
Latha Poonamallee
This is the story of approximately one thousand villages in the Alwar district of Rajasthan, the desert state of India, with a population of more than a million people. This region is nestled among the Arvari hill ranges and includes the Sariska Forest, one of the last few homes of the great Indian tiger. It is a harsh and semiarid land with temperatures fluctuating from zero degree Celsius in the winter to forty-nine degrees Celsius in the summer. People in this region are traditionally vegetarians and animal lovers. The case study attempts to capture the story of these villages and their peoples and of how they got together twenty years ago, catalyzed by a young, committed social-change leader who transformed their lives and the world around them. The author tries to capture the multiple voices of people from this community-old and young, men and women, the catalysts and those catalyzed. This is a story of how a community ravaged by nature and man achieved the improbable through cooperation. In the 1980s these villages in Rajasthan, like sixty thousand other villages in the country, were experiencing a severe drought. Water was scarce, distress migration was rampant, and poverty was stark. But these people did not give up. They responded by reviving old water-harvesting structures. Using local materials, their traditional knowledge, and help from the voluntary agency Tarun Bharat Sangh, they rebuilt a network of structures. The underground aquifers got recharged, and such large-scale water conservation has made a seasonal nullah (canal) into a perennial river, the Arvari. To ensure that the river and the surrounding ecology remain prosperous, the villages in Arvari watershed have formed the Arvari River Parliament. This ecological emancipation, brought about through community involvement, ushered in changes. Availability of water freed women's time and they began to
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get involved in income-generation activities; this led to schools being formed for the children of the area. There is a hopeful future where once there was none. Moth Literacy and Catalytic Organizing at Positive Innovations, Incorporated: Exploring a Social Change Organization's Ethos and Practice as a Case Study in Transformative Cooperation
Anita Howard
This case study looks at transformative cooperation in a contemporary American social movement context-the push for national math literacy. It also highlights a suggestive example of resource sharing and relational practice among cross-boundary community stakeholders: local citizens of all ages and backgrounds, professional educators, businesspeople, social service providers, government officials, and foundation representatives. The organizational setting for the case study is Positive Innovations, Inc. (PII), a reform-oriented consulting firm in Jackson, Mississippi. The firm's mission is to improve student achievement and access through school and community reform using a range of programs and services that promote math literacy and community development. Its documented success rests on an important story of affirmative and nonbureaucratic organizing. The firm's approach appears human in scale, generative by design, and transformative in its strategy for promoting economic and educational development in effectively left-behind and disenfranchised communities. The PII story is especially intriguing because it simultaneously suggests both encouraging and disheartening insights into community opportunity structures. Unlike more figural treatments of social movement phenomena, the PII case study is not drawn as a heroic tale of individual leadership that produced bottom-up reform. Rather, it is a straightforward account of how ordinary people worked together inventively to build new futures for at-risk communities. The central research interest is PII's approach to twenty-first century organizing in educationally and economically neglected U.S. communities. Although social decay affects urban and rural U.S. populations of many demographic makeups, PII currently operates in predominantly African American communities throughout the South.
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Experiencing Transformative Cooperation: Stories of Senior Fellows of the American Leadership Forum, Houston Gulf Coast Chapter
Nigel Stratford
The American Leadership Forum is a nonprofit leadership-development organization with six chapters across the nation. This founding chapter, established by Joseph Jaworski, author of Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (1998), invites diverse area leaders to join an annual class of senior fellows to learn the latest scholarship on leadership, undertake a weeklong wilderness challenge, and complete a community project together. Seasoned by these experiences, a dozen individuals shared their understanding of the phrase experiencing transformative cooperation for this research. They also proposed how they would lead an anticipated meeting toward transformative cooperation, highlighting the power of diverse people to come together, to talk, and to learn how to transform their worlds for the better. The research design employed a conversational protocol that promoted appreciative inquiry about past and future experiences of transformative cooperation. The protocol also invited real-time experiential learning about how the ongoing research conversation itself exemplified aspects of transformative cooperation. What If the Earth Was My Home, and Words from a Prophet: A Collection of Stories of Voices in Transformative Cooperation
Maria Elisa Ruiz Arauz
Canal to Canal is an initiative undertaken by the Cleveland Metro Parks in cooperation with Parque Natural Metropolitano, Panama City, Panama, with the advisory support of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. This habitat-conservation initiative is an international effort based on similar assets, namely, migratory birds and water canals. The Ohio & Erie Canal and the Panama Canal continue to play a central role for people and birds living in Cleveland and Panama City. Neotropical birds migrate between these places to take advantage of the abundant food of the Ohio summer yet escape its winter scarcity. Participants cooperated to generate a number of educational, communication, and cross-training agreements that reflect these areas' avian links.
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Relationships and Humanness in Socioeconomic Poverty: Transformative Cooperation in a Brazilian Favela
Mary Grace Neville
This case study is based on the community Quatro Varas, a shantytown in the 250,000-person urban periphery of Fortaleza in Northeastern Brazil. The region is one of the poorest in the country, with the highest rates of illiteracy, the lowest levels of income, and the highest rates of malnutrition and infant mortality nationwide. However, the people associated with Quatro Varas are far from disadvantaged. In fact, the author suggests that their collective action, catalyzed by two transboundary leaders with whom the community members collaborate, increases the self-esteem and economic productivity of the lives of most people who choose to belong to Quatro Varas. Stories from the people of Quatro Varas illustrate a social fabric that supports dignity, justice, and community. A web of transformative cooperation is created through the journeys, relationships, and programs that are connected by what is now called the Projecto Quatro Varas. The web extends the links of interpersonal relationships emerging from unconditional and deep regard for other human beings. Quatro Varas allows this marginalized social class that does not have access to a local economy to be included in a healthy and productive community. The residents of Quatro Varas have created their own local economy, an open system with permeable boundaries. The significance of Quatro Varas is its ability to recast a traditional powercentric model of community leadership and to step outside the relentless culture of poverty. The generative core of Quatro Varas is the reciprocity in and engagement of the relationships that knit together the web of community. The depth and richness of the economically poor people of Quatro Varas illustrate the potential power of transformative cooperation. In this case, poor is indeed rich.
Transformative Cooperation in a Unionized Transportation Company
Edward H. Powley
In the midst of potential financial failure and dissatisfied union workers, Transport LTL's president and chief operating officer outlined his vision
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for breakthrough leadership, where leadership is at every level among union and nonunion employees and across organizational levels and functions. Company leaders learned about the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) Summit, a process for large system change, and adopted the approach for systemwide change and the transformation of relationships throughout Transport LTL. This study reports instances of transformation and transformative cooperation that were the result of two AI Summits that facilitated relationship and operational transformations. Through this change process, innovative cost-cutting strategies were developed, relationships were strengthened between management and union employees, and new levels of cooperation emerged across traditional boundaries. Throughout the Summit, people developed enhanced relationships through conversations and activities that emphasized the existing positive relationships, the company's success stories, and areas where the company does well. Not only did individuals and groups shift from negative, problemfocused relationships to positive, energizing relationships during the Summit, but teams also were empowered to develop and initiate projects, the results of which intended to improve the bottom line. At the Summit, team members worked together on project ideas, built groups and coalitions around pilot projects, and then proposed the seeds of projects to the larger Summit group. Management joined union-proposed projects, supported their ideas, and committed resources to ensure that the project ideas came to fruition. At the end of the day, each Summit had fostered seven or eight teams dedicated to specific project areas such as communication, throughput measures, safety, training, and equipment. These groups continued to meet after the Summit and generated both operational and human outcomes.
Pina Bausch Wuppertal Tanztheater: A Case of Transformative Cooperation
Mauricio Puerta
For more than thirty years the German dance company Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal has been shaping and reshaping modern dance standards around the world. With its roots in Ausdrucktanz, or
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"expressive dance," which looks to everyday movements to express personal experiences, this company has been in endless exploration of the human condition. This focus has taken the company to create dance pieces in different parts of the world, such as Los Angeles, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Palermo, and Tokyo, in an attempt to express the essence of human nature around fundamental themes: love, intimacy, relationships, violence, angst, loneliness, alienation, rejection, humor, and the struggle for self-identity. In traditional dance companies the director or choreographer uses the dancers as tools or material to create what he or she has in mind and wants to say, many times regardless of what the dancers want to say. At the Tanztheater Wuppertal each piece is the result of emerging processes of interaction between dancers and choreographer in which each member brings his or her experience to the stage. The dancers therefore are not portraying a predefined character, but rather are presenting themselves with their particularities, their ways of understanding and feeling the world around them. In this way each piece becomes a rich perspective built from the subjective expressions of reality that dancers and choreographer bring together to create a performance that grows from the inside out. The phenomenon becomes even more remarkable when one considers that a harmonious performance is created without a single commonly understood language among the director and the dancers. Case Study Methodology Meta-Analysis and Grounded Theory
The goal of our investigation was to discover and present common elements among these stories of transformative cooperation. We used grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) to analyze the case studies. We first open-coded the cases individually and arrived at 984 codes, which we then grouped into 99 sets of codes (Appendix 1), and regrouped into sixteen trees and primary branches (Appendix 2). This aggregation was achieved through an iterative process of clarification, discussion, and collation. The final analytical step was to distinguish the meaningful relationships in our forest of trees. Returning repeatedly to the voices in the
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data, we worked first to identify the integrating themes and elements that characterize transformative cooperation in our eight case studies, and second, to examine the process dimensions that underlie the phenomenon. In the consequent discussion on theoretical implications that follows, we embed these concepts in the literature in an effort to build bridges and invite scholarly discourse. Our Team Research Story: Research Process, Identities, and Lenses
Along with conventional meta-analytic and grounded-theory techniques, we employed an action-theory research stance that acknowledges the interplay between the lenses we prefer as idiosyncratic organizational researchers and the research enterprises that we construct and conduct. Hence we and the rest of the case study authors talked early and regularly in the analysis process about sustaining the integrity of the subjects' voices and about how we could help one another soften interpretations that seemed too great a sense-making leap. We reflected on the nature of inherent bias in this study due to our own vested interests as authors of case studies in the meta-analysis. Moreover, we realized that our own collaboration was an instance of transformative cooperation, adding another layer of conversation about the integrity of our analysis of the phenomena we researched. For example, as we appreciated the influence of participants' histories in the stories of cooperation, we turned that insight onto ourselves and talked about our own histories and how they were biasing our ongoing analysis. This exploration manifested as recursive conversations that could frustrate those preferring more direct and rapid progress. Yet these experiences sharpened our perception of data about grounding transformation in participants' systemic histories, about their communication, and about the rich temporal dimensions of a group's development of agreement and transformation. Convening regularly for as long as our progress took, we managed to broaden and build our analytical agreements, despite taking critical stances on one another's reasoning. We shared an overarching commitment to our research mission, and this commitment enhanced our ability to let the data and our idiosyncrasies lead us in the case analysis and theory building.
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Overarching Themes and Elements from Our Meta-Study: Participant System Histories and Dynamics of Relating, Feeling, Knowing, and Doing
In this section we present the overarching themes and elements that were found in our analysis and vivify these aspects with selected examples from the cases. In all of the cases, participants expressed their respective systemic histories and sociodemographic characteristics. We called this tree of codes the participant system histories (PSHs) that each participant brought to the theater of engagement. The PSHs manifested in the participants' ways of relating (R), feeling (F), knowing (K), and doing (D), or the RFKD dynamic that influenced cooperation and learning, which in turn transformed participants' understanding of their systemic histories. These recursive loops converged participants' interactions, while their PSH identities developed integrity with their collective realities and challenge, manifesting as positive, reverberating change. The diagram in Figure 10.1 depicts a descriptive model of this transformative cooperation process. Each aspect is discussed in the next sections. Participant System Histories
Our data show that participants' cooperative behaviors were influenced by their personal histories and relationships within the greater systems that brought them together. The PSH tree includes the branch codes presented in Appendix 3. These words describe both personal and organizational behavior. Cooperation in each case revealed cultural and his-
Relating
-Doiog$F~Ih>gKnowing
FIGURE
1 0.1. Recursive relationships among transformative cooperation components.
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torical influences, whether in Poonamallee's case from India, with its distinctive culture and spiritual values and its history of colonialism; in Dyck's story of Honokahua, where the indigenous and modern cultures collided; in Powley's history of union management conflicts in Transport LTL; or in Howard's depiction of the education-organizing efforts of Positive Innovations with the age-old history of racial and cultural divides. Certainly the "financial reality" codes influenced organizational behavior. At an individual level, two key dimensions emerged among the codes: the systemic history of the individual leaders, and an epiphany or passionate commitment that the leaders had at some point. These examples can be found in the story of Rajendra Singh, TBS founder, in Poonamallee's Alwar case; in the history of Dave Dennis in the PII case; and in all the senior fellows' stories. Likewise, in the Brazilian favela case, Airton, the younger of the two brothers, tells his story of finding his calling to become a lawyer and work with the poor. He tells of studying biology and looking at cells under a microscope when he began to realize that every person, like every part of a cell, has a function. He began deeper soul-searching, asking, "Why am I here? What is my function?" In some ways, for transformative cooperation to happen, these individual and organizational dimensions have to join the conversation and fuse horizons. Ways of Relating
Participants' systemic histories created distinctions and boundaries that were reconsidered and recreated as quality relationships developed in these stories of transformative cooperation. Some of the ways that participants related and learned included communicating, collectivizing, coming together, balance, ways of believing, ways of being effective, and connectedness (see Appendixes 1 and 2 for supporting branch codes). Relating in these ways would be grounded in ways of feeling and doing, and influenced by ways of knowing and communicating. It makes sense, therefore, that participants all reported the importance of a common horizon or vision. We propose that cooperating stakeholder groups create a common, orienting vision that they can work toward while resolving their tensions and challenges. Such a vision
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enables shifts beyond the bounds of discrete interpersonal interactions or events to consider much larger legal, sociopolitical, and economic issues. But the clarity of any resulting shared purpose and commitment nevertheless depends on participants' tangible ways of relating, as noted by one senior fellow in Stratford's case: The very typical picture is a group ... that comes together for some time ... to somehow deal with some current, mostly future issue, or deal with a current issue by talking about what they're going to have in the future, and I have seen some real marvelous alignment of the human spirit in some of these.
Once again we see a conversation between concrete cooperation and abstract personal and group identities and visions. Participants alternately stand on one while transforming the other, in a balanced syncopation that may converge the group harmoniously toward thresholds of transformation. One senior fellow used the metaphor of musicians in an orchestra to characterize this interplay: I've come to the table to negotiate with you, and I pledge to you a balance. I will listen carefully and respectfully, and speak respectfully and honestly to you. That's my balance. Now, if you have balance and I have balance, then the two of us together will create harmony. We can play together like musicians in an orchestra. But if members of the orchestra haven't tuned their instruments?! No, they come having promised their members that they have practiced, have tuned their instruments, and will pay attention during the playing. And that way there will be some harmony.
The quality of relationships forged by the stakeholder groups emerges from our cases as a critical element in the transformation process. High-quality relationships form the foundation of a robust process of visioning and vision actualization through everyday routines. These relationships emerge and become stronger through continued action and interaction; this interaction is sustained through seemingly inviolable divides and their frustrations. In fact, it is the everyday routines and activities that build the necessary trust to invest in building these highquality relationships among stakeholders, in combination with a positive belief that there is value in these relationships, in the vision, and in the work that participants are doing together. These activities may be climbing a mountain (Strafford, 2003), the tireless digging of ponds (Poona-
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mallee, 2003), the organizing of a community center (Neville, 2003), or the reaffirmation of a willingness to wait (Dyck, 2003a, 2003b). In sum, high-quality cross-boundary relationships emerge when the stakeholder groups are able to hold on to what is important to each of them while being willing to let go, learn, and trust in development toward shared vision clarification and accomplishment. This process depends on a high level of reflective self-awareness and self-management by all the parties involved. Relationships and realities transform when the people involved transform themselves. Ways of Feeling
Ways of feeling was another tree of codes in the cooperation dynamic that emerged from our data. Affect and its resonance among participants are important elements of this tree. Actions were energized by affect in ways that seem to defy cost-benefit rationality, which led to cascading impact across multiple levels. Rajendra Singh in Poonamallee's case illustrates the centrality of feeling: "I cannot give any ideological, rational explanations; it was simply an emotional decision to stay and do the work." Words like fun, optimism, hope, empathy, affection, love, alive, and caring were seen in all the cases. In Strafford's case, one of the senior fellows stated: I'll come in without any of those preconceived notions and with a lot of enthusiasm. And I'm really genuinely excited about the project, so I see everybody else, and they think, "Hey, look, she's excited, I'm getting excited too." You know? You'll just elevate the energy of everything. People will start vibrating at a different level.
The cases also distinguished the results of generative emotions, such as giving and sacrifice. Honoring the sacrifices of those who came before is perhaps most powerfully conveyed by images of ancestors' remains scattered on bulldozed Honokahua sand in Dyck's case. The generous feelings are exemplified in Howard's case, which describes stipend receivers who decided to return their summer earnings and pool them in a central fund to be shared by all advanced placement classrooms. Not all feelings reported were positive. One senior fellow from Strafford's case described the difficulty of talking around the table when
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discovering stakeholders' systemic breakdowns and "healing the hurt" to liberate cooperation. As a facilitator, she would decorate the conference room in a soothing theme, such as a Hawaiian luau, and put simple toys on the table for fidgeting with. Similarly, Powley's case showed how the process of coming together in AI (Cooperrider, 1986) dispelled fears in the reliability and inclusiveness of the cooperation: They feared that this would just be another change-management technique. Yet when people saw that this was coming from the top and that the company's management was so engaged by the process, they felt this would be different. Some employees feared that people who came would be closed-minded or that the Summit wouldn't come together, that people wouldn't show up.
Underneath these various ways of feeling cooperation rings an emotional responsiveness to relationship. A senior fellow in Strafford's case described it as social passion in this way: You have to stay connected to that passion. And the way you do that is to stay connected to the people, those faces that will hit you. They give you all the energy you need to go back and slay the dragon because you're not doing it for you, you're doing it for them. People really are compassionate.
Acknowledging and engaging these emotions is instrumental to inspiring committed and collective action toward transformative cooperation. As Howard (2003) puts it in her paper, "Transformative cooperation is driven by emotional resonance. Transformative cooperation does not happen without resonant relational connection."
Ways of Knowing
Through emotionally supportive connections, conversations and action in these groups build organizational knowledge on participants' collective histories. A positive and affirmative assumption or attitude about collaborators as well as an assumption that all the stakeholders are open to developing sufficient common understanding for progress were well supported. As discussed, openness to possibilities facilitates learning by way of a guiding vision and tenacity. Ruiz Arauz states in her case that "the actors are aware of the realities and their complexities, but are able
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to deal with them by having the sense of finding ways that represent the appreciation of what the future could be." In Stratford's case, coding revealed the prevalence of groups clarifying their vision, principles, and organizing metaphors. A representative quote was, "How about the conversations about the mission and the values and the cornerstone principles? We had lots of those." Across the cases, the ways-of-knowing tree included knowing the local ground rules, boundaries, diversity, possibilities, projects, decision making, and big-picture and long-term complexities. There is a lot to know and learn while cooperating. Managing such complexities requires sincere developmental conversations and organizational innovation.
Ways of Doing
The codes in the ways-of-doing tree suggest collaboration, with a strong focus on eo-creation and change. Often a significant action would be taken by the group, provoking willingness to come together in cooperation. One senior fellow from Stratford's case highlighted a threshold of confidence that could be reached by achievement of such a significant action. "Right, some tangible things did happen, of course, but mostly it's the sense that you can do it. And there's a lot of ER-encouragement and reassurance-going on." Celebration of accomplishment was evident: Because you've got to keep people motivated. And so, even little successes should be celebrated because people then see they've done something. They've accomplished something, and they're ready to move to the next level. Not only do participants have to feel that they are making a difference, but it needs to be measurable.
For transformative cooperation to happen, it seems that action and communication are coincident and given an experimental quality. Visions and understanding are built with practices, capacities, and new ways of sharing collective resources. Although there is a role for expertise, there is no role for "experts" in this approach. Coming together is based on invitation and inclusion, and the collective storytelling shapes and communicates participant realities. Ground rules include affirmative assumptions about the other, equality of voice, openness, and coordinated pursuit of an overarching vision for the future of the community.
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In every one of the cases, community action has been catalyzed and supported by individual action and supportive structures providing opportunity for the community to engage together. For example, in Powley's case, the AI Summit provided such a context and space for engagement; in Ruiz Arauz's case, on building pathways, two countries cooperated to create a context for learning; and in Poonamallee's case, the River Parliament and indigenous capacity building provided the necessary access to opportunity structures for a diffused leadership and community engagement. Complementary to these supportive structures is an emphasis on "giving." Regardless of background, skills, and availability of resources in a conventional sense, there was opportunity and inclination for everybody to give. This could take a most basic form, in the ground rule that one senior fellow advised: "Do no harm." Integrating these dynamic aspects of transformative cooperationrelating, feeling, knowing, and doing-a quality of relationship and cooperation may grow. We aggregated codes into a tree called ways of being effective, the branches of which are ownership, capacity, reclamation, and confidence, which together present a participant like a mountain-grounded, ancient, and reaching. The participants can come together as whole individuals and develop their awareness of a common challenge, and are consequently open to relating and intentionally transforming their organization. Participants seemed to need both affirmation of their positive roles in their existing system as well as affirmation of their power to transform it for mutual benefit. Through time they were able to come together again and again and make personal and collective gains. Propositions That Emerged from Our Analysis
To complete the grounded theory analysis, descriptive propositions were synthesized from the code trees and their apparent relationships. These propositions can function as hypotheses to guide further research. 1. Fundamental change in the relationships between conflicting parties, who have a long history of being antagonists, can be transformed into a more healthful, respectful, and productive association.
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2. Transformative cooperation is a generative process leading to an accord, the impact of which often transcends mere agreement to large-scale influence previously unknown or even imagined. 3. When transformative cooperation emerges, personal and structural changes occur among and beyond the parties enmeshed in conflict. 4. Transformative cooperation creates opportunities for collective learning and growth. Emergent Theoretical Issues
As a research team, we discovered the following theoretical issues when considering the body of cases and some associated streams of organizational research.
Process Versus Outcome
Is transformative cooperation a process or an outcome? We argue that transformative cooperation is both process and outcome, both a process of becoming and a state of being. Parallels include the dualnature theory of light in physics or Giddens' (1984) structuration theory. In that sense, transformative cooperation is a process that prepares people and organizations to make particular kinds of generative and transformative outcomes possible, but it is the outcomes that qualify cooperation as transformative; both the ends and the means influence each other, through cooperative cycles of vision and action, discourse and recourse. Tipping Points
Gladwell's (2002) metaphor of the tipping point informed us how transformations in the cases would cascade after a long buildup of events, subgroups, and tensions between social, structural, political, historical, and economic factors. Each community has its own unique and dynamic combinations of these events, people and factors, and hence has different tipping points and developmental pathways. While establishing causality or making predictions in such complex phenomena is
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next to impossible, the intersubjective, self-similar factors nevertheless reveal patterns and tipping points among them, as shown by our code categories. For instance, the tipping point in the Honokahua Burial Site case (Dyck, 2003a, 2003b) came at the confluence of heightened multistakeholder awareness, peak levels of disinterred human remains, and government intervention. One senior fellow who studied cooperation as a pastime talked about groups developing sufficient confidence through shared vision and progressive achievements to take a "leap of faith" and do something truly transformative. Another indicator for the tippingpoint dynamic is the prevalence of a systemic challenge that charges the collective search for a vision and transformation; if frustrations turn to conflict, as in Honokahua and some villages in Alwar, then broadening and rebuilding cooperation certainly dramatizes the nature and impact of transformative cooperation.
Conversational Learning
A considerable amount of the time spent cooperating in these stories involves coming together and talking. Review of the fifty codes (Appendix 4) in our conversation set characterizes these conversations as having balance, a sense of space between freedom of voice and willingness to listen, between power and responsibility, between chatting and planning. It is this conversational space that researchers consider in conversational learning theory (Baker, Jensen, and Kolb, 2002). They propose that conversational space is opened as participants balance dialectical tensions, including the tension between epistemological discourse and ontological recourse. The recourse modes were suggested by participant recollections of finding commonality in the group, and trust and synergy. Given the variety of reported content-histories, facts, stories, visions, feelings, values, dialogue-the implied flexibility and resilience of the groups' conversations may also support the idea of a conversational learning space, where participants feel safe enough to be open to new meanings and to trust one another to find a better, equitable way ahead. One senior fellow found it helped to "encourage each other to sense, see, listen to, and speak of the whole system." Another senior fellow focused on inviting diverse stakeholders to the table and "cultivating" their capacities for dialogue: "The
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challenge with participation is, we haven't had the experiences with one another to effectively go to the table with that kind of trust." We propose that transformative cooperation includes conversational learning where participants practice their cooperative ways of relating, feeling, knowing, and doing, and learn how to coordinate their organizational activities more effectively. Perhaps they undergo a small fractal of the tipping-point process in the form of small contributions among open listeners who expect to learn something that can build excitement and release powerful distributed action.
Recursive Movement Along the Temporal Domain
Prominent in these case studies are the dynamics of progress toward substantive and sustainable change in the way individuals in organizations relate to, work with, come to know, and feel about one another. Our case stories of transformative cooperation suggest temporal dynamics that are not linear, consistent, or stable in their cadence. Figure 10.2 depicts the interplay between the past, present, and future lineage of transformative cooperation as identified in the case studies. The shared space intersecting all three domains represents the restorying of the
FIGURE
10.2.
Past, present, and future interplay.
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past, the reshaping of the future, and the alteration of current interactions where the boundaries of "we" are expanded. Each way of relating, feeling, knowing, and doing described in these cases has past, present, and anticipated experiences along a continuum of development. Looking at practices of transformative cooperation beyond individuals and specific groups suggests that transformative cooperation is a long-term, perhaps infinite process of recursive development, because it even includes ancestral connections to ways of relating, feeling, knowing, and doing. As we saw earlier, recursive relating and coming together in conversations produce future visions and resilient agreements grounded in historic experiences. Perhaps that is why their coordinated action effectively transforms the system's trajectory toward healthy sustainability. In at least several of these cases we see multiyear, intergenerational, and interspecies acts of cooperation that enriched community life. Because the past is an important consideration if cooperation is to be a transformative force, reclaiming and protecting that which is sacred is necessary. This means honoring and respecting what is sacred to the participants, remaining aware and rooted in present action, and looking forward to the joined horizons of future collaborative opportunities. Respecting the Past. The past must be included in any consideration of transformative cooperation that will have sustainable and positive reverberations. Examples from our case studies are the honoring of ancestral burial sites (Dyck, 2003a, 2003b), the reclamation of traditional water management practices (Poonamallee, 2003), and community learning and growth (Neville, 2003). This pattern is especially illuminating given the future-oriented bias of current sustainability definitions. Although sustainable development was originally conceived as "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), numerous definitions have emerged since then (Gladwin, Kennelly, and Drause, 1995) with some researchers calling for a more comprehensive definition to include sociocultural characteristics (Starik and Rands, 1995). The engagement and education of others in the promotion and stewardship of diverse cultural and spiritual values permits a fuller understanding of systemic transformations and sustainability.
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However, all of these definitions are devoid of concern about the heritage and lineage of humanity. Even the Earth Pledge of the June 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development is blind to the past as it encourages those swearing to it "to act to the best of my ability to make the earth a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations." Tenacity in the Present. Displays of tenacity are demonstrated by participants feeling confident and acting purposefully in certain ways of relating, knowing, and doing. Examples from our case studies include steadfastness of belief in environmental bountifulness (Poonamallee, 2003), commitment to habitat conservation (Ruiz Arauz, 2003), strong belief that self-created alternatives are available for the extremely poor (Neville, 2003), and the resolve to use education to gain access to opportunity for marginalized populations (Howard, 2003). There is a soulful and inspirational belief that the actions of participants involved in the transformation will be fruitful to their respective causes. This tenacity is forward-orienting and way-finding for the individuals involved and serves as a positive emotional attractor (Dyck, Caron, and Aron, 2006) to others on the periphery of the transformation. There is commitment to mission, encouragement and reassurance, and principled practice. Being committed to the moment recognizes the impact of the present on the future but also demands an openness that was evident in the cases and conveyed by codes such as emergence, discovery, spontaneity, surprise, creating, big picture, and emergent leadership. The apparent intentionality of effort is balanced by "letting go" to enable trust in that which is not immediately apparent or that which one is not able to articulate. Perhaps tenacious cooperation to transform a system has to open spaces for new organizational behavior. There is a fundamental belief that what you are doing is right and that guidance and direction will appear. It forms a tacit knowing or an unarticulated contentment and confidence that implicitly supports one's actions. Even amid complete chaos and massive disruption, one experiences an inner calm, a sense of peace, and a bizarre or illogical centeredness that imparts a feeling that everything will be okay. However, tranquility necessitates lengthy forbearance and composure.
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In the Honokahua case study (Dyck, 2003a, 2003b), for example, one of the participants stated the following: Going out to the site every week and looking into these ancestral graves, we weren't only bearing witness, we were there waiting for an opening, waiting for something to happen that would change. We didn't even know if it was coming; we just had to be there. Faithful attendance, that's all you can do. And what little protections that you have in place, you must make sure that they are adhered to. There's a part of you that's just there. It never gives up. Eventually something opens up.
joined Future Horizons. Compromise, giving in, and retracting central tenants that were core to the participants' missions were not figural in our examples of transformative cooperation. Strength of commitment to the cause that brought them to the engagement was not diluted by coming together. The sacredness of ancestral human remains among native Hawaiians in Dyck's case was in fact heightened because of the Honokahua controversy. Likewise, the river was now more central to human existence in Poonamallee's case, and education was more of a fulcrum for change among participants in Howard's case. However, what changed was that space was made for the other through shared governance, community participation, and a rekindled passion for a generative lineage that moves participants along the temporal domain. Although government is often associated with structure, rules, and bureaucracy, we saw meaningful benefits to case study participants from being invited into a collective decision-making system. In particular, shared governance was a prominent feature of the cases of Dyck, Poonamallee, and Neville. In Dyck's case, Hawaiian Island burial councils were implemented that comprised native Hawaiians and land developers who facilitate a comprehensive protocol when human skeletal remains are found. Similarly, in Poonamallee's case, to ensure that the river and the surrounding ecology remained prosperous, the villages in Arvari watershed formed the Arvari River Parliament. The Brazilian favela Quatro Varas in Neville's case is run as a collective, open to a wide range of levels of involvement, and forms a spider's web of relationships. Participation by the community also took multiple forms in our stories. In Neville's case, Quatro Varas offers a community-based program for residents of and visitors to the favela and is composed of primary care therapies, job skills training, and hope that blends spiritual traditions
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and academic training. In Dyck's case, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel annually hosts the Celebration of the Arts festival, which requires extensive interior changes to accommodate the various cultural events attended by local native Hawaiians and visitors. At the Tanztheater Wuppertal, in Puerta's case, each performance is eo-created with the dancers and the choreographer by intimately capturing the felt emotion of each dancer. Ruiz Arauz's research discovered how migratory birds and their water canals expanded the community of participant learners. Through the reclamation of what was most sacred to case study participants, a renewed passion emerged for understanding the generative lineage or the pathway to their respective vitalities. For native Hawaiians in Dyck's case it was reclaiming and protecting the sacredness of their ancestors' remains. Poonamallee's story revealed the life-giving force of water, and Howard's case demonstrated liberation through education. Transformative cooperation was possible in all of the cases because the confluence of participants' future horizons created widened vistas of possibility. Table 10.1 reflects a summary of the past influences on the future that each of the participants in the case studies drew on to work through the present. For instance, the Honokahua Burial Site in Dyck's case drew on ancient Hawaiian protocols for disinterment and reinterment to work through the land-development conflict and to create structural transformation for the future. Traditional water-management practices in Poonamallee's case were used to address famine and impoverishment in the present and to create a thriving and self-sustaining ecology. Transport LTL in Powley's case identified individual and collective strengths from past highpoint experiences to reorient current chronic conflict between union and management toward an egalitarian future. While maintaining sustenance for the present and ensuring viability for the future are indeed important for the sustainability of transformative cooperation, so must be honoring the sacredness of our ancestors and the artifacts of our past. We need to balance looking forward with looking backward and seek guidance from the past when envisioning sustainability for the future. While Calvin (1994) suggests that humans are the "stewards of life's continuity on earth," Clifford Nae'ole from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel (Dyck, 2003a, 2003b) emphatically affirms that we are all Kahu, or the honored caretakers of our past.
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TABLE
1 0.1. Past influences on the future through the present
Case Study
Past
Present
Future
Honokahua Burial Site (Dyck, 2003)
Sacredness of iwi (bones) Ancient Hawaiian protocols
Land development conflict Honokahua controversy
Relational and structural transformations
Famine and impoverishment Desert
Thriving and selfsustaining Shared governance Math literacy Community development
Traditional water Indian waterways management reclamation (Poonamallee, 2003) practices Positive Innovations Inc. (Howard, 2003)
Resource sharing Relational practice
Unequal access to education and opportunity
American Leadership Forum (Strafford, 2003)
Leadership: community experiences and scholarship
Practicing Partnerships and transformative cross-boundary relational leadership cooperation
Brazilian favelas (Neville, 2003)
Authentic relationship Valuing humanness
Healthy community webs Extreme poverty
Community creation Flourishing of human spirit
Migratory patterns of cardinals (Ruiz Arauz, 2003)
Search for similarities World as ecosystem
Disparate migratory learning
International cooperation to conserve bioregions
Tanztheater Wuppertal (Puerta, 2003)
Idiosyncratic presenting of self
Heritage of diversity Emergent creation of novelty
Transport LTL (Powley, 2003)
Collective sharing Searching for strengths
Harsh financial times Chronic conflict
Mutual respecting Egalitarianism
Conclusion: Next Steps and Research Possibilities
Our analysis of the eight case studies and all sense-making in this chapter are works in progress and part of an ongoing effort to establish a research agenda on transformative cooperation. We hope that our inquiries will serve as a springboard to further discovery of holistic and systemwide exemplars of collaboration beyond the NDTC conference. Our questions to direct future research begin from a conceptual
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vantage point by asking, How do we assemble a theory of transformative cooperation? What are the antecedent conditions to transformative cooperation? What are the process dynamics that facilitate transformative cooperation? To study transformative cooperation we need to be able to measure the variance in examples of transformative cooperation and identify the relationships that covet or would be best served by transformative cooperation. From a practical perspective, we must build transformative cooperation praxis into our organizations, communities, and international affairs and determine the elements that would be included in transformative cooperation pedagogy. Finally, to continue this important work we must be able to articulate the positive outcomes and reverberations of transformative cooperation and establish what sustains reverberations from transformative cooperation.
References
Baker, A. C., P. ]. Jensen, and D. A. Kolb. 2002. Conversational Learning. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Bal, M. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University Press. Calvin, W. H. 1994. "The Emergence of Intelligence." Scientific American, 271(4):101-107. Cooperrider, D. L. 1986. "Appreciative Inquiry: Toward a Methodology for Understanding and Enhancing Organizational Innovation." Doctoral dissertation, Organizational Behavior, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Cooperrider, D. L., and]. Dutton (eds.). 1999. No Limits to Cooperation: The Organization Dimensions of Global Change. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Dyck, L. R. 2003a. "Honokahua: Evolutionary Moments of Transformative Cooperation." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Dyck, L. R. 2003b. "Transforming Business and Society with Cooperation: Effects of Transformative Cooperation Between Improbable Parties in Conflict." Paper presented at the Academy of Management, Seattle, WA. Dyck, L. R., A. Caron, and D. Aron. (2006). "Working on the Positive Emotional Attractor Through Training in Health Care." Journal of Management Development, 25(7): 671. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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Gladwell, M. 2002. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Back Bay Books. Gladwin, T. N.,].]. Kennelly, and T.-S. Drause. 1995. "Shifting Paradigms for Sustainable Development: Implications for Management Theory and Research." Academy of Management Review, 20(4): 874-907. Glaser, B. G., and A. L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Howard, A. 2003. "Math Literacy and Catalytic Organizing at Positive Innovations, Incorporated: Exploring a Social Change Organization's Ethos and Practice as a Case Study in Transformative Cooperation." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Jaworski,]. 1998. Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Neville, M. G. 2003. "When Poor is Rich: Transformative Power of Relationships and Humanness." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Poonamallee, L. 2003. "Transforming Realities: Making the Improbable Possible Through Co-operation." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Powley, E. H. 2003. "Transformative Cooperation in a Unionized Transportation Company." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Puerta, M. 2003. "Pina Bausch Wuppertal Tanztheater: The Power of Emotions and Coexistence." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Ruiz Arauz, M. E. 2003. "What If the Earth Was My Home and Words from a Prophet: A Collection of Stories of Voices in Transformative Cooperation." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. Starik, M., and G. P. Rands. 1995. "Weaving an Integrated Web: Multilevel and Multisystem Perspectives of Ecologically Sustainable Organizations." Academy of Management Review, 20(4): 908-935. Strafford, N. 2003. "Experiencing Transformational Cooperation: Stories of Senior Fellows of the American Leadership Forum, Houston Gulf Coast Chapter." Paper presented at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation Conference, Cleveland, OH. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. In Our Common Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Dyck and Stratford
Appendix 1. Ninety-Nine Sets of the 984 Free Codes
Action Affect Affirmation Antecedents Assumption Awareness Balance Barriers Being-state Believing Big picture Boundary Building Capacity Catalyst Celebration Change Child Clarity eo-creation Coexistence Collective Commonality Communication Community Complexity Confidence Conflict Confluence Connection Contagious Continuity Cooperation Core Creating Culture Decision making
Design Desire Diversity Emergence Encouragement Energy Epiphany Equality Experiencing External Facilitating Faith Focus on Freedom Generating Giving Global Ground rules Harmony History Inclusion Information Innovating Inquiry Intentional Intergenerational Intervention Inviting Leadership Learning Letting go Life Local Metaphors Method Mutuality Nature
Openness Organizing Outcomes Ownership Pace Paradox Participation Personal Perspective Possibilities Power of conversationa! energy Process Project Protecting Reclamation Relationship with government Researcher's relationship Resource Sharing Stakeholders Storytelling Sustainability TC Process Temporal Vision
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Appendix 2. Sixteen Code Trees and Primary Branches
1.
Ways of Doing Action, Catalyst, Affirmation, Building, Change, Co-Creation, Do No Harm, Connecting, Creating, Giving
2.
Ways of Knowing Assumptions, Constructs, Clarity, Awareness, Valuing, Big PictureComplexity, Local, Temporal, Vision
3.
Ways of Feeling/Affect
4.
Participant System and Histories Culture, Diversity, Epiphany, Experience, External, Financial Reality, Relationship with Government, History
5.
Balance Harmony, Mutuality, Paradox
6.
Ways of Differentiating Barriers, Boundaries, Conflict, Diversity
7.
Ways of Believing-Faith
8.
Ways of Being Effective Capacity, Confidence, Ownership, Reclamation
9.
Possibilities Intergenerational, Child, Temporal
10.
Communicating Storytelling, Co-Forming an Initiative, Power, Respect in Conversation
11.
Collectivising Commonality, Collective, Organizing Metaphor, Confluence, Cooperative Sharing, Culture, Resources Sharing
12.
Coming Together Coexistence, Continuity, Inclusion, Inviting
13.
Design Equality, Ground Rules, Organizing, Project, Decision Making
14.
Intention-Emergence/Letting Go
15.
Leadership/Encouragement
16.
Changed Outcomes
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Appendix 3. Eight Sets of Codes Supporting Participant System History
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Culture Diversity Financial Reality Experience External Influences Relationship with Government History Epiphany
Appendix 4. The Set Aggregated as Communication Codes
Action-Oriented Conversations Active Listening Balance in Listening and Expressing Change Through Conversation, Dialogue Communicating Communicating Positively and Respect Communication Communications System Community Conversation Conversation Critical to Community Conversation, a Trigger to Change Conversations about Values and Purpose Conversations Beyond the Bottom Line Conversations, Regular Frequent Dialogic Establishment of Communication System Human Dialogue Life-Giving Communication Listen Listening Listening and Being Heard Listening Quality More Communication Than Ever
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Negative Remarks Opportunity to Speak Power and Responsibility Power of Conversation Power of Dialogue Power of Stories Power of Transformative Cooperation Power of Togetherness Power of Trust and Honesty in Dialogue Publishing Values Regular Communications and collaboration Respect Respect and Courtesy Respect for Sacred Respect for Tradition Respectful Agreement Same Kind of Language Seeing Through Signage Talking Medicine Talking to Understanding Feelings Talking, Really Talking Transformative Cooperation and Conversation Trust and Respect Willingness to Listen Willingness to Hear Word of Mouth
11
Designing Transformative Learning PAUL SHRIVASTAVA
Transformative cooperation is a vital idea deeply needed in our troubled world. Most of our world-scale problems, such as poverty, conflict, pollution, and terrorism, have become intractable in recent years. They cannot be resolved by incremental and fragmented approaches. To solve them we need systemic transformation of our economic, social, political, and technological systems. Because such transformation implicates many individuals and organizations, cooperation plays a central role in bringing about successful change. However, both transformation and cooperation are poorly understood in concept and practice. What exactly do they mean? How can we enable people to engage in them? How can we get managers to learn these concepts? These are some of the key questions that need to be addressed. As educators, learning and training are our tools of trade. In this chapter I am interested in understanding and explaining the learning implications of transformative cooperation. I seek to better understand what transformative learning is and how it can be accomplished. As members of a profession, we can participate in global transformation by developing transformative learning systems. This chapter articulates transformative learning in a way that allows business educators to examine their professional assumptions and practices, and it offers avenues for designing transformative learning systems. I begin by exploring transformative cooperation and its requirements. I
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then develop the idea of transformative learning in the context of business education and training. This discussion is followed by a review of the role of technology in creating transformative learning, and by an examination of the design of blended learning solutions that emphasize connectedness in learning experiences. The chapter provides examples of transformative learning, and concludes with some questions for business education. Transformative Cooperation
Taking a cue from the "New Designs in Transformative Cooperation" conference invitation, I accept transformative cooperation to be "the process that generates a new threshold of cooperative capability and takes people to a higher stage of moral development, while serving to build a more sustainable world future" (Cooperrider, Sorensen, Yaeger, and Whitney, 2003; Burns, 2003; Hubbard, 1998). One vision of building a more sustainable world implies transforming the institutions, systems, and practices that affect relationships between humans and nature. Sustainable development is an economic strategy that seeks to meet the needs of the current generation while being mindful of the needs of future generations. It preserves and augments ecological resources to ensure their future sustainability. While this approach implies wide-ranging changes in all our economic, social, and political systems, the most immediate and relevant institutions and systems for implementing sustainable development are corporations and the world economic order. Transformation here means comprehensive structural change in corporations and in world trade and economic policies-change that critically questions prior assumptions, that encompasses all parts of the system, and that results in higher levels of economic and ecological performance. Cooperation is an essential element of such transformation. In our complex and interconnected world, large-scale changes cannot be accomplished without cooperation between and within organizations. Cooperation requires the parties to see commonality among their goals, to be willing to share resources, and to make mutual sacrifices for the common good. It also requires new definitions and measures of success that are directly tied to sustainability goals. Transformative cooperation is both an individual and organizational
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commitment to jointly pursue higher goals of sustainable development. At the individual level it implies a moral commitment to minimizing our personal ecological footprint. At the organizational level it subscribes to the ethics of collective ecological action. At the global level it acknowledges the importance of sustainable relationships between humans and nature, a respect for nonhuman life, and the collective responsibility of intergenerational stewardship of nature. Transformative learning
Transformative learning in this context is learning that supports transformative cooperation by providing the cognitive capabilities and knowledge base for that learning. It is learning that enables individuals to take on the challenge of transforming themselves, their organizations, and their communities. It is as much about content or subject matter as about the process of learning. It is learning that changes emotional, psychological, and social patterns of behavior to enable transformation to occur. There are at least two important conditions for transformative learning if sustainability is to occur. First, subjects must have intrinsic interest in the overarching goal of sustainability. Intrinsic interest is established through an understanding of the cause-effect relationships of sustainable development. Intrinsic interest occurs when learners find joy or pleasure in sustainability activities. So transformative cooperative learning for sustainable development must be based on an understanding of organizational impacts on the environment. Second, the learning must make connections between self and others, and reconnect self with work and ideas in new and generative ways. Transformative learning is about breaking old patterns of behavior and reestablishing new ones. Transformation also implies large-scale and systemwide changes. Connecting to others. Transformative learning connects learners to peers with whom they can share a spirit of inquiry and empathy. It connects learners to experts who can provide experienced and mature viewpoints and guide them thru difficult concepts. It connects learners to their organizational stakeholders to place learning in context. In transformative learning these connections to others need to be widespread, with the ability to affect large numbers of people.
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Connecting to work. Transformative learning is work focused. It provides knowledge on a just-in-time basis to get work accomplished efficiently and effectively. It enhances productivity. It fosters links between work and broader business and social goals. Connecting to self. Transformative learning encourages connections to one's self through self-exploration and getting in touch with emotional and spiritual aspects of self. It espouses self-reflection, self-examination, and self-discovery. It seeks incremental growth in the whole person and not just incremental understanding. It involves taking responsibility for learning. Connecting with ideas. All learning is about connecting with ideas. Transformative learning seeks to deepen our understanding of ideas by uncovering their ethical assumptions. It encourages understanding the global, social, ecological, and ethical implications of ideas, and possibilities for change. Transformative learning has been practiced in many different contexts under different rubrics. Books such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire and Myra Bergman Ramos (2002); Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change, by lra Shor (1992); and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks (1994) represent one stream of thought in transformative learning. These writers are concerned with critical inquiry as a method for personal, social, and global transformations. Their aim is to empower groups to challenge oppression and basic assumptions. Freire identifies the current educational system as an arm of oppression. He advocates transforming the classroom away from a view of the teacher as making a "deposit of information" into the minds each student. This view valorizes the teacher, devalues the experience of the students, and reproduces the attitudes and practices of the teacher and the oppressive society to which the teacher belongs, in which life is judged by material possessions. Freire and Shor and hooks all argue in favor of classrooms in which teachers and students are on equal footing and the subject matter is rooted in the experiences of the students. Through such studentcentered learning, they believe, students can become empowered, and empowerment is collective rather than individual. While this notion of transformative education is very useful and has had an enormous impact on educators, it can be further extended by
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reconsidering "the classroom" in the technologized society in which we live (Cranton, 1994). Computers, the Internet, and telecommunications technologies make the world our classroom. Information can be acquired from anywhere and anyone, at any time. Ideas can be discussed, argued, archived, blogged, and Web cast. People can cooperate, collaborate, and work in teams to produce intellectual products. These technologies can and should inform any approach to transformative learning (O'Sullivan, Morrell, and O'Connor, 2003). It is the element of ubiquitous technology, particularly collaborative technology, that makes cooperative transformation feasible and even easy. Technologically driven transformative collaborative learning is particularly relevant to business organizations in the context of ecological sustainability. Transformative learning in business and organizational settings can serve as a method of productive sustainable change. Business organizations now provide the learning context for a large number of adults. Organizations, with their structures, systems, cultures, technologies, and market conditions, form the milieu in which learning occurs. Technology is indisputably one of the key drivers of business productivity, customer and supply-chain relationships, and internal organizational changes in business today. Technology is also a fundamental driver of ecological pollution and, consequently, sustainability. Technology-Enabled Transformative Learning
For a large part of our history, learning and teaching have been intensely interpersonal processes involving teacher and learner. They have occurred in formal classroom settings or in informal mentoring relationships. In the last decade, with the proliferation of information and telecommunication technologies, we witnessed a fundamental change in basic learning processes, especially among adult learners. Numerous learning technologies emerged that allow different modes of communication, collaboration, assimilation, and testing. These technologies include presentation technologies, the Internet, and collaboration software. They offer many possibilities for making new connections and restructuring old ones. Table 11.1 lists several educational and training technologies and the kind of change processes they enable.
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TABLE
11.1. Learning technologies and the change processes they enable
Technology
Enables
Presentation technologies
Clear communication of ideas
World Wide Web
Repository of information Distribution of information Scaling to reach large numbers of learners Anytime anywhere access
E-mail and instant messaging
Instant connection among people
Video Conferencing
Multiperson collaboration Voice and image sharing
Printing, webcasting, podcasting
Self-publishing, wide information dissemination
Handheld and mobile computing devices
Mobile learning, portability
Wireless communications
Remote access
Collaboration technologies
Cooperation, cowork, team work, group effort, partnerships
This emphasis on the proliferation of technologies does not imply that they are the main or only driving forces for transformative learning, or that all learning needs to be technologically enhanced. Instead, the purpose of introducing these technologies is to show the wide array of tools now available to educators to meet their transformational objectives. Transformative Professional Learning
In the context of professional business learning, in recent years we have seen an emergence of blended learning solutions. These are hybrid learning formats that combine traditional instructor-led classroom training with online learning, in-company projects, and external social or environmental projects. Many companies, including Kodak, the Body Shop, and Cisco Systems, are experimenting with blended learning as a way of expanding the reach and scope of their training. By breaking the mold of one-way instructor-centered classroom training, blended learning solutions offer opportunities for expanding diverse learning objectives, incor-
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porating different learning activities and resources, and reaching large audiences to bring about transformative changes (Shrivastava, 2005). One popular manifestation of technology-enhanced learning in business is online MBA programs. Several dozens of these programs are available and several more are under development. While they do not fulfill the promise of transformative learning, they innovatively use technology to make connections with others, encourage virtual teamwork, and engage social challenges on a global scale. Some of these programs use blended, personalized, and connected learning programs to provide just-in-time knowledge. At this time I do not see any excellent examples of well-established learning programs directed toward transformative change. However, there are great opportunities in many professional areas for implementing such learning. Consider the health care area. Medical errors cause more than one hundred thousand deaths each year in the United States. Medical decision making currently is largely the domain of medical practitioners, specifically doctors. Doctors train very hard to gain the expertise and skills necessary to become professionals. Medicine is progressively becoming more technologized. Supporting doctors is now a whole layer of technical workers (technicians, equipment operators, paramedical workers, and nurses) who deal with medical equipment, testing, and interpretation of data. With the availability of medical information on the Internet, patients are becoming more aware of their medical conditions. Clearly the relevant knowledge base for medical decisions is expanding dramatically, and the doctor-patient relationship is increasingly mediated with other professionals. This is a highly promising milieu for blended transformative learning that engages all relevant sources of knowledge to reach better medical decisions. Existing professional learning programs can reach their transformative potential by incorporating several features. Emphasize project-based learning. People learn by doing. This is especially true for adults. Professional programs could increase the level of engagement in learning by emphasizing project-based learning. Projects that are designed to be problem focused and relevant to learners' interests evoke interest in learning. Projects can be designed to vary in size, scope, complexity, content, process, and involvement of others to suit virtually any learner's needs. Projects that are relevant to workplace issues have the added attraction of being useful after completion.
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Centralize personal agendas and interest. To sustain the interest and effort level of learners, learning must be made intensely personal. This approach requires centralizing the experience of learners in the learning process. Learning must evoke and explicate learners' life experiences because deep emotional understanding stems from these experiences. Learners' experiences must be surfaced in a safe environment. Learners should be encouraged to individually and collectively examine, critique, and extend their experiences. Support managed collaboration. Collaboration is a labor-intensive process. Working with others involves additional work. Collaborative learning can succeed only when it is supported with appropriate tools, services, and infrastructure. It can be facilitated by providing a collaboration platform or framework, having facilitators to move the process along, and offering rewards for collaborative outputs. Incorporate multiple perspectives. In a world divided along so many social, political, and cultural lines, understanding complex problems requires understanding them from the multiple perspectives of various stakeholders. The whole area of sustainable development is rife with complexities and conflicts. Transformative learning about sustainability is built on multiple-perspective understanding of issues. The synthesis of multiple perspectives into solutions that transcend conflicting positions can lead to systemic change. Engage important problems. Transformative learning requires a high degree of motivation on the part of learners. Motivation to learn and excitement about the learning content increases if the content is associated with important social and human problems. Unfortunately the link between the content and its broader context is not always clear to learners. Learning programs are often limited, focusing on specified issues and topics that include the body-of-knowledge requirements of the field. The larger context and the relationship to larger social problems is either ignored or not specifically identified. Holistic Embodiment Pedagogy
Another route to transformative learning is to radically change pedagogical approaches. Current pedagogies largely focus on cognitive performance, ignoring physical and emotional performance. Even the
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cognitive elements are further fragmented into disciplinary silos. So a typical college course focuses on a few selected topics within a subfield of a discipline, with little connection to the organizational, social, cultural, and historical context of the topics. The content is delivered in an unembodied, acontextual, objectivist pedagogy bereft of action and emotion. If the managing of professional work is to be something more than a set of disembodied analytical techniques, the content must be taught differently. It must be infused with emotion and passion. Managing with passion involves using analytical skills, physical stamina, and the human spirit to accomplish and exceed goals. Holistic embodiment involves extending learning beyond traditional cognitive and analytical performance and goals to include physical and emotional or spiritual performance. Physical embodiment of work concepts can take the form of participant observation of ongoing activities, internship, and organizing activities and events, and the necessary training for them. Spiritual performance in this context involves understanding the role of spirit in the accomplishment of goals, and developing skills of spiritual realization. The human spirit can be evoked through a variety of experiences-religious, artistic, communitarian, physical, naturalistic, and others. An example of a course designed with this approach is my course "Managing with Passion." This course seeks to build knowledge of basic events-management skills in an interdisciplinary, integrative, holistic, and action learning mode. It integrates disciplines of the mind with those of the body and spirit in exploring essential lessons in organization and management. It is designed as a capstone experience that allows students to integrate and apply their prior knowledge from management and other courses, and their life experiences, in designing and creating an event. It is a projects-based course that encourages learning by doing; accordingly, course goals are achieved through multiple projects. The course uses an embodiment pedagogy that allows students to physically and emotionally experience what they learn intellectually. The course is built around organizing and experiencing a triathlon-a race (the Susquehanna Steelman Triathlon in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, www.steelmantri.com) that includes the sports of swimming (.4 miles), biking (13 miles), and running (3 miles). The race is designed and
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executed as a community event and draws participants from the university and its various stakeholder communities. It is a USAT (National Standards body) sanctioned standard race. Learning objectives of the course include the following: 1. Analytical: Learn the basic concepts and techniques of management necessary to create a community-based triathlon event. These concepts and techniques include visioning, designing, planning, budgeting, promoting, advertising, organizing, fundraising, supervising, hiring, training, and maintaining accounts. 2. Physical: Train for and participate in the sprint distance triathlon as an individual or as a relay team member. 3. Spiritual: Understand and experience the human spirit and its role in work accomplishment. Experience the emotional cycle of setting and accomplishing challenging goals. Reflect on great feats of the human and community spirit.
Students learn how to conceptualize, design, and organize a real event. Their efforts lead to creation of a triathlon race for the community. This course teaches them the full cycle of activities for creating events. With this knowledge they are able to professionally create other events for their community, company, or social organization. On the physical side, students learn to set personal goals and train to achieve them. They are guided, prepared, and motivated to complete an actual triathlon race at whatever level they are capable. Training for and doing a triathlon is an exciting and exhilarating experience and can make fundamental changes in the ways people think and behave. Participants also learn the different ways of getting in touch with their spiritual side. They understand how emotion and spirit create motivation and passion for their pursuits. Through readings, observation, experiencing, reflection, and meditation, students develop spiritual skills. Organizing and managing are necessary in all walks of life and in all types of private-, government-, and volunteer-sector organizations. The course is relevant to anyone who wishes to learn basic concepts and practices of management and to experience management. There are no prerequisites for the course, but participants must be willing to exercise both their minds and their bodies, both inside and outside the
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classroom. They do not have to be an athlete, or an expert swimmer, runner, or biker, to complete this course. People with the inclination for outdoor activities and in healthy condition can train to do triathlons. Triathlons are an endurance sport that requires training. Participants work to achieve their personal best, and not necessarily to outcompete others. With appropriate training even seventy-year-olds complete races. If a participant is not able to do the full triathlon the first time, he or she can be part of a relay team on which they do one of the three sports-swimming, biking, or running. So, in the easiest scenario, one can be the runner in a relay team and end up walking the entire three miles! People with physical handicaps are also welcome and work with the instructor to accomplish their personal goals. Questions for Business Schools and Educators
Business schools and their faculty are key players in shaping management education and training. They face both the challenge and the opportunity of transforming business education for the betterment of corporations and society. By engaging in transformative learning they also stand to distinguish their own products and services in a highly competitive marketplace. Given the structural barriers to change, any move in this direction is likely to be long-drawn-out and difficult. Those wishing to embark on this journey should begin by questioning the core assumptions of their programs. Training formats. Most business schools' programs are a variation on instructor-led classroom training. Some programs move the class from campus to corporate offices if demand warrants it. Some programs are adding on small e-learning components to their programs. But few if any programs have questioned the appropriateness of this approach or used blended learning to its full potential. Blended learning offers many creative options for delivery. Learning content. Standard textbooks are the backbone of learning materials in business education programs. These texts are augmented with some Web materials, and on occasion with customized company materials. The textbook made sense as a source of consensual knowledge of the field in an era of information scarcity. Today there is neither an information scarcity nor consensus. Textbooks alone are
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inadequate for delivering content. The new technologies of e-learning offer opportunities for intense customization and even personalization of content to meet the needs of specific individuals and groups. Content can come from nontraditional sources, from multiple experts and peers, in many different formats (images, audio, video, text, short messages, and so on). In this milieu of rich content opportunities, business schools must question the appropriateness of textbooks and explore designing and using content creatively. Business models. Much of business education is undergirded by the classical economic assumptions of profit-maximizing firms or modified versions of such assumptions. In today's economy, companies are simultaneously pursuing a bewildering variety of business models and social goals. They may optimize market share, intellectual property, social capital, human resources, and ecological performance, among others. Business education should question its traditional assumptions about which organizational goals are worth pursuing. Alternative pedagogies. Using holistic embodiment or other transformative learning approaches offers business schools major opportunities for educational innovation. Such approaches are particularly appealing to adult learners because they more fully incorporate the whole person and his or her skills into the learning process. To support experimentation and innovation, schools will need commensurate faculty development, changes in the evaluation and reward of instructors, and appropriate infrastructural support. Role of the faculty. In traditional B-schools, faculty are the main drivers of change. If transformative learning has to occur, faculty must introduce it. That means they must first appreciate its importance and understand its implications for their teaching. However, to the extent that transformative learning involves learners taking responsibility for their own learning, we need to reassess the roles of faculty and learners and the relationships among them. Learners could play a more active role in defining learning goals and designing their own training. My main purpose in this exploratory chapter has been to initiate a conversation on transformative learning. As an educator, I am eager to understand how one can design and implement transformative learning experiences. Clearly I am not ready to offer any firm conclusions. Learning can be the generative engine underlying transformative cooperation.
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Learning in business organizations has historically fostered incremental changes. Transformative change offers a whole new challenge to our profession. References
Burns, James McGregor. 2003. Transforming Leadership. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Cooperrider, David L., Peter F. Sorensen, Therese Yaeger, and Diana Whitney (eds.). 2003. Appreciative Inquiry: An Emerging Direction for Organization Development. Champaign, IL: Stipes. Cranton, Patricia. 1994. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Freire, Paolo, and Myra Bergman Ramos. 2002. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Press. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Hubbard, Barbara Marx. 1998. Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential. Nova to, CA: New World Library. Shor, Ira. 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: University of Chicago, Press. Shrivastava, Paul. 2005. "Work Embedded E-Learning." In Charles Wankel and Robert DeFillippi (eds.), Educating Managers Through Real World Projects, 225-247. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishers. O'Sullivan, Edmund, Amish Morrell, and Mary Ann O'Connor. 2003. Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning: Essays on Theory and Praxis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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The Usefulness of Design Research in Elementary and High Schools for Management Education ]ORDI TRULLEN, JEAN M. BARTUNEK, and MARYELLEN HARMON
The purpose of this book is to develop new designs for transformative cooperation, especially designs related to business and management in some way. Design is a term that is growing in popularity in management. It has been fostered by Boland and Collopy's book (2004) based on the opening of the Peter Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University. In addition, Postrel's book (2004) has gained wide attention. Design was also the focus of a recent issue of Fast Company (June 2005). Often considered under the rubric of design science, design is emerging in management research as well. It has recently been discussed conceptually by Romme (2003a) and van Aken (2004, 2005). Moreover, a large-scale design project, what some consider the largest planned change intervention that has ever taken place, is under way at the National Health Service in England (Bate and Robert, in press; NHS Modernisation Agency, 2004; Plsek, Bibby, and Whitby, 2007). In addition to specifying the topic for discussion at the New Designs in Transformative Cooperation conference and for this book, the editors invited authors to view this event as a forum for sharing our thinking and for developing new hypotheses and agenda items on this key topic. In this chapter we take advantage of their invitation in multiple ways. First, we focus the chapter on design-on how designing may be used in efforts to create more effective education. Second, we suggest a way of contributing to management thought on design that comes from
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an unlikely source: elementary and high school teachers. Some kind of collaboration between management professors and high school and elementary school teachers, one in which management educators actually learn from these educators, would truly be transformative. In particular, we explore the possibility that design approaches developed primarily for elementary and high school math and science education might foster management education in a way that suggests transformative cooperation, if not being transformative themselves. There is considerable discussion (see, for example, Ghoshal, 2005; Gosling and Mintzberg, 2003; Mintzberg and Sacks, 2004) of the idea that management education can benefit from initiatives that foster new ways of thinking on the part of students. Third, what we present here are not completed, fully tested ideas. Rather, they are ideas we have been exploring that we want to open up to others in order to foster joint exploration and development. The outline of the chapter is as follows: We begin by introducing and describing design research, paying particular attention to the concept of ideal type or design structure. We focus on ways in which design research has been implemented in elementary and secondary education. In the second part of the chapter we suggest some ways that designbased research can help improve existing research in management education, especially management education understood broadly, in ways that may foster transformative cooperation. A Design Approach to Research
The idea of a design science was originally suggested by Herbert Simon in his well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial (1996). In that book, Simon distinguished between natural sciences and artificial, or design, sciences. The first type of science was concerned with "how things are" whereas the second referred to "how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals" (58-59). Simon described design sciences as particularly suited for professional fields, which include, among others, engineering, architecture, and medicine. Despite the importance of Simon's conceptualization of design science, Schon (1990) noted that Simon's view of design was somewhat limited. Simon considered design as optimization: deciding the most
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efficient way to attain certain goals given constraints. However, most of the real-life problems that practitioners face are ill-defined. Romme (2003a) quotes Archer (1984, p. 348), who defines an ill-defined problem as "one in which the requirements, as given, do not contain sufficient information to enable the designer to arrive at a means of meeting those requirements simply by transforming, reducing, optimizing, or superimposing the given information alone." Ill-defined situations involve an uncertain and evolving design structure in which an intervention further changes the nature of a problem (Dorst, 2004) rather than "solving" it. Despite the fact that such a conception might force us to forgo the idea of a design "science" (Schon, 1990), we can still accumulate knowledge about a repertoire of particular designs, that is, about why certain designs work better than others in particular contexts and about the know-how needed to carry them out. Design Research in Education
Management researchers have only recently begun to address the design sciences. In contrast, design researchers in education have been dealing with these issues since the mid-1980s. In the education field, design approaches were born out of the awareness that learning was a situated social process and that there was a need to go beyond laboratory experiments, where learning had been equated with narrow measures of individual cognitive change. Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004) argue that design research in education was born out of three basic needs: to study learning phenomena in real contexts rather than laboratories, to go beyond narrow measures of learning, and to obtain research findings from formative evaluation. As Brown (1992, p. 147) noted, in the 1970s psychologists interested in learning and memory shifted away from the "almost exclusive study of the learning of lists of words, pictures, and paired associates to a concentration on coherent content." Rather, they focused on the learning of disciplinary bodies of knowledge such as physics or mathematics and on areas of expertise in which learning was self-motivated and took long periods (such as chess). Along with increasing complexity of the contents of learning came increasing interest in contexts that were not as artificial as laboratories and that took into account the social nature and contexts of learning.
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In the last ten years, design researchers have succeeded in garnering resources and have created their own community niche within the education field. Despite recognizing the need for increasing replicability of their findings and for combining their work with other, more traditional experimental approaches (Shavelson, Phillips, Towne, and Feuer, 2003), design researchers in education have advanced considerably in pursuing research that is sufficiently grounded to be helpful to specific communities of learners, while at the same time and with different degrees of success contributing to learning theory more generally. Design researchers in education attempt to engineer instructional environments that did not exist before and to study them systematically in order both to improve the learning effectiveness of the classroom and to contribute to educational theory (see, for example, Barab and Squire, 2004). The original developers of this approach were Ann Brown (1992) and Allan Collins (1992). Brown (p. 143) emphasized this twofold objective when she said that a "critical tension [when doing design research] is that between contributing to a theory of learning ... and contributing to practice." Collins complained about the lack of systematic study of classroom interventions with regard to, for example, new technology. Many classroom interventions, he said, were carried out without a sound basis for knowing whether they would work and why. He pointed out that most of the educational literature about designing innovative learning environments in the classroom had remained largely theoretical. For example, several psychologists and educators, such as Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Kolberg, Gilligan, and many modern-day counterparts, as well as proficient teachers agreed that children learn best not from what they hear but from what they do, and that they remember best that which carries interest and emotional content for them. However, these ideas had not been adequately tested empirically in real classroom settings. So the initial rationale for conducting design experiments was twofold. On the one hand, there was little knowledge about how interventions could work in different classroom settings; on the other hand, there were in the literature many ideas about how to design innovative classroom environments-ideas that had been theoretically discussed but rarely tested in practice. The initial work of Brown and of Collins, and the work of researchers, teachers, and developers following their lead, has had considerable impact on practice and research. For example,
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several curriculum development efforts, such as the work of the Educational Development Center (http://www.edc.org) based in Newton, Massachusetts, are consistent with and foster these approaches. Components of Design Research in Education
As Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004, p. 18) state, "Design experiments were developed as a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational designs based on principles derived from prior research. This approach of progressive refinement in design involves putting a first version of a design into the world to see how it works." Design experiments continually build on mismatches between conjectures about the effects of certain design features and the observations made. The guiding idea is that of refinement, or as Bereiter (2002) has put it, "sustained innovative development." Because these designs are carried out in real-life settings, it is neither possible nor desirable to control for all possible relevant variables that can affect them (Barab and Squire, 2004). Instead, the aim is to optimize the design as much as possible (Collins, 1992; Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc, 2004), which means "to systematically explore the space of designs in relatively few experiments, so that one can extrapolate into the regions of the space that cannot be tested directly" (Collins, 1992, p. 17). The final product is a profile that includes the strengths and weaknesses of the design. Design research may be better understood by distinguishing it from other types of research approaches that have traditionally been used in education, especially laboratory studies, ethnographic research, and large-scale evaluative studies. Collins (1999) has noted that, contrary to laboratory studies, design studies are related to messy situations and deal with multiple dependent variables. Specifically, laboratory experiments control for those variables that are most relevant to understand learning in real settings; hence they seriously limit the applicability of their results. Instead, design studies try to accommodate contextual variables in the design and to explore how these variables combine and interact with different design features. But design studies should not be confused with ethnographic research either. It is true that ethnographies are set in real-life contexts,
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but they are clearly nonintrusive. Instead, design research is aimed at repeated intervention. Finally, large-scale evaluative studies use a variety of measures to determine the effects of a program or intervention. However, "they do not provide the kind of detailed picture needed to guide the refinement of a design" (Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc, 2004, p. 21). Examples of Design Research in Elementary and High School Education
As we illustrate with several examples, many varieties of design studies have been carried out in education. All of these studies, however, share some features to a greater or lesser extent: they intend to create new instructional environments and to study them. That is, these designs are intended to help the communities of learners that implement them, while at the same time researchers try to understand the conditions under which the design is working in order to be able to extrapolate some of the findings to other contexts. Finally, the design research examples described in this section also resemble each other because they involve several iterations, rely on vast amounts of both qualitative and quantitative data, and are collaborative. Creating New Instructional Environments to Foster Learning. Brown
(1992) used design experiments to create and study change in elementary schools from traditional teacher-centered education to "intentional learning classrooms," where "students are encouraged to engage in selfreflective learning and critical inquiry" (p. 149). With such learning and inquiry as the goal, she experimented with the effectiveness of a variety of classroom features such as the curriculum and the teacher's role to determine how well these features accomplished her goal. On the basis of her work she helped develop a process called reciprocal teaching, which involves students sharing responsibility for instructing each other in a structured manner. This process proved to be quite successful. Shrader, Lento, Gomez, and Pea (1997) and Shrader and Gomez (1997) studied the implementation of a new technology called CoVis, short for Learning Through Collaborative Visualization. CoVis was a community of thousands of students, hundreds of teachers, and dozens of researchers working together to find new ways to think about and practice science in the classroom in a way that resembled the authentic
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question-centered, collaborative practice of real scientists rather than the more frequently used approach of teaching students well-established facts. This project was implemented in fifty-four schools with different degrees of success. Shrader and Gomez (1997) studied three schools that were particularly successful in implementing CoVis and tried to understand why this happened by looking at similarities across successful schools. The authors showed that the successful schools had already pursued some initiatives of their own to reform their teaching and learning practices at some point in the past, before meeting the researchers. This experience accounted for reduced fear of change, which played a large role in this kind of intervention. Another example is the work of Loh and others (1998) and Radinsky and others (1999, p. 8), who studied the use of the so-called Progress Portfolio, "a software environment for classroom inquiry projects ... that use complex datasets." Progress Portfolios were designed to help accomplish classroom environments in which K-12 students would take responsibility for conducting sustained inquiry, such as by formulating their own research questions and designing their own investigations. The implementation of this software and the activities created to work with it in class constitute a new educational design whose enactment in different contexts can be studied in detail. Confrey and Lachance (2000) studied the concept of splitting in several teaching experiments. Splitting is a construct developed from the literature on mathematical education that challenges several assumptions about how students best learn the concepts of division and multiplication. The authors argue that this construct cannot be introduced as mere lecture content in the classroom; rather, the students' voice and social interactions in class are key for them to really grasp the multiplication and division concepts in a new way. Based on a review of existing research, the authors develop what they call a conjecture, which guides the whole design experiment. "Unlike a formal hypothesis in an experimental design approach, a conjecture is not an assertion waiting to be proved or disproved .... Research guided by a conjecture seeks to revise and elaborate the conjecture while the research is in progress" (p. 235). The conjecture is an inference based on inconclusive evidence from the content area of mathematical pedagogy. The conjecture drives the whole teaching experiment by generating the questions the design will explore.
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It also determines what content areas will be covered by the curriculum used in the classroom intervention. Before designing the curriculum, the researcher has to think, "What would curricular activities that support splitting look like?" (p. 241). Confrey and Lachance (2000) recommend keeping the curriculum activities open to change in order to incorporate the reactions that students exhibit when interacting with curriculum activities during the course. This is done partly by monitoring the assessment of the activities carried out. Assessment is a crucial part of the process and must take many different forms, both formal and informal. It "must be informed by and consistent with the content, pedagogy, and theoretical framework of the conjecture along with the other components of the intervention" (p. 248). Assessment can include peer student reviews, presentations, standard tests, and task or open-ended interviews with some students to see the extent to which they understand the idea of splitting. Also within the field of math education, Cobb (2000) has been working on several design experiments intended to test a particular instructional theory called realistic mathematics education. This theory assumes that "mathematics is a creative human activity and that mathematical learning occurs as students develop effective ways to solve problems and cope with situations" (p. 317). The teaching experiments that Cobb carries out are intended to see how this broad framework can be operationalized in the classroom. The Brown study, CoVis, the Progress Portfolio, and the interventions linked to particular mathematics learning theories are all examples of new designs implemented in real classroom settings. In all these instances, the researchers study a phenomenon that they themselves have helped to create. All of the designs are also aimed at fostering student learning based on the understanding of key concepts. The interventions intend to create more effective learner communities, and they are assessed by their capacity to do so.
Conducting Design Research
Design researchers attempt to understand the means by which new instructional designs affect the classroom and create generalizable findings. They are interested in determining as carefully as possible the
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context in which the learning process takes place, and the combinations of design factors that lead to desired results. The aim is to develop midrange theories (for example, about the impacts of reciprocal teaching on students' engagement in critical inquiry) that capture the richness of context details while at the same time allowing replication and testing of the results in other settings. Van Aken (2004) describes these theories as technological rules, or general statements that "link an intervention or artifact with a desired outcome or performance in a certain field of application" (p. 228). Understanding why designs work differently under different contextual or even cultural constraints (Heaton, 2002) is key to improving existent designs. When Shrader, Lento, Gomez, and Pea (1997) studied the implementation of CoVis in several schools, their ultimate aim was to improve the CoVis design in the future. Their intermediate objective was to test and develop midrange (that is, context bound) learning theories linked to the implementation of CoVis. For example, one of the findings of their comparative study of high and low socioeconomic status schools was that those schools with more material resources used CoVis differently than did schools with fewer resources. The latter struggled to get access to the new technologies needed for CoVis, while high socioeconomic status schools were more concerned with trying to integrate technology into a new pedagogic philosophy that put more emphasis on self-directed learning. Thus, by studying how CoVis was implemented in different settings, the researchers refined their theories about how CoVis would work. They came to realize that CoVis adoption meant different things in different settings. More interestingly, they realized that there were different stages through which schools had to go during implementation, such as acquiring the equipment, getting acquainted with the technology, integrating it with the curriculum, and so on. This finding was integrated into their theory and helped reshape the CoVis tool. The CoVis example illustrates how design-based research is concerned with understanding why certain interventions work differently in a variety of contexts (such as in low and high socioeconomic status schools). Design experiments in schools tend to address several variables simultaneously, such as the role the teacher adopts, the pedagogical philosophy of the school, what curriculum is implemented, and so on. For
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example, in the CoVis project, Shrader and Gomez (1997) explored differences between schools where the teachers were in close contact with the researchers while implementing CoVis and those where the relationship was much more distant. They also explored differences between schools where there was already a commitment to innovative teaching pedagogies before CoVis was implemented and those that had always followed a more traditional path. This approach was consistent with Collins's (1992) argument that one of the key features of a design experiment methodology was to be able to compare multiple innovations. To sum up, these studies tried to compare particular cases where the design was implemented in order to be able to improve it, to understand better how it works, and to extrapolate some of the findings to other contexts. Such research always has one or more research questions in mind that guide the data collection and analysis. Cobb and others (2003, p. 11) note that "different classroom design experiments may set their focus on different constellations of issues." Collaboration Between Teachers and Researchers
Design research in education is also highly collaborative. Researchers and teachers together define research objectives and research design, operationalize constructs, formulate interventions together, and study their effectiveness (Cobb, 2000). Education researchers typically eodevelop design experiments with practicing teachers. Both the theory brought in by educational researchers on issues such as metacognition and the experience of teacher-practitioners are taken into account to design new settings that enhance the learning of the class. According to Cobb (2000), a design-oriented teaching experiment starts with clarification of the learning goals for the class and a previous hypothesis regarding how instructional activities (interventions) will be enacted and interpreted by students. To establish the learning goals for the class and decide how to intervene and analyze the data collected, the research team collaborates with the practicing teachers, because they are the ones who know their students and the history of the class. Researchers and practitioners conjecture together about how interventions will affect the ways in which students make sense of their activities in class.
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Cobb (2000) insists that it is very important that researchers develop a relationship of trust and mutual respect with teachers and not consider them as mere translators of the researchers' plans. Design experiments in education are built on the implementation logic of mutual adaptation (Snyder, Bolin, and Zumwalt, 1992}, which assumes that teachers' insights are as relevant as those of researchers. Cobb (2000, p. 331) recommends "an extensive series of interactions [between researchers and teachers] ... before the teaching experiments begin so that the teacher and the researchers can understand each other's viewpoints." It is key to develop with teachers shared assumptions about what are considered new interventions and how their effects will be interpreted. A great advantage of collaboration is that researchers can focus not only on the class but also on the learning of teachers themselves. Teachers' development during the experiments is a key learning point of the intervention, and their insights on how their role evolves are relevant to reshaping the intervention as the experiment goes on.
Iteration and Extensive Data Collection
Finally, design research in education is highly iterative and involves an intense data-collection effort. Insider and outsider research teams (Bartunek and Louis, 1996) periodically analyze a variety of data (tape recordings from the classroom, notes, materials produced by students, interviews, and so on) to determine whether these data support the researchers' conjectures. The analysis of the data leads the research team to reformulate its conjectures and modify certain elements of the instructional environment to see what happens. Cobb and others (2003) state that the "designed context is subject to test and revision, and ... successive iterations that ... play a role similar to that of systematic variation in an experiment" (p. 9). This research approach typically follows a logic of pattern matching (Yin, 1993) whereby the research team makes predictions based on theory about what will happen when the intervention is enacted and then tries to evaluate the extent to which these predictions are congruent with the observations. The quality of a design experiment depends on carefully documenting all the steps taken during the research process. Cobb (2000) and Cobb and others (2003) insist on keeping records of all research meet-
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ings and on recording how certain conjectures were made and rejected or supported. The data should be detailed enough so that other researchers can follow and critique the analysis. Design experiments in education are extremely iterative and based on continuous feedback loops. Teachers and researchers keep going back and forth from theory to data and from data to theory, creating new testable hypotheses as they proceed with the experiment. Clearly all research projects advance through an iteration between data and theory (Schutt, 2001), but what makes design-based research special is the short cycles of iteration. The research task starts with the selection of a given design to be implemented. Then, on the basis of the analysis of the implementation process, researchers and teachers modify the original design in ways that seem conducive to enhanced student learning. Therefore design experiments involve a great deal of attention to and reflection in and on practice (Schon, 1983). In carrying out such iterative methods, researchers behave very much as ethnographers paying attention to multiple data sources. For example, Brown's research (1992) assessing attempts to foster reciprocal teaching drew on different types of data such as transcripts of class sessions, observations of teachers coaching and responding to questions, records of students' portfolios, and videotapes of recorded group discussions and peer tutoring. Cobb (2000, p. 320) states that short, daily debriefing sessions conducted with the collaborating teacher immediately after each classroom session are invaluable .... Ongoing analyses of individual children's activity and of classroom social processes inform new thought experiments in the course of which conjectures about possible learning trajectories are revised frequently. As a consequence, there is often an almost daily modification of local learning goals, instructional activities, and social goals for the classroom participation structure. [italics added]
In other words, the design is continually shaped and reshaped. The refinement of interventions helps the researchers to reinterpret results from previous data that were not completely understood. As an example, Steffe and Thompson (2000) described one of their microexperiments. During the class the teacher asked two children to cut a stick (drawn on a computer screen) in two equal pieces. After some thinking,
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without assistance from the teacher, the kids decided to walk their fingers through the line. The girl counted five shares and the boy started where the girl ended and counted five more. Then they cut the stick in two equal parts. On the basis of this class episode, which emerged more or less spontaneously, the researchers made an interpretation that served to test a new conjecture. As Steffe and Thompson (p. 283) explain, "based on our interpretation that Jason and Patricia partitioned the stick mentally in Protocol 11 into an indefinite numerosity of sticks of equal but indefinite size before counting, the hypothesis was formulated that these children could establish an equipartitioning scheme." The researchers then generated a new teaching episode or protocol in which they asked the two kids to partition a stick in four equal parts. This example illustrates how iterative design experiments can be. From one day to another or even within the same day, teachers try to grasp students' sense-making processes and create new activities that test their conjectures about students' mathematical learning. This approach is similar to the work of detectives creating situations that help them confirm or disconfirm their hunches. The Ideal Type and Its Operationalization
Design research in education starts with what Banathy (1991) calls the creation of an image, an ideal-type situation that the design should model. This ideal type situation is based on the theory or theories that support the research. Any aspect of a design will eventually have to be linked to the future desired image. The design will also have to make sense from a systemic perspective. This means that the different design elements must make sense as a whole, not only individually, and that they must relate to the original image or ideal type. As a matter of fact, one of the major challenges in educational design research is to avoid introducing piecemeal innovations into the classroom without a theory of learning or an ideal type that supports those innovations and connects them as a system (Brown, 1992). Without an ideal type or a theory of learning behind the intervention, the new design does not contribute to the creation of knowledge that can be used in other interventions. This concept of an ideal type resembles Schon's (1983, 1990) discussion of a generative metaphor. When analyzing the ways in which
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practitioners solve problems, Schon (1983) showed how professionals transform ill-defined situations by framing the problem as if it was a familiar one for which they have their own repertoire of ideas that can be tested in practice. The metaphor is generative because it provides the practitioner with guidelines for action based on his previous experiences. It helps to define the design structure that is necessary for taking action. In design research this ideal type, or generative metaphor, is based on previous research (often linked to previous design studies in the same area). The ideal type is just an ideal in the sense that it is only a preliminary design that will be modified as the study unfolds. The final design implemented will be highly dependent on features of the context that cannot be completely anticipated. This situation happens because "no design can specify all the details, and because the actions of participants in the implementation (such as students, parents, teachers, and administrators) require constant decisions about how to proceed at every level" (Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc, 2004, p. 17). In fact, Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc also affirm that "the effectiveness of a design in one setting is no guarantee of its effectiveness in other settings" (p. 17), because contextual constraints such as teachers' proficiency, students' backgrounds, and so on can block transportability of the results. Despite recognizing the limitations of particular designs to be implemented elsewhere, Collins (1992) also emphasized the need for design experiments to be based on an underlying theory so that the mechanisms that make a certain design work can be understood and the design can be translated to other contexts. Brown (1992) also stated that in her design studies she attempts "to engineer interventions that not only work by recognizable standards but are also based on theoretical descriptions that delineate why they work" (p. 143). The importance of a previous ideal type or design structure that is based on previous research is evident. Any changes that are made during a study to modify the design must make sense within the context of this initial ideal type. Otherwise, implementation of parts of the design randomly or in isolation from the underlying theory will prove ineffective. We can observe this phenomenon in the widespread dissemination of the reciprocal teaching procedure (Brown and Campione, 1996). Reciprocal teaching reading groups (Palincsar and Brown, 1984) are formed by six or so participants who take turns leading a discussion
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and making sense of a certain article, video, or any other material they need to understand. When first thought of, reciprocal teaching was an integral element of a learning theory in which the main goal was to achieve a deep understanding of the text through a structured debate with peers who had made some effort to lead the discussion of certain parts of the text. However, some teachers implemented parts of reciprocal teaching without attention to its underlying design, and Brown and Campione (1996) complained that "too often something called reciprocal teaching is practiced in such a way that the principles of learning it was meant to foster are lost .... Questioning, summarizing, and so forth are engaged in rituals divorced from the goal of reading for understanding that they were designed to serve" (p. 291). The Ideal Type or Design Structure: An Example. Brown and Campione's (1996) work provides an excellent illustration of the concept of ideal type and how a certain learning theory can sustain multiple design interventions aimed at accomplishing a particular design goal. The authors introduced a new instructional approach they called Fostering Communities of Learners (FCL). FCL is "a system of interacting activities that results in a self-consciously active and reflective learning environment" (p. 292). Briefly summarized, the FCL model is based on three main pillars (see Figure 12.1). Students in a particular class are assigned group research about a certain topic. For example, they study predator-
Reflection
Research
Share information
Deep disciplinary content
12.1. Community of learners: The basic system. souRCE: Brown and Campione, 1996, p. 293
FIGURE
Consequential task
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prey relationships. This topic is part of a larger area of inquiry that all students in the class have to master (such as animal-habitat interdependence), and this larger area of inquiry comprises other subtopics such as reproductive strategies, food chains, and so on in which other class groups specialize. Students have to know about all the content; thus groups need to share their respective expertise with the rest of the class. This sharing is also motivated by a consequential task in which students have to put all this knowledge together. In addition, all of these activities (research, sharing, and consequential task) must be linked to a topic of inquiry that is rich enough for exploration so that these three activities do not become too trivial. The authors developed and tested this model in an inner-city context over the course of a decade. The ideal type shown in Figure 12.1 provides a road map to follow-the backbone of the design, so to speak. How the ideal type is operationalized or implemented may differ in different contexts. Regarding this issue, Brown and Campione (1996) stated that "the activities that we have used serve these support functions [the three parts just described], but they could be replaced by others, as long as they also serve the same functions, thus preserving the system" (p. 295). Some of the activities involved in FCL included reciprocal teaching, a research seminar, guided viewing, guided writing, cross talk, distributed expertise, exhibitions, tests, design tasks, and so on. As shown in Table 12.1, the authors classified these different activities according to their linkage
TABLE
12.1. Elements of FCL
Research
Share Information
Consequential Task
Reading/studying
Jigsaw
Exhibitions
Guided viewing
Cross-talk
Tests, quizzes
Consulting experts face-to-face
Distributed expertise
Design tasks
Consulting experts via e-mail
Majoring
Publishing
Peer- and cross-age teaching and research
Exhibitions
Authentic assessments
souRCE: Brown and Campione, 1996, p. 295
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to the model in Figure 12.1. Each activity was a research, share information, or consequential task type of activity. To sum up, this illustration of Brown's work shows the importance of a formal model or ideal type system in design research. This model may be achieved through many different interventions that can be carried out simultaneously or not, and that might differ from context to context. Yet all interventions must be guided by the model and be aimed at testing previous conjectures. Some Implications for Possible Design Approaches in Graduate and Undergraduate Business School Programs
Whereas design researchers in the field of education started to create their own academic community in the early nineties, the introduction of design research-based approaches in organization studies is just starting. Although action research has a long tradition in our field, its purpose is not explicitly to design new situations or to generate cumulative valid knowledge about interventions that can be transferred to other contexts (Van Aken, 2004). Two Dutch scholars, Joan Ernst Van Aken (2004, 2005) and Georges Romme (2003a), have recently started to articulate how a design research approach would look in organization studies; and Boland and Collopy (2004) have suggested ways that managers may think of themselves as designers. Inspired by Herbert Simon's book and by ideas from Chris Argyris, Donald Schi:in, and the systems-thinking literature, these authors show the potential that design research can have to address rigor versus relevance dilemmas in business schools, and to ground a science of management design that resembles other design disciplines such as engineering or architecture. In the rest of this article we argue in line with Van Aken and Romme that design research has considerable unexplored potential in organization studies. In particular, we delineate how work in educational design research may be used to improve management education and how, in doing so, it might also suggest some means of fostering transformative cooperation. Romme (2003b) has addressed management education from a design perspective. He argues that management education can be considerably
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improved if management scholars use their knowledge about theories of organizing not only to improve the content of what is taught but also to improve the design of the course and the management of student learning. He illustrates ways that designing a class as a real organization (see, for example, Romme and Putzel, 2003) whose purpose is learning, or applying peer mentoring and delegation principles in class, are some organizational principles that can be used to improve college education. Romme (2003b) explicitly states that his focus was on finding ways that organizational theory can improve education rather than the other way around, arguing that considerable educational research has been done regarding particular process elements such as the curriculum, specific technologies, and the effects of certain assessment procedures, but these do not focus on the organization of the class per se. We have shown, however, that many design educators have paid attention to the components of teaching not only by looking at particular elements such as technology or assessment but by more broadly trying to capture the complexity of the classroom context and systematically both designing and studying learning in classrooms in holistic ways. Hence we argue that regardless of the potential for using management theory to design more effective classroom environments, it is also very useful to make use of design research done in elementary and high school education, and to find ways to translate it into undergraduate and graduate business education. In fact, Romme's approach is similar to that of design educators in high schools because both aim to generate deep, self-motivated, and critical learning. In the rest of this section we explore ways that design research in education may contribute to improving education in business schools. To do this, we build on some examples of the already large existing literature on business education, and show what design-based research might contribute to it. Our discussion is based on the assumption that it is not unusual for professors to make changes in discrete aspects of their teaching with the purpose of improving the learning experience. It is rare, however, for such discrete changes to be designed to work together in the service of accomplishing an envisaged ideal state in the classroom, and for their ongoing implementation to be viewed as testing conjectures about how to accomplish this ideal state.
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Creating Learning Environments in Management Classrooms: The Need for an Ideal Type
We have presented several examples of the sophisticated ideal states that may be envisioned in a classroom. These include Confrey and Lachance's (2000) recognition that students' interactions are key to grasping multiplication and division concepts; the CoVis program's construction of science classrooms resembling the authentic question-centered, collaborative practice of real scientists (Shrader, Lento, Gomez, and Pea, 1997); Progress Portfolios' (for example, Loh and others, 1998; Radinsky and others, 1999); classrooms in which students formulate their own research questions and design their own investigations; and Brown and Campione's FCL, a system of interacting activities that results in an active and reflective learning environment. All of these ideal states are theoretically based and quite applicable on a college or university level as well as at the K-12 levels, where they have been implemented to date. The common thread among all these design-based research studies is an underlying design structure or ideal type and a group of conjectures that the researchers have in mind before implementing changes aimed at accomplishing this ideal type. There are also methods designed for ongoing testing of hypotheses, and these can range in scope from small segments within individual class sessions to entire school years. Designing does exist to a limited degree in management education. For example, in Roger Putzel's (1992) experience-based organizational behavior course, each element of the curriculum is designed according to an underlying logic of treating the class as a real organization. This underlying vision or ideal state is then made explicit in a series of principles and norms that guide all class interactions and that are summarized in a manual the author gives to students at the beginning of the course. On the basis of several iterations of the course spanning many years, Putzel (2001, 2003; Romme and Putzel, 2003) has progressively refined it, and different versions of it have been implemented in other universities around the world. Despite successful experiences such as the course designed by Putzel, there are also examples in the business education literature of failed educational intervention. These may be due in part to the lack of a clearly articulated ideal state and the lack of behavior-based conjectures aiming to accomplish it in the classroom.
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For example, Hagen, Miller, and Johnson (2003) described the "disruptive consequences" of introducing a critical management perspective into a master's in business administration (MBA) program. They described how students were not very receptive to certain changes in the way classes were conducted. These changes included reflecting together in the first class session on the kind of knowledge privileged in management education, the introduction to the class of poststructuralist theories, bringing an actor to class to assist in role-playing, and exploring gender-related topics. The authors stated that it "proved difficult to destabilize existing frames of reference enough to experiment with alternative mindsets" (p. 248). They seemed to attribute the course's failure to somewhat abstract structural forces when they argued that "the twin hegemonic structures of capital and education proved too powerful a distraction for both us and the students to fully escape its bounds" (p. 249). They argued that issues such as power, gender, and emotions, when treated openly in class, can have disruptive consequences, and they concluded that "there can be no pedagogic template for courses of this nature. To propose one would be to construct another kind of orthodoxy" (p. 255). Yet the examples of design in elementary and high school settings that we have described are also very radical and ambitious in breaking with traditional course designs while at the same time pointing to the relevance of a pedagogical template or ideal type. This template needs to be accompanied by tested conjectures on how to accomplish it when creating new instructional environments. Design research thus opposes Hagen, Miller, and Johnson's assertion and suggests that one of the possible reasons why their innovations might not have worked was the lack of an explicit comprehensive model that sustained them in a holistic way and from which conjectures about the class could be inferred. Cautions in the Implementation of Design Approaches. We noted that it is not possible simply to redesign individual aspects of a classroom and expect to see major changes that make a contribution beyond the original setting. In fact, as Brown and Campione (1996) noted, a major challenge of educational design research is to avoid piecemeal innovations that are not accompanied by either an envisaged ideal or a learning theory about how these innovations are expected to work. Unless there is a theory of learning at their root, new piecemeal innovations
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will not contribute to any broader approach to learning. Hagen, Miller, and Johnson's study (2003) clearly shows problems that may be encountered by individual innovations that are not part of a larger master plan for the class. Researching Classroom Design
As we have noted, design approaches in education necessarily involve research. The research questions addressed may range from microresponses to a particular element in a classroom to macroissues such as the role of socioeconomic conditions in the meaning of and challenges to implementation of particular educational approaches (see, for example, Shrader, Lento, Gomez, and Pea, 1997). Design experiments in schools tend to investigate simultaneously several variables, such as teacher roles, pedagogical philosophy, and curriculum. Moreover, these multiple variables may be tested both within and across sites, because the purpose of the design approach is to contribute to larger educational questions and theorizing, not solely to an individual classroom. An ideal type or model for the design is just the first step in a design research approach. If a particular learning environment is desired, multiple components need to be designed or redesigned in ways that are consistent with the envisaged ideal state. This means that researchers and teachers must think collaboratively about appropriate ways of assessing what is going on in the classroom. Assessment protocols must be congruent with the design model that the researchers are trying to implement. For example, if researchers want students to learn to think as scientists and develop skills in designing an investigation and collecting, displaying, and interpreting data in terms of hypotheses, they will have to use assessment methods that allow them to capture these phenomena. Multiple-choice tests in such a context are useless, because they do not provide clues on how to proceed in tailoring the design model to the particular context at hand. The examples we have described in this chapter indicate the need to collect many types of data and to monitor constantly what is going on in the class. Design studies follow a logic of replication rather than a sample logic (Yin, 1993). In a sample logic, cases are supposed to be representative of a larger population or universe, and findings are generalized
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according to statistical criteria. In the case of design studies, generalizability is achieved by building theoretical models that supersede current ones (Steffe and Thompson, 2000). This means "having the intent to build models that apply in principle to settings beyond the ones that gave rise to the models originally" (p. 304). The scope of applicability of the theories keeps growing as new evidence is collected from design experiments. In management education, we normally read studies that have assessed the impact of the implementation of a certain innovation in one business school. For example, Martins and Kellermanns (2004) recently published a study that explained students' acceptance of a Web-based course management system. Their research tested a variance model of student acceptance by using a questionnaire survey administered in class to 243 students from nine different business courses in a large university. In another study, Brower (2003) explained her experience in teaching an asynchronous Internet-based organizational behavior and human resources course. She presented an "example of how a quality classroom discussion was emulated using electronic bulletin board technology to create an on-line student-centered learning community" (p. 22). In a third study, Arbaugh (2000) compared two MBA strategy classes, one traditionally taught and another using asynchronous Internet technology, to see which one exhibited higher levels of participation and learning. It is possible to draw some comparisons between these studies and design research approaches in K-12 education. Some studies, like that of Martins and Kellermanns (2004 ), despite their usefulness for a systematic assessment of particular innovations, are far from what designbased approaches aim to accomplish. Rather, studies like these, which use standard measures and surveys of participants not tied to any particular design, represent large-scale studies of educational interventions. Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004, p. 21) comment that these studies "can be used to identify critical variables and to evaluate program effectiveness in terms of test scores," but the data collected are not detailed enough to guide the development of the design. Brower's (2003) research was much more detailed in analyzing and providing the reader with verbatim transcripts of particular interactions that took place among students in a Web-based class. This study
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provides useful insights for other faculty who want to develop a similar type of course (that is, to introduce an electronic discussion board). Brower's study, however, is ethnographic rather than conjecture guided. The author describes her experience and that of her students retrospectively but does not clearly indicate whether the data collected were part of a purposeful effort to test her own conjectures about the intervention. Arbaugh's (2000) study tested some preliminary conjectures about the effects of a certain design by implementing pretests and posttests and having a control group, but it was less rich in respect to the qualitative nature of the data collected. In addition, both Brower's and Arbaugh's interventions were not refined as the course unfolded, and their data analysis took place only at the end of the intervention. These illustrations are not meant to downplay the value of these studies for their own purposes. Rather, our aim is to suggest new possibilities for how classroom education can be visualized and developed in ways that are integral with accompanying research. Our examples make clear some of the ways in which the work of design researchers in elementary and high schools can inform approaches to management education, and ways of assessing the impacts of attempts to improve management education in some iterative manner. In some of the work in management education quoted here there are some promising features from a design research perspective. Some researchers are working with constructs that closely resemble ideal types. Brower (2003), for example, included a definition of a learning community in her paper and related what happened to that definition in the e-board discussions. The asynchronous Web-based technology is thus a means toward a learning community ideal type, and one could think of other ways to accomplish that same aim. All in all, it seems feasible for design studies in education to be translated into business contexts. More effort is needed in developing more explicit awareness of the ideal type that is desired, including conjectures about systematic ways of accomplishing it, being open to analyzing data in ways that lead to continual redesign of the intervention, and making greater efforts to collect a much larger variety of data (such as videotapes, different kinds of assessment, content analysis of verbatim interactions, and so on). At the same time, we need studies that look simultaneously at various contextual variables such as type of school,
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teachers' professional development, resources available, and so on. Studies that combine pretests and posttests and that have control groups are also very valuable. To do all this, management faculty will have to collaborate with one another as both teachers and researchers. Design Research as a Means of Fostering Transformative Cooperation
We have described ways that math and science educators use design approaches to improve education. We have also considered some examples of management education from the perspective of the design work done by math and science teachers and their research collaborators. In this final section of the chapter we discuss some implications of this work more specifically for fostering transformative collaboration, especially in some type of educational setting. The approach starts with development of a clearly articulated ideal state-in this case, what transformative cooperation might mean in practice. It may have many manifestations, but one that may be particularly pertinent may be similar to the community of learners originally developed by Brown and Campione (1996), in which people and groups from different sectors educate one another on an ongoing basis about phenomena of importance. A second component is the means, the various conjectures and hypothesis tests, that are created to help accomplish the ideal state in a holistic way. Many of the elements depicted in Table 12.1, while not pertinent in all their specifics, suggest ongoing means by which attempts to achieve the ideal state may be accomplished. The final component is ongoing research on the part of those leading such efforts and the researchers collaborating with them, in order to enable ongoing testing of the means by which the ideal state may be accomplished. Fostering communities of learning may be an aim in many settings in which different individuals and groups hold different but necessary information. These settings may range from small discussion groups to global satellite conferences, and design-based research approaches can help implementers learn how to accomplish their aims and adjust them across contexts. Of course fostering a community of learners is only one of many ways of visualizing transformative cooperation. The design approach encourages attention to multiple such visualizations, as well as ongoing
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research-based development, testing, and systematization of ways of accomplishing them on an ongoing basis. In conclusion, when university professors gather to discuss their work (either teaching or research), they do not typically consider ways they can learn from the classroom experience of teachers in elementary and high schools. As we have shown, however, design-based research approaches that are quite comprehensive have been developed for elementary and high school math and science classrooms. The models developed there can serve as exemplars for work that might be undertaken in universities, and may also suggest a kind of transformative cooperation in itself among K-12 teachers and management professors. The models can suggest means of visualizing ideal states, of developing conjectures and testing them, of paying attention to the impacts of contexts, and on the basis of all of these examples and a collaborative research model, of developing and testing theory about cooperation. We hope that this chapter has suggested a truly helpful way of accomplishing the aims set forth in this book. References Arbaugh, J. B. 2000. "Virtual Classroom Versus Physical Classroom: An Exploratory Study of Class Discussion Patterns and Student Learning in an Asynchronous Internet-Based MBA Course." Journal of Management Education, 24: 213-234. Archer, M. 1984. "Whatever Became of Design Methodology?" In N. Cross (ed.), Developments in Design Methodology, 347-350. New York: Wiley. Banathy, B. H. 1991. Systems Design of Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Barab, S., and K. Squire. 2004. "Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground." Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13: 1-14. Bartunek, ]., and M. E. Louis. 1996. Insider/Outsider Team Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bate, S. P., and G. Robert. In press. User Experience to Healthcare Improvement: The Concepts, Methods, and Practices of "Experience-Based Design." Abingdon, UK: Radcliffe. Bereiter, C. "Design Research for Sustained Innovation." 2002. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 9: 321-327. Boland, R.]., and F. Collopy. 2004. Managing as Designing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Brower, H. H. 2003. "On Emulating Classroom Discussion in a DistanceDelivered OBHR Course: Creating an On-line Learning Community." Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2: 22-36. Brown, A. L. 1992. "Design Experiments: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Creating Complex Interventions in Classroom Settings." Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2: 141-178. Brown, A. L., and]. C. Campione. 1996. "Psychological Theory and the Design of Innovative Learning Environments: On Procedures, Principles, and Systems." In L. Schauble and R. Glaser (eds.), Innovations in Learning: New Environments for Education, 289-325. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Cobb, P. 2000. "Conducting Teaching Experiments in Collaboration with Teachers." In A. E. Kelly and R. A. Lesh (eds.), Handbook of Research Design in Mathematics and Science Education, 307-333. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Cobb, P., J. Confrey, A. diSessa, R. Lehrer, and L. Schauble. 2003. "Design Experiments in Educational Research." Educational Researcher, 32: 9-13. Collins, A. 1992. "Toward a Design Science of Education." In E. Scanlon and T. O'Shea (eds.), New Directions in Educational Technology, 15-22. New York: Springer-Verlag. Collins, A. 1999. "The Changing Infrastructure of Education Research." In E. C. Lagemann and L. S. Shulman (eds.), Issues in Education Research. Problems and Possibilities, 289-298. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Collins, A., D. Joseph, and K. Bielaczyc. 2004. "Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues." Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13: 15-42. Confrey, J., and A. Lachance. 2000. "Transformative Teaching Experiments Through Conjecture-Driven Research Design." In A. E. Kelly and R. A. Lesh (eds.), Handbook of Research Design in Mathematics and Science Education, 231-266. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Dorst, K. 2004. "On the Problem of Design Problems: Problem Solving and Design Expertise." Journal of Design Research, 4(2). Retrieved on August 16, 2005, from http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index. php?journalCODE=jdr. Ghoshal, S. 2005. "Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices." Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4: 75-91. Gosling, J., and H. Mintzberg. 2003. "The Five Minds of a Manager." Harvard Business Review, 81: 54-64. Hagen, R., S. Miller, and M. Johnson. 2003. "The 'Disruptive Consequences' of Introducing a Critical Management Perspective onto an MBA Programme." Management Learning, 34: 241-257.
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Heaton, L. 2002. "Designing Work: Situating Design Objects in Cultural Context." Journal of Design Research, 2(2). Retrieved on August 16, 2005, from http://www.inderscience .corn/browse/index. php? journal CODE =i dr. Loh, B., J. Radinsky, E. Russell, L. M. Gomez, B. J. Reiser, and D. C. Edelson. 1998. "The Progress Portfolio: Designing Reflective Tools for a Classroom Context." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Los Angeles, 627-634. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Martins, L. L., and F. W. Kellermanns. 2004. "A Model of Business School Students' Acceptance of a Web-Based Course Management System." Academy of Management Learning and Education, 3: 7-26. Mintzberg, H., and D. Sacks. 2004. "The MBA Menace." Fast Company, 83: 31. NHS Modernisation Agency. 2004. Ten High Impact Changes for Service Improvement and Delivery: A Guide for NHS Leaders. London: Department of Health. Palincsar, A. S., and A. L. Brown. 1984. "Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities." Cognition and Instruction, 1: 117-175. Plsek, P., J. Bibby, and E. Whitby. 2007. "Practical Methods for Extracting Explicit Design Rules Grounded in the Experience of Organization Managers." Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43: 153-170. Postrel, V. 2004. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: Perennial/ Harper Collins, 43: 153-170. Putzel, R. 1992. "Experience-Based Learning: A Classroom-as-Organization Using Delegated, Rank-Order Grading." Journal of Management Education, 16: 204-219. Putzel, R. 2001. "Maximum Use of Process: XB, the Experience-Based Learning Organization." Unpublished manuscript, Saint Michael's College, Colchester, VT. Putzel, R. 2003. XB: Manual for a Learning Organization. Colchester, VT: Saint Michael's College. Radinsky, J., B. Loh, J. Mundt, S. Marshal!, L. M. Gomez, B. J. Reiser, and D. C. Edelson. 1999. "Problematizing Complex Datasets for Students: Design Principles for Inquiry Curriculum." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Romme, A.G.L. 2003a. "Making a Difference: Organization as Design." Organization Science, 14: 558-572.
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Romme, A.G.L. 2003b. "Organizing Education by Drawing on Organization Studies." Organization Studies, 24: 697-720. Romme, A.G.L., and R. Putzel. 2003. "Designing Management Education: Practice What You Preach." Simulation and Gaming, 34: 512-530. Schon, D. A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schon, D. A. 1990. "The Design Process." In V. A. Howard (ed.), Varieties of Thinking: Essays from Harvard's Philosophy of Education Research Center, 111-141. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schutt, R. K. 2001. Investigating the Social World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Shavelson, R. J., D. C. Phillips, L. Towne, and M. J. Feuer. 2003. "On the Science of Education Design Studies." Educational Researcher, 32: 25-28. Shrader, G., and L. Gomez. 1997. "Inventing Interventions: Three Successful CoVis Cases." Paper presented at the Annual Educational Media Conference, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Shrader, G., E. Lento, L. Gomez, and R. Pea. 1997. "Inventing Interventions: Cases from CoVis. An Analysis by SES." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Researchers Association, Chicago. Simon, H. A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial. (3rd ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Snyder, J., F. Bolin, and K. Zumwalt. 1992. "Curriculum Implementation." In P. W. Jackson (ed.), Handbook of Research on Curriculum, 402-435. New York: Macmillan. Steffe, L. P., and P. W. Thompson. 2000. "Teaching Experiment Methodology: Underlying Principles and Essential Elements." In A. E. Kelly and R. A. Lesh (eds.), Handbook of Research Design in Mathematics and Science Education, 267-307. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. van Aken, J. E. 2004. "Management Research Based on the Paradigm of the Design Sciences: The Quest for Field-Tested and Grounded Technological Rules." Journal of Management Studies, 41: 219-247. van Aken, J. E. 2005. "Management Research as a Design Science: Articulating the Research Products of Mode 2 Knowledge Production in Management." British Journal of Management, 16: 19-36. Yin, R. K. 1993. Applications of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Unyielding Integrity The Key to Creating Next-Generation Transformational Partnerships ANDREW R. MCGILL
Much rapid growth and innovation in recent decades have been attributed to new and powerful forms of organization that have became common across the business world. Whether described as partnerships, joint ventures, alliances, collaborations, or other synonymous bilateral relationships, these ventures-all subtly different yet, at their core, remarkably similar-bring together two or more firms to work toward some common goal. Because companies are rarely better than the people they employ, how well a partnership's key people work together ultimately does much to determine the success of these partnering ventures. The same dynamics that make for successful partnering among multiple organizations may also apply across groups within a single large organization. These new partnering ventures include strategic alliances for reducing uncertainties from business demands and pressures (Burgess, Hill, and Kim, 1993)-enabling partners to remain lean and agile by pooling resources, forming an alliance to exploit an opportunity, or linking systems in a joint venture (Kanter, 1989). But to be truly successful,
I am grateful to Case Western Reserve University doctoral student Nigel Stratford for his thoughtful comments and suggestions during the preparation of this manuscript.
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these new ventures ultimately must create superior value for customers by employing skill sets that are hard to imitate and that render both organizations more adaptable to change (Day, 1994) while minimizing risk, accelerating partner learning, and leveraging each firm's tacit knowledge (Dunning, 1993). Such collaborations are fragile-and success does not come easily. To succeed in such ventures, partners must move from a traditional adversarial mode, with a somewhat paranoid worldview centered on domination and the fear of domination, to a cooperative mode, in keeping with the positive organizational philosophy, in which the partners decide to grow by aligning with others (Kanter, 1989) and in which they must begin to build trust and unyielding integrity. These new positivity-based partnering ventures have led to remarkable discoveries (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), produced tremendous gains in economic value (Welborn and Kasten, 2003), provided road maps to exponential growth (Charan and Tichy, 2000; Tichy, 2002), and forged efficiencies previously unimagined in what some businesses could accomplish (Bossidy, Charan, and Burck, 2002; Snee and Hoerl, 2003). Yet for all their proven and potential high value and opportunity, the pendulum of these relationships swings with a corresponding high degree of risk-risks that can expose the worst undersides of our organizations and ourselves. Only those of strong conscience, deep awareness, and continuous vigilance may be strong enough to avoid succumbing, because these new relationships expose a triad of pitfalls at the very core of organizational reality in this competitive world-forces economic, biological, and sociopsychological-that insidiously combine to form powerful natural obstacles to partnership success, a natural inertia that ensures a high probability of failure for every such venture. Only diligent leaders committed and recommitted to their own unyielding integrity can compete against this overwhelming inertia toward failure to exploit this positive organizational potential. Indeed, the vast majority of such business partnerships, joint ventures, or collaborations do fail to achieve their full potential, with somewhere between 55 and 70 percent-depending on the study-disbanded or falling short of achieving their stated objectives (Ellis, 1996;
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Segil, 1998; Kanter, 1989)-often leaving behind companies that have overinvested or underachieved, or both, at the macroeconomic level, in the process producing jaded human beings at the microlevel-frustrated battle-weary troops who conscientiously represented their firms in the partnership and interacted with one another every day; people for whom the scars can run deep, with memories that can be rich, vivid, even vile. Even so, these partnering relationships grew at a 25 percent annual rate in the years 1985-2000 (Das and Teng, 1999, 2000; Pekar and Allio, 1994) and have continued that growth pace into the new century. In fact, alliance activities of the thousand largest U.S. firms accounted for 35 percent of their revenue in 2000-up from less than 2 percent in 1980 and 21 percent in 1997 (Harrison and Pekar, 1998), despite their "unusually high rates of failure" (Park and Ungson, 1997, 279-280), which typically comes about over mistrust, fear of loss of control, and misunderstandings about the motivations of their partners (Long and Arnold, 1995). In many such failures, managers were often too aggressive, in part because they were rewarded for "selling solutions" rather than engaging in a partnering dialogue (Liedtka, 1996), and for being overly concerned about the political risks of honesty, thus depriving their partnership of an essential ingredient for success. Why Alliances Fail
To knowledgeably take advantage of the positivity potential of these new partnerships-not simply approach them in good-faith blindnesswe must first examine why so many such ventures fail. Inevitably, building adequate foundations for long-term alliance success often fails due to two common miscues (Judge and Ryman, 2001): Seeking to gain at the expense of a partner Refusing to make short-term sacrifices for the long-term good More elaborately, Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy's methodical review of partnering difficulties (1998) identified the most common sources of extreme imbalances that can undermine such ven-
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tures-among them, excess partner dependence (Anderson and Narus, 1990; Doz, 1992; Spekman and Salmond, 1992; Sriram, Krapfel, and Spekman, 1992), simultaneous competition with alliance partners (Bucklin and Sengupta, 1993; Doz, 1988; Hamel, Doz, and Prahalad, 1989), opportunistic exploitation of a partner's contribution (Bucklin and Sengupta, 1993; Powell, 1990), distrust (Borys and Jemison, 1989; Powell, 1990), leadership conflicts (Bronder and Pritzl, 1992; Ohmae, 1989; Sriram, Krapfel, and Spekman, 1992), cultural differences (Doz, 1988; Lorange and Roos, 1993; Lei and Slocum, 1992; Parkhe, 1991), lack of goal consensus (Borys and Jemison, 1989; Dwyer and Oh, 1988; Powell, 1990), lack of information sharing (Borys and Jemison, 1989; Mohr and Spekman, 1994), hidden agendas (Powell, 1990), lack of commitment (Anderson and Weitz, 1992), imbalance of investment (Spekman and Salmond, 1992), and lack of support among internal and external stakeholders (Lorange and Roos, 1993 ). In the main, these partnering shortcomings all amounted to violations of trust on some dimension. Alliances built on such selfish foundations rarely survive their initial development phase-and if they do, many fail shortly after being launched, when it becomes apparent that one or more of the partners are "exclusively interested in their own gain" (Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy, 1998, p. 759). In fact, to fail in such fragile strategic alliances, all it took was for one of the partners to be overly focused on the benefits that could accrue to its own parent firm, while ignoring the benefits to the partners (Kawasaki, 1995). For example, in one failed health care alliance, each partner hired separate legal counsel, and the subsequent talks and negotiations were adversarial from the start. Neither party focused on the potential to create a more progressive health system or to provide better patient care, and not surprisingly, neither ever came close to achieving either goal (Appleby, 1997). When executives cannot converge around creating such customer value, their alliance efforts are likely to fail (Hirsch and Gregg, 1997). Almost without exception, when alliances succeeded it was because customers provided a common focus in which high-performing partnerships found meaning (Liedtka, 1996; Shortell, 1988). When they
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improved customer service, organizations gained earlier and more complete information about the direction of the marketplace, could better anticipate improvements and new products and services that customers would demand, and improved the likelihood of success and speed in new product introductions (Harrison and St. John, 1996), thereby building trust and respect between the two partners, which leads to an enduring relationship. An accounting firm study reported by Kanter (1989) indicates that one potential reason for missing such a critical downstream success factor as customers is that executives give too much attention to partnership beginnings and not enough to what follows. They spend half of their time creating the joint venture, another quarter developing its plan, and 10 percent establishing partnership management systems, leaving only about one-seventh of their committed time to manage the partnership itself-typically an inadequate investment. In contrast, successful partners built cultural compatibility and a common customer-centered sense of purpose, developed trust, and were supported by each partner's parent executives, strategic consistency, functional capabilities, and communication and information-sharing skills (Rule and Keown, 1998). Interestingly, alliances among domestic firms were more likely to fail than those with international partners (Park and Ungson, 1997), with cross-border joint ventures with partners from culturally distant countries lasting longer than domestic partnerships built on formal contracts and binding arbitration (Sullivan and Peterson, 1982; Thorelli, 1986). Those domestic strictures replaced cooperative positivitybased behavior potential with enforcement commitments and threats bolstered by pressures for short-term success (Thurow, 1992), a big step toward their undoing. Park and Ungson (1997) also found that such domestic partnerships were more likely to dissolve than international collaborations when the domestic firms competed with one another, had high levels of product-market overlap, or utilized technology transfer. To accomplish a successful "strategic fit," firms need to understand each other's real objectives in the alliance. This is not easy, because one firm may have hidden agendas around acquisition or divestiture (Bleeke
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and Ernst, 1995; Nanda and Williamson, 1995), agendas may change as leaders do, or other such selfish intentions could come into play. While learning each other's real objectives might present a time-consuming challenge, it is better than the danger of not knowing and being left in a vulnerable position (Das and Teng, 1999). Trust, a priori for positive organizational approaches, was repeatedly identified as essential for success (Bellandi, 1997), and when it could not be forged, it was often because leaders were unable to expand their frames of reference to include the interests and needs of both organizations. Also, when top executives focused exclusively on financial performance, important investments were lacking-and adequate time was not allotted to build customer value (Bellandi, 1997). Similarly, when executives saw an alliance as undesirable or as a last-ditch option to preserve current employment or market share, their alliance was likely to fail. Gulati (1995a, 2003), underscoring the importance of a positivity focus, found that the willingness of a corporation to enter into an alliance was negatively related to the belief that their chosen partner would act opportunistically. Those expectations, based on experience, can breed lost integrity. And the more such tarnished partnering experiences muddy one's career path, the more skeptically-and guardedly-future such endeavors will be approached. Addressing the challenge of what it takes for successful global partnering and the potential of positive organizational growth is important because only by understanding the natural forces working against these ventures and being ever-vigilant in combating them can we become diligent leaders who achieve real unyielding integrity and together climb the mountain to achieve the full potential of our partnerships, as our global economy requires. The Partnership Foundations
Most partnerships begin against a backdrop of equity, even innocence, and perhaps some naivete, with the best of intentions-mutual learning, skill blending, market expansion, interdependence, product development, research, results sharing, goal transparency, candor, and of
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course, the proverbial goal of one plus one equaling three. The best partnerships remain stable for as long as the partners can continue to acquire core skills from the partnership that lead to economic benefit (Kogut, 1989). Yet despite such auspicious birthrights and their emerging popularity and political correctness, few partnerships end on such glamorous terms (Kanter, 1989, 1994). Along the way something happens: many partners cannot wait to go their separate ways, never to cross paths again. Experienced skeptics often recite tales of relationships cloaked in inequality, need, and dependence; hidden agendas; downright exploitation; and ultimate mistrust (Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy, 1998). Many report lack of cooperation and opportunistic behaviorguile and self-interest (Das and Teng, 1999)-by their partners (Kanter, 1994); infighting as they attempt to get ahead at the expense of their partners (Hamel, Doz, and Prahalad, 1989); or exploitation of such alliances as a cover for appropriating the firm-specific resources of their partners (lnkpen and Beamish, 1997). Managers accustomed to acting decisively and presenting full-blown plans-in part to look good to underlings or bosses-need to learn the patience of consensus building to succeed as partners, which can mean becoming comfortable presenting half-formed ideas for discussion prior to making decisions. "Coming in with prepared documents" and "not fully consulting and collaborating" were two big reasons why ventures failed, Kanter reported (1989, p. 188). But such cooperation can make executives with a need to control feel both vulnerable and exposed. "Collaboration for many managers was initially an unnatural act," reported Liedtka (1996, p. 34). Achieving it, according to her study of successful and unsuccessful partnerships among professionals, "required that partners locate common ground on which to build their relationship." This occurred with the greatest success when partners could progressively work through their points of conflict and harness and leverage the creative potential in the diversity of the partners' views. These relationships were built on the cornerstones of shared goals and clear and realistic expectations of each partner's contribution. Organizations that excelled at building such relationships brought three key things to the partnership: A set of skills A way of thinking
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A variety of organizational supports to drive partnership success In fact, one study of successful collaborations in Europe added that, to maximize success, some executives may even need to consciously "lose battles in order to win wars" (Rugman and D'Cruz, 1997, p. 406), which is not easy for people accustomed to being decisive, getting their way, and winning as often as possible. A Triad of Oppositional Forces
Partnerships built on trust and unyielding integrity are essential to exploit the positivity potential while combating what we suggested earlier was a looming dysfunction facing such ventures, which are propelled by a triad of negative forces that combine like a grand germ to insidiously threaten them. This triad is built on economic forces, foreseen well by scholars from Smith (1776) to Marx (1867)-forces endemic to free-market capitalism; by biological forces described by Darwin (1859), Mendel (Dunn, 1965) and current geneticists that breed in us survivalof-the-fittest instincts; and by social and psychological forces that drive us from the best in transformational intentions to a more efficient, traditional transactional, blinders-on approach to life (Quinn, 2003). This approach is aggravated by broad-based, antipositivity findings that the psychological effects of bad forces-including how partners might gauge their interactions with one another-ultimately outweigh the effects of good ones (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs, 2001; Reis and Gable, 2003). Within this triad, a host of mechanisms conspire to destroy partnering-hence the triad's insidious nature. In economics, both Smith and Marx became scholars of capitalism, albeit from antithetical beginnings. They wrote eloquently about the lure to win and the seductiveness of money that free markets can bring (Smith, 1776), producing a dialectical tension that can corrupt, as Marx (1867) concluded in his treatise on capitalism. Consider in modern business how we fall into Marx's trap as we reward success by celebrating heroes and compensating winners. Many managers can become obsessed with their versions of success and lapse into dysfunctional behaviors-seeing things only through their own lenses, banishing those with other thoughts, and becoming preoccupied with winning at any cost (Finkelstein, 2003)-an invitation to ethical transgressions.
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Conspiring with such questionable leadership is conventional wisdom around incentives: to get someone to perform-especially when the tasks before them are very hard, challenging, and perhaps even near the ethicalline-simply raise the financial incentive for success. And because many of the most creative and innovative discoveries in established businesses come through collaborations with others, the financial incentive imposes a reality that can breed tendencies for a manager representing one company in a partnership eventually to cheat the partnership by succumbing to the lure of big rewards from his home company, thus maximizing rather than optimizing his firm's take in the deal. Senior managers collude in this process by raising rewards for performance almost like high-stakes poker. With no easy answers, opportunities for self-enrichment and succumbing to the lures of our economic system abound-and only those strong in integrity can avoid going over the line and being lured by such temptations. Biologically, one and a half centuries ago Darwin (1859) detailed the long tendency for stronger creatures to outsurvive their weaker brethren-a natural human instinct to "win" genetically, with the fittest species surviving. Mendel concurrently explained a genetic phenomenon that may reinforce-if not actually drive-such behavior by foretelling the genetic tendency for certain genes to dominate weaker ones (Dunn, 1951, 1965), even "repairing" them to conform to the stronger historical norm. Hence our most basic biology holds deep, hard-to-change evolutionary roots that could drive us to lapse into competitive animalistic behaviors that can perceive winning as essential for survival, with conscious collaboration-not even trying for the "win" -as something almost alien. In addition, succeeding in a partnership venture usually requires seeing the best in your partner's acts, rather than the worst, and being appropriately empathetic when things go wrong. Provocative recent research (Caspi and others, 2003) suggests that there may be genetic impediments to seeing the best and demonstrating empathy. Researchers found that a common, naturally occurring variation in the sequence of genetic information on a segment of DNA among individuals-what scientists call a functional polymorphism-in the promoter region of the gene that controls how the neurotransmitter serotonin is transported through the body-the so-called 5-HTT gene on chromosome 17q11.2-may affect how well and how quickly
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people recover from traumatic events, such as the death of a spouse or loved-one, or other traumatic disorders. Scientists believe that the serotonin system, the target of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs such as Zoloft and Paxil, contributes to depression, with the serotonin transporter receiving particular attention because of its involvement in the reuptake of serotonin at brain synapses. There are two forms-long and short-of the 5-HTT gene in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter. An individual can inherit two copies of the long form, two copies of the short form, or one of each. In the reported research, scientists in England, New Zealand, and Wisconsin found that patients with alternative forms of the gene, called alleles, reacted differently to trauma. Patients with one or two copies of the short allele of the 5-HTT promoter polymorphism exhibited more depressive symptoms, diagnosable depression, and suicidality in relation to stressful life events than individuals with only the long allele. The subject group with the twolong allele pattern-about 31 percent of the population of 845 studiedapparently circulated greater amounts of serotonin, experienced fewer depressive reactions, and were more resilient to trauma. Thus the 69 percent of the people without that same genetic variant may not be able to "recover" as quickly from trauma in their partnering relationships and could be prone to improperly attribute events as partner "faults" or "mistakes," as a clinically depressed patient might. People with the right genetic predisposition to recover better and faster from negative events may fare better as partnership operatives. Psychologically, the natural forces in most organizations drive people to conform (McGill, 1989; McGill, Johnson, and Bantel, 1994). This means adopting and operating within a transactional mind-set, in which they are internally or self-focused, conforming to maintain the equilibrium and stay within organizational norms to succeed, and driven and directed to stay within those comfort zones by external forces that can deliver rewards and decree success (Quinn, 2003). In the alternative transformational mind-set, people consciously fight the system and become externally focused-that is, focused on unleashing some tremendous potential-and internally directed toward accomplishing that high goal. The latter happens rarely, Quinn concludes, because "hypocrisy is ubiquitous. We all lack integrity" and "the world conspires to lure us toward mediocrity and transactional thinking" {p. 161).
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That hampering tendency to conform is compounded by a perverse paradox in partnerships: to succeed and maintain their partnership, what partners need most is early successes-short-term wins (Welborn and Kasten, 2003). But to succeed for the long-term, partners must work together early to build trust and develop unyielding integrity. While not mutually exclusive, the dilemma around such choices can be exacerbated by the fact that powerful, anti-positivity psychological forces often impose a negative bias in how we cognitively see, recall, and attribute certain events (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs, 2001), including those related to interactions with new partners. Baumeister and his colleagues report exhaustive examples of bad events having far stronger impact than good ones, finding-even in relationships a lot like partnerships-that harmful effects from bad things exert greater influence than the beneficial effects of good things. Negative forces, which the lion's share of the reported research emphasizes, activate what are called aversive drives, leading to defensive behaviors that avoid danger, failure, rejection, and other generalized responses to environmental conditions-our classic evolutionary psychology genetic roots (Elliott, 1997; Boyatzis, 1973; Gable, 2000; Schmalt, 1999). Reis and Gable (2003) explain that in social interactions that likely extend to the interactions of key partnership operatives, negativity tends to increase over time, so partners must be continuously vigilant about building enough positive affect into their relationships to overcome the natural negatives. For instance, in research on couples, Gottman (1994) proposed that positive or good interactions need to outnumber bad ones by a five to one ratio or a relationship will likely fail. He concluded that longterm relationship success depends more on not doing bad things than on doing good things. This finding carries fundamental caution for prospective business partners as well. Baumeister and his colleagues, in related findings, reported that there are many more words to indicate negative emotional states than there are to indicate positive ones (Russell, Fernandez-Dols, Monstead, and Wellenkamp, 1995), there are more specific and narrow definitions for bad traits than for good ones (Claeys and Timmers, 1993), people have greater recall of negative emotional events than of positive ones (Finkenauer and Rime, 1998), and they have enhanced memory for "bad" material (Taylor, 1991); in addition, negative events carry more information-processing weight
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than positive ones (Fiske, 1980), and people engage in more thorough and careful information processing of negative events than of positive ones (Clore, Schwartz, and Conway, 1994). There were also findings that are especially important in the early days of partnership formation, when key leaders are developing their relationships and striving to build trust: for example, bad information about a new person carries more weight and has a larger impact on impressions than good information (Peeters and Czapenski, 1990). In short, bad events can have a lasting impact while good events produce only a transient positive effect. This can pose a natural psychological obstruction to successful partnering. These psychological roadblocks, added to the economic and biological forces working against partnering, combine to form a powerful inertia toward failure, but on one that a emphasis on positivity can help overcome. While the inertia of these three forces-free-market capitalism, the natural human instinct for competitive survival, and the psychological drive to conform-may combine to make regression to zero-sum partnership outcomes powerful, even naturally predictable forces, it does not ensure the inevitable failure of the partnership. A commitment to a positive outcome built upon awareness, diligence, and continuous focus on success factors can win out, especially if partnerships operate in a new, powerful, and transformational way-where unyielding integrity and continuous vigilance become essential, supported by transformative parent organizations with the patience to initially optimize and ultimately maximize their success in these new ventures, which require time so that trust and unyielding integrity can be built among their leaders. Partners and Total Transparency
What does all this mean? In the aftermath of the scandal-ridden early twenty-first century (McGill, 2003), it means that to reap the positivity potential partners must operate with total transparency-not just on the first day of their partnership, but every day. It means that all parties put all their cards on the table, every day, every hour. When things change, they candidly say so-right away. And good partners push back on each other, in a sense serving as each other's conscience, while at the same time looking out for each other's well-being, consciously playing
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the role of devil's advocate at key junctures and around critical decision making. As Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy (1998) report, an obvious outcome of such discussions is that potential conflicts, misconceptions, and issues of concern are handled in real time-that is, they are not allowed to fester-with each partner held blameless as a solution to the problem is sought. There will be no secrets, no surprises, no "gotcha" discoveries that result in one partner claiming them alone or otherwise exploiting the other. Rather, it becomes incumbent for each partner to protect the other-in a sense becoming their proverbial brother's keeper, looking out for their brother first, even before they look out for themselves. In theory-and in the most successful joint ventures-either partner could take either side of the deal any day and feel that they were getting a fair shake. To do otherwise can invite destructive evolutionary problems as partnerships age: new managers succeed initial ones with eyes on marking their success, new opportunities for partners to take back to their home company become apparent, the economic lures for winning for the home team mount. Partnerships can lose their core culture or their reasons for being, or become vulnerable to an egregious manager looking to maximize his personal copybook. Even if none of these things happens, power is rarely constant during the course of a partnership, and that too invites abuse from a dominant partner. Only by continuously looking out for our brother partner can we work toward building true and lasting trust-an a priori requirement for unyielding integrity-and come to work together in true partnership. The requirement that partnerships must reach this high level of unyielding integrity has been driven home by thoughtful colleagues Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi of Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and their insightful work on knowledge creation and what it takes for it to succeed. They build on Polanyi's distinction between tacit (personal, context specific, hard to formalize and communicate) knowledge and explicit (codified and transmittable in formal, systematic language) knowledge (Polanyi, 1966) and conclude that the "tacit knowledge of individuals is the basis of organizational knowledge creation" (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 72), a critical goal of most partnerships. Thus, for partnerships to succeed, they must mobilize the tacit
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knowledge created and accumulated at the individual level by members of the partnership. Without unyielding integrity built on trust, this critical transfer of tacit knowledge at the individual level can be selective, censored, politically driven, incomplete, and even held secret by some. This result dooms the partnership's potential. Explicit knowledge, like the letter of the law, can be shared, simply by writing it down and giving it to someone. In the strictest sense, morality aside, it requires neither trust nor unyielding integrity. But this communication of explicit knowledge captures only the most formal of conclusions and holds little of the richness of the innovation process that is required to create new and better things-products, markets, people, processes. Nonaka and Takeuchi describe knowledge creation as an interchange between explicit and tacit knowledge by way of a knowledge conversion as social interaction between individuals occurs around their tacit and explicit knowledge. Through dialogue, people interchange the explicit here-and-now knowledge of today with the might-be tacit knowledge of tomorrow, leading to visions of new things that can be accomplished. For example, Nonaka and Takeuchi report, when creating its first minicopier, Canon's team of developers came together at an offsite resort to wrestle with their biggest obstacle: how to come up with a low-cost, disposable print cartridge that would be highly reliable and easily used in home machines. After hours of frustration struggling to put his vision (tacit knowledge) into words (explicit knowledge) that the others could grasp, the team leader sent out for beer to help the group relax and perhaps spur its creativity. As the beer was consumed and the cans were emptied, the leader's explicit image of his tacit solution became clearer. He held up an empty beer can and asked, "How much does it cost to manufacture these cans?" In answering the question and applying the process of manufacturing beer cans to manufacturing copier drum cylinders with the same material, the team moved from a fuzzy tacit notion to a clear and explicit example that proved a model for Canon's minicopier printing drum solution, a model that transformed the industry. Without trust, these kinds of open-both formal and informal-exchanges and learning sessions do not occur, and unyielding integrity is never achieved, whether within large, complex organizations such as Canon or in joint ventures involving multiple partners.
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In successful partnerships, such informal interfaces are the "glue that holds the alliance together" (Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy, 1998, p. 763). They reinforce personal commitment and trust, provide access to information and contacts, and foster the development of informal networks. These interpersonal relationships can brace the alliance, especially when it is under stress, providing a safety net in tough times.
Building Real Trust
Real trust, a stepping stone to unyielding integrity, also serves to mitigate one of a partner's biggest worries or concerns-the predictability of partner behavior (Shapiro, Sheppard, and Cheraskin, 1992)-because, as Ring and Van de Yen report, "Where there is trust, people may not choose to rely upon detailed contracts to ensure predictability" (Ring and Van de Yen, 1994, p. 110). Indeed, much research supports the notion that trust and control form parallel and interacting forces, suggesting that the more you have of one, the less you may need of the other (Das and Teng, 1998) in order to achieve the satisfactory cooperation required in any partnering venture (Doz, 1996; Kanter, 1994). Trust is the prime prerequisite for effective control and moderates the need for control mechanisms (Gould and Quinn, 1990) because it induces desirable behavior (Mohr and Spekman, 1994); it is considered an essential ingredient in almost all human relationships because it has an efficient smoothing effect on human exchanges (Arrow, 1972; Luhmann, 1979; Williamson, 1993; Zand, 1972). Such trust can be built by the following means:
Risk taking. Because trust leads to risk taking and because risk taking enhances trust (Boon and Holmes, 1991), trust can be accumulated from prior satisfactory experiences (Gulati, 1995a); a firm's reputation for being honest, fair, and trustworthy is often the first piece of evidence that justifies taking an initial risk (Barney and Hansen, 1994). Equity. Ensuring that equity and fairness are preserved (Das and Bing, 1998) builds mutual trust, while a lack of equity can significantly undermine such trust. Communication. Open and prompt communication, with partners continually speaking their mind on issues, creates an infor-
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mation symmetry as partners "collect evidence about their partners' credibility and trustworthiness" (Das and Bing, 1998, p. 501), while helping partners develop common values and norms (Leifer and Mills, 1996) and with their sustained interaction critical for holding the partners together (Madhok, 1995). Interfirm adaptability. This is the willingness to accommodate deviations from the norm and to be flexible. Such bilateral adaptability in joint ventures provides an incentive for acting toward mutual rather than self-interests (Madhok, 1995). In applying positive psychology's appetitive model to partnering, some specific behaviors are suggested for success that satisfy the three intrinsic human needs of autonomy, competence, and relatednessessentially, feeling understood and appreciated by your partners-and can predict day-to-day fluctuations in human perceptions of well-being (Reis and others, 2000). Relatedness is especially significant because of its association with only positive affect-the intrinsic enjoyment of an activity-and not negative affect. Thus relatedness behaviors can bolster a partnership by building positive psychological perceptions, even reservoirs of positivity, to strengthen it in troubled times, whereas lack of relatedness is tantamount to representing disinterest in the other people involved. This result is reinforced by at least some evidence that positive assertive psychological triggers such as relatedness actually go beyond theoretical phenomena and can stimulate physiological and hormonal responses (Carter, 1998). If the results of such positive psychological research are borne out, partners deliberately planning to stimulate such positives would likely bring big advantages to the partnership table, psychological underpinnings that could do much to enhance their perceived trust. Regarding trust, research by Liedtka (1996) on successful and less successful partnerships found that in the winning ventures, trust was earned over time, whereas in the less successful ones "it was demanded" (p. 26). That research identified two core requirements of successful partnerships-absolute faith in the technical capability of a partner and deep belief in each other's intentions. Either alone is insufficient for success. Thus, as Ring and Van de Ven (1994) found, equity plays a significant role in partnership trust formation. One critical part of that trust formation, Liedtka found, was a willingness to forgive, because
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early stumbles are inevitable in most partnerships. In struggling ventures, partners responded to problems by distancing themselves and letting their partner "twist in the wind." Worse, whereas successful partners acknowledged their problems and put the past in perspective to begin again, in struggling partnerships leaders publicly ignored the problems but privately remembered and even dwelled on them. Clearly, acknowledging failures, forgiving them, and moving ahead has proven a far healthier course. This impact of trust on current and future relationships has been shown in a wide variety of settings (Larson, 1992; Uzzi, 1997). The context of firms' previous partnering relationships with each other had an important impact on how tightly coupled future relationships between the pair might be (Islett and Provan, 2002). Firms favored past allies because their history provided information that helped reduce the uncertainty in choosing a partner (Li and Rowley, 2000), with much of the decision hinging on the reciprocity-the value of benefits exchanged and the regularity with which partners contributed to the ventureshown in their previous partnerships (Balakrishnan and Koza, 1993; Gulati, 1998). Indeed, Gulati found that alliance partners abandoned hierarchical controls in favor of trust-based flexibility when they could (Gulati, 1995a, 1995b). And when alliances have existed for a long time, the bonds between key officials in the two cooperating organizations sometimes became closer than the operatives' links to their own parent organizations (Kanter, 1989)-a key indicator of developed trust. Gulati (1995a) concluded that as firms learn more about each other-through experience and reputation-a knowledge-based trust around the norms of equity evolves (Shapiro, Sheppard, and Cheraskin, 1992), producing a strong cognitive and emotional basis for that trust. In addition, the informal personal connections that build across organizations help inform methods for organizing the partnerships and establishing governance structures (Ring and Van de Ven, 1994) in which an embedded social network based on prior alliances (Kogut, Shan, and Walker, 1993) can serve to police operatives in successor partnerships to behave in accordance with expected norms. It should be emphasized that not all business relationships require such deep partnerships. Despite the fact that the word partnership is frequently thrown around to represent almost any business relation-
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ship today, in anything less than the special collaborative relationships emphasized in this chapter the use of the word partnership is a misnomer. It confuses and corrupts, tarnishing these special, select relationships. Many business relationships will always be adversarial, practicing straight economic exchange, plain vanilla money-for-stuff transactions, with no special relationships involved. Such fee-for-service and fee-forproduct relationships, where the best deal for the best price wins the day, will always be around. The "partner" relationships emphasized throughout this chapter are far more than these-clearly special, complex, and at a much higher level of personal interdependence and trust. Partnering Minimizes Economic Waste
Making the most of our partnering opportunities through positivity is important because the world cannot afford the inefficiencies bred by very imperfect markets and very imperfect companies. For instance, providing quality, efficiently priced health care is one of the great challenges facing the West, because the cost of providing health insurance is the fastest rising uncontrolled cost of doing business in the United States. Yet accomplishing anything will require trust and cooperation among multiple parties-employers, insurers, providers, hospitals, suppliers, physicians, patients-yet even among progressive health care organizations, building trusting relationships across that value chain of organizational boundaries has proved challenging, even from simple and basic beginnings. Take one large national hospital group and its plans a few years ago to construct seven updated cardiac catheterization laboratories at a list price of roughly $1 million each. With three leading national providers in the cardiac catheterization lab field involved, the hospital group had the potential for a big win-and some big savings-if all seven labs could have been built by one lab-building partner, with potential added benefits from collaboration, volume pricing, comprehensive training, staged installations, planned functionality, and the like. But enough trust-between physician and hospital, hospital and parent system, system and prospective cath lab providers-could not be built to make that happen. The players were hamstrung by the negativity of the past and were not ready for unyielding integrity, in part because key leaders in
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the parent hospital firm "didn't think you got the best deal by partnering," and in part because the favored bidder-supplier was seen as a company "that never stopped selling" long enough to truly partner and build trust and was not perceived as continuously having the system's best interests at heart. Not only was there no perception of unyielding integrity, there was also no indication that it was even desired-and perception ruled. There was no gesture toward, let alone quest for, positivity. In the end, all three supplier companies built some of the seven labs. They were chosen through traditional adversarial bidding processes, and at full price. No money was saved, no added benefits were achieved, and no positivity power of partnering was gained. The downside of this straight economic transaction is that it imposed great waste. Consider that teams from all three cath lab providers made numerous sales calls and presentations at each of the seven hospitals and at corporate headquarters, costing each provider $200,000 to $250,000 in sunk marketing costs. In any business, the costs for highpriced medical and technical experts-the price of an inefficient and costly bidding processes-must be recouped. If Provider A loses its bid at Hospital 1, it will be certain to make up those costs when it prices and wins the job at Hospital 2-thus recovering the aggregate marketing costs, as it must. In the main, these bidding sessions added little value, produced miniscule new knowledge, and consumed hundreds of hours of many health care professionals' most valuable asset-their time-with little to show for it. Even worse, amid such fragile relationships among buyer and seller, salespeople and local hospital administrators with a favored vendor were ripe on both sides for divide-and-conquer strategies aimed at undermining any systemwide deal that could have been negotiated at the corporate level. Such positioning is mostly about power and control-and a sorry lack of trust. But a health care system as fragile as that in the United States cannot afford such luxury and waste. A single supplier-probably any of the three-chosen on a corporate-wide basis-you could have thrown a dart at the wall to pick one-would have been preferable to the independent decisions that evolved at the seven local sites. Almost $2 million of the $7 million spent on the seven cath labs could have been saved. But these leaders-in the hospital firm and in the supplier companies-were reluctant to follow the positivity roadmap, to put all
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their cards on the table, to operate with total candor and transparency, to move toward unyielding integrity. Yet this unyielding integrity is essential for business to prosper on a global scale. Perhaps some examples will help illustrate the point. It is well known that companies use collaboration to find new ideas and new sources of value (Welborn and Kasten, 2003). Welborn and Kasten have called this growth through strategic collaboration the Jericho Principle, which posits the importance of creating a "collaborative landscape" built around intimacy-the degree to which collaborators expose their core competencies and value to one another-and dynamism-the degree to which they are willing to take dramatic steps together and consciously reject going it alone. Kodak and Fuji joined forces with a trio of Japanese camera makers to develop a next-generation standard for photographic film, as did IBM, Toshiba, and Siemens for advanced memory chips (Harrison and St. John, 1996), in partnerships built on the Japanese keiretsu model of cooperation. Similarly, Starbucks and McDonald's partnered with outside environmental groups by, respectively, creating a biodiversity-friendly "shade grown" coffee and improving the environmental quality of its cups, and by reducing waste in operations and packaging. UPS followed suit with less environmentally harmful packaging materials (Rondinelli and London, 2003). In the traditionally highly fragmented U.S. health care industry, there is today a pressing need for a more integrated system that can raise quality while controlling costs (Starr, 1982). One early success is a three-way alliance among the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, a leading Washington state HMO, and suppliers Owens and Minor and 3M HealthCare (Gould, 1999). This alliance demonstrates that a preset reimbursement-called capitation-could be successfully applied to the purchase of medical and surgical supplies. Bolstered by a risk-sharing financial system that shared gains as well as losses, the companies changed their internal systems to create more efficient distribution through an integrated supply chain-leading to a 35 percent reduction in costs over three years and an enhanced commitment to their alliance. Similarly, Judge and Ryman (2001) cite other health care partnerships that have increased market share, raised profits to three times the rate of competitors, and created alliances with alternative medicine providers that tapped into a multibillion-dollar health care subsector (LaPuma, 1998).
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In a decade of studying such ventures, however, Welborn and Kasten (2003) have concluded that "the longer it takes for such a collaborative relationship to generate value, the more likely it is that one or more participants will lose their appetite, threatening the investment for everyone." The catch-22 here is that this short-term rush to perform and generate value may come at the long-term expense of the partnership first building lasting trust and unyielding integrity among its operating partners. Hence, in driving to succeed in the early days and keep their partnership together, the participants may be unconsciously conceding that their partnership will achieve less than its full potential. That paradox raises basic questions about the very cornerstones of a partnership-and the priorities on which the partners place the greatest importance. The best way to avoid such bad endings, Welborn and Kasten report, is through good beginnings-initial negotiation and consensus-building, restrictions on employees working in the collaboration through confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements, as well as "no poaching" agreements regarding each other's employees ultimately detailed in some sort of partnership agreement. The delicate balancing act here is to have some form of agreed-on legal structure to the joint venture without having lawyer-driven detail slow or even strangle the partnership's growth. The signing of the initial agreement should be the last time the partners look at it, because once the people operating as partners are driven to pull out the contract and examine the letter of its terms, the partnership is for all purposes doomed in terms of achieving its full potential. It has allowed the explicit to overpower the tacit, the historical fear of negativity to eclipse the promise of positivity. Yet if all the potential issues and challenges in the partnership could be expressed in the explicit language of a contract, the partnership probably would not be necessary-because with everything codified, there would be little new to do or to learn. Balancing a Teeter-Totter
Trust and relational integrity have become societal expectations-and now legal mandates-for Western businesses. In partnerships, these typically mean balance, equity, and fairness. Envision a teeter-totter equilibrium of gains-fine as long as things stay in balance, moving up and down over time, and provide a perceived equality, with neither
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party gaining excessively over the other. But put a fat guy on the teetertotter and things change fast. Successful partners trust that equity and balance will ultimately be achieved in such relationships (Korsgaard, Scheiger, and Sapienza, 1995; Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy, 1998). Larson (1992) described such partnerships as having a back-andforth pattern of reciprocity, which provides a social structure to the alliance in which a cyclical exchange process provides the means for each partner to escalate their commitment to the relationship incrementally (Li and Rowley, 2000), and the regular demonstration of each partner's commitment creates a "long shadow of the future" (Axelrod, 1984, pp. 129, 152) and becomes a foundation for building trust (Larson, 1992). As Larson states, "If one side extended itself in a special effort to deliver on a promise, the other side responded in kind at the next opportunity. The results were perceived by both as beneficial (even if the gains were small)." As a result, in most successful partnerships, there is a strong sense of shared values, skill at bridging diverse viewpoints, and the ability to analyze and redesign processes as necessary to accomplish the partnership's goals. These efforts are supported by larger parent organizations that value both the ends that the partners are seeking and their means of getting there. In less successful ventures, conflict is suppressed, substituting compromise, which perpetuates mediocrity and indifference (Liedtka, 1996) rather than excellence and commitment. Part of success is rooted in how the partnerships are conceived. In the most successful ones, Liedtka reported, partnerships are seen both as organizational relationships at the business unit level and as personal relationships between key individuals in the partnership. Liedtka found that partnership success swings on leaders developing a "partnering mind-set" from which they see the venture as representing an important opportunity, assume that their partner will be there for them, trust their partner, and are ready to learn from each other. To succeed, the partnering mind-set requires a corresponding partnering skill set and a supportive parent that provides commitment, processes, and resources to facilitate the collaboration. As such, keys to building alliance success include having an expanded sense of what constitutes partnership success-an understanding of the "bigger picture" (Judge and Ryman, 2001, p. 76), which allows partnership operatives to employ a holistic approach to channel their
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energy to serve their customers collaboratively rather than dwelling on every individual partner transaction. This forms a core part of success among the partners (Bucklin and Sengupta, 1993), who rely on each other to do their part, in the process accepting their vulnerability to opportunism or the shirking of duties by their partner. Successful managers in such alliances must possess skills different from those that lead to success in traditional businesses or functional units within bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations (Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, and MacAvoy, 1998). They must hold positivity-based perspectives that can accentuate creativity and learning-including functional and interpersonal skills and an "alliance mind-set." Forming such an alliance that balances equitable gains on both sides is important because perceived inequitable gains achieved by one party in a partnership can breed cycles of retribution for those perceived excessive gains, producing a hidden agenda for one partner to rebalance the scale, distracting or preoccupying the partner, and ultimately undermining any true partnership potential. This means not that partners must get exactly the same things from their relationship, which would largely make productive partnerships moot, but that there must be an equality in what each partner extracts from the partnership over time. For instance, if a U.S. company does a joint-venture partnership with a local firm in a developing country with the expectation that it will learn the market, prove itself a good local citizen, gain access to the best workers, and the like, while the local firm expects it will learn new manufacturing technology and quality control, such expectations may well represent equity and an equality of learning for both. So divergent learning is not only okay, it is also desirable. But if one partner then utilizes their learning to gain unfair differential advantage over the partner-say the local firm then uses its influence with politicians to throw out the American partner, and the host company expropriates the plant without proper notice or compensation-that differential gain results in a huge outcome inequality. Even so-called win-win partnerships can result in inequalities. Because such partnerships can actually lead to outcomes more accurately described as "WIN-win," where one partner gains so much more than the other that the relative balance in their gains is lost-like the fat kid getting on the teeter-totter. These inequalities are often unseen and can
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motivate some to equalize the gains by making adjustments on their own. Some such adjustments can lead to prison, as in embezzlement or fraud, to say nothing of dramatic headlines. But consider the less egregious examples that happen in the everyday world. Take Larry's Bait Shop. Larry began patronizing the Bait Shop years ago, on weekend fishing trips. He liked the old man who ran the place, and liked relying on a place to get good bait. But then the bait shop's owner died. His young nephews, one in his late teens, another in his early twenties, took over the bait shop, where they had worked from time to time for years. But they had little business savvy and ran the marginal business into the ground, ultimately facing bankruptcy. Larry liked the boys and thought what they really needed was not bankruptcy but some help learning about business, and encouragement that they could succeed. So Larry bought the bait shop from the boys, retaining them to work at and run the place under his guidance as an absentee owner, and visiting every weekend. Things got better almost from the outset and worked very well for the first few years. The boys kept their jobs, developed good relationships with customers, and grew the business and their business sense while retaining the old-time character of their uncle's place. The bait shop was in the black-small profits at first, working into the tens of thousands by the second year. That is when something strange occurred: cash seemed to be missing from the till with growing regularity, something Larry initially attributed to carelessness in making change or balancing the day's transactions. But with the losses recurring regularly, Larry was forced to dig deeper and see the light. It turned out that the boys were helping themselves to the cash drawerfor everything from meals to pocket money. They began aboveboard, leaving IOUs in the till, then settling their loans on payday. Larry knew about this and reluctantly approved. But as time passed, the tillborrowing habit became more egregious in frequency and amounts, and it became easier for the boys simply to destroy or skip the IOUs rather than pay them off, making it look like the money was just lost in the natural course of trade. In the end the boys were taking a few hundred dollars a week, justifying it as their share of the profits-because, hell, we built the business, we run the business, we're the ones who know the customers and we're entitled to a piece of the action. Clearly they had crossed the integrity line in spades. But their
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justification, regardless of how rationalizing and unethical it was, begged some questions: Did they ever ask for a piece of the action? (No.) Why not? (Larry would have said "no." Actually, Larry would have said "yes" and was planning to give the boys profit sharing at year-end as a "surprise bonus, which they have earned and deserve because they made the place successful.") In that light, unyielding integrity was lost on both sides-obviously by the boys, for stealing from the till, less obviously but also by Larry, for reaping profits from the bait shop that could be perceived as inequitably large by the boys, who saw those profits as being "built on our backs." Hence, when Larry began to feel that the profits were large enough to share with the boys, he should have put the issue on the table with them immediately and discussed his future profit-sharing plan or some comparable equitable solution for the boys. Extremes threaten unyielding integrity, and excesses often tempt some people to seek their own equity, however sloppily and unethically. The mere recognition and acknowledged appreciation for their efforts, with a commitment to share in the success down the road, can often keep most people from going over the edge, as it probably would have done in Larry's case. But when integrity yields-even at a bait shop-bad things can happen. Thus relationships can begin equitably and turn inequitable, at least in perception. And it is in such conditions that the partner gaining the differential advantage needs to be ever vigilant of the other guys, putting himself in their shoes, looking at things as they might, and adjusting the situation to restore balance and equity. This is a high standard, but one essential if we are to maximize positive organizational outcomes. Continuous vigilance toward such a goal ensures that one partner will not gain unfairly at the expense of the other-something essential in these special partnering relationships. This can happen at any scale, and in building such unyielding integrity in partnerships, it is important that relationships remain dynamic, not locked in. That is why paying too much attention to explicit contract terms is discouraged-because the partners could miss the spirit of the relationship. Take the case of a luxurious condominium resort in Hawaii managed by one of the state's top resort operators. We'll call it Hawaii Resorts. For years Hawaii Resorts paid the condominium owners $24,000 in annual rent for its small office space on the property. But when the man-
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agement company was able to help the condominium resort lower its property insurance costs by $50,000 a year by incorporating the condominium project into Hawaii Resort's global master policy, the condominium's leadership group saw it as an extraordinary gain. To rebalance the scale-and before Hawaii Resorts could even ask the condominium to consider it-Hawaii Resorts' rent was reduced to $2,400 a year, saving it more than $20,000. The condominium was not contractually bound to do this, but it was the right thing to do. And that is what unyielding integrity means in a partnering relationship-looking out for the other guy's interests as well as your own. In the same spirit, two years later, with the post-9/11 exponential escalation in insurance premiums-especially for places where large numbers of people gathered, such as hotels and resorts-Hawaii Resorts was no longer able to help provide the condominium with lower cost insurance. So the condominium bought its own-and raised Hawaii Resorts' rent back to its original amount. This is an equitable example of looking out for your partner and yourself, leading with unyielding integrity on both counts but not overlooking sound business practices in the process. Building Unyielding Integrity
So how do you get started? Easy. Put all your cards on the table. That means asking such questions as the following:
At the outset: What do you expect to gain from this partnership? And why partner with me? Along the way: What has changed or evolved? Always: Have we changed any of our fundamental goals? These questions should be asked of both organizations in a partnership, not just one's own, and they should be asked over and over. In the beginning-before making the deal, in deciding on the depth and potential value of the prospective partnership-it pays not to mince words. Answers to the following two questions will tell you a lot: Will and how will the partners share "eureka" discoveries? Will such discoveries be considered proprietary for you-or for us? This is an easy yet powerful way to begin and sustain the integrity process.
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Some organizations have become masters at building integrity by such candor and directness. Consider the grand success of the positivitydrenched Detroit human development organization Focus: HOPE, a place unmatched in the world for building people's self-sufficiency and self-esteem simultaneously through its partnerships with big business, small business, universities, government, foundations, community groups, and tens of thousands of individuals-Focus: HOPE's "colleagues"-in Southeastern Michigan. Focus: HOPE was created in the aftermath of the bloody 1967 Detroit riot, one of the worst in modern U.S. history, initially to provide food for pregnant and nursing mothers and infants (Tichy, McGill, and St. Clair, 1997). It has blossomed into a national food program for senior and low income citizens (the Commodity Supplemental Food Program), a day care center complete with Montessori school, and training programs to prepare young people for careers in the machine trades, engineering professions, and high technology. What is special about Focus: HOPE is that when it develops someone for the future, it does not prepare them for some entry-level marginal job, where they would be the first to go in an economic downturn. Rather, when Focus: HOPE "fixes" someone, it saves not just the person but, intergenerationally, his or her family as well, because Focus: HOPE's graduates are prepared not for minimumwage work but to enter the economic mainstream at middle-level wages or above. Graduates of its Machinist Training Institute typically earn upwards of $32,000 a year and win 100 percent placement, and graduates of its Center for Advanced Technologies, with their college associate's and bachelor's degrees, can enter the workforce at starting salaries above those of graduates from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology-approaching $75,000 a year. Since founders the late Father William T. Cunningham and suburban housewife Eleanor Josaitis created Focus: HOPE, they have put all their cards on the table with all their partners, including student colleagues, all the time. Their relationships are the picture of unyielding integrity, as is their institution-and its graduates. The leaders instill it. They model it. So do upperclassmen and mentors. From a tell-it-like-it-is former drill sergeant who helps the high school graduates upgrade their math and reading skills two to three grade levels in six weeks to qualify for the more demanding programs, to an executive director rejecting
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monies and potential new training programs because "they just don't fit with our mission," to a food center complete with shopping carts and cash registers "because children here with their mothers to get food from our government food program shouldn't experience anything different from the child who goes to the regular supermarket with parents who pay," Focus: HOPE epitomizes the positivity of dignity, honor, and high ethics-and imprinting the right models. Focus: HOPE, with virtually no financial wealth of its own, nonetheless continually rejects opportunities to partner with monied organizations that might not be prepared to operate at its high level. That's unyielding integrity. Just as every organization should, Focus: HOPE does a demanding assessment before it enters into any venture, seeing how that venture fits with its thirty-five-year-old mission statement: "Recognizing the dignity and beauty of every person, we pledge intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty, and injustice, to build a metropolitan community where all people may live in freedom, harmony, trust and affection-black and white, yellow, brown, and red, from Detroit and its suburbs, of every economic status, national origin, religious persuasion, we join in this covenant. March 8th, 1968." If the fit is right-that is, it is intelligent and practical and contributes to Focus: HOPE's higher goals-then it will be taken to the next step. If it is not: no deal. That is part of the integrity with which this remarkable place operates. Perhaps one reason so many respected bigbusiness organizations, in particular, are eager to partner with Focus: HOPE (which supplies skilled manufacturing parts to General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Roger Penske's Detroit Diesel, and the U.S. Defense Department on a competitive-bid basis from its for-profit businesses) is that, unlike some public service organizations big on mulling and contemplating, Focus: HOPE is a place for decisions and action. Its partners like that. Its students like that too, because they are better prepared to enter and succeed in the workforce. Focus: HOPE continually examines fit. It does not stop at the organizational level but probes deep into the human level as well-as should most firms looking to build successful partnerships. Focus: HOPE utilizes numerous vestibules in its developmental programs' transition points, where people are candidly evaluated in an interactive dialogue on their potential to succeed at the next level. But with emphasis always
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on the dignity and success of every colleague, these vestibules provide opportunities for people who do not continue in the programs to leave and move directly into good journeyman jobs at good salaries, positions often procured by Focus: HOPE on the basis of its emphasis on total human development and the success and dignity of each of its colleagues. Similarly, in business partnerships candor is critical as key people build trust and unyielding integrity. Because most partnerships ultimately succeed or fail on the basis of the individuals operating them at the individual manager level, the appropriate questions to ask-again from both sides-are as follows: What's in it for me? What's in it for you? What did I miss? What aren't you telling me? Are there any hidden agendas? If you haven't, why can't you put all your cards on the table? These issues are worth revisiting frequently, especially early on, when partnership relationships are being developed. Meaty issues-such as if and how you will share eureka discoveries among the partners-cut to the core of trust and unyielding integrity. The theft or perceived theft of an idea generated in the midst of a partnership is a common deal breaker. When one partner sees different or future potential for an idea, he or she can exploit it for later individual use outside the partnership, or put everything on the table-perhaps having to fight with the partner even to acknowledge the idea's potential-and agree to share in future successes, even though the one partner's role may be little more than that of a passive investor. The important point in the latter example is that the passive partner retains equity in an idea derived from the partnership. Critical Ingredients
In taking advantage of positive organizational potential by building successful partnerships and the unyielding integrity they require, a few things emerge as critical. Given the strong lure of economic rewards that could tempt a manager to favor his employer company over his partner-
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ing one, that temptation should be straightaway erased. This can be done by rewarding key partnership managers from both firms on the basis of the success of the partnership, not the success, or lack thereof, of their home companies. That means establishing long-term details on salaries and performance bonuses, as well as wealth-sharing instruments such as "shadow stock" to allow key leaders to share in the direct success of the partnership, as if it were a separate company with its own stock. But consciously separating from the parent firm to join in some partnership requires more than adjustments of the financial rewards. When leaders are deployed or detached, out of sight and out of mind, they can easily be overlooked when it comes to succession at the parent company. Some guard against that by keeping one foot on their home turf, the other in their temporary assignment in the new partnership. Such halfhearted commitment by a manager is not unyielding integrity. It is more temporary time-passing and politically correct ticket-punching, and few highly ambitious partnerships will succeed with less than fully committed players. For that reason, it is essential in beginning a partnership that seeks to accomplish big things and build unyielding integrity for key managers to make multiyear commitments to the venture-rarely less than five years and often as many as ten-and for that time, to commit themselves fully to the partnership and its potential. That may mean consciously withdrawing from consideration for big jobs at their old home company-even the CEO job-that they once would have cherished and that still may make them envious, jobs that would cause them to make an untimely and premature departure from their key role in the new partnership if the opportunities evolved now. In fact, one easy way to see how committed your partnering organization, and its key partnership operatives, are to your venture is to see how deep and sincere a commitment in time and economic allegiance they are willing to make to your new partnership.
Unyielding Integrity and Power
The important learning points here are that large and powerful institutions striving to exploit the opportunities offered by positive organizational approaches and achieve unyielding integrity as they partner must
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commit their best people irrevocably, and always strive to see things through the other guy's eyes and understand their perceptions of events. The larger the "power gap" is between partners, the greater is the obligation for the larger, more powerful organization to go the extra mile to look out for the other guy, avoiding abusing their power, and absolutely retaining unyielding integrity. Take Nissan's luxury Infiniti brand and its heady launch days in the late 1980s. This was the luxury brand that was supposed to change the entire car-buying and car-ownership experience in the United States, to build the highest customer satisfaction and repurchase rates by raising the entire level of customer care. Infiniti offered more than a mere economic transaction-it wanted to build revolutionary relationships with its customers. In a sense, Infiniti's ambitious transformational goal was to bring positivity-based unyielding integrity to one of the most cut-throat businesses around. The amazing thing was that it actually began to succeed, winning number one sales and customer satisfaction awards from J.D. Power and Associates in its first two years. In the process, even the more sales-successful Lexus brand borrowed heavily from Infiniti's Total Ownership Experience. A key ingredient of the Infiniti experience was that even though its dealers were technically independent businesspeople who could sell cars for whatever price they chose, all sales for the same product would close within a narrow price band. The rationale was this: most pent-up consumer dissatisfaction from prior automotive transactions ultimately involved money, and consumer perceptions of being shortchanged. For Infiniti to have any chance of transforming those perceptions and building and winning a new and higher-level customer relationship, it would need to mitigate discrepancies over money so customers could look beyond their wallets and experience objectively the total Infiniti experience. With virtually all sales for its high-line Q45 occurring within a narrow price range in its first two years in business, an otherwise delighted Infiniti owner would not have the humiliating experience of meeting someone who could demean them by saying, "Oh, yeah, I paid $3,000 less than you-it's a nice car." And any money conflicts over service and warranty issues were similarly mitigated by Infiniti's generous, comprehensive warranty, supported by additional monies that its field service people had autonomy to disperse in less routine situations.
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From its leadership position Infiniti was carving a new path in satisfying customers-a path that all survey data indicated would be continued when it came time for people to buy another car. Infiniti was well on the road to winning their repurchase by having done more than sell a car. Infiniti had built a new type of relationship with its customers. It had won the highest levels of customer trust ever recorded. Infiniti was building unyielding integrity with its special customers, and every indication was that 70 percent or more of Q45 owners would repurchase an Infiniti-and probably another Q45-when the time came, because of their special tradition-shattering experience. No car company had ever recorded intended repurchase rates over 60 percent-and at that heady previous-record number, Honda's stay was brief. Infiniti was en route to changing its industry. Then Infiniti regressed. In the summer of 1991, with fifteen hundred more Q45s in stock than it was on track to sell, Infiniti did the unthinkable. Pushed by an "outsider" sales manager new to Infiniti and with roots in its Nissan parent and Ford before that, in classic auto industry "move the iron" mentality, Infiniti cut the price on those luxury cars by more than 15 percent-by up to $5,000 a car-to unload its lots. Worse, advertisements by some tradition-bound Infiniti dealers ensured that the word got out to prospective customers, but also to indignant owners who "knew you were just like the other guys all along." That combined with concurrent less generous warranty support and new and unusually high settlement costs for cars returned as their leases expired ensured Infiniti's fate. Its unyielding integrity regarding money was shattered. Infiniti would be an also-ran, just like its then-failing Nissan parent. This Nissanization of Infiniti decision making-traditionally rote, anachronistic, pedal-to-the-metal, with little thought of a grander goal-shattered what Infiniti had spent five years and more than $1 billion to build. More important, it shattered the new and special positivity-based car-owning experiences of the then forty thousand Q45 owners-owners who saw the experiences of their two prior years as some sort of great lie, owners for whom trust and unyielding integrity had been lost in the dark of night. All so a few short-sighted American managers could empty their lots and look good in front of their Japanese bosses, who it turns out did not know what they were doing anyway, ultimately losing control of their near-bankrupt company to
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the French automaker Renault, no stellar player in its own right. To be sure, Infiniti is still around and performing adequately, but its edge in building a new level of positive trust-based relationships with customers and transforming its industry in the process is lost forever. Our colleague Larry Selden of Columbia's Graduate School of Business cautions companies to be more selective in choosing customers, and more discrete in understanding them. Then go the extra mile and build unyielding integrity, if that is what makes business sense. There are those you should love, Selden says, and those you should hate (Selden and Colvin, 2003). And in pursuing Selden's model, it may be that companies should seek to build their highest-level positivity-based relationships-complete with partnering built on unyielding integrity-only with a select group of top customers, as Infiniti started to do before faltering under pressure. For the others-those customers less critical to a company's core business success-varying degrees of mere economic transactions may be appropriate, especially with those customers you should hate. This is the dilemma of starting and successfully maintaining critical business partnerships that can exploit their positive organizational potential, those built on and requiring trust and unyielding integrity. But it is through these steps and by following this positivity-based approach that we can make the most of these opportunistic ventures on which our global economy is so dependent. References
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Leadership for World Benefit New Horizons for Research and Practice JAMES D. LUDEMA and C. KEITH COX
In this chapter, we offer a preliminary research agenda for the study of leadership for world benefit. On the basis of a review of the literature and the results of qualitative interviews with fifteen pioneering corporate executives, we suggest six new horizons for leadership research. They consist of examining the dynamics of leadership in (1) redefining the purpose of business, (2) eo-creating meaning on a large scale, (3) promoting transformative cooperation, (4) advancing strategic innovation and change, (5) operating across cultures in a global environment, and (6) elevating ethical practice. The fundamental premise of this chapter is that while many existing theories and models of leadership apply equally to all businesses, there are unique characteristics of businesses dedicated to world benefit that call for new theories and approaches. Introduction
As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, society continues to grapple with the proliferation of technology, globalization of commerce, and increased interdependency between individuals, organizations, communities, nations, and the biosphere. Many thinkers, like Duane Elgin, an evolutionary activist, paint a troubling picture of impending crisis if constructive action is not taken. As Elgin stated (quoted in Phipps 2001, p. 1): We are beginning to tear at the fabric of the biosphere at the very time that we're stressing it with climate change, at the very time that we're
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stressing it further with population, at the very time that we're diminishing the availability of critical resources like water.... And it's utterly clear that not only are these critical individual trends, but that, as you look at the dynamics of their convergence, we are facing an unprecedented whole-system crisis within the next few decades. Something powerful is going to begin happening at that point, and while right now we can turn away from this, in another twenty years a systems crisis will be an unyielding reality that we will have to deal with. And we will either deal with it by pulling together as a human family to produce what I would call an "evolutionary bounce," or by pulling apart to produce an evolutionary crash. In the face of these trends, many are looking to the business sector to take a leadership role in creating solutions that will lead toward sustainability, harmony, and peace. The accomplishment of this goal will require a dramatic shift in the mind-set of the modern organization, but in particular it calls for new forms of leadership-leadership capable of awakening the "organizational conscience and soul" (Cox, 2005) while simultaneously engaging a wide range of stakeholders in creating innovative solutions to our world's most pressing issues. In short, the challenges for leaders are immense, and new leadership theories and approaches are required (Ajarimah, 2001). Despite the fact that leadership has been well studied by the organizational sciences for the past seventy-five years, scholars and practitioners have not yet developed a leadership theory that is well suited to the complex business environment of the twenty-first century. In part this is a result of how leadership has been framed-from a predominantly modernist, individualistic, positional, and economic perspective (Bass, 1990; Bryman, 1996; Hosking and Hunt, 1982; House and Aditya, 1997; Hunt and Dodge, 2000; Nicoll, 1986). This traditional leadership orientation has put the focus narrowly on the individual; on corporate goals, shareholder value, and the bottom line; and on management practices. While these factors are important and cannot be ignored, they do not adequately address today's global conditions or place sufficient emphasis on the greater common good. Needed are new theories and approaches that define the purpose of leadership in a more global context and show how leadership can contribute to the sustainability of human systems and the biosphere (Alien and others, 1998). Encouraging examples of this next wave of
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leadership theory are beginning to emerge. For example, forty scholars recently gathered for the Kellogg Leadership Studies Project sponsored by the Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. Their purpose was "to transform the theory and practice of leadership to help build a caring, just, and equitable world" (Kellerman, 1998, p. 1). Their three years of discussion, debate, and theorizing emphasized the need for more shared and collaborative leadership approaches focused on (1) creating a supportive environment where people can thrive, grow, and live in peace; (2) promoting harmony with nature and thereby providing sustainability for future generations; and (3) creating communities of reciprocal care and shared responsibility where every person matters and each person's welfare and dignity is respected and supported (Alien and others, 1998, p. 1). Likewise, many business executives have been experimenting with more holistic leadership practices aimed at combining the discipline of commerce with the purpose of fostering social and environmental wellbeing. For example, Judy Wicks (2002, p. 282), founder of the White Dog Cafe, writes: My business is a way that I express my love for other people. It's the way that I increase my capacity to care, and increase the capacity to care for my employees and my customers. It's really, in a sense, my ministry.... I envision an interconnected economic system that's based on love, and respect, and care, and service that mirrors the spiritual interconnectedness of all living things.
It is apparent that a philosophical shift is under way, and the field of leadership is becoming open to new approaches, expanded horizons, and radical reconceptualizations (Bass, 1990). In this chapter we contribute to this shift by offering an initial research agenda for the study of leadership for world benefit. By leadership for world benefit we mean the many ways in which leaders in the business sector are putting their people, imagination, and assets to work to benefit the earth, from its ecosystem to the needs of its vast, diverse population (see http://worldbenefit.case.edu). This kind of leadership is not simply about "socially responsible" programs, initiatives, marketing, or public relations. It involves defining the organization's purpose to address society's most pressing concerns, such as inequitable distribution of wealth, human rights, education, disease, nutrition, the quality
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of women's lives, environmental destruction, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity. It includes delivering on a set of core values that minimize harm, maximize benefit, build accountability and responsiveness to stakeholders, and promote human, social, and environmental flourishing. It means doing all of this by leveraging the inventiveness and market discipline of business to generate opportunities, mitigate risks, create innovations, integrate systems, and drive financial results. The chapter is broken into three sections. In the first section we briefly describe our methods. In the second we identify six areas of research we believe to be particularly promising. We developed these by interviewing fifteen executives about the challenges they face in leading for world benefit. We then extended these findings by connecting them to the leadership literature. In the third section we draw final conclusions. Methods
To conduct our study, we used a process of Appreciative Inquiry accompanied by selected conventions of grounded theory. Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Fry, Barrett, Seiling, and Whitney, 2002; Ludema, Cooperrider, and Barrett, 2001; Ludema, Whitney, Mohr, and Griffin, 2003; Whitney and TrostenBloom, 2003) is a research method that emphasizes the use of positive questions to explore in depth the forces and factors that give life to organizational phenomena when they are at their very best. The purpose of AI is to create generative theory-theory able "to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is 'taken for granted,' and thereby to furnish new alternatives for social action" (Gergen, 1978, p. 1346). AI leads to generative theory by focusing on exemplars and by systematically studying the root causes of their success. In doing so it dislodges old certainties, accelerates new discoveries, and opens expanded horizons for practice. Like many other forms of qualitative research, when done well AI generates broad, rich descriptions; emphasizes process and the unfolding
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of events over time; increases sensitivity to contextual factors and the meanings of those involved; discovers unexpected phenomena; enhances the development of new ideas and theories; and provides relevance and interest for both scholars and practitioners. Conger (1998) and others (Alvesson, 1996; Insch and Moore, 1997; Morgan and Smircich, 1980) point out that methods like AI are particularly useful in the exploratory phases of leadership research when the goal is to generate and explore as many hypotheses as possible about the phenomenon under study. AI is well suited for our study because the domain of leadership for world benefit is new and scarcely researched, and because our aim is to develop new ideas and theoretical groundings based on what exemplary leaders are doing and saying in their own words. Data Collection Using Appreciative Inquiry
We conducted one-on-one or two-on-one, semistructured interviews (Rubin and Rubin, 1995) with fifteen leaders using an appreciative interview guide adapted from the Web site of Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University (see http://worldbenefit.case. edu/inquiry!interview_guide.doc). Fourteen of the fifteen were corporate leaders. One was a leader of city government (Sharon Sayles Belton, former mayor of Minneapolis). The preponderance of corporate leaders was intentional. We wanted to focus our research on the unique characteristics, challenges, and opportunities that leaders of business face as they seek to place their organizations in the service of world benefit. We included Sharon Sayles Belton because her case illustrates how business can collaborate with government (public-private partnerships) to promote public safety, neighborhood viability, economic development, and solutions to urban concerns. See Table 14.1 for a list of the interviewees. The leaders had to meet two criteria in order to be a part of the study. First, they had to demonstrate a sustained commitment to issues of world benefit. For example, Rick Wagoner and Larry Burns at General Motors have demonstrated a long-standing commitment to developing the hydrogen car, Bob Galvin is legendary for his commitment to high ethical practice in business dealings around the world, and Anita Roddick is well-known for her commitment to a range of social and
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TABLE
14.1. List of interviewees
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Rick Wagoner, CEO, General Motors Corporation
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Larry Burns, Vice President of R & D, General Motors Corporation
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Robert W. Galvin, Chairman Emeritus, Motorola
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Anita Roddick, Founder and Non-Executive Director, The Body Shop
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Tim Smucker, Chairman and CEO, J.M. Smucker Company
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Rory Stear, Founder and CEO, Freeplay Energy
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Pam Dommenge, President, Pet Zone
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Bill Thomas, founder of The Eden Alternative 1 M
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Mats Lederhausen, Vice President of Strategy, McDonald's Corporation
10. Bob Langert, Director of Public and Community Affairs, McDonald's Corporation 11. Robert B. Horsch, eo-President, Sustainable Development Sector, Monsanto Company; General Manager, Agracetus Campus 12. Ralph Groteluschen, Director of Safety Standards, Environment Energy Management, John Deere Corporation 13. Arden Ameli, Director of External Relations for Health, Safety, and Environment, BP 14. Tim Araps, Vice President of Human Resources, Dirt Devil, Royal Appliance Mfg. Co. 15. Sharon Sayles Belton, former mayor of Minneapolis, currently serving as Senior Fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
environmental causes such as fair trade practices, animal rights, and the fight against HIV/AIDS. Second, they had to have been in a leadership position within the company and demonstrated a track record of shaping their organization's social architecture (structures, strategies, products, processes, and so forth) to support its commitment to world benefit. Many of the interviews were conducted as part of a course on business as an agent of world benefit in the Ph.D. program in Organization Development at Benedictine University (http://www.ben.edu/odhome). In many cases, the doctoral student who conducted or eo-conducted the interview was an executive in the same company as the leader. This helped enormously to facilitate access to the leaders and to make for a richer, deeper interview due to a high level of "insider" knowledge. 1
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All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. In most cases the interviews lasted about an hour, but in some cases they stretched to an hour and a half or two hours. The interviews were supplemented with participant observation; historical documents such as company annual reports; official statements on corporate social responsibility; books written on or by the leaders; internal strategies, reports, and proposals; memos; and e-mails. Grounded Theory
Grounded theory (Glaser, 1978, 1992; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987; Strauss and Corbin, 1998) is the discovery of theory from data that has been systematically gathered through the qualitative research process. Researchers collect and interpret multiple waves of data on an evolving basis. The spirit of the process is to "examine the data from all possible perspectives under conditions of rigorous debate and intellectually honest skepticism" (Lee, 1999, p. 45). The purpose is to develop theory that offers insight, understanding, and frameworks for action for scholars, practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). The conventions of grounded theory include a three-phase analysis process-open coding, axial coding, and selective coding-to enrich the texture and increase the explanatory power of the theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). Open coding is the process of identifying "naturally occurring" categories depicted by the data and organizing them in a coherent fashion. Axial coding involves reconnecting the naturally occurring categories in new ways and developing them to explain the phenomenon under study. Selective coding entails integrating and refining the theory. During this phase, all categories are structured around a single compelling storyline, connected to existing literature, and elaborated in depth. Removing irrelevant categories and further developing weak ones refines the theory. In this study, we analyzed our data using open and axial coding and began the selective coding process by connecting our findings to the existing literature and offering horizons for future research. We saved the development and refinement of new theory on leadership for world benefit for other publications (Amodeo, 2005; Cox, 2005; DiVirgilio, 2005; Meda, 2005; Saint, 2005).
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Data Analysis Using Conventions of Grounded Theory
To begin our analysis, we sorted our interview transcripts into six overlapping bundles so that three people would analyze each transcript. Then we (the authors), along with four additional doctoral students, each read and analyzed one of the transcript bundles, searching for themes and categories in three specific areas: (1) characteristics of the leaders, (2) challenges and opportunities faced by the leaders, and (3) ways in which these leaders create organizational cultures, structures, strategies, products, services, and operations that support their commitment to world benefit. To remain open to new discoveries, we also searched for themes and categories that did not fit into the three specific areas. After the six of us finished analyzing our respective transcripts, we met together for a full day to share and discuss our findings. Then we (the authors) took the findings of the research group and further refined them to create the categories explained in the next section. Finally, we undertook a review of the leadership literature and linked pertinent leadership theories to our findings. All along, in the spirit of AI and generative theory, we searched for the themes, categories, and theoretical formulations that, in our view, held the most promise for understanding and advancing leadership for world benefit. New Horizons for leadership Research
On the basis of our preliminary findings, we identified six areas of future research that we believe to be particularly promising. They consist of examining the dynamics of leadership in (1) redefining the purpose of business, (2) eo-creating meaning on a large scale, (3) promoting transformative cooperation, (4) advancing strategic innovation and change, (5) operating across cultures in a global environment, and (6) elevating ethical practice. Each subsection of this section starts with a story from one of the interviews that illustrates the theme. Next we explore bodies of leadership literature that we feel illuminate the theme. Finally, we offer a set of questions that point in the direction of fruitful future research.
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Redefining the Purpose of Leadership
For the most part, the traditional leadership orientation has put the focus narrowly on the individual; corporate goals, shareholder value, and the bottom line; and management practices. While these factors are important and cannot be ignored, the leaders we interviewed tend to see their role as one of servant or steward. They see their organization as a form of "sacred trust," an instrument for good that is temporarily under their care. As such, they talk about the purpose of leadership as bringing out the best in others to build a better world. Executive Perspective: Anita Roddick
An example of this perspective comes from our interview with Anita Roddick, who founded of The Body Shop in 1976 and is now a nonexecutive director of the company. She still works closely with the company, providing her expertise and creativity approximately three months a year. The remainder of her time is devoted to social activism. For her, this activism takes the form of networking, writing, lecturing, developing documentaries and other forms of mass communication, and working with causes that stir her soul, such as human rights, environmental conservation, animal protection, and community trade. Roddick believes that the purpose of leadership is "to serve the well-being of the planet and its people, period." This commitment is operationalized in The Body Shop's mission statement, which opens, "To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change." Roddick asserts that leadership must create a "moral canopy" supported by pathological optimism, brilliant communication, creative experimentation, social activism, incessant storytelling, constant inquiry, unwavering bravery, uplifting of the human condition, onerous responsibility, a strong ethical backbone, authenticity, heartfelt compassion, and a bias for action. Roddick has many stories that illustrate this leadership style in action. One revolves around what she believes is one of the first corporate initiatives to pay employees on company time for volunteering. That initiative, with our children on the edge, when our staff of over a thousand had gone and worked for two or three weeks in orphanages,
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mental institutions, and ... nobody in the world wanted to go to Albania. But we were there during the Balkan wars and we were there rebuilding hospitals; staff were going out, they would leave us and get trained to go in the medical corps and then come back again. It is still the most, it is the only expression of spirituality in the workplace that I could ever, with absolute honestly, say that was the case. When you take spirituality to mean, as a Gandhian definition, to work for the weak and the frail, in service to the weak and the frail, and you allow your staff, young, under thirty in many cases, and whose ethics are care, and you allow them to believe that their workplace is about more than money to make a living ... and you give them opportunities to go into these communitiesthey come back so charged, as an active citizen ... it is like a spiritual change of values. That really was a great program! Roddick views part of the role of leaders committed to world benefit to be a voice for the voiceless, one that sounds the trumpet for justice. She writes, "I believe it is now more important than ever before for business to assume a moral leadership. The business of business should not be about money, it should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed" (Roddick, 2000, back cover). Roddick's perspective is supported by three streams of leadership literature, each of which is in its infancy when it comes to being deeply understood from the standpoint of scientific research: appreciative leadership, servant leadership, and stewardship theory. These theories offer a radical reconceptualization of traditional understandings of leadership. Appreciative Leadership
The appreciative leader makes it his or her business to see the best in people and to leverage their strengths to achieve significant and mutually valued goals. This idea is based on the theory and practice of AI (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Fry, Barrett, Seiling, and Whitney, 2002; Ludema, Cooperrider, and Barrett, 2001; Ludema, Whitney, Mohr, and Griffin, 2003; Whitney and Trosten-Bloom, 2003), which claims that organizations perform at their best when they engage in a relentless search for and expansion of their greatest strengths, assets, capacities, and capabilities. On the basis of his research, Cooperrider (2001) suggested that what "appreciative leaders" have in common "is an uncanny capacity to see,
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magnify, and connect all that is good and best in people and the world around them, and to summon all that is best in life ... a 'positive core' capable of mobilizing transformational conversation and cooperative action." He highlighted three core competencies of the appreciative leader: (1) a focus on the greater common good combined with the belief that individuals have the power to bring a vision of a higher purpose to reality; (2) the use of inquiry-the art of the positive question-to uncover the strengths, capacities, and potentials of all individuals; and (3) the drive for inclusion, seeking to bring all relevant voices into the conversation. The appreciative leadership lens highlights the importance of relational capacities, creating webs of inclusion and generating positive alternatives for a better future.
Servant Leadership
The core tenet of servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977) is that the leader is a servant first and foremost, putting the needs, desires, and interests of others above his or her own. Greenleaf (2002, pp. 23-24) asserted: The servant-leader is the servant first .... Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, serve first .... All men and women who are touched by the effort grow taller, and become healthier, stronger, more autonomous, and more disposed to serve.
Subsequent definitions and discussion have revolved around and expanded on this key theme. For example, Blanchard (2002, p. xi) defined the servant leader as "getting people to a higher level by leading people at a higher level." Covey (2002) concluded that servant leaders empowered others to live, love, learn, and leave a legacy. Spears (2002, p. 4) proclaimed that servant leadership is a "long-term transformational approach to life and work-in essence, a way of being-that has the potential for creating positive change throughout our society." While servant leadership does not yet have a strong empirical foundation, academic investigations are on the rise (for example, Buchen, 1998; Choi and Mai-Dalton, 1998; Fading, Stone, and Winston, 1999; Graham, 1991; Russell, 2001; Sendjaya and Sarros, 2002) and the servant leadership movement as a whole has gained traction in many organizations, creating a strong business case for its efficacy. Many companies adopting servant leadership practices (for example, ServiceMaster
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Company) have been consistently rated on Fortune Magazine's list of the top one hundred best companies to work for in America (Sendjaya and Sarros, 2002). Stewardship
Stewardship (Block, 1993) is a popular, nonacademic perspective that has received significant attention from practitioners and executives alike. It is based on the ideas of empowerment, democracy, accountability, service, profitability, humility, and spirituality. It responds to the fundamental question, "Who are we here to serve?" The literal definition of a steward is someone who manages property or other affairs for someone else. Thus stewardship is holding something in trust for another. At the most basic level, stewardship is defined as "accountability without control or compliance" (Block, 1993, p. xx). Block (1993) operationalized stewardship in a number of ways that are congruent with many of the things said by our interviewees: (1) to hold in trust the well-being of some larger entity-the organization, our community, the earth itself; (2) to be of service and to be accountable without having to be in charge; (3) a way to use power to serve through the practice of partnership and empowerment; (4) a commitment to dialogue, not an act of concession; (5) supporting the freedom of ourselves and others; (6) the redistribution of wealth; and (7) an alternative to patriarchal strategies that attempt to drive change down from the top. The stewardship lens helps synthesize two seemingly contradictory concepts: servant leadership and the requisite for profitability. Instead of the more traditional either-or mind-set, stewardship promotes a bothand perspective that stresses balance and possibility. "The revolution is ... about the belief that spiritual values and the desire for economic success can be simultaneously fulfilled" (Block, 1993, p. 48). Horizons for Future Research
To redefine the purpose of leadership, many questions are waiting to be explored. If world benefit is a noble purpose of leadership, then what is world benefit? Who defines it and how? World benefit seems tightly connected to deeply held core values. What are these values and where
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do they come from? How are they and should they be developed? What organizational and societal structures, systems, processes, and environments must be created to accelerate and support leadership for world benefit? What factors inhibit it? How is leadership for world benefit operationalized at the level of community, societal, or global leadership? Does it produce results different from other types of leadership? If so, how? What are the differences between leaders committed to world benefit and other leaders, if any? Leadership and the Co-Creation of Meaning
A key task for leaders of world benefit is to manage relationships among multiple stakeholders with differing interests and agendas. Corporations are increasingly interdependent with a variety of constituenciesWall Street, government regulators, the media, activist organizations, local communities, consumers, and the general public-all of which bring their own perspectives, expectations, hopes, and demands. In this context, traditional sources of authority such as size, economic performance, research rigor, marketing savvy, political access, and legal muscle continue to be important, but they are not sufficient to maintain public legitimacy and support. They are even less adequate for building transformative cooperation-collaborative working relationships that generate desired innovation and change in markets, products, services, and technologies. To accomplish these kinds of outcomes, leaders need to become skilled at working with multiple groups to generate shared meaning through processes of dialogue. Executive Perspective: Sharon Sayles Be/ton
An example of this kind of shared meaning-making process comes from our interview with Sharon Sayles Belton. During her tenure as mayor, Sayles Belton led a process to create the Phillips Partnership, an awardwinning collaboration of city government, the business community, the advocacy community, and neighborhood residents to revitalize the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis. When the initiative first got started, the neighborhood was plagued by crime, poverty, and violence, and although there had been many
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attempts to improve these conditions, sustained change remained elusive. Undeterred, Sayles Belton brought together the various stakeholders to envision and create the changes they desired. At first this was difficult because there were high levels of suspicion and mistrust and because each group had vastly different experiences, languages, and agendas. But over time, as relationships were strengthened and people began to share their hopes and dreams, they discovered many areas of shared interest and opportunity. Together they committed to investing in four specific areas: crime, housing, job training, and infrastructure issues. A new crime-tracking and police deployment system was implemented, Train-to-work programs provided job training and placement for motivated adults, several new housing developments were initiated, and funds were obtained to provide improved access to freeways from the neighborhood. Today Phillips is undergoing a renaissance: serious crime is down by 45 percent, mixed-income housing developments are bringing people back to the neighborhood as well as providing affordable housing for lower-income residents, job-training programs are placing residents in living-wage jobs with benefits at area hospitals, property values have risen significantly, and most important, citizens are safer and feel a renewed sense of pride in their community. The Phillips Partnership is now recognized as a model for effective alliances and has received numerous awards, including the Excellence in Public-Private Partnerships Award, presented by the United States Council of Mayors in 1999. The Phillips Partnership model has been replicated in 144 cities across the United States. The need for leaders to become skilled at creating shared meaning through processes of dialogue is supported by two streams of research: new leadership and dialogicalleadership. New Leadership
Bryman (1996) coined the phrase new leadership to refer to theories that described leaders as "managers of meaning" (Smircich and Morgan, 1982) and purveyors of symbolic action (Pfeffer, 1981). Bryman noted that the aim of new leadership revolved around leaders changing the way individuals thought about what is attractive, possible, and essential through the active promotion of values and shared images of
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the future. Included in this new leadership paradigm were theories such as visionary leadership (Sashkin, 1988; Westley and Mintzberg, 1989), charismatic leadership (Conger, 1989; Conger and Kanungo, 1987, 1988; House, 1977), and transformational leadership (Bass, 1985; Bass and Avolio, 1990; Burns, 1978). Bass's work (Bass, 1985; Bass and Avolio, 1990) provides a useful illustration. Building on the work of Burns (1978), Bass showed that transformational leaders elevate and empower individuals in order to activate their higher-order needs and raise their awareness of the importance of task outcomes, thus stimulating them to work for the good of the whole. They do this by (1) developing an inspiring vision; (2) engendering pride, respect, and trust; (3) creating and communicating high expectations; (4) using symbols to focus efforts; (5) challenging followers with new ideas; and (6) giving individuals respect and responsibility (Bass, 1990; Bryman, 1996). Numerous studies have supported Bass's work (Bass, 1985; Bass, Avolio, and Goodheim, 1987; Bass, Waldman, Avolio, and Bebb, 1987; Hater and Bass, 1988; Waldman, Bass, and Einstein, 1987; Yammarino and Bass, 1989). Dialogical Leadership
Dialogicalleadership is based in theories of social constructionism and transformative dialogue (Berger and Luckman, 1966; Bouwen and Fry, 1996; Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Ford, 1999a, 1999b; Ford and Ford, 1994; Gergen, 1999; Grob, 1984; Homans, 1992; Smircich and M organ, 1982; Stacey, 2000). Gergen, Gergen, and Barrett (2004) define transformative dialogue as "a relational accomplishment that creates new spaces of meaning and enables the organization to restore its generative potentials." They see it as a form of conversation aimed at facilitating the collaborative construction of new realities. They identify four central components of transformative dialogue. The first component is the act of affirmation. Because meaning is born in relationship, an individual's lone utterance contains no meaning. It requires the supplementation of others. Affirmation ratifies the significance of an utterance as a meaningful act. Affirmation can take the form of simple acknowledgement, curiosity, appreciation, or wholehearted agreement, but it is a starting point for dialogue.
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Productive difference is also essential. The meaning of any utterance in a dialogue is acquired from its difference from other utterances. Simply to echo each utterance of the other destroys meaning. The meaningmaking process is made robust by virtue of distinct voices. There is, however, a difference between productive and destructive differences. Destructive utterances impede the process of constructing a mutually viable reality by curtailing or negating what has preceded it. Productive dialogue sustains or extends the potentials of a preceding utterance. The creation of conversational coherence is a third essential ingredient in transformative dialogue. Coherence is achieved when one's words or actions contain some fragment of the words or actions of the other. Gergen, Gergen, and Barrett (2004) call this metonymic reflection. The other finds himself or herself reflected in the words and actions of the other, and coherence is achieved. The final ingredient is temporal integration through the use of narrative. As people go about constructing their desired world, materials are required for solidification. The world must become compelling, reliable, and significant. An effective way to accomplish this is to fit the current construction into a meaningful narrative or story that has a past and a future and gives the presence a sense of relevance within the flow of history. According to Bouwen and Fry (1996, p. 550), this transforming, generative dialogue, or what they called conversations-for-possibility, alters current conversational patterns to create commitment to some group construction or meaning. They suggest that to move a group or organization in the direction of new possibilities, the dialogue should (1) interrupt the dominant process (relational) and content (task) related dialogue; (2) use language (such as metaphors) that causes hearers to listen and consider things in new ways; (3) enable individuals to coauthor a history or new narrative; and (4) generate new possibilities and meanings that allow individuals to make new affirmations, requests, and assurances to one another. Horizons for Future Research
New leadership and dialogicalleadership theories offer many avenues for future research. For example, from the perspective of new leadership,
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how do leaders committed to world benefit create visions of the future that include and elevate the aspirations not only of internal organizational stakeholders but of external stakeholders too? How can leadership work with multiple stakeholders to define higher business purposes that respect, honor, and incorporate seemingly conflicting or opposing points of view? What kinds of dialogical processes are called for? From the perspective of dialogicalleadership, what kind of dialogical "moves," skills, or abilities contribute to the creation of transformative dialogue? From a more pragmatic standpoint, how can a leader initiate multiple, transformative dialogues, and what is required to promulgate the conversations across a global system? Finally, what is required to ensure that new conversations become part of the normal, day-to-day discourse? Leadership and the Power of Transformative Cooperation
Leaders for world benefit understand that both the end and the means of global prosperity are brought about by the noble aspirations, creative imagination, and cooperative action of people. Their work revolves around linking and forging strong nexuses between many different internal and external constituencies: leadership and employees, organizations and communities, and business and society. An example of this capability comes from our interview with Tim Smucker. Executive Perspective: Tim Smucker
Tim Smucker is chairman and co-CEO of the J.M. Smucker Company. The J.M. Smucker Company was founded in 1897 in Orrville, Ohio, and has been family run for four generations. The values-driven organization is the market leader in fruit spreads, ice cream toppings, health and natural foods beverages, and natural peanut butter in North America. The organization employs more than 2,700 employees worldwide and distributes products in more than forty-five countries. As a leader for world benefit, Smucker has a deep commitment to building up the best in all people-to nurturing the development of human excellence. He understands the need for and the impact of transformative cooperation. His personal leadership philosophy revolves
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around strong relationships at all levels, characterized by encouragement, candid dialogue, mutual trust, respect, constant appreciation, continuous learning, and the open exchange of ideas and resources. As Smucker explained: I love the business because I think it contributes to society.... We have always felt that we have a number of constituents that we work with, those being employees, shareholders, customers, consumers, and the communities in which we work .... We encourage our employees to get involved in education initiatives or whatever it is their interests are .... What is most meaningful is working with people to help grow their ideas that are already there. I think that is always the most rewarding thing, that you are providing an opportunity to grow. It is individual growth combined that makes a company grow or society grow. Smucker also elaborated on the potential for good that can result from strong partnerships and the combination of strengths of those outside the organization. He mentioned the creation of the Heartland Education Community, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization that encourages and generates ideas on how to help the local community. His description of the organization's genesis highlights the convergence of diverse groups and their ability to work together to provide novel, meaningful solutions: That is one of the most rewarding experiences that I have had and it has been a consortium of people. Actually, it started with our company; the [local] school system; Kent State University; the College of Wooster; the Institute of Global Ethics out of Maine; Woodrow Wilson Foundation out of Princeton, NJ; and the Kettering Foundation out of Dayton. All of this started with one simple idea-the question of, "How can we help?" We got this consortium together and developed an organization that is now recognized in the state and nationally. But it wasn't as much money as it was human resources .... Now we have a mixture of business leaders, school teachers, school administrators, people from the United Way, the chamber of commerce, and parents .... What you can do is provide leadership and say it is OK to ask questions and to get involved in very, very important issues. Smucker's insights connect tightly with three current theoretical streams of research that help establish the fundamental importance of transformative cooperation-leader-member exchange (LMX) theory,
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relational leadership theory, and the recent work on high-quality connections (HQC). Leader-Member Exchange Theory
LMX theory (Dansereau, Graen, and Haga, 1975; Graen and Cashman, 1975), grounded in dyadic theory, stipulates that a high-quality exchange relationship between leaders and followers results in several positive outcomes such as higher-follower performance, citizenship behavior, satisfaction, and commitment, as well as lower-follower turnover (House and Aditya, 1997). Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) identified four evolutionary stages that have marked the advancement of dyadic thinking: (1) vertical dyadic linkage theory, (2) LMX theory, (3) highquality LMX relationships, and (4) systems and networks. The research element that is the most exciting and relevant to the work of leaders for world benefit is the fourth level of dyadic thinking: systems and networks. This level of larger collectives and networks is viewed as the final frontier for creating high-quality exchanges. The ability to create strong relationships across global stakeholder groups is paramount for the leader focused on building the business while concurrently pursuing a social change agenda. Relational Leadership
Relational leadership is based on the idea that all human interactions could be considered a form of leadership. In this context, many relational leadership theories suggest that in order to lead, leaders must build trusting relationships at all levels. For example, Cardona (2000) suggests that for leaders to engage followers in successful relationships, the leader needs to adopt positive values (such as integrity) and to practice behaviors (such as sacrificing self-interest) that encourage strong partnerships and a sense of meaningfulness. The result is loyal followers who perform at a higher level. Similarly, Brower, Schoorman, and Tan (2000, p. 227) extend and integrate LMX theory and trust theory (Hosmer, 1995; Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, 1995) to show that the LMX relationship is built "through interpersonal exchanges in which parties to the relationship evaluate the ability, benevolence, and integrity of
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each other." These perceptions are then predicted to influence individual behavior (such as risk taking) and outcomes (such as commitment). According to Dyer (2001), relational leadership at the most basic level revolves around valuing people while creating meaning and identity through working relationships. She suggests that to be a successful relational leader an individual needs the following competencies: leading employees, interpersonal savvy, work-team orientation, conflict management, change management, accepting feedback from others, and a balanced approach in using leadership skills. Hunt and Dodge (2000) add that the relational focus dismisses the belief that leadership is confined to a single individual or a small group of formal or informal leaders. Instead, relational leadership theories acknowledge that leadership can occur anywhere at any time, and at their best they can stimulate a dynamic organization with leadership propagated at all levels. The dawning realization for leaders for world benefit is that in complex, chaotic environments there is a need for shared leadership throughout the organization. This is especially true considering the global scope of today's business environment and the number of stakeholders that must be involved. High-Quality Connections
Dutton and Heaphy (2003) state that a high-quality connection (HQC) is characterized by a higher emotional carrying capacity, an increased capacity to endure stress and conflict, and a high degree of connectivity that opens the space for creativity and novel possibilities. Remarkably, the authors also cite research (for example, Miller and Stiver, 1997; Taylor, Dickerson, and Klein, 2002) that demonstrates the ability of an HQC to increase physiological well-being and individual vitality, positive regard, and mutuality, the full engagement of individuals with one another. The positive implications of HQCs for leaders for world benefit are obvious. As Dutton and Heaphy (2003) point out, HQCs improve the exchange of valued resources, foster meaningfulness among employees and stakeholders, facilitate individual growth and development, and enable competence through caring, safe, and effective learning environments. Thus HQCs can assist leaders in building contexts that promote
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human flourishing, which in turn produces the organizational intelligence, compassion, integrity, and virtuousness that can lift the leader's organization to higher levels of profitability while moving society toward a more sustainable future. Horizons for Future Research
As we begin to shift our view of leadership from the sole, individual leader to a more relational perspective, many questions can provide new directions for leadership research. For example, How is transformative cooperation developed and, most important, sustained over time? How do leaders create and organize positive relationships beyond the traditional boundaries of the organizational system and across multiple groups and constituencies? And finally, how do leaders for world benefit create a culture of high-quality connections to support the need for leaders at every level of the organization? leadership and the Management of Strategic Innovation and Change
While the executives profiled in this chapter realize that world benefit is a key business imperative, getting their organizations to put it into practice requires leadership on multiple levels. First, it requires finding, creating, or developing a market for their products and services. This can involve extensive dialogue with a range of stakeholders, including experts in the fields of sustainability and corporate responsibility, government regulators, industry peers, customers, distributors, suppliers, nongovernmental organizations, activist groups, local community members, and others. It can also require influencing public policy, public opinion, and the educational system to promote public awareness. Second, it involves creating a compelling vision and persuasive business case for why the organization should invest in socially responsible products or practices, and then communicating that vision over and over again in easily understood language. Third, it requires engaging the whole organization in the creation of new technologies, products, services, and channels that are cost-effective and attractive to customers. Many of our interviewees said that this engagement process is the most
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important step. It leads to a flurry of innovation by inviting people to "aim higher" and by connecting the vision with their existing strengths and skill sets (for example, getting engineers to eliminate waste, designers to create new technologies, and salespeople to succeed in the marketplace). Finally, putting world benefit into practice requires finding creative ways to reward and recognize socially responsible behavior, both internally and externally with suppliers and distributors. These themes are clearly captured in our interview with Bob Langert. Executive Perspective: Bob Langert
Bob Langert is senior director of social responsibility at McDonald's. He began his career with McDonald's in 1982 as a logistics, transportation, and distribution manager and in 1989 shifted over to what was then the Environmental Issues department because he wanted to "get involved with things that really could change the world." Since then, his work has had a huge systemic impact in the areas of sustainable forestry, solid waste reduction, electrical energy conservation, humane treatment of animals, and sustainable farming. Bob and his colleagues also invest heavily in education and youth development programs, local and regional sports programs, neighborhood beautification initiatives, health care efforts, cultural events, and community development projects. More recently they have launched a global initiative to promote balanced, active lifestyles. In his interview, Bob talked about how, in the early years, it was difficult to get restaurant owners and corporate executives at McDonald's to invest in environmental issues. He realized early on that if he were going to get their attention he'd have to make it practical and profitable. He began with initiatives like the Green Light Program, a partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in which McDonald's retrofitted the interior lights in all of their U.S. restaurants with more energy-efficient lighting. The initiative got people's attention by dramatically reducing McDonald's energy consumption and saving the company tens of millions of dollars per year in electricity costs. Bob also talked about the importance of multiplying McDonald's impact by recognizing and rewarding environmental leaders. He and his colleagues have integrated socially responsible practices into McDon-
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ald's worldwide food supply chain. For example, they established standards and onsite audits for all suppliers in the areas of animal welfare, use of antibiotics, quality and safety, sustainable forestry, and other natural resource issues such as clean water, air, and soil, and biodiversity. This approach, he says, helps to educate suppliers about sustainability issues, reward them for best practices, and elevate the consciousness of the entire industry. Finally, Bob stressed the importance of taking a leadership stance on issues of corporate responsibility by opening the corporation to ideas from leading sustainability experts. McDonald's works closely with the Environmental Defense Fund, the EPA, Conservation International, The Natural Step, and animal welfare experts to establish and exceed industry standards rather than just comply with them. Strategic leadership theory sheds valuable light on these challenges.
Strategic Leadership Theory Strategic leadership is the process of providing the direction and motivation necessary to drive the organizational transformation that creates a competitive advantage. It entails an individual's capability to anticipate, envision, strategize, coordinate, and facilitate organizational members and relevant constituents to initiate and implement major change (Christensen, 1997; Hosmer, 1982; Ireland and Hitt, 1999; Maghroori and Rolland, 1997; Merron, 1995). These actions, behaviors, and decisions have also been referred to as strategic management (Prescott, 1986). Strategic leadership theory is representative of the ongoing debate regarding the impact of leaders and top executives on organizational performance and effectiveness. To date, the results from the study of strategic leadership have been inconclusive. While a number of studies have demonstrated that leaders do have a considerable impact on organizational performance (Fiedler, 1996; House, Spangler, and Woycke, 1991; Smith, Carson, and Alexander, 1984; Thomas, 1988), there is evidence that suggests that any positive impact can be constrained by the environment, organizational inertia, and even the leaders themselves (House and Aditya, 1997). These considerations are specifically relevant to leaders for world benefit in publicly traded businesses. Environmental pressures are fierce
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and there is question as to how far a leader can drive an organization toward world benefit considering the institutional forces at work. Additionally, the issue of sustaining the pursuit of world benefit comes into question, especially after the departure of a high-profile organizational leader. For example, Anita Roddick discussed how The Body Shop lost some of its "activism edge" after she stepped down from overseeing the day-to-day leadership of the organization. Horizons for Future Research
The mixed research results prevalent in the literature indicate the need for a more detailed, comprehensive investigation on this emerging stream of thought. According to House and Aditya (1997), future research on strategic leadership theory could include a look at common constraints limiting leaders, distributed leadership among top management teams, the impact of environmental factors (such as organization size) on leader effectiveness and organizational performance, and how leaders affect individual processes (such as policy formation), among others. Also of interest are the dynamics at play in organizational creativity. How and why does combining higher purpose with the motivation to excel in the marketplace ignite human innovation and creativity? Are identity and identification at play, and if so, in what ways? What are some of the other psychological, sociological, and organizational factors involved? Finally, what are the key leverage points (structures, strategies, rewards, incentives, job designs, systems, processes, rituals, and so on) for creating and sustaining "new" culture or world benefit in organizations? Cross-Cultural leadership and the Dynamics of Global Organizing
Leaders for world benefit must contend with a climate characterized by globalization, multinational organizations, exploding third-world development, the proliferation of technology, and a mobile, worldwide workforce. The sphere of organizational influence is growing while the planet is simultaneously shrinking to resemble a small global village. In this context, the challenges for leaders are immense and it is clear that new leadership approaches and competencies to manage the complexity
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are needed (Ajarimah, 2001). Our interview with Rory Stear, founder and CEO of Freeplay Energy, illustrates that even for a small, growing global organization the complexities can be enormous, requiring a multifaceted leadership approach.
Executive Perspective: Rory Stear Freeplay Energy is an international business whose mission is to "provide access to energy to everybody all of the time." The company manufactures and markets devices such as radios and cell phones that have their own built-in power sources that are not dependent on electrical wiring or batteries. As an example of today's complex, global business environment, consider that Freeplay Energy now sells its product all over the world, in both industrialized and developing nations; its research and development and supply-chain procurement are done in South Africa; manufacturing is managed through Hong Kong; and the company's headquarters is in London because it is equidistant from the West coast of the United States, Hong Kong, and South Africa. Additionally, Freeplay's major markets are in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with secondary markets throughout the developing world. Stear, by simply reflecting on his travel schedule, demonstrated the diversity of cultures that he must understand, manage in, and honor in order to operate effectively. It's [being the CEO] given me an opportunity as an individual to travel enormously, which I enjoy, and to understand an enormous amount about a lot of different cultures, and to live and work in those different cultures. I'm in the United States about a week of every month, in Hong Kong four to six times a year, and in South Africa about six times a year.
Furthermore, in the developing world, much of the sales of the product are done in collaboration with governments, aid organizations, and not-for-profit organizations. Freeplay Energy also runs the Freeplay Foundation, which is tasked with getting the technology, especially when it is utilized in radios, to people who need it the most (mostly in Africa). It does various programs with AIDS orphans (of which there are fifteen million on the continent of Africa), with the sixty-five thousand child heads of households as a result of genocide in Rwanda, and with people
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in Niger who want to exchange their guns for radios in the aftermath of the most recent major civil war. As a global CEO focused on world benefit, Stear has shown that it is possible to find a path to achieve the multiple, simultaneous, and sometimes contradictory goals revolving around balancing the needs, desires, and expectations of all global stakeholders. It gives me enormous satisfaction to know that we have not just created an engine to create wealth, but rather we are, as a company and as a group of individuals within that company, utilizing our talents to perhaps do things differently and show that there's another way, a better way, maybe, of business being centrally involved in the organization or the communities in which they operate.
As of yet there are no empirically supported theories that sufficiently address leadership at the global level-leadership that factors in the nuances of performing on the world stage. However, promising new research is emerging in the area of cross-cultural leadership.
Cross-Cultural Leadership
The theory of cross-cultural leadership (House, Wright, and Aditya, 1997) is a serious attempt to understand the influences of culture on leadership. This theory, building on implicit leadership theory (Lord and Maher, 1991), suggests that Expected, accepted, and effective leader behavior varies by cultures ... the importance placed on, and effectiveness of, person- and taskoriented leader behaviors are contingent on the culturally endorsed implicit theories of leadership (CILTs) of the broader social system .... CILTs indicate the extent to which individuals in positions of leadership are expected to be change-oriented, risk-oriented, visionary, directive, and proactive, as opposed to being reactive, nondirective, risk-averse enactors of prevailing social consensus, and maintainers of the status quo. [House and Aditya, 1997, p. 454]
Therefore, leader behaviors that are compatible with existing CILTs will be more effective than behaviors that are not. Furthermore, the House and Aditya (1997) theory details how culture (that is, interactions between cultural norms, organizational practices, and so on) is a determining factor in the types of leader behaviors that will be accepted, effective, and supported.
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Other writing focuses on the behaviors, skills, competencies, mindsets, and so on required for global leaders to manage the complexity and intensity of their role. For example, Petrick and others (1999) recommend a global leadership style that focuses on balancing four competing criteria of performance: profitability and productivity, continuity and efficiency, commitment and morale, and adaptability and innovation. Gregersen, Morrison, and Black (1998) outline a leadershipdevelopment process specifically for global leaders. The underlying premise of their approach is to create emotional connections for participants, explore ethics and other cultures, and prepare individuals for the dualities (such as local versus global) of global leadership. All things considered, successful global leadership entails being able to understand complex issues from multiple perspectives while enacting a multifaceted strategy by wearing numerous globally strategic hats in a highly integrated and balanced fashion. Failure to do so has been linked with such negative outcomes as low employee morale, avaricious financial practices, social disintegration, and an emphasis on unchecked economic growth versus a more reasonable pattern of sustainable development (Petrick and others, 1999).
Horizons for Future Research
Building on the work of Bilimoria and others (1995), intriguing questions for future research on global and cross-cultural leadership include the following: What skills and competencies are required for global leadership? How do we prepare leaders for leadership focused on global sustainability? What are the useful guidelines to help leaders balance the duality of their role? What does a global conversation look like and what concretely can be done to improve its effectiveness? Finally, how do major shifts in personal consciousness work their way into organizational and global transformation? leadership and the Elevation of Ethical Practice
There are two aspects to be considered here. The first is how to define ethical. What is ethical, and what are the processes we should use to determine it? These questions are particularly important in a business
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environment that is increasingly global and cross-cultural. Globalization represents an enormous intensification of ethical conflict-as organizations expand into foreign locales, there is a tendency for the reality within the organization to deviate from that of the surrounding community (Gergen, 2001). The import of alien constructions of the real and the good may come into sharp conflict with local understandings (Gergen, 2001). Corporations are capable of influencing mainstream societal events, and their power is not only economic, but social and political as well. Similarly, ethical and legal concepts are context and culture specific. It is not clear that there is universal agreement on what behaviors or practices are considered appropriate, legal, ethical, or moral across cultures (Henderson, 1992; Toffler, 1986). What is commonly practiced and socially acceptable in one culture is often repudiated in another. Ethics and morals differ not only among various countries but also among individuals in the same country. To contribute to the shared sense of what is good in the local community, organizations must discuss the values of the local community and integrate them into their business practices. Notions of right and wrong or justice and injustice are validated by the values and attitudes of a given culture (Donaldson, 1989). Global ethics results from agreements or dialogical coordination among societies, corporations, and organizations. Meda (2005) suggests that in this global context, ethical leadership is the act of participating with and engaging others in an ongoing process of ethical dialogue that allows human systems to articulate and enact their highest ideals. She proposes that ethical leaders do this (1) by using themselves (that is, their intentions, words, and actions) as catalysts for ethical dialogue and practice, and (2) by working with others to shape their organizational systems, structures, and strategies to support ethical dialogue and practice. These ideas were highlighted as important by many leaders in this study and are illustrated powerfully by our interview with Rob Horsch in the next executive perspective section. A second area that needs to be considered is the development of self. Many of the leaders we interviewed are deep thinkers (and feelers) who can be characterized as extremely self-aware, introspective, and emotionally intelligent. They each thought long and hard about their individual contribution and were very cognizant of the impact of
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their words and behaviors on internal and external stakeholders. Each individual had his or her own set of personal practices (such as meditation) that grounded them in reality while providing the motivation and inspiration to meet and exceed high personal standards. Furthermore, all of the leaders shared exceptional stories and experiences that can be described as epiphanies or turning points that shaped their outlook on life and the business world and further developed what can be referred to as a moral compass. These leaders had a sense of their core purpose involving changing the world for the better. Executive Perspective: Rob Horsch
A good example of the complexity of ethical questions comes from our interview with Robert B. Horsch, vice president of international development partnerships at Monsanto and member of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Hunger Task Force. Horsch is a brilliant scientist, savvy businessman, and engaged global citizen who believes deeply in the potential of biotechnology to promote nutritional, social, economic, and environmental benefit. In 1998, he and three of his colleagues received the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Clinton for their contributions to the development of agricultural biotechnology. It all began in 1979 when a group of scientists discovered that crown gall, a common plant disease characterized by warty growths on roots and stems, is caused by a natural process of genetic engineering. A bacterium attaches itself to the plant and transfers a piece of its DNA into the plant's cells. Genes in the DNA stimulate the cells to divide, which causes a growth (or gall) that is receptive to the bacterium at the site of infection. In essence, the bacterium creates a home for itself by genetically modifying the plant. Horsch and his colleagues saw the potential of this process for agricultural applications and began developing a simple and reliable method for transferring desirable genes into crop plants, including soybean, corn, wheat, cotton, canola, tomato, and potato. In the early 1980s, Monsanto moved to patent the process and has since become a leading provider of agricultural products and solutions based on biotechnology, genomics, and breeding. Horsch and Monsanto were stunned when, in the late 1990s, a
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global movement against biotechnology crops was organized and dozens of countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Brazil, boycotted their products. Horsch claims that their research and development process had been conducted at the highest possible levels of industry standard, legally and ethically, and had been a model of transparency. Counter to industry trends, he and his colleagues had published their research in top journals; organized and taught public courses on how to practice their methods; launched outreach programs to apply their technology to applications in developing countries; lectured extensively on the science, benefits, and risks of agricultural biotechnology; and participated actively in the global debate on biotechnology by teaching, lecturing, conversing, and mentoring other scientists in both public and private service. Similarly, Horsch believed (and still believes) that the benefits of agricultural biotechnology are enormous while the risks, if developed with proper transparency and scrutiny, are small. The benefits include higher yield; better grain quality; higher nutrient value; lower production and labor costs; increased revenue for farmers; reduced pesticide spraying, water consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions; and improved soil conservation and draught resistance. From his perspective, these benefits are perhaps most valuable to the poor. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 850 million people are undernourished, including 800 million in developing countries (mostly Africa and Asia). In his role as vice president of international development partnerships, Horsch works with the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations such as Winrock International, Sasakawa Global 2000, and the Mexican Foundation for Rural Development to help provide increased production, food security, and economic development to the world's poorest communities. And yet, despite Horsch's convictions about the rigors and transparency of Monsanto's research and about the potential of agricultural biotechnology for world benefit, many people continue to object to its practices on ethical grounds. They claim that Monsanto's science is selfserving; that their patents and methods further centralize agricultural production and disenfranchise small farmers; that their oversight and transparency are insufficient; that their dialogue with external stakeholders is inadequate; that their patterns of deception in the past make
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them untrustworthy in the present; that there is no way they (or anyone else) can fully anticipate the impact that genetic engineering will have on the future of the planet and its people; and most important, that no one (including Monsanto) should be able to place a patent on the biological processes of life found in nature. Some people go so far as to argue that Monsanto and other agricultural biotech firms should be shut down. In this context, what it is the role of leadership for world benefit? The theoretical lens of ethical or moral leadership and advanced change theory are helpful in answering this question. Ethical Leadership
Definitions of ethical leadership vary (see Caldwell, Bischoff, and Karri, 2002; Laszlo and Nash, 2002; McDonald, 1999; Minkes, Small, and Chatterjee, 1999). Some authors suggest that there exist universal ethical standards, such as the pursuit of justice, fair play, and equity, that can and should be enforced across cultures and organizations (Gini, 1996). Others argue that ethics are by nature contextual and contingent on the beliefs of a given system (Gini, 1996; Laszlo and Nash, 2002; Minkes, Small, and Chatterjee, 1999; Rost, 1991). "Given the diverse value systems and goals of different companies and cultures, ethical leadership is generated from within a particular corporate environment rather than from a single moral blueprint applicable to all companies" (Laszlo and Nash, 2002, p. 2). Dictionary definitions of ethics support this view. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1981) defines ethics as "the moral principles, values, rules, or standards governing the conduct of the members of a group," and ethical as "in accordance with a group or profession's accepted principles of right and wrong" (p. 242). Thus the members of a particular group define what is or is not ethical on the basis of the meaning making done in their own processes of dialogue. Statements such as "I feel this is right" or "I think this is unethical" operate within relationships to prevent, admonish, praise, provide guidelines, and invite forms of action. They are moves or positionings that enable groups to construct a culture considered to be moral or ethical (Gergen, 1994). Ethical leadership, then, is not an issue of individual sentiment or
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rationality but a form of communal participation-a continuous dialogue in which leaders, along with many other people, repeatedly ask the questions, What is our purpose? What are our values? What do we consider to be good, true, right, and possible? Who else do we need to involve in the conversation to enrich our perspective? How can we best put into practice what we believe? Advanced Change Theory
Quinn (2000) presents a set of change principles called advanced change theory (ACT), designed to facilitate personal, organizational, and societal transformation. While the focus of his work centers on the "change agent," it is quite obvious that if the term leadership were substituted in its place, the concepts and meaning would still be relevant, perhaps even more so. Quinn suggests that through self-discipline and self-awareness, by making fundamental choices around higher purpose, and by being inner-directed and outer-focused, individuals can stimulate transformational change. To develop transformational capability, we cannot be normal people doing normal things .... We need to go inside ourselves and ask who we are, what we stand for, and what impact we really want to have. Within ourselves we find principle, purpose, and courage. There we find the capacity not only to withstand the pressures of the external system but also actually to transform the external system. We change the world by changing ourselves. [p. 19]
In closely examining the ACT change process, it is evident that it is well aligned with the principles and values of leaders for world benefit. For example, prevailing themes from the interview data spoke to the notions of transcending self, fear, and external sanctions; eo-creating productive community; and focusing on emergent realities. Furthermore, it was common practice for these leaders to embody their vision of the common good, to lead with moral authority, and continually to look within themselves for clarity and better understanding of the world. Finally, in Quinn's discussion of transformational leaders, he described what we believe to be the essence of the leader for world benefit-a servant-leader mentality and the desire to create a social movement. As Quinn stated, "they [transformational leaders] feel a need to
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satisfy a deep personal calling that is linked to a positive and constructive change in the outside world" (2000, p. 34). Our interviewees were each shaped by their own epiphany that generated their personal calling to world benefit. These individuals also were constantly motivated to do the right thing and bring about the results envisioned while striving for authenticity. Horizons for Future Research
Meeting the ethical expectations that society has for business will rely heavily on organizational leadership, and it can be considered a critical component for leaders for world benefit. Yet in an age in which every business act has social and environmental consequences, many of which are speculative or simply unknown, there are many questions that need to be answered. As previously mentioned, How should "ethical'' be defined? What is ethical, and what are the processes we should use to determine it? How much dialogue with stakeholders is necessary? Who should be the stakeholders and how should the dialogues be conducted? What are effective processes for ensuring the success of these "ethical" dialogues? What role should corporate boards and governance procedures play? What are the most important contributions that government, nongovernmental organizations, communities of faith, citizen groups, and education can make? What does ethical leadership look like in practice? Can we develop ethical individuals? If so, what is the best developmental path? Conclusion
A global shift in consciousness is under way and the threads of a sustainable future are beginning to be woven together. Citizens around the world are taking note of fair trade, organic food, alternative energy sources, socially responsible investments, green building, workers' rights, microenterprises, and environmentally friendly businesses, among a number of other positive social trends. Ironically, for-profit organizations, once vilified and labeled as obstacles to a better tomorrow, are transforming themselves to meet society's new green expectations, and on many fronts they are leading the way.
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With this chapter our hope was to lift up some of these inspirational stories of individuals committed to a legacy of good business and a better world while simultaneously attracting scholars and practitioners alike to this emerging field of study. While our research has uncovered several new, exciting leadership research streams, there is still much work to be done.
Note
1. The authors would like to thank Mona Amodeo, Tracey Cantarutti, Marilyn Carter, Gina Hinrichs, Mike Mantel, Mark Picker, Cheryl Richardson, Dan Saint, Gail Von Gonten, and Kym Wong for conducting or eo-conducting the interviews and sharing their results with us.
References
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Fostering Sustainability Across Many Companies The Importance of Project Memes HILARY BRADBURY
Sustainable development requires a process that involves multiple entities and companies working together in search of system change (Senge and others, 2007; Roome, 1998). If it is true, then, that sustainable development is really about ushering in "the next industrial revolution" (McDonough and Braungart, 1998), it becomes important to think beyond individual businesses as mechanisms for making such systemic change possible. We might instead become quite concerned with collaborative efforts across societal and industrial sectors and among many companies and organizations. The SoL Sustainability Consortium is one such collaborative effort. The Consortium convenes executives to learn together about how to respond to the demands of sustainable development. In this chapter I look closely at an interesting paradox in this collaborative effort, namely, the DocuCom project. What makes DocuCom paradoxical is that it can be considered simultaneously a failure and a success. It is a failure in the sense that it did not take root inside the company where it was born, yet it has been quite successful both in the traditional accounting of success as profit and in shaping a whole host of similar endeavors in very different companies and organizations. This chapter proposes that project innovations-! call them memes for reasons I explain shortly-that come alive as new practices and products inside one company may be said to succeed or fail to the degree that they can reproduce in other companies; a project
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succeeds insofar as it has offspring. Thus the capacity for project memes to evolve and fit in multiple organizational contexts is a crucial element in decreeing them "successful." Moreover, in arenas requiring systemic change, the measure of success of a discrete project in a company is the degree to which it contributes memes that help evolve the entire systemsuch as, say, the value chain of a business, or an industrial field-to a more sustainable state. In proposing memes as a way to think better about successful outcomes of transformative collaboration, I stress (1) the importance of learning as a valued end in itself, (2) the adoption of a longer time horizon, (3) the synergy of numerous organizations, and (4) the highlighting of a level of analysis in reference to the whole system. Orientation
The chapter starts by outlining more of what is meant by sustainable development, especially in the realm of management. It then proceeds to describe the Sustainability Consortium, the context in which data were gathered for the chapter. Then the project at DocuCom, a North American corporation, is introduced, following which is a description of the broad net effect of the project on other organizations. The conceptual framework offered for a deeper understanding of what is at play in the consortium draws on biologist Richard Dawkins's notion of memes (1976). Following an introduction to the concept, I present memes from the project in DocuCom and report how these innovations have since evolved in the other Consortium companies. The chapter ends with reflection on the incompatibility of the current accounting system when we take a whole-systems perspective, a level of analysis that is more appropriate for sustainable development. The Challenge of Sustainability
The term sustainability is often used as shorthand for a broader business mandate that integrates concern for financial well-being with concern for environmental and social well- being. 1 Whether green environmentalism, social justice, corporate social responsibility, or sustainability is used to label this mandate, corporate leaders are feeling pressure to address social and environmental concerns along with
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financial performance (Holliday, 2001; Livesey and Kearins, 2002; Luke, 2001). Naturally some are seeking ways to avoid real change by "greenwashing" or otherwise buffering their business from external pressures with symbolic gestures. Yet others are finding opportunities to create new institutional forms that reflect deeply held values while simultaneously serving their shareholders. Statistics about the relatively unsustainable state of our environment and economy are startling, with information suggesting that all life systems are in decline (Worldwatch Institute, 2003) coupled with strong warnings from the Union of Concern Scientists about global warming in particular (see http://www.ucsusa.org). Major ecosystems are in decline. The benefits accrued by the few from the processes of the industrial era increasingly outweigh those accrued by the many. Natural systems are likely to decline further as poorer countries extract and use fossil fuel sources to offer their burgeoning populations the benefits that we in the overdeveloped nations have enjoyed for decades. The broader business mandate, with its multiple foci on ethics, environmental concern, safety, and community investment (see, for example, Paine, 2003; Shrivastava, 1995; Shrivastava and Hart, 1995) makes attending to this new mandate more complex than the traditional task of running a business; moreover, it is beyond the training and experience of most business leaders (Paine, 2003) and, presumably, employees. Were the problems of the natural world merely aesthetic or the loss of species merely a moral outrage, there would be no problem for business leaders. However, the human economy and human systems are themselves subsidiaries of nature. The problem is therefore one of self-interest to business leaders, because if there is no planet, there will be no profit. Expanding Notions of Fiduciary Responsibility to the Triple Bottom Line
The older and still conventional financial analyst's view of sustainability is that "external costs" such as the negative impact on the natural or social environment reduce a company's profitability. Such costs are therefore seen primarily as a risk-management issue. Fiduciary responsibility, understood as a requirement to maximize returns, therefore precludes consideration of social and ethical issues such as the environment. However, this view has begun to change in the business world.
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Critical value drivers in this area are considered to be the need for cost containment (environmental waste is a cost), the need for market growth through stakeholder satisfaction, and the capacity for innovation. In responding positively to these value drivers, competitive advantage is understood to be possible and thus shareholder value is increased, as expressed in dividends, share price, and earnings quality. Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly all academic and business studies show a positive correlation between environmental performance and stock market performance (Dixon, 2005; Gupta and Goldar, 2005). Because management quality is the leading determinant of stock market performance, management toward sustainability, which means management of a rather complex set of issues, appears therefore to offer an excellent proxy for management quality. In a nutshell, executive concerns are slowing broadening from managing a single financial bottom line to managing the so-called triple bottom line (Bragdon, 2006; Elkington and Robins, 1994; Savitz and Weber, 2006) of financial, social, and environmental capitals. Memes for Sustainability
I draw on the notions of Richard Dawkins (1976) to understand the effect of one project's impact on other organizations. The term memes comes in the context of Dawkins's writing on human evolution. He suggests that evolution occurs in three ways: competition, cooperation, and creation. Management scholars normally focus on only one type-competition-when referring to interorganizational alliances (Gulati, 1995; Powell, Koput, and Smith-Doerr, 1996). In this chapter the paradigm for learning together is that of cooperation, where the learning shared in a consortium increases the innovation capacity of other companies in their efforts to develop as sustainable enterprises. In contrast to the instrumental, technical, rational conventions of management thought, the cooperative paradigm of learning together is relational (Bradbury and Lichtenstein, 2000; Senge and others, 2007). Dawkins first defined the notion of a meme when he noted that animals act to perpetuate their genes even at the cost of their own lives. Thus one could infer that genes carry a "mission" toward reproduction, and in support of that mission they precipitate behavior by their
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"carrier" that makes reproduction more likely. The transition from biological theory to social theory came from philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991), who sought to explain why some ideas operate as genes do, to self-perpetuate. I draw on Dawkins's theory of memes to help define success in interorganizational collaboration. Any organizational practice that produces its own repetition in another part of an interorganizationallearning collaborative (possibly including a culturally appropriate reshaping) is the work of memes. The work of reproduction is the evolution of sustainability. The Sustainability Consortium
Business leaders who gather at the SoL Sustainability Consortium recognize the need to act in the face of amorphous environmental and social problems but do not quite yet know how to act. Founded in 1999 as a part of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), the Sustainability Consortium is a voluntary association of about a dozen member organizations that have an interest in tackling sustainability. Most of the member companies are large corporations, including Ford, GM, Nike, Shell, BP, and Unilever, but there are exceptions, such as Plug Power, a small fuel-cell company, and the World Bank. The Consortium's purpose statement articulates its goal "to nurture the desire and capacity ... to build knowledge for achieving ... sustainability [through] engaging people committed to leadership and learning to collectively [redirect] commerce, education, and technology" (Laur and Schley, 2004). The facilitators' original vision was for an inclusive consortium that would represent the "whole ecology of organizational life" (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] included). As an interorganizationallearning alliance of organizational leaders, the Sustainability Consortium has applied principles of organizational learning and dialogue to develop and institute new business practices that incorporate concern for broader social and environmental issues. Over time the Consortium members have established structures and routines, including a steering committee, a set of goals, membership fees, and an evolving set of practices around meetings and projects. Two of the founders act as paid coordinator-facilitators. The major Consortium activities have evolved since 1999 to include semiannual meetings and projects. Member organizations rotate respon-
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sibility to host the semiannual meetings, typically choosing a site near the host company's corporate headquarters. Nonmember attendees must be invited by a member organization or by the facilitators, ensuring a balance of experienced and new participants. Meetings include opportunities to create new projects, which have grown over time in number and size. Not all organizations participate in all projects, but the organizers encourage such participation. One of the distinctive characteristics of the Consortium is that projects are carried out by volunteers from the member organizations rather than by staff hired from member fees, which is more typically the case in other consortia. Consortium projects begin as abstract, conceptual work. For example, early on a subset of the Consortium participants worked to develop a frameworks document, so called because the authors put different theories about sustainability into a coherent framework for use by the participants. As relationships within the Consortium increased in depth and quality, multiple projects evolved over time, from abstract to concrete and from dyadic collaborations to multiparty ones. For example, the "cool fuel" initiative refers to an initiative between an oil company and an industrial carpet manufacturer. Employees in the carpet company received gas cards, which tracked how much oil they used. In turn, the oil company promised to plant enough trees to offset the carbon emissions from the combustion of the gas. A third-party NGO certifies that the right number of trees are planted, allowing for reporting of this activity in public. Other members have sought to create similar partnerships. Later still in the life of the Consortium, "materials pooling" evolved as nine Consortium companies saw a need for pooling information and financial resources to rid their supply chains of toxic materials. Collectively, individual contributions built capacity for addressing the challenges associated with finding out what is in a supply chain. This turned out to be quite a difficult task because suppliers were reluctant to disclose this information, and regulation of chemicals and fears associated with transparency slowed down the work, requiring emphasis on trust building. The participant companies began sharing information across traditional boundaries and inquiring about the underlying assumptions of product development, manufacturing processes, and management
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and stakeholder engagement processes. New product designs and processes eventually started to emerge from the collective. Data Collection
An important feature of the Consortium's work is its semiannual meeting, to which approximately fifty participants, about one-third of whom are new to each meeting of the Consortium, come for two or three days. Roughly two hundred individuals, including executives, line managers, internal consultants, and engineers and other individual contributors, from the member companies have participated in meetings since 1999. Meetings also include invited researchers, representatives from NGOs, consultants who participate in sustainability efforts at member companies, and potential members. Four researchers, of whom this author is one, attended Consortium meetings between 1999 and 2004. Individual field notes were discussed post hoc in regular teleconferences. Communal observational data were double-checked with facilitators and, where appropriate, with participants. Additionally, a total of forty-two interviews were conducted on the experience of collaboration inside the Consortium. All the interviews were transcribed, except in one case, where audio equipment malfunctioned. The mean number of transcription pages for all interviews is fifteen (single-spaced). Open dialogue and multiple opportunities for people to work together allow us to frame the Sustainability Consortium as a context for generating and transmitting memes conducive to learning about sustainability. The question we therefore brought to the data was whether failure in one organization that is part of the learning network can be seen nonetheless as generative from the learning network as a whole to the degree that memes-good ideas becoming practices-spread. In the next section I concentrate on just one of many projects: DocuCom. I reviewed the interviews to understand how this company's memes evolved. DocuCom
In 1991, DocuCom, a brand-name computer and office machine manufacturing company, authorized a "cleansheet" effort to develop a digital
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platform for the corporation. The new systems were to be "zero-tolandfill," meaning that both machines and support systems, such as service, would not generate waste. Most important, the design for radical recovery of assets meant that the machine could be remanufactured and those parts that could not be reconditioned would be recycled. By 1998 the new platform had realized $3.7 billion in profit, with a $13 billion revenue stream and an internal rate of return of 22 percent. The machine is capable of 98 percent recyclability and 90 percent remanufacturability. The remanufacturing alone resulted in $3 billion in revenue, turning in an approximately 80 percent profit margin. One hundred and fifty machines are built each day, retaining highly paid, highly skilled jobs in the United States. Using a Likert scale to measure employee engagement with the project over the seven years, employees reported an average of 3.48 out of a possible 4, that is, triple the national average (Tritch, 2001). Between 20 to 25 percent of corporate revenue was generated though this one platform. The new platform also won many environmental awards. By 1999 the chief engineer had joined the SoL learning consortium and agreed to host other participants at DocuCom so that his peers might learn from SoL's learning efforts. All attendees interviewed reported being very impressed with their experience at DocuCom. This certainly sounds like a success. However, by 2000 the chief engineer had been forced to "retire," an outcome that is common with other chief engineers in this company and that is explained by their having "rocked the boat just too much." The platform project team, which had reported working Saturdays for the seven years without a dime in overtime, had been disbanded. Again, this is a common occurrence in this and many similar organizations when the life of a project has ended. The result is a dispersal of organizational learning, and its diminution and dilution inside the organization. Remanufacturing was running at least 30 percent lower than what was possible, mostly as a result of sending parts offshore-usually to China-which proved cheaper, in the short term, than remanufacturing in the United States. The reason offered by those newly in charge was the need for cost cutting. The service innovations were mostly ignored by the service department (the largest division in DocuCom). The reasoning offered, though not by the service department, is that the innovations threatened to do
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away with service as it is traditionally conceived and replace it with telephone-computer hookups run by computer-trained staff. Nonetheless, the product sold well and other unimagined successes ensued.
Dissemination of Learning and Practice
By 2002 the platform had proved to be particularly popular with a large corporate customer that has since insisted that other suppliers (and DocuCom's competitors) embrace similar environmental standards. In effect the meme of zero-to-landfill had come to have an impact on a whole industry. Moreover, many of the system engineers who were part of the DocuCom project left DocuCom for a local technology university, where they anchored a new think tank on remanufacturing and recycling. In this way the memes began to evolve in the educational environment. Turning now to the interviews of Sustainability Consortium members who were present when DocuCom hosted the meeting, those interviewed recalled the meeting, in which they learned about DocuCom, as a particularly productive experience. Specifically, they recalled the richness of the context. Interviewees mentioned that their DocuCom hosts had allowed them to talk openly with project employees and to walk the factory line. In this context of rich peer-to-peer learning, we see three core memes-or ideas that became practices-named in the descending importance placed on them: a. Concept and practice of designing for zero-to-landfill b. Importance of cultural innovations to facilitate employees' engagement through connecting their personal values to innovations at work c. A precautionary approach in dealing with executive decision makers of an organization, even if a project is successful In the interviews we learned that since 2002, business leaders in the Sustainability Consortium have engaged in differing degrees of evolving these core DocuCom memes. At the simplest level, many interviewees mentioned that they have called on the DocuCom chief engineer (the "alpha meme carrier") to share advice and help them with their own
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efforts at catalyzing sustainable development. For some interviewees, this informal advice has led to a mini learning network. For example, an interviewee from an airplane manufacturing company in the Sustainability Consortium had been most inspired by the zero-to-landfill concept. Given his relatively high status in his company, he has been able to bring some of these ideas to the employees in the design phase of new aircraft. Additionally, two interviewees from a personal-transportation manufacturing company reported being inspired most by the realization that they would need to deal with their executive decision makers differently. After learning about the politics of DocuCom, they consciously slowed down their own demonstration project to make sure that it did not outpace executive approval. What might be seen as "going slow" was argued to be "going slow to go fast." They had learned from DocuCom that efforts around sustainability were really rather radical in the sense that they changed core mental models concerning how business is supposed to be conducted. In particular, they expanded fiduciary considerations to include managing to the triple bottom line beyond financial capital to include social and environmental capital. Perhaps the most literal evolution of ideas inside the Consortium was described by the CEO of a Consortium company who admired the DocuCom project so much that he hired DocuCom's chief engineer, whom he described as "the salt of the earth." Subsequently, a number of the most central players from the DocuCom project were also hired. Together they are leading a successful business developing clean energy technology for the CEO. The core concept of zero-to-landfill is again present in the new company. The arrival of the DocuCom group brought an environmental ethic to what had been perceived as a purely technological challenge. Additionally, in broadening the understanding of the work in which they are engaged, employee engagement efforts are seen as both important and welcome. While not replicating the extent of DocuCom's culture change efforts, much more emphasis has been placed on off-site team-building efforts. Because the CEO was the one who hired the chief engineer, the question of how to engage executive decision makers is moot. More generally, it continued to be common in Consortium meetings in 2005 to hear of "brown bag lunches" to host the former DocuCom
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chief engineer so that he could tell his own story directly to new project teams. Likewise, site visits were set up at the chief engineer's new company with a view to multiplying the !earnings around these specific memes. Additionally, the DocuCom memes have come to mix with others that have evolved from other projects brought to the Consortium. In the interorganizational projects under way (mentioned earlier; for example, cool fuel), it is common to hear of new hybrid memes. In the world beyond the Consortium, presentations at conferences and publicity from environmental awards-sometimes given by the Hollywood "greenerati," who have taken up sustainability as a causealso help evolve the memes into project groups that lie far beyond the Sustainability Consortium. Reflection
I have suggested that DocuCom is successful because its memes continue to proliferate in the interorganizationallearning collaborative. On the basis of the foregoing example, I suggest that success in a transformational project, so much a part of moving companies toward sustainability, should be judged on the following four indicators of success rather than simply on whether they continue inside one company: Benefit to multiple organizations. Traditional definitions of success and failure focus on single organizational units. When we look at the DocuCom case from only the DocuCom perspective, it seems like a failure to the project team in that its best was not realized inside DocuCom. However, when we look more systemically, we see numerous organizations positively affected. Therefore, when considering sustainable development, depth of effect in one organization might be weighted with spread of effect across organizations. Learning as a valued end in itself. When we look at DocuCom with a stress on learning as a valued end, we see a learning-filled effort that continues to catalyze learning. Many of the project engineers who worked on DocuCom have since spread to other learning environments, where they continue to build on their work. More important, and discussed earlier, DocuCom has inspired many participants in the Consortium to create new designs for products and processes as well as employee engagement.
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Longer time horizon. When we look at DocuCom from the shortterm perspective, we see that promise was not substantiated in the organization itself. However, when we look from a longer time horizon, we see that partial failure in one domain has continued to catalyze success in others. Tangible benefit to a larger ecology of organizations. What matters for a sustainable world is not how many single companies get their single sustainability projects right, but rather the degree and momentum with which sustainability memes can proliferate and change the larger landscape of the organizational world. In this sense, memes are a product of and gift to the commons. Conclusion
The chapter argues that success in a sustainable development initiative may be defined as any organizational practice that produces its own repetition in another part of an interorganizationallearning collaborative. I must ask, however, how useful is a systems-based definition of success and failure? Given today's business reality, why would one company celebrate its "failure" by helping to create success in other companies? Yet sustainable development cannot be accomplished by individual companies. Theory on organizational failure (Quinn and Cameron, 1983; Sutton, 1987) is both rare and focused entirely on the single-organization level of analysis. What would it take to shift our attention from success or failure to attention to the required level of system health, namely an ecology? What would it take for us to complement individual companies' balance sheets with the practice of generating a public balance sheet? Note
1. The term sustainability has grown in popularity since 1987, when it was first defined in the Brundtland report from the UN's World Commission on Business Development. Sustainability was defined there as "meeting the needs of the present generation without reducing the capacity of the future generation to meet their own needs."
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References
Bradbury, H., and B. Lichtenstein. 2000. "The Space Between: Operationalizing Relationality in Organizational Research. Organization Science, 11(5): 551-564. Bragdon,]. 2006. Profit for Life: How Capitalism Excels. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton. Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New York: Penguin Science. Dixon, F. 2005. "Total Corporate Responsibility Funds: Maximizing Financial and Sustainability Performance." GreenBiz.com, January. Available online at http://www.greenbiz.com/news/columns _third.cfm ?NewsiD =2 75 78. Elkington, J., and N. Robins. 1994. Company Environmental Reporting: A Measure of the Progress of Business and Industry Toward Sustainable Development. Paris: UN Environmental Program, Industry and Environment Office. Gupta, S., and B. Goldar. 2005. "Do Stock Markets Penalize EnvironmentUnfriendly Behavior? Evidence from India." Ecological Economics, 52: 81-95. Gulati, R. 1995. "Social Structure and Alliance Formation Patterns: A Longitudinal Analysis." Administrative Science Quarterly, 40: 619-652. Holliday, C. 2001. "Sustainable Growth, the DuPont Way." Harvard Business Review, 79(8): 129-132. Laur, J., and S. Schley. 2004. "The SoL Sustainability Consortium: Society for Organizational Learning." Available online at http://www.solonline. org/public_pages/comm_SustainabilityConsortiumCore. Livesey, S. M., and K. Kearins. 2002. "Transparent and Caring Corporations? A Study of Sustainability Reports by The Body Shop and Royal Dutch/ Shell." Organization and Environment, 15(3): 233-259. Luke, T. W. 2001. "SUVs and the Greening of Ford: Reimagining Industrial Ecology as an Environmental Corporate Strategy in Action." Organization and Environment, 14(3): 311-336. McDonough, W., and M. Braungart. 1998. "The Next Industrial Revolution." The Atlantic Monthly, 282(4): 82-92. Paine, L. S. 2003. Value Shift: Why Companies Must Merge Social and Financial Imperatives to Achieve Superior Performance. New York: McGraw-Hill. Powell, W. W., K. W. Koput, and L. Smith-Doerr. 1996. "Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology." Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(1): 116-145. Quinn, R., and K. Cameron. 1983. "Organizational Lifecycles and Shifting
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Criteria of Effectiveness: Some Preliminary Evidence." Management Science, 29: 33-51. Roome, N. (ed.). 1998. Sustainable Strategies for Industries. Washington, DC: Island Press. Savitz, A., and K. Weber. 2006. The Triple Bottom Line. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Senge, P., B. Lichtenstein, K. Kaeufer, H. Bradbury, and J. Carroll. 2007. "Collaborating for Systemic Change: Conceptual, Relational and Action Domains for Meeting the Sustainability Challenge." MIT Sloan Management Review, 48(2): 44-53. Shrivastava, P. 1995. "The Role of Corporations in Achieving Ecological Sustainability." Academy of Management Review, 20(4): 936-960. Shrivastava, P., and S. L. Hart. 1995. "Creating Sustainable Corporations." Business Strategy and the Environment, 4: 154-165. Sutton, R. 1987. "The Process of Organizational Death: Disbanding and Reconnecting." Administrative Science Quarterly, 32: 542-569. Tritch, T. 2001. "Talk of Ages." Gallup Management Journal, Winter: 32. Worldwatch Institute, 2003. State of the World: Special 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Norton.
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Cultivating Transformative Collaboration Actionable Knowledge as Aesthetic Achievement FRANK]. BARRETT
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," p. 20 For all the intelligent activities of men, no matter whether expressed in science, fine arts, or social relationships, have for their task the conversion of causal bonds, relations of succession, into a connection of means-consequence, into meanings. When the task is achieved the result is art. -John Dewey, Experience and Nature, pp. 369-70
This chapter is concerned with the challenge of generating actionable knowledge that facilitates collaborative breakthroughs between stakeholders engaged in conflict. I propose here that the conventional approach to knowledge as rational and propositional is not adequate for achieving creative collaboration between parties engaged in conflict. I argue that to achieve cooperation requires more than cognitive, propositional ways of knowing; transformative cooperation requires an aesthetic mind-set. With this in mind, I call for an "aesthetic way of knowing." Aesthetic experiences involve awakening to the immediacies of vivid experiences, and openness to wonderment and a widening of horizons. I look at three diverse illustrations of groups locked in con-
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flicts who are able to achieve collaborative breakthroughs in relational patterns. I draw on these cases as well as on aesthetic philosophers to propose four elements of transformative collaboration: an aesthetics of surrender, wonder, appreciation, and forgiveness. Finally, I explore the conditions we can create to support the emergence of collaborative transformations, including cultivating provocative competence and incremental disruptions, exploring self-learning narratives, and creating small promises and mini-commitments. Transformative cooperation is an aesthetic achievement, one that involves creating moments of disruption that invite exceptional meaning making. Modernity: Cooperation as Transaction
We have inherited, as a condition of modernity, a rationalist way of knowing. One of the more commonly accepted logic favoring the benefits of cooperation stems from game theory, an exemplar of instrumental rationality. Robert Axelrod (1984) demonstrated that cooperation is a rational transaction that pays off more than competition does. Seeking to shed light on the complex dynamics of international relations, researchers were concerned with the feasibility of cooperation between competing egos. His early experiments-iterations of the "prisoner's dilemma"used computer tournaments and mathematical models to demonstrate that it is possible and desirable to adopt a cooperative posture of reciprocity rather than choosing options that serve only individual needs. The recommended strategy follows a tit-for-tat rationale: it is best to start with a cooperative move and then replicate whatever the other party does on succeeding moves. Working from a rationalist, economic paradigm-a logic of cooperation as transaction, as mediating calculation of interests-Axelrod's work provides an empirical rationale for choosing cooperative strategies as a way to realize one's preordained goals. Economic and rationalist approaches to cooperation, including game theory, are consistent with modernist ways of knowing and have influenced the way we approach managerial education. As Maclntyre pointed out (1981), the manager is the uncontested figure of modernity. The manager engages in instrumental rationality, treats the ends as given, and concerns him- or herself with technique. This economic view has infiltrated the way we conceive of relationships, coordination, and cooperation. In
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organizational life, relationships are referred to as transactions. We speak of interdependencies that must be analyzed and categorized ("Is it pooled, sequential, or reciprocal?") and of coordinating mechanisms and integrating devices that must be managed. The language of the managerial technocrat is a language of predictability and closure upon meaning. This technocratic mind-set suggests that novelty is something to be explained (and eliminated); managerial action is framed in terms of routines, often borrowing the language of computer programming. Activity (individual or organizational) can usually be traced back to an environment stimulus of some sort .... when a stimulus is of a kind that has been experienced repeatedly in the past, the response will ordinarily be highly routinized. When a stimulus is relatively novel, it will evoke problem-solving activity aimed initially at constructing a definition of the situation and then at developing one or more appropriate performance programs. [March and Simon, 1958, pp. 160-161] Following Maclntyre (1981), the role of the manager in many bureaucratic settings is to solve problems, remove contradictions (or at least the appearance of contradictions), and eliminate failure or error. The concern here is that technocratic mind-sets that seek a closed circle of interpretation must be interrupted if cooperative or collaborative endeavors are going to have transformative impact. Is there an alternative to the view that cooperation is a form of instrumental transaction? One perspective that deserves consideration is the aesthetic argument, a proposal that cooperation is an achievement of exceptional meaning; that cooperation can be creative, vivid, beautiful, sublime, disruptive, artful design, with a good sense of form and poetic wisdom. In particular, the topic of transformational cooperation seems appropriate for a vocabulary of poetics and aesthetics. Transformational cooperation implies that cooperation yields a creative outcome that would not have been possible without interpersonal engagement. Indeed, I argue in this chapter that transformative cooperation might be more akin to aesthetic activity; the conditions that yield creative outcomes are not unlike the conditions that artists and musicians set for themselves when they are seeking to make creative contributions. Further, the communicative expressions that lead to transformative outcomes are aesthetic representations-metaphor and narrative-rather than propositional forms of representation.
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I share examples of groups with a history of conflict and hostility who are able to achieve transformative cooperation; from there I articulate how in each case what makes knowledge actionable is an aesthetic sensibility that supports transformative moments. I then put forth an aesthetics of cooperation, drawing on theorists who have written about aesthetic philosophy. I speak specifically of four elements: surrender, appreciation, wonder, and forgiveness. Finally, I speculate on the conditions and interventions that further the possibility of transformative breakthroughs. Aesthetics and Vivid Experience
The word aesthetic means "pertaining to sensuous perception." It originates from the Greek esthetisch. For the Greeks this term was connected to the notion of perception, because the eyes were considered the primary organs of sensation. In the Greek world, the eyes were more than a sense of physical seeing; the eyes were a metaphor for all the senses. Perhaps the closest original meaning that remains in our vocabulary is its opposite, anaesthesia, which refers to the deadening of the physical senses, the inability to feel or perceive-in essence, the deadening of the sensory organs. If the opposite of aesthetic awareness is numbness, then aesthetic awareness is awareness that is open to the immediacy of wonderment. "Aesthetic ways of knowing" involve awakening to the immediacies of vivid experience. Aesthetic experiences involve openness to the wonderment of possibilities; a move of surrender, a letting go of instrumental motives; an appreciation of nuances and provocative possibilities; an experience of wholeness and fulfillment, of widening horizons and connections; an intimacy that transforms the ordinary. Consider the following excerpt from an essay by poet Mark Doty (2002, pp. 3-4): I have a backache, I'm travel weary, and it couldn't matter less ... because I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really-rather it's that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.
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This is hardly the language of game theory. To be "held in intimacy with the things of the world" while looking at a 350-year-old painting of fruit, cheese, raw shellfish, and wine is not an ordinary experience. For Doty, it is a deeply sensual experience. He notices the spiral of lemon peel, how one rind curls in the air, how one rind dips toward the wine glass. He notices the gray cast of the glass; nuances of the cup, the platter, the pearl-handled knife, "its particulars distilled into an aura of intimacy." He notices the harmonies, the gradations of texture, the scent, flavor, light. Simple becomes complex, ordinary become sublime; he celebrates the extraordinary behavior of light. There is a sense in which this encounter is two way: the painting seems to be speaking to him, has reached out and pulled him into its sphere. He feels overcome with emotive power, it "takes him over." There is a transcendent luminosity, a stretching beyond the visual field of the object itself. He is even startled, perhaps in awe, of the quality of light that captures other routine objects. He senses a reverberating connection that extends beyond the frame of the picture and transforms his surroundings; the world itself looks different-more alive, more dynamic; he experiences a connection of harmony and love. He is elevated out of the drab ordinary world. Through the rest of this lovely essay, Doty reflects on personal memories, awakened feelings, and associations-entire worlds that are opened up through this encounter with one Dutch painting. This is an experience of epiphany. What we may not notice at first glance is that there is a risk involved in these kind of encounters-a willingness to become uplifted. Aesthetic Knowledge
To illustrate the richness and complexity of the aesthetic perspective, I consider briefly the contributions of philosophers from different traditions. For Plato, for example, the beautiful, along with the good and the true, was one of three primary archetypes. Physical objects, such as works of art, were beautiful to the extent that they imitated pure ideas. Art objects are mere copies of changeless, eternal patterns or forms. To see a work of art as beautiful is to see a reflection of the pure form of beauty. Imagination, for the Greeks, was subservient to reason. Socrates distrusted artists because they confuse appearance and reality and play with our emotions, causing us to sweep reason aside.
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For Immanuel Kant, the notion of imagination as mimetic, or imitating, is replaced with the notion of the creative or producing imagination. Kant's famous Copernican revolution was his insight that the imagination was the "unknown root" of the two stems of human cognition-understanding and sensation. Imagination is the primary precondition of all knowledge. In order for anything to be known it must be preformed and transformed by the synthetic power of the imagination, a notion with revolutionary implications for the fields of epistemology as well as aesthetics. The proposal that imagination grants the power to invent or create a world is a notion that became a point of departure for Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and the entire Romantic movement. In the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico directly challenged the dualistic assumptions of the rational, detached way of knowing laid down by Rene Descartes. He documented how cultural and historical knowledge shapes awareness. Earlier civilizations facing mysterious and unintelligible events could understand the universe only in relation to their own bodies, "by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination" (Vico, (1774/1966, p. 117). When they experienced the terror of lightning flashes and rolls of thunder from the sky, they imagined that the gods were at work, or they pictured the sky as one "great animated body" (p. 118). They had "poetic wisdom"-ruled by imagination, passions, senses, and feelings rather than reflective reason. More recently, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989) used the art metaphor as a way to outline his theory of hermeneutic understanding. He articulated an "aesthetics of reception" that goes beyond seeing the reader as interpreter. His primary metaphor that knowledge is a "fusion of horizons" emerged from his inquiry into dialogical encounters with art. Encountering a work of art is a form of representational play that can break through the closed horizon of interpretation and disclose a truth. He rejected Plato's notion of mimesis as a form of copying. We get pleasure from watching a drama, for example, not because it copies reality but for "the joy of knowledge." Aesthetic experiences are essential experiences; they reveal by presenting a world of open horizons, of "still undecided possibilities" and contingencies (p. 289). The American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey (1934) similarly claimed that the capacity for the creation of art is not confined to artists, poets, and musicians. Artistic moments occur when the whole creature
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is alive, creating activities that are capable of contributing "directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life" (p. 27). Aesthetic experiences are dramatic and compelling-moments when the person is in "active and alert commerce" (p. 19) with the world, moving forward to test ideas and undergo consequences. These are active moments of experimentation, but also moments of a receptive sense of "undergoing," being acted upon, fully absorbed and "taken up," moments of "acute aesthetic surrender" (p. 19). Taken together, these philosophers hold that there is a difference between prepositional ways of knowing and aesthetic ways of knowing. It remains now to demonstrate that aesthetic knowledge is uniquely actionable in relational settings. Next I present three illustrations in which divergent parties locked into patterns of hostility and conflict are able to achieve transformative breakthroughs in collaboration. Generative Metaphor Intervention to Achieve Transformational Cooperation
As we explore later, Dewey claims that vivid experiences begin with preceding ideas and a questioning curiosity that participants bring to experience; Hannah Arendt (1978) claims that affirmative wondering helps one to break out of nonthinking habit and leads to passionate thinking. The following illustration concerns an experiment aimed at creating transformative cooperation in a system that is weighed down by seemingly intractable conflict. (For a fuller description, see Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990.) In the early 1980s, the Medic Inn, a low-cost, one-star hotel facility, was taken over by a larger enterprise and given the mandate to transform itself into a first-class, four-star facility. The parent company invested in the property and upgraded the physical facilities. However, the quality of service was slow to change. Managers were locked in cycles of interpersonal conflict and interdepartmental turf wars. Planning meetings were laborious, and managers had a difficult time making collective decisions. In private the managers blamed one another for incompetence. Interpersonal tension and competition were seemingly insurmountable obstacles to generating strategic plans for the future, and many expressed fear of losing their jobs. In particular, the two operating departments-the
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rooms department and the food and beverage department-were locked in bitter turf battles. Some of the managers refused to speak to one another in public or private. At one point, to the embarrassment of the entire staff, two managers engaged in a shouting match in the lobby of the hotel in full view of customers. It was clear to the consultants that the managers needed to engage in a different kind of dialogue in order to develop consensus about vision for creating excellent service and four-star quality. But how could a group divided by competition and turfism engage in transformative dialogue with one another when all they could see in one another was incompetence? How could a group with depressed aspirations talk about an affirming vision of the future? The consultants sensed that the group needed to develop an appreciative vocabulary before it would be possible to interact constructively. The consultants introduced a "generative metaphor intervention" in which the managers directed attention to a different but related domain. In brief, metaphor presents a way of seeing something as if it were something else; it transfers meaning from one domain into another, organizes perception, and provides a framework for selecting and naming characteristics of an object or experience by asserting similarity. Metaphors act as subtle transactions across contexts, vibrate with multivocal meanings, provoke new thoughts, excite with novel perspectives, and enable people to see the world with fresh perceptions. Metaphor also facilitates the learning of new knowledge (consider the science teacher proposing "the atom is a solar system" as a way of inviting students to "see" the structure of an atom). Fresh insights are transferred instantaneously, bringing about semantic and perceptual change. With this approach in mind, the consultants decided to steer the group away from attention on the current domain. To interrupt the cycle of deficit-oriented discourse, they called a moratorium on all planning meetings. They created a task force of managers to take a collective journey to a generative metaphor-a different but related domain-Chicago's famous Tremont Hotel, one of the premier four-star properties in the county. Arrangements were made in advance with the Tremont staff to be available for interviews with the Medic Inn managers. The managers' task was to conduct focused interviews with the Tremont managers. Their focus was to be highly selective-to discover the factors and forces
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that contributed to excellence in a different domain. Their task was to create a vivid image of the Tremont hotel working at its best. The activity was designed so that conversations would not focus on imperfections and deficiencies at the Tremont. Inquiry was deliberately appreciative in nature and revolved around these core questions:
1. What were the peak moments in the life of the hotel-the times when people felt most alive, most energized, most committed, and most fulfilled in their involvement? 2. What was it that Tremont's staff members valued most about themselves, their tasks, and the organization as a whole? 3. Where excellence had been manifested, what were the organizational factors (structures, leadership approaches, and so on) that most fostered excellence? Participants observed the Tremont staff and collected numerous stories of peak experiences. Tremont employees recounted stories, some in elaborate detail, about such times as when they made extra efforts to attend to guests' needs; some told of crises that required exceptional cooperation and extra effort. The Medic Inn managers came together the second day armed with an array of peak-experience stories in which the Tremont staff contributed the best of themselves to their task. When they arrived in the conference room, there was a marked change in energy. They were excited and energized about what they had discovered. The consultants asked them to share details of narratives and factors they had heard. As they debriefed one another, relations between the previously hostile managers began to shift subtly: they talked to one another about the numerous details they had collected, about how service was delivered, how food was prepared, how rooms were cleaned, how staff members collaborated during crises. They generated lists of a myriad of factors that were associated with organizational excellence and images of four-star hotels. The quality of their interaction was markedly different. There were no expressions of distrust or hostility. On the third day, the participants interviewed one another about their own peak experiences, the moments in their lives when they were operating at their best, moments of exceptional meaning and significance. Finally, on the fourth day they began to articulate aspirations for their own hotel. There were no traces of the cycles of blame and
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turf protection. Before the entire management group, two managers who had not spoken in months decided to "bury the hatchet" and hugged each other in front of the room, to which the others applauded. The group returned to their hotel with a new cooperative spirit and a renewed capacity to generate consensus. The quality of their dialogue was markedly different-cooperative and supportive. They continued the dialogue that had begun with the appreciative inquiry at the Tremont and within a few months developed a collective strategic plan to bring four-star service to the Medic Inn. Within a few years they had achieved a four-star rating from the Michelin rating service. The creation of a generative metaphor and the managers' inquiry into the Tremont experience helped to create a new discourse: managers had a new set of tools-narratives about cooperation, trust, exceptional contributions. These affirmative interpretive repertoires made new actions possible. The group members were liberated from their scripts of habitual cynicism, doubts, and obstacle identification. Because the topic of discourse had shifted, people became less constricted with one another and began to share their aspirations for their own hotel. Generative metaphor intervention seeds transformational dialogue by opening new spaces of meaning in which participants can imagine generative worlds and hopeful scripts. The inquiry led to affirmative stories that, once shared, created common tools, a minimal structure that allowed the interlocutors to engage in a dance of hopeful alternatives. When participants turned to their own future, they had a new past to rely on; they had common resources-stories about peak experiences at the Tremont and stories of their own best practices from their own histories. Sharing Personal Narratives to Accomplish Transformational Cooperation
Is it possible to forge transformative cooperation between two groups who tend to frame each other as the embodiment of evil? Consider the current debate between pro-life and pro-choice groups. Each group is convinced that its view is the only right one; each party has reduced the other to a negative stereotype; debates tend to result in polarized opposition. The way in which discourse is currently played out, each party tends
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to lock the other into simplified stands: complex issues are reduced to
two simple answers. People feel that they are "joining" an alignment of interests when they choose one side of the argument; they feel validated within certain discourse communities of similar positions. The language of warfare sometimes depicts these bipolar conflicts: exchanges are winlose, with much at stake; there is a pull to defend one's arguments against the well-armed, solidified opposition; one aligns oneself with allies to guard against losing territory and security. The dominant discourse as polarized opposition is often sustained by the media in dramatic depictions of bipolar debate. Controversial issues are seen as singular, dramatic conflicts. Participants on either side of contentious issues often fail to see how dominant discourses constrain a range of discourse moves and possible repertoires around the issue. They are engaged in a closed circle of interpretation. An aesthetic intervention into their conversation would involve attempts to open the horizon of possible meanings, to set up a context in which multiple cues can trigger multiple meanings, to change the ideas and expectations people bring to the conflict. Habitual ways of talking shape how ideas are expressed, deeming which experiences and observations can be cited as legitimate in supporting a point of view. We are all prone to patterned ways of living that are obstacles to "affirmative wondering." In Arendt's words (1978), they become oblivious and need to be interrupted. Is it possible to transform the discourse that polarizes these two groups? The Public Conversations Project (PCP), founded in 1989, seeks to create an alternative to this polarized debate by fostering constructive dialogues between parties (see Chasin and Herzig, 1994; Chasin and others, 1996). These facilitators work with groups that have a history of marginalizing and demonizing the other, sometimes to the point of destructive action. Their approach involves avoiding repeating habitual repertoires of hatred so that group members can talk to one another in constructive ways. The PCP experimented with ways to have these polarized groups-such as pro-choice and pro-life-hold conversations in which they were not locked into repeating habitual repertoires that are part of the dominant discourse, allowing them to talk about their differences in a constructive way. Activists on both sides are brought together in small groups to work together for two and a half days. They typically begin their meeting with a dinner in which participants are free to talk
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to one another about any issue except, in the case of pro-life versus prochoice, the issue of abortion. A facilitator then guides the conversation in a different direction. The facilitators set ground rules. Participants are asked to refrain from interrupting when another person is responding, to share air time and allow each party to respond. Participants are asked to speak as individuals rather than as a spokesperson for a particular position or movement. They are asked to share their thoughts and feelings, to speak from the full range of their experiences, and to ask questions of one another that arise from their genuine curiosity. The three questions that PCP poses are deliberately constructed to seed a different kind of conversation. The participants are permitted to take as much time as they need. Everyone has the opportunity to speak uninterrupted and to hear the others' answers. The participants are asked: 1. How did you get involved with this issue? What's your personal relationship or personal history with it? 2. We'd like to hear a little more about your particular beliefs and perspectives about the issues surrounding abortion. What is at the heart of the matter for you? 3. Many people we've talked to have told us that within their approach to this issue they find some gray areas, some dilemmas about their own beliefs, or even some conflicts. Do you experience any pockets of uncertainty or lesser certainty, any concerns, value conflicts, or mixed feelings that you may have and wish to share?
The first question-designed to ask people to tell the seminal stories that helped shaped their views-typically yields a variety of personal experiences. Often they share experiences from their own lives or the experience of a family member at a crisis moment. The sharing of one's personal experience with an issue tends to change the way public positions are heard. The participant places the belief in the context of a personal narrative and allows others to hear how a particular belief might have evolved. There is a greater likelihood that a story will generate an affirmative response because it concerns the individual's involvement in the issue. (While it is easy to declare that one's belief or opinion is wrong, I cannot say that your story or experience is wrong because I must accept it as your personal story.) The second question then gives them a chance to declare their public views and core beliefs
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about the abortion issue. Finally, participants are asked about possible gray areas in their beliefs-areas of uncertainty or ambivalence. This question opens a new way of looking at one's "opponent" because it admits that the presentation of a unified, singular stand belies a more complex dynamic. When one person admits these self-reflexive doubts, others are likely to follow. This move allows the conversation to move away from defending stances. In January 2001, six Boston women public leaders from both sides of the abortion debate revealed that they had been meeting in secret for six years, with the help of the PCP, to come to a better understanding of one another. They reflected on their experiences in a coauthored Boston Globe article entitled "Talking with the Enemy" (Fowler and others, 2001). They revealed their early anxieties about the meetings and their suspicions of one another, the tension at certain points, in particular around the choice of language and labels. They found one of the ground rules helpful-to avoid the "hot buttons" that unleash polarizing rhetoric (such as likening abortions to genocide or, on the other side, phrases such as products of conception). They reported that "despite the strains of these early meetings, we grew closer to each other. At one session, each of us told the group why she had devoted so much of her time, energy, and talents to the abortion issue. These accounts-all deeply personal-enlightened and moved us .... while we struggled over profound issues, we also kept track of personal events in one another's lives, celebrating good times and sharing sorrows. As our mutual understanding increased, our respect and affection for one another grew." One of the effects of the dialogue was that the leaders from both sides encouraged their respective allies to dampen the rhetoric they used to typify the opposing group. A year into the dialogue, one of the pro-life leaders, Frances Hogan, recalled in an interview on National Public Radio that while she thought that abortion was killing, she refused to call it murder. She refused to demonize the opposition with charged language. She had learned, she said, that "toning down the rhetoric is critical." Finally, the parties revealed that while their own beliefs in their issues never wavered, they continued to meet because "when we face our opponent, we see her dignity and goodness." They reported that they "learned to avoid being overreactive and disparaging the other side and to focus instead on affirming our respective causes."
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South Africa was ruled for fifty years by a white-only government, one that imposed a rule of apartheid. There were several movements-notably the African National Congress-to destabilize the country. To maintain separation of the races and to silence dissent, the government frequently used violence. Prominent black leaders, including Nelson Mandela, were imprisoned. When Mandela was elected in 1994 and the policy of apartheid was abolished, many black leaders wanted to punish those white officials who had engaged in violence and repression. Some proposed public trials similar to the Nuremberg trials of 1945. However, in light of a compromise that had been negotiated during the transition to the dismantling of apartheid, Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Under the leadership of President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC was created to expose the truth about the dark past, a phrase that resonates with Heidegger's notion that truth is concealed. Its mandate is to hold investigations into the atrocities that were committed during the apartheid era. The TRC grants amnesty to anyone who confesses their role and discloses fully their accounts of participation in violent actions. What TRC has discovered is that the requirement to disclose in public the details of killings is not easy. (This might be a factor in why some perpetrators are choosing prison sentences rather than seek amnesty.) Judges ask confrontational questions and occasionally perpetrators publicly acknowledge lies and cover-ups. The horrors of the past are recounted, sometimes in gruesome detail, and there is a public acknowledgment of wrongdoing and manipulation. Eric Taylor was a policeman in South Africa who had used violent methods against whites to repress uprisings. A committed Christian, he joined the police force at the age of eighteen; he associated communism with atheism and therefore justified the repressive tactics necessary to stop the threat of a takeover of the government by non-Christians. In essence, he associated the repressive tactics of the police with patriotism. He applied for amnesty and told of his participation in the killings of the Guguletu 7, a group of seven black men who were ambushed and killed by South African police. After their murders in 1986, the media
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reported the official police version: the seven men were armed terrorists and died in a shoot-out with police. Television pictures showed guns next to their bodies. An official inquest in 1986 determined that the police were defending themselves. At the time, many people did not believe the official story. When the TRC began its hearing, Eric Taylor applied for amnesty and had to tell his version of the events in a public courtroom. Sitting in the courtroom were the mothers of the boys who were killed in 1986. Taylor disclosed that the video showing the guns near the bodies of the victims was manufactured by police, that the young men were lured into a trap and killed by a "secret government death squad." He described how he asked one of the men to raise his hands in the air, how he shot him in the back of the head. Under pointed questioning, Eric Taylor admitted, "My only concern was to commit the murders and get away with it." In a separate interview, Taylor described the moment when he realized that his actions were morally wrong: I saw a film in 1990, Mississippi Burning, about apartheid. It made an impression on me, especially the involvement of the police in assassination of activists. I realized that police should be about protection, not assassination. After that I read Mandela's autobiography and it changed my whole perspective.
Eugene De Kock, a former police colonel, was convicted as a mass murderer and was to serve a 212-year prison sentence. He was known as the voice of "prime evil" and it was said that he would not only kill his "targets" but would also burn or blow up the remains to destroy evidence. When he confessed his crimes before the TRC, the black audience applauded, apparently for his honesty. How can we account for a response of applause after hearing the horrors, the destruction, the participation in these crimes against humanity? Toward an Aesthetics of Transformative Cooperation
In this section I draw out themes from each of the examples presented to discuss the nature of aesthetic sensibility within cooperative settings. Along the way I draw on a cluster of terms from philosophers that point toward aesthetics as a way of knowing.
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Cultivating an Aesthetic of Surrender
Central to an aesthetic way of knowing is that in order to be receptive one must let go of habitual ways of knowing and relating, suspend efforts to control outcomes, relinquish investment in predetermined outcomes, surrender familiar protocols, give up instrumental concerns, and suspend efforts to manipulate people or events for instrumental purposes. In the Medic Inn case, the managers agreed to let go of their habitual discourse of blame; in the abortion dialogue, the two foes agreed to let go of the contested issue, to suspend their interest in the passionate topic; in the South Africa story, the victims agreed to let go of vengeance and listen for another story. These were attempts to dislodge linear, predictable responses. Cultivating an aesthetic of surrender invites openness to and wonderment over what unfolds, enhancing the capacity for the players to engage in transformative cooperation and achieve creative breakthroughs. There is a thread through aesthetic theory that can best be summed up in the phrase letting go. It is a letting go that leads to connections with a greater sense of wholeness. Kant's notion that appreciation of an aesthetic moment involves a selfless apprehension-one must let go of instrumental interests-and a "purposiveness without purpose," granting the imagination free play. In particular, when apprehending the sublime, one is faced with powerful sensations that interrupt and dislodge familiar ways of knowing. An experience of the sublime "does violence to the imagination," coming with an immediacy that interrupts familiar categories of knowing. Bergson (1941/1946) also emphasizes the importance of letting go of familiar intellectual categories. When we are able to surrender intellectual ways of knowing, we have intuitive access to duree, the becoming of life, the undivided, progressive creation that resembles "a gradually expanding rubber balloon assuming at each moment unexpected forms" (p. 95). Surrender leads to an appreciation of wholeness: the intellect analyzes, the intuition synthesizes. Surrender to an invitation is close to Gadamer's notion (1989) that when we approach a text or a work of art, it is important to attend to the invitation that the art issues, to agree to be allured or pulled into the aura of the text, to allow the art to awaken and stir responses without willful interference. Critic I. A. Richards (1924/1985) invoked a "letting go" and cited Coleridge's contention
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(1983/1817) that to understand poetry requires a willing suspension of disbelief. According to Dewey (1934), we submit to aesthetic experiences that are dramatic and compelling-moments when the person is in "active and alert commerce" with the world, moving forward to test ideas and undergo consequences. These are active moments of experimentation, but they also create a receptive sense of "undergoing," being acted upon, fully absorbed and "taken up," moments of "acute aesthetic surrender" (Dewey, 1934, p. 19). They are meaningful and exceptional: there is a wholeness, a sense of coherence and fulfillment that differentiates these moments from ordinary "inchoate" experiences (see Shea, 1980). We have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. [Dewey, 1934, p. 36]
Swiss Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar is particularly provocative in suggesting that surrender (or in his terms, receptivity) is necessary to apprehend the radiance of beauty in the world. The primary obstacle to appreciating beauty is speed and overactivity. One must slow down in order to be receptive to the beautiful. This is not just a passive surrender, however. When speaking of reflection on the transcendent within the mystical tradition, there is a tendency to depict this move as a withdrawal from the world, a desire to leave the world, to create an inner emptiness, to escape the limits of the human condition. This, Balthasar claims, is a denial of the beauty in the world. The recognition of beauty in the world demands decisive courage, at least as much as the recognition of truth and goodness. It is a risk: there is a loss of self involved in accepting the invitation to beauty. Beauty draws us in, enchants, enthralls, stuns, awakens, disturbs, entraps, provokes. However, ignoring beauty is also a risk. If we ignore beauty in the world, our other capacities begin to atrophy as well. "We can be sure that whoever
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sneers at her name (Beauty) as if she were the ornament of the bourgeois past-whether he admits it or not-can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love" (Balthasar, cited in Oakes, 1994, p. 18). If we accept receptivity as the opening, we might also accept Balthasar's claim that not all of our senses are equally adept at receptivity. In particular, we tend to overemphasize vision. Vision, or perception (that is, seeing), is a mode of control. Listening, or hearing, on the other hand, is a better mode for surrender. The eye is the organ with which the world is possessed and dominated, the immediate reflection-in the sphere of the senses-of the rational intellect that comprehends. Through the eye, the world is our world, in which we are not lost; rather, it is subordinate to us as an immeasurable dwelling space with which we are familiar. The other side of this material function denotes distance, separateness. It is not through a close encounter that it comes to terms with things but through the look from a distance that tames them-the way trainers stare down wild animals in a circus ring .... Hearing is a wholly different, almost opposite mode of the revelation of reality. It lacks the fundamental characteristic of material relevance. It is not objects we hear-in the dark, when it is not possible to see-but their utterances and communications .... That which is heard comes upon us without our being informed of its coming in advance. And it lays hold of us without our being asked. We cannot look out in advance and take up our distance. It is in the highest degree symbolic that only our eyes-and not our ears-have lids. [cited in Oakes, 1994, pp. 136, 7]
Gazing implies a kind of control; we choose what to see; when someone stares at us we feel that we are "in their gaze" and confined. Hearing is a more defenseless reception. The moment of surrender is a moment of absorption and immersion. The beauty of hearing sounds-of words and music-always remains evanescent and ungraspable. Put simply, according to Balthasar, the ears are a more vulnerable organ.
Cultivating an Aesthetic of Appreciation
Appreciation is the art of valuing. Surrender is a letting go in order to let something else in. The "something else" is not neutral. In these examples there is an attempt to value and lift up some dimension, an assumption that there are positive, expansive forces to be discovered. In the case
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of the Medic Inn, the managers deliberately searched for moments of excellent service at the Tremont Hotel; the women involved in the PCP intervention paid attention to learning moments in one another's lives; the TRC held an image of restorative justice, that victims and perpetrators could live in peace. The notion of appreciation is emerging as a major force in the organizational-change literature, in the positive organizational scholarship literature, and in the positive psychology movement. Appreciative sensibility is also a requirement for meaningful aesthetic encounters. Whitehead claims that in art the concrete elements "elicit attention to particular values ... the habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values." For Nietzsche, the transformation that occurs when one is encountering art is akin to the experience of love: "When a man loves, ... he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect; he is more perfect .... Art here has an organic function; we find it present in the most angelic instinct, 'love.'" Vickers (1968) saw "appreciative systems" as a culture's readiness to see or value. Appreciation in this context of aesthetic ways of knowing does not connote superficial pleasure or entertainment; rather, it connotes a deeper, meaningful experience. "We must remember that the worth of any great work of art is not something that can be grasped in a moment. To appreciate and judge an excellent painting, for example, we must do much more than glance at it in a gallery. Ordinarily we must live with it until its sensuous qualities, meanings, and forms sink deep into our ... minds" (Rader, 1966, p. xxxi). Dewey has a notion of appreciative awareness in his sense that aesthetic experiences are vivid, coherent, and consummatory. He cites an angler enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of his catch-the taste, the smell, the physical involvement, the "completeness in living" (Dewey, 1934, p. 26). For Dewey, aesthetic experiences involve appreciative valuing in the sense that they are vivid, coherent; the imagination, the body's senses, and cognition are all involved: "the union of sense, mood, impulse, and action characteristic of the live creature" (Dewey, 1934, p. 26).
Cultivating an Aesthetic of Wonderment
Surrender has to do with letting go of the past; wonder is the stance of discovery, of openness to what emerges. In each of the vignettes already
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presented there is a stance of questioning that is immersed in wonder. The managers of the Medic Inn interviewed and asked questions of their counterparts; the women in the abortion discussion agreed to listen to one another as if there was something new to be discovered; the participants in the TRC submitted themselves to rigorous questioning. The last example reminds us that wonder is not always painless. Vico's notion of poetic wisdom (1774/1966) is connected to a stance of innocence and wonder. What makes poetic wisdom possible is an absence of certainty and a fresh perception of the ordinary world, as with the ancient Greeks, "whose minds were not in the least abstract, refined or spiritualized, because they were entirely immersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in the body" (p. 118). These ancients had an unfettered innocent relationship to the world: "for ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men" (p. 116). Poetic wisdom is an awakening to innocence, an embodied knowledge intuited through the senses, staying in contact with deeply felt, concrete relations. For Hannah Arendt (1994), the absence of wonder might have evil consequences. In 1960 she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann and analyzed the nature of evil in fascist society. The assumption at the time was that Nazism was due to a radical, overwhelming evil force let loose in the world. Arendt shocked the world with her conclusion that Nazism was not due to overwhelming impersonal force. She was struck by the matter-of-factness of evil, the sheer ordinariness of Nazi perpetrators-most were ordinary job-holders and good family men. What struck her was their thoughtlessness, their obliviousness. She coined the term the banality of evil. Eichmann and others were seduced by Nazi evil because of their failure to think. Eichmanns' crimes were due not so much to evil thinking as to the "absence of thought." It must have been shocking at the time to hear monstrous deeds described as banal. It is worth exploring how she construed the nature of thinking. What did she mean by thinking? Thinking, she claims, is an interruption of the ordinary. The life of banality is a world of grandiose statistical calculations, disposable and interchangeable units, abstract cliches. Thinking does not begin with puzzlement or problem solving. Thinking begins with wonder. To be more specific, thinking begins with admiring wonder, the kind of wonder that Greek men held for the gods.
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It is in a state of wonder that active transformation can occur. (Here she strikes a chord similar to Dewey's notion that ideas trigger inquiry that leads to transformation). Thinking, as a form of wonder, involves the suspension of will, a departure from control. It is a "thinking that is not a willing." It is, she writes, "passionate thinking" (Arendt, 1971, p. 4 ). Wonder begins with questioning, but not just any questioning; it involves an admiring and affirmative questioning (Arendt reminds us of Heidegger's notion that to think and to thank come from the same etymology). A thinking posture approaches with the expectation of encountering the unexpected, the strange, the novel. It is a questioning that is "a surrender before the disclosure of being" (Arendt, 1971, p. 23). This wonder is an affirmative creation: it is in a state of wonder that one is able to see connections that are concealed-the wholeness behind appearances. Thinking is not passive; it is a vibrant, passionate activity, a "sensation of being alive" (Arendt, 1978, p. 123). Thinking is not so much the quest for truth as the quest for meaning; in this sense, Arendt claims, the main modality and representation of thinking is not propositional knowledge; rather, it is aesthetic, and more specifically, metaphorical. Evil, in her construal, is one outcome of a lack of wonder. She referred to Eichmann as a "sleepwalker" (Arendt, 1994). Cultivating an Aesthetic of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is giving up hope that the past can be improved upon. In this sense, the aesthetic of forgiveness is a specific form of surrender that furthers transformative cooperation. In each of the cases illustrated earlier, the participants did not focus energy on fixing the mistakes that others had committed in the past. The managers at the Medic Inn, the women discussing their relationship to the abortion issue, the perpetrators in the TRC-all engaged in a different kind of narrative activity, one that moved beyond a discourse of vengeance and resentment. Arendt, like Dewey, had a special sensitivity for the nuances of human action. She reminds us that action has two parts-the initiation of the action and the achievement or outcome. We tend to focus on the achievement and evaluation of outcomes. Arendt claims that we need to develop a vocabulary that appreciates beginnings of action, a sensitivity to the miraculous potential in new beginnings. For Arendt, speech
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and action are at the heart of human uniqueness, the means by which people express their distinction. To act means to take initiative, to begin anew, to "insert ourselves into the world" like a "second birth" (1958, p. 176). Something new is initiated that cannot be predicted on the basis of anything that has happened before. The acting agent can never know the full meaningfulness of what he or she does: He who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes "guilty" of consequences he never intended or foresaw, that however disastrous or unexpected the consequences of his deed, he can never undo it, that the process he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who himself does not act. [Arendt, 1958, p. 181). Because actions are unpredictable and irreversible, society (and more specifically, bureaucracies) tries to eliminate action, or to deal with actions as "planned products." It is important that we make attempts to relieve one another of the burden of irreversibility and unpredictability. Every action starts chain reactions and new processes: "the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation" (Arendt, 1958). It is impossible, then, to avoid trespassing and violating others' borders. One can never undo what one has done, and one can never predict the reverberations or consequences of a deed once it has been initiated. The only escape from the predicament of irreversibility is the capacity to forgive. If we eliminate forgiveness, then we need tighter bureaucratic borders to control unpredictability and guard against trespassers. For Arendt, forgiveness is one example of exceptional human action, a completely unpredictable intervention, an interruption to cycles of vengeance. Derrida (2001), building on Arendt's notion, speaks of the necessity of forgiveness in light of recent crimes against humanity. Forgiveness is necessary in order to achieve transformative cooperation. Yet the decision to forgive is itself completely unpredictable and, following Derrida, does not make rational sense. We can never understand one person's decision to forgive another. If aesthetic awareness is an interruption of rational ways of knowing, then forgiveness is the interruption par excellence of pragmatic concerns and instrumental motivation. For Derrida,
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forgiveness is granted on grounds of spontaneous transcendence, of a desire to exceed both the injury and the wrongdoer. This puts the act of forgiveness outside the logic of human reason. It speaks to the redemptive nature (and, I would argue, to the aesthetic awareness) of this complex human emotion. Factors That Support Emergence of Aesthetic Knowledge as Actionable
If there is a pattern to the way the aesthetic philosophers discuss these experiences, it appears to be something like this: There is an encounter with something in the world-a text, an object of nature, a piece of art, a story, a poem; an interaction with another person-that triggers a disruption of habitual ways of thinking. There is then an interior referent to emotion-some movement of significant affect occurs ranging from curiosity to pleasure to bedazzlement or rapture; then (suddenly) perceptions of the outer world beyond the art object or experience itself become reconfigured. Something in the world looks different; a new gestalt emerges. In James Joyce's terms, there is an epiphany. Not only does the participant experience a transformation, but the world also is transfigured: the horizon seems to extend and expand; meaning is magnified. The feeling is one of relief or joy. There is voluptuousness to these moments-an epiphany that enlarges the context for understanding. These moments of transformative collaboration are stories about the emergence of new beliefs. One outcome of these encounters is that participants come to believe something that they did not believe before. The central argument of this chapter has been that these transformations in belief are not the outcome of logical convincing. Rather, they are aesthetic achievements. These illustrations do not offer us a picture of an epistemic, rational moral subject who rationally sifts data, gathering evidence from the world in order to better understand it; nor is it one in which a person tests hypotheses, forms a worldview that changes only when data sufficient to unseat are encountered. Belief requires a high degree of organismic involvement rather than rational testing (Sarbin, 1998). In the illustrations presented here, participants arrive at a different awareness of one another, often hearing stories that offer historical reasons for actions (rather than sets of causes). Following Maclntyre
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(1981), "There is no logical transition that will take one from unbelief to belief. The transition is not in objective considerations at all, but in the person who comes to believe. There are no logical principles which will make the transition." Is there anything we can learn from these moments that we can transfer to other contexts? In this section I briefly suggest some of the factors that could support the emergence of aesthetic awareness that leads to transformational cooperation. Create Small Disruptions
The interventions in each of the illustrations are artful and provocative disruptions of patterns of belief. They suggest that one skill that supports transformative moments is the ability to nurture small disruptions and incremental reorientations that dislodge familiar ways of knowing, keep learning processes vital, and handicap inferior routines. Incremental experiments sharpen aesthetic awareness.
Create a "Holding Culture" to Support Aesthetic Surrender
It is probably no accident that the greatest artistic creations are displayed in museums-protective settings that act as a kind of sanctuary that frees the observer's attention, supports appreciative awareness, and allows for the emergence of discovery. The creation of an alternative setting or symbolically unfamiliar environment creates the space for aesthetic surrender. It recalls Winnicott's notion (1971) of the "holding environment" and the emergence of transitional objects as ways to guard against anxiety and support the agent to embark on short, experimental expeditions. In these illustrations there are clear signals that a different kind of action, discourse, and way of knowing are called for. The Medic Inn managers went to another hotel in another city, away from the context that triggered habitual discourse and inquiry into a different domain rather than the topic that triggered habitual competitive patterns; the women discussing abortion spent a weekend together, including an informal evening of dinner that excluded the topic of concern; the TRC set aside the symbolic space of judicial discourse.
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Create Appreciative Questions That Trigger Wonderment
Humans transcend themselves with every question. Questions are a reaching beyond, a stretch into unknown space. We live our lives at every moment in worlds of questions (What tie should I wear today? How should I prepare for that meeting?). We make decisions and head in preset directions with subtle questions. Following Arendt, as thinking animals we seek meaning through relentless questioning. Following her provocation, thinking can be a ceaseless and restless wonderment of questions. Questions are openings and the means by which the world is revealed. The formation of questions in each of these cases is appreciatively focused. Each case opens with an unconditionally positive question that already imagines a positive world; the artful questions themselves bypass the normal routines and taken-for-granted ways of knowing and relating. In the TRC, the first question is, How can we substitute retributive justice with restorative justice to move forward together with new understanding? Share Personal Learning Narratives
Telling a story in public, saying out loud what is usually private, is transforming-for both speaker and listener. In the cases of the Medic Inn, the abortion discussion, and the TRC, a central part of the cooperative activity was telling stories. In the Medic Inn case, managers searched for and relayed stories of exceptional service; in the abortion case, the participants told their personal learning narratives, how they came to view the issue from a particular angle; in the TRC case, perpetrators told stories of their involvement and included the voice of the victim in their telling. Heidegger (1962) contends that the "forgetfulness of being" demands that we deliberately uncover and disclose being. Put another way, these stories are testimonies to participants relaying how they arrived at certain understandings. Narratives are particularly helpful for grasping how people arrive at understandings. They serve as sequential constructions that give order to a life. A simple list of events, chronicles, facts, and patches of momentary happenings do not constitute a story. Rather, following
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Sarbin (1998, p. 229), sharing one's story is a creative achievement, a reminder of why a vocabulary of aesthetics is appropriate: The choice of plot or story line does not follow from logic or argument but from aesthetic requirements .... the emplotment of a narrativewhether a novel, a history, or an unvoiced fantasy-is a creative act. From the bits and pieces of fact and fancy, the author selects some items for elaboration and ignores other items that would render the plot overly cumbersome, absurd, unconvincing, or lacking in charm and grace. The author in any genre has authorial (i.e., poetic) license ... when the made-up story is about the self, the mere exclusion of a particular fact or even a particular fancy need not carry the implication of neurosis or dishonesty, but of artistry and creativity.
When parties are locked in moral conflict, they tend to employ a number of familiar narratives and rhetorical moves: they see themselves as acting virtuously to defend a higher good; they describe themselves as locked in opposition to another perspective; they are unlikely to articulate the position of the opposition in a way that the other side would accept; their have a large interpretive repertoire to describe what is wrong with the other group; their vision of resolution of the conflict involves capitulation or elimination of the other group. "Normal" discourse between disputants often amounts to recapitulating the reason and justifications for holding a certain belief. It is not just any story that promises potential. Retelling familiar stories that have become habitual routines often depicts the events that have led to current intransigence. Dialogue Can Be Transformative When the Parties Tell New Stories
Narratives plot a developmental trajectory that allows the protagonist to account for the reasons that one rather than another mode of conduct was chosen. Stories put motives, alternative desires, and reasons for choices within a developmental context. When people tell stories they are presenting themselves (when they are the protagonists) as shaped by contextual factors. In the examples presented in this chapter, the participants are called on to construct a different story, one that recasts and reconfigures past events in a different light, emphasizing alternative specifics.
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One unique framework that guides the construction of stories in these examples is the discourse position that is created for the speaker. In the abortion debate example, the participants are asked not to speak from the standpoint of their ideological positions. Rather, they are asked to speak as individuals, to speak personally rather than to recount abstract arguments, to tell stories about their involvement in the issue. This approach sets up a more generative listening. It is easier to accept someone's personal experience than to accept their entrenched opinions. If you tell me your experience, I cannot say that you are wrong, as I can if you are presenting your stand or belief. Appreciate the Potential of Small Promises and Mini-commitments
Arendt (1958) claims that given the unpredictable nature of human action, one of the norms we must rely on is the offering and fulfillment of promises. Making and keeping promises are central to identity. Without promises, we wander in a sea of equivocal notions and contradictions. Promises and commitments are small islands of security. In the earlier illustrations, participants are asked to make small commitments. The managers at the Medic Inn agreed to suspend regular planning and concentrate on the Tremont Hotel for a limited amount of time; the participants in the abortion discussion agreed to hold off habitual ways of relating and experiment with a different way for one weekend. Participants agreed to minimal rules that regarded charged language as off-limits. There are certain words and phrases that serve to stimulate spirals of indignation because of their history within a pattern of discourse. To call abortion "murder" is a "hot button" for prochoice proponents, just as calling the fetus a "product of conception" is a hot button for pro-life proponents. Also, in the Medic Inn case, managers were asked to refrain from planning meetings that would lead to cycles of blame and efforts to avoid blame. These are very small agreements that make room for an array of other tools that can keep parties engaged. I am reminded of the life of Oscar Schindler, the German industrialist who protected and liberated hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust. We sometimes forget the incremental promises that Schindler made that led to his growing commitment as a liberator. We forget that at the
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beginning of the war he was a Nazi and probably exploited cheap Jewish labor. At one point he made an effort to protect two or three Jews in his factory, perhaps for self-serving reasons. This one small deed led him to see that other Jews were enslaved and there were more opportunities to risk protecting them. He gradually grew into the awareness that he could do more. His motives for protecting Jews began to change. In a sense, his large, heroic efforts began somewhat accidentally, as a relatively small gesture.
Conclusion
We live in a time when we are reminded daily that incommensurate moral frameworks can lead to unwanted, if not violent, outcomes. To talk about breakthrough cooperation, or transformative cooperation, it is important to remember the context of modernity, the view of self, the dilemma of competing moral frameworks that we have inherited. Achieving transformative cooperation is a peculiarly modernist dilemma. More specifically, the forms of cooperation that were taken for granted in premodern societies must now be achieved. One of the characteristics of modernity is a radical differentiation of lifeworlds, a loss of taken-for-granted common sense that once held communities together. As a result, we do not share common resources (following Maclntyre, 1981; Taylor, 1989; and Berger, Berger, and Kellner, 1973); we do not even share a common moral framework, even if the vocabulary is the same. This situation puts a premium on the process by which we construct collaborative endeavors. It also challenges the conventional way we think about knowledge. Aesthetic knowledge is not an object that can be transferred from one party to another; development of imagination is necessary-an aesthetic awareness that breaks through, disrupting the casual and ordinary shifting of roles as one moves between lifeworlds. In this chapter I have argued that transformative cooperation involves a disruption of routine and the cultivation of aesthetic awareness. These moments are transformational: both self and horizon are expanded. Just as Kant articulated a set of categories of the aesthetic that reflected the eighteenth-century sensibility, I am proposing aesthetic categories that are appropriate for breakthrough cooperative achievements: aesthetics
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of surrender, wonder, appreciation, and forgiveness. In the words of Michel Foucault (1986, p. 350), What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. Couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not the life?
References
Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. 1971. "Martin Heidegger at Eighty." New York Review of Books, 17(6). Arendt, H. 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt. Arendt, H. 1994. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Axelrod, R. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Penguin Books. Barrett, F., and D. Cooperrider. 1990. "Generative Metaphor Intervention: A New Approach to Intergroup Conflict." Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 26(2): 223-244. Berger, P., B. Berger, and H. Kellner. 1973. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House. Bergson, H. 1941/1946. The Creative Mind, trans. M. Andison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Chasin, R., and M. Herzig. 1994. "Creating Systemic Interventions from the Socio-political Arena." In B. Berger-Gould and D. Demuth (eds.), The Global Family Therapist: Integrating the Personal, Professional and Political. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Chasin, R., M. Herzig, S. Roth, L. Chasin, C. Becker, and R. Stains. 1996. "From Diatribe to Dialogue on Divisive Public Issues: Approaches Drawn from Family Therapy." Median Quarterly, 13(Summer): 4. Coleridge, S. T. 1983. Biographia Literaria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Originally published 1817.) Derrida,]. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Dewey, ]. 1934/1980. Art as Experience. Perigee Press. Doty, M. 2002. Still Life with Oysters. Boston: Beacon Press. Dewey, ]. 1958. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover. Emerson, R. W. 2000. "The Poet." The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Modern Library.
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Foucault, M. 1986. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3: Care of the Self. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House. Fowler, A., N. N. Gamble, F. X. Hogan, M. Kogut, M. McCommish, and B. Thorp. 2001. "Talking with the Enemy." Boston Globe, January 28, Fl. Gadamer, H. 1989. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row. Maclntyre, A. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. London: Duckworth. March, J., and H. Simon. 1958. Organizations. New York: Wiley. Oakes, E. 1994. Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs V on Balthasar. New York: Continuum. Racier, M. 1966. A Modern Book of Aesthetics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Richards, I. A. 1924/1985. Principles of Literary Criticism. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Sarbin, T. 1998. "Believed-in Imaginings: A Narrative Approach." In J. Rivera and T. Sarbin (eds.), Believed-in Imaginings. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Shea, W. 1980. "Qualitative Wholes: Aesthetic and Religious Experience in the Work of John Dewey." Journal of Religion, 60(1): 32-50. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vickers, G. 1968. Value Systems and Social Processes. New York: Basic Books. Vico, G. 1774/1968. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. Cambridge, UK: Tavistock Press.
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New Designs in Transformative Cooperation The Growing Call and Converging Conversation DAVID L. COOPERRIDER, RONALD E. FRY, and SANDY KRISTIN PIDERIT
Sometimes a short anecdote can express more than many words, and as we move toward conclusion of this volume we would like to start with a story, something recent and dramatic. In many ways the story is a microcosm and tool for connecting significant themes, concepts, and questions for the future of transformative cooperation. But most of all the story is a poignant reminder of "why this matters now." Visit to the Promised Land
Sadly, at the time of this writing the situation in the Middle East appears more unstable, some say hopeless, than ever. It appears that nobody can find a solution to the bloody bombings, the conflicts and bitterness between the Arab and Jewish people and others, the massive suffering and distress, as well as the spreading of terror around the world. The situation is precarious. It is dangerous. And nobody sees an easy solution to the widespread religious and sectarian cleavages. Nobody? A few months ago I (David Cooperrider) had the opportunity to speak at the dedication for the new Arison School of Management in Israel. During the talk I raised questions about the beleaguered region and asked, "Where is the peace going to come from? From the lawyers?
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Not likely. From the military? Not likely. From governments? From the religious leaders-Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etcetera?" The proposition, tentatively offered, was that it would be none of these. The best place to look, I argued, would be the world of industry and new forms of business-that business perhaps could be the most important force for peace. Forget about the major headlines of Enron and WorldCom, we suggested, because the twenty-first century might well become a time when we learn to unite the dynamism of good business with the global issues of our day. I used several examples from this book. After that talk a stranger came up to me. He said, "I'd like to invite you to meet me at my helicopter tomorrow morning at 8:00. I want you to see this thesis in action-business as a force for peace." He then went on: "It's a story of human imagination and the capacity to make something from nothing, except for hard work, imagination, and human cooperation." Promptly at 8:00 a.m. the next day we took off. With the Mediterranean sparkling on the left, our destination was the Galilee region, across the desert, to an area without any natural resources. It is called Tefen and the man taking us there was both humble and excited, like a child. Who was he? He was the seventy-nine-year old Israeli business leader Stef Wertheimer. Later we discovered that this unassuming man was perhaps the wealthiest person in Israel and that what he has created now accounts for more than 10 percent of Israel's export gross national product. When we landed and jumped out of the helicopter, I could not believe my eyes. Up until the mid-1980s Tefen was a barren hilltop grazed by local goat herds. Today the scope of industrial exports manufactured at Tefen equals that of the entire Jerusalem area. Beautiful homes and neighborhoods surround what Wertheimer calls a "capitalist kibbutz"with four Tefen model industrial parks that have given birth to more than two hundred new businesses. Thousand of homes and hundreds of neighborhoods surround the cluster of businesses. Schools and hospitals have been built, as well as museums. It was impressive. What was most surprising is this: the whole complex is based on the principle of coexistence: Arab and Jewish people, previously polarized, are now living together, going into business together, building
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schools and art museums together. It is a human oasis of transformative cooperation. And it is dramatically transforming seemingly intractable conflicts into collaborative energies for economic empowerment, development, growth of the arts, building community, and peace. Tefen is igniting a revolution in hope in that region by harnessing the best in business to melt frozen animosities and in the process create islands of peace and shared prosperity. It is a place of equality, not only between groups of differing religious and ethnic persuasions, but also between women and men, as many of the entrepreneurs being schooled and financially supported are women. It is also a place of innovation in sustainability, including eco-efficient manufacturing facilities as well as new and clean energy sources. Wertheimer's big aim is to create a hundred more of these islands and carefully locate them throughout the non-oil-producing countries of the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean. The vision is, he argues, capable of becoming the region's version of a Marshall Plan, and one that growing numbers of supporters from Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority believe could lift the region out of poverty and take a major step toward ending terrorism in the region. We [editors] were shocked that we had never heard of this enormously important Tefen innovation in transformative cooperation and of the new designs that enable it, from the economics to the arts and esthetics of this huge residential setting. What was the most exciting part of the visit? It was the moment when we visited a class of Jewish and Arab ten-year-old children. The joy was palpable. The children were laughing and singing. They were learning and playing together in a region of the world that most define and know as hopelessly entrenched in hatred. It was a scene that, with the click of a button, we felt should be shared with everyone in the world. Let us call this story "the miracle in Tefen," because it defies our expectations. A Fitting Ending for This Volume
Why is this a microcosm of new designs in transformative cooperation and an integrative story for the chapters in this volume? Here are five themes present in the miracle of Tefen and each pointing to areas of commonality, areas of divergence, and promising potentials for extend-
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ing this dialogue on transformative cooperation beyond this volume and into the future:
1. New designs in transformative cooperation may represent the core human task and opportunity of the twenty-first century-the most important business opportunity, human development opportunity, and opportunity for positive global change. Much needed in the social sciences, however, is a new vocabulary of human cooperation in economics, organizational theory, and interpersonal relations, for without it we will continue to be blind to stories like the miracle in Tefen. Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles once declared that "the goodness and decency of human beings and their institutional creations goes almost unproclaimed in our cynical age, and hence our continuing predicament" (Eccles, 1984). A case in point involves the new designs embedded in the transformative cooperation in Tefen. We wonder aloud how many readers of this volume have ever heard of this achievement. A rough poll: it is close to zero, as we have shared this story with more than a thousand people and none had heard it before. 1Wittgenstein argued that the limits of language are the limits of our worlds. One theme that emerges from the chapters in this volume is that our professional vocabulary for human cooperation is in fact impoverished, and on almost every page of at least several chapters herein (especially those by Eisler; Henderson; and Dutton, Lilius, and Jason Kanov) it appears as though each had to defend the absurdity of what they were writing. In relation to economic theory, Riane Eisler wrote of the language of caregiving and the love economy; and in juxtaposition to the competitive advantage of corporations, Jane Dutton wrote of compassion as a driving force in organizational dynamics. If these words seem naive or misplaced in the context of the vocabulary of utility, payoffs, optimal strategy, self-interest, rational economic man, Enron, and efficient markets, then the authors have perhaps truly succeeded. What is at stake with our language, they argue, are images of human nature that make it almost impossible even to see and do research on extraordinary acts of human cooperation, compassion, partnership economies, and love-such as the business and society miracle in Tefen. Much needed in the field, we believe, are scholars like those in this volume who are willing to be courageous, to break the barriers of common sense by offering new forms of theory, of interpretation, of intelligibility.
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2. New designs in transformative cooperation is an exciting interdisciplinary meeting ground for integrative scholarship focusing simultaneously on the macro-, mesa-, and microsocial enablers of positive human phenomena. Its advancement, as many of the authors in this volume suggest, requires an appreciative eye-searching for those things that give life to the emerging best in living human systems-and will benefit from the rigor found in the rapidly growing domain of positive organizational scholarship. It is true that today's global forces for change have taken us into a remarkable new set of circumstances, one in which human social organizations inherited in the modern era may be unequal to the challenges posed by global climate change, overpopulation, technology-driven revolutions, tipping-point dynamics, unstable imbalances between rich and poor, weapons of mass destruction, and the clash of cultures and perhaps civilizations. Although very different in form, these various trends, from the warming of the biosphere to 24/7 trading over the Web, are all transnational, crossing boarders all over the globe, simultaneously affecting local-global realities and reminding us that the earth, for all its historically reproduced divisions, is a single unit. As Cooperrider and Dutton (1999, p. xv) once summed up, "A world of thoroughgoing interdependence is upon us, and along with it is a historic opportunity to anticipate and imagine, to discover and design a new vision of the world's cooperative potential." Anomalies such as the miracle in Tefen are conspicuously overlooked by social scientists. It is precisely here where the continuing study of new designs in transformative cooperation can take inspiration from what authors in this volume have referenced variously as an orientation to research called positive organizational scholarship, or POS (Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn, 2003), which is informed by the positive psychology of human strengths (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) and the call to appreciative inquiry in organizational life (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Fry, Whitney, Seiling, and Barrett, 2002; Cooperrider and Avital, 2004). To appreciate, quite simply, means to value and to recognize that which has value-it is a way of knowing the best in life. In the language of POS, it means a research focus-a positive bias-seeking fresh understanding on dynamics that are typically described by words such as excellence, thriving, flourishing, abundance, resilience, and virtuousness.
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POS does not reject the "normal" or even dysfunctional patterns in human systems, but it attempts rigorously to shed light on "the enablers (e.g., processes, capabilities, structures, methods), the motivations (e.g., unselfishness, altruism, contribution without regard to self), and the outcomes or effects (e.g., vitality, meaningfulness, exhilaration, highquality relationships) associated with positive phenomena" (Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn, 2003, p. 4). More often than not, POS focuses on phenomena that are not in accordance with the norms of a system and searches for exceptional positive deviations from the norm-in other words, it seeks out phenomena that are unexpectedly positive. Sometimes this leads, through the simple definition of positive deviancy, to research that is much more ideographic and embedded within small sample sizes. Throughout this volume the benefits of this approach are illustrated, for example, in the chapters by Dutton, Lilius, and Kanov; Zhexembayeva; and Dyck and Strafford. Most important for the future of research in this arena is a lesson that is illustrated vividly in the chapter by Dutton, Lilius, and Kanov. What is the lesson? In a word, it is a call for a scholarship of integration, a style of multiple levels of analysis research that approaches new designs in transformative cooperation simultaneously from the microlevel, in terms of human qualities or ways of being, to the mesolevel, that is, the interhuman and group dynamics, to the macrocontexts of the institutional and economic domains. Cross-level linkages are a challenge for any theory of development because both origins and impacts of change originate or are experienced at multiple levels. However, distinguishing between these layers of organizational analysis is important because each form is associated with discrete events, event antecedents, and event impacts. By argument and example, these authors of "The Transformative Potential of Compassion at Work" demonstrate the ways in which daily instances and expressions of compassion can contribute to an organization's capability for cooperation, where cooperation is defined as voluntary acts of working with others for shared advantage. This multilevel approach is precisely the kind of analytic lens that could be used to understand the miracle in Tefen, where Arab and Jewish communities are cooperatively linked through many levels of quality connections. Are the transformational successes in this "capitalist
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kibbutz" to be understood best through the expression of personal qualities of compassion, or through the economic dynamics involved with business innovation, joint entrepreneurship, and partnership economics? The answer obviously involves a complex interweaving of factors, and the chapters in this volume provide exciting inquiry models that will serve to elevate the rigor, relevance, and impact of this domain of knowledge.
3. Especially promising, we believe, is the leap from the personal and interhuman conceptions of cooperation to a new direction in cooperation scholarship that illuminates business and society cooperationwhat we have talked about as a call to understanding business better as an agent of world benefit-where organizations are viewed both as centers for the combination of human strengths as well as magnifiers outward. The relationship between business and society-including business's search for mutually beneficial advances that address the world's most pressing global needs-has become one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. Throughout the world, immense entrepreneurial energy is finding expression-energy whose converging force is in direct proportion to the turbulence, crises, and call of our times. In the case of Tefen, there is a dramatic, emerging transformative innovation of business as a force for peace and reconciliation. Already, with massive success (10 percent of Israel's export gross national product) substantive plans are emerging in which the Tefen model elevates and extends itself outward as magnifier of peace and security; it is talked about as a Marshall Plan of many Tefens to take root in numerous parts of the Middle East's non-oil-producing countries. In part what the cooperation literature needs, as a number of authors in this volume demonstrate, is the rediscovery of institutions, or what Cooperrider and Dutton (1999) have written about in The Organization Dimensions of Global Change, an eye toward social systems which recognizes that cooperation is a precious, renewable, nondepletable, and abundant resource that can grow the more it is practiced, used, and exercised. There are some who believe that this kind of progression of non-zero-sum or positive-sum patterns of interaction from the interaction of gene cells, groups, and institutions outward to the whole of society is the most powerful impetus behind life's basic direction when viewed over billions of years. Robert
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Wright (2000, pp. 6-7) argues that "over the long run, non zero sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums, more mutual benefit than parasitism. As a result, people become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence ... it is something whose ongoing growth and ongoing fulfillment define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." While this idea may be a bit grandiose, and a bit off in its logic of an ultimate destiny in socioculturally evolving systems (yes, we may blow ourselves up), there is, however, a useful contribution here, urging us to assume (and search for) the possibilities of larger and larger life patterns that support just the kind of positive-sum cooperative processes we are seeking to know. This is what many of the chapters in this book attempt to do. For our purposes here it is enough simply to highlight the vast potentials indicated by the chapters in part three, including Zhexembayeva's documentation of the early development of the Innovation Bank in the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, as well as the chapter by Dyck and Stratford. Both chapters are born of a conviction that the future of human society and of the natural world is intimately linked to the future of the world economy, business enterprises, and extended multisectoral and multiorganizational sets of cooperative partnerships. When one reads the cases in these chapters, one is reminded of the call sounded by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan when he spoke to thousands of the world's business leaders at the 1999 gathering of the World Economic Forum. He said, "Let us choose to unite the power of markets with the strength of universal ideals. Let us choose to reconcile the creative forces of private entrepreneurship with the needs of the disadvantaged and the requirements of future generations." We believe this may in fact become the most prolific domain for the study of transformational cooperation. The Innovation Bank in the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit is beginning to overflow. Profitable factories and buildings are being designed in ways that, surprisingly, give back more clean energy to the world than they use. Bottom-of-thepyramid strategies and microenterprise models are demonstrating how business can eradicate poverty through sustainable profitability. Companies are designing products that leave behind no waste-only "food" that becomes input into other biological and technological cycles.
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The power of these emerging innovations defies simple categorization into such familiar domains as business ethics, philanthropy, and any nonstrategic corporate social responsibility initiative. One by one, positive interruptions are erasing the false dichotomy embedded in the so-called great trade-off illusion-the belief that firms must sacrifice outstanding financial performance if they choose to address societal challenges strategically. As chapters in this volume ask, could it bewith the right mix of innovation and entrepreneurship-that the creation of sustainable value could become the business opportunity of the twenty-first century? Are we actually beginning to recognize the next phase of responsible business and global corporate citizenship? Can we anticipate a tipping point in business practice, as well as in management education and research, that will redefine the very nature of business's approach to earning profits and to influencing society positively? While the questions are not yet answered, one thing is increasingly certain: there may well be a vast harvest of new knowledge in new designs in transformative cooperation if we can collectively focus more attention on the idea of business as an agent of world benefit. It is an arena we would label as high priority. 4. We define transformative cooperation as the process that generates a new threshold of cooperative capability and takes people to a higher stage of moral development, while serving to build a more sustainable world future. This definition raises a key question and a central discovery. The question is, What are the most important forces for sustaining the transformative process in systems where change initiatives often meet their death through inertia, resistance to change, demoralizing challenges, and the like? The answer is, We have seriously underestimated the role of positive affect-emotions such as hope, inspiration, joy, gratitude, pride, and interest-in sustaining long-term transformative change, and we have scarcely begun to understand the "aesthetics of transformative change." Almost all of the chapters in this volume in one way or another talk about the affective dimensions-the emotions-that serve to energize and sustain the transformative trajectories of increasingly powerful cooperative engagements. The foundational work in this area is perhaps best expressed in the chapter by Sekerka and Fredrickson that extends Fredrickson's (2003) broaden-and-build model to creating upward, self-
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reinforcing transformational dynamics. So what good are positive emotions? At first blush it might seem that in cooperative settings positive emotions simply mark the well-being of people and their relationships. However, exciting research is showing that the cultivation of positive emotions also produces optimal functioning for transformative development. Positive emotions appear to transform cooperative dynamics because they broaden and build people's habitual modes of thinking, and in so doing make relationships and people more flexible, empathic, and creative. Over time such broadening builds stronger social bonds, better cooperative climates, and higher joint performance capabilities. The broaden-and-build theory also predicts an "undoing effect" of past negative patterns, and as successful new patterns lead to self-reinforcing trajectories, the cooperative system takes in the "surplus" and in turn becomes a buffer when inevitable setbacks occur. The importance of this dynamic is the most consistent theme moving across every section of this volume. But it raises an important next question: How is the transformative power of positive emotion cultivated? Returning to our Tefen story, the most memorable moment, as we mentioned, was when we were sitting with a class of Jewish and Arab children who were joyfully playing and learning together. One explanation for understanding how this situation was cultivated can be found in Barrett's proposition about sustaining transformative trajectories. In his argument, sustaining transformational cooperation requires careful attention to the aesthetic dimension of experience-surrender, appreciation, wonderment, and forgiveness. One of the most striking things one notices when entering this capitalist kibbutz in northern Israel that is based on coexistence and eo-ownership of the businesses is not simply the economic model but the aesthetic model at work. Everything in the conscious design of the setting was guided by Stef Wertheimer's great love for art. Tefen's buildings are beautiful. The grounds are filled with sculptures, art centers are filled with drawings and paintings and rooms for poetry and music. An accident? Not likely. It was as if the whole place was set up for communication and communitas via analogically mediated communication bridges. When pressed on the success factors making Tefen possible, Wertheimer pointed to the investments in the aesthetic foundations of cooperation. In rational analytic terms it made no sense, this huge investment in the arts-but what an addition to our expanding
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vocabularies of cooperation. From this example, we might conclude that the code of sustaining transformative change needs to be rewritten. We have underestimated the affective and aesthetic dimensions of cooperative life. It is an area, to be sure, that is ripe for continued research.
5. What about the emphasis on new designs? We are in so many ways infants when it comes to our cooperative capacity for building a global society congenial to the life of the planet and responsive to the human spirit. The chapters in this volume are offered in anticipation and hope that there will in fact be a boom in experiments and designs like the miracle in Tefen and the many examples described throughout this book. We believe we are entering an age of eo-design-a time when we are all being invited to help in the historic task of redesigning our economy and ecology away from our unsustainable past and toward a truly sustainable future. Many predict that the clock is ticking unpredictably and that a rapid, effective, more conscious human response will require levels of human cooperation and global action like we have never before witnessed. As we wrote in the introduction, one of the key words is designing, used in much the same sense that James March (1999) talks about as the skill and understanding embodied in the arts of planning, inventing, making, and doing, where the central concern of design is "the conception and realization of new things." Several of our colleagues at Case Western Reserve University have, perhaps better than anyone else, made the case that the field of organization theory and management has missed something in its romance with a view of managers as decision makers as opposed to designers (Boland and Collopy, 2004). Though decision and design are inextricably linked, managers and scholars have too long emphasized the decision face of management over the design face, and we have much to learn from design fields such as architecture, the arts, and product design. Designers have a special vocabulary-words like rapid prototyping, image sketching, form, improvisation, iteration, opportunism, celebration of alternative, creative tension, solution focus, multiple perspectives-all of which indicate finality in only a tentative way, and a passion not for how things are but for how they might be. The most resilient design projects are those that invite many others into the design process, and as Karl Weick emphasized, "unfinished designs have more vitality that do finished designs" (Boland and Collopy, 2004).
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As we conclude this volume, we share one hope: may this work on new designs in transformative cooperation serve as an invitation-an unfinished beginning-and an opportunity to invite multiple perspectives and iterations, and an ongoing dialogue that matters.
Note
1. There are exceptions-the innovation in Tefen has been noticed by a few. In their book War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, the prolific Alvin and Heidi Toffler (1993) site Wertheimer's example as one of the most important "quiet revolutions" in the world today. Our argument is that it is quiet in the same way that quiet fields like economic science are on subjects like compassion, caring, and cooperation. In the intellectual and "newsworthy" pecking order of the day the vocabularies of competition, self-interest, and conflict are more highly developed, as argued in the chapters by Eisler and Henderson.
References
Boland, R., and F. Collopy. 2004. Managing as Designing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cameron, K. S., J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn. (eds.). 2003. Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Cooperrider, D. L., and M. Avital (eds.). 2004. Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, Vol. 1:. Constructive Discourse and Human Organization. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Cooperrider, D. L., and J. Dutton. 1999. The Organization Dimensions of Global Change: No Limits to Cooperation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cooperrider, D. L., and S. Srivastva. 1987. "Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life." Research in Organizational Change and Development, 1: 129-169. Eccles, J. 1984. The Wonder of Being Human. New York: Free Press. Fredrickson, B. 2003 "Positive Emotions and Upward Spirals in Organizations." InK. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship, 163-175. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Fry, R., D. Whitney, J. Seiling, and F. Barrett. 2002. Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field. Westport, CT: Quorum Books.
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March, J. G. 1999. The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence. Oxford, UK: Black well. Seligman, M. P., and M. Csikszentmihalyi. 2000. "Positive Psychology." American Psychologist, 55: 5-14. Toffler, A., and H. Toffler. 1993. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. New York. Little, Brown. Wright, R. 2000. Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books.
Contributors
Frank ]. Barrett is professor of management in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also a faculty member of human and organizational development at the Fielding Graduate University. He received his bachelor of arts degree in government and international relations from the University of Notre Dame, his master of arts degree in English from the University of Notre Dame, and his doctorate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University. Barrett has consulted to various organizations and has written and lectured widely on social constructionism, Appreciative Inquiry, organizational change, jazz improvisation, and organizational learning. He is coauthor, with Ronald Fry, of Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity (Taos Institute, 2005). He has published articles on metaphor, masculinity, improvisation, organizational change, and organizational development in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Human Relations, Organization Science, and Organizational Dynamics, as well as numerous book chapters. He is coeditor, with Ronald Fry, of Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation (Quorum Books, 2001). He is also an active jazz pianist. In addition to leading his own trios and quartets, he has traveled extensively in the United States, England, and Mexico with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
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Jean M. Bartunek is Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and professor of organization studies at Boston College. Her doctorate in social and organizational psychology is from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a fellow as well as a past president of the Academy of Management and an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Her most recent book, co-edited with Mary Ann Hinsdale and James Keenan, is Church Ethics and Its Organizational Context: Learning from the Sex Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Church (Rowman and Littlefield, in press). Hilary Bradbury is director of sustainable business programs at the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Southern California. She regularly teaches in executive management programs, leading both short courses on business aspects of sustainable development at the University of Southern California and a yearlong course on systemic action research for sustainable enterprise in the master's program in Positive Organizational Development at Case Western Reserve University. She is editor of Action Research and co-editor of the Handbook of Action Research (Sage, 2001). She holds a doctorate in organizational psychology and a master's degree in hermeneutics. Arran Caza is at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research examines how individuals and organizations deal with uncertainty and how they structure the unknown. Arran is a doctoral fellow of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. David L. Cooperrider is professor of organizational behavior in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. He is coauthor (with Diana Whitney) of Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2005). Cooperrider was editor of Advances in Appreciative Inquiry: Constructive Discourse in Human Organizations (2004), the first volume of a series published by Elsevier, and co-editor (with Jane Dutton) of Organizational Dimensions of Global Change: No Limits to Cooperation (Sage, 1999). C. Keith Cox is a seasoned facilitator of positive change with more than sixteen years in the organization development field. His focus is on designing, developing, and delivering integrated business transformation solutions for clients. His career with world-class professional services
Contributors
firms has enabled him to work with global Fortune 500 firms, middlemarket companies, and start-up organizations across multiple industries on a myriad of change initiatives. In 2000 he founded Tirawa Consulting, an organization development consultancy, and in 2001 he became a charter member and partner of Appreciative Inquiry Consulting, a global, "chaordic" consultancy. Keith is also an adjunct faculty member at both DeVry University's Keller Graduate School of Management and Bowling Green State University's Department of Management. He received his doctorate in organization development from Benedictine University in Chicago and a master of organization development degree and master of business administration degree from Bowling Green State University.
]ane Dutton is William Russell Kelly Professor of Business Administration and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. She received her doctorate from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on compassion at work, high-quality connections, and energy and thriving at work. Among her publications are a co-edited book (with Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn), Positive Organizational Scholarship (Berrett-Koehler, 2003); a co-edited book (with Belle Rose Ragins), Exploring Positive Relationships at Work (Erlbaum, 2007); her own book, Energize Your Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 2003); and a co-edited book (with David Cooperrider), No Limits to Cooperation (Sage, 1999). Loren R. Dyck is a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. He holds a master's degree in business administration and a master's degree in human resource management (MA/HRM) from Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu. In addition to his twenty years of experience as a facilitator, manager, and executive coach, Dyck has also held adjunct faculty positions at three universities and is currently a Weatherhead Affiliate Instructor. His teaching and consulting activities focus on emotional intelligence and appreciative inquiry, and his research interests include the role of distinctive human strengths in intentional personal change, transformative cooperation, and organizational innovativeness. Riane Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, and social activist internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade (HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), which has been translated into twenty-two languages.
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Her latest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), is also widely recognized for its innovative and practical proposals, as are her other books, including Sacred Pleasure (HarperCollins, 1995), Tomorrow's Children (Westview Press, 2000), and The Power of Partnership (New World Library, 2002). Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (http://www. partnershipway.org), has taught at the University of California, and is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and the World Business Academy, a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group, and founder of the Alliance for a Caring Economy. She is author of more than two hundred essays and articles for publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Political Psychology, Brain and Mind, and Futures to The UNESCO Courier, The International journal of Women's Studies, Human Rights Quarterly, and World Encyclopedia of Peace. She serves on many boards, commissions, and advisory councils, including the editorial board of World Futures and the international editorial board of The Encyclopedia of Conflict, Violence, and Peace. She consults to business and government on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.
Barbara L. Fredrickson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and principal investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina. She is a leading scholar within social psychology, affective science, and positive psychology. Her research centers on positive emotions and human flourishing and is supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. Her research and her teaching have been recognized with numerous honors, including, in 2000, the largest prize awarded in psychology, the American Psychological Association's Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. Ronald E. Fry is associate professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, where he directs the new master's program in Positive Organization Development and Change. His doctorate is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fry has been involved in research and consulting with a variety of systems, including Ford, General Electric, Northern Telecom, Key Services Corporation, Mittal Steel, MSNBC.com, Greater Houston Mental Health Association, Boys & Girls Clubs of America,
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the U.S. Navy, World Vision, and Roadway Express, on projects related to employee involvement, participatory management systems, fundamental cultural change, team building and executive development, strategic planning, and Appreciative Inquiry summits. He is widely published in the areas of organizational development, Appreciative Inquiry, team building, change management, executive development, and the role and functions of the CEO. He was part of the group that originated the Appreciative Inquiry approach and continues both to apply and to study the application of Appreciative Inquiry in the field. His most recent book (with Frank Barrett) is Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity (Taos Institute, 2005). He also recently co-edited, with Frank Barrett, Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field (Quorum Books, 2001).
Barbara Gray is professor of organizational behavior and director of the Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation at the Pennsylvania State University. She has a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Dayton and a doctorate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University. Her research deals with multiparty collaborative alliances, negotiations, intergroup conflict, and sense-making. Her current work focuses on power and institutionalization in alliance formation, leadership and constructing meaning in collaborative networks, and the framing of environmental conflicts. She has published three books: Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems (Jossey-Bass, 1989), Joint Ventures: Economic and Organizational Perspectives (Kluwer, 1995), and Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflict: Concepts and Cases (Island Press, 2003). Her research has been published in numerous prominent journals. She has chaired the Academy of Management's Conflict Management Division, served as president of the International Association of Conflict Management, and served on several editorial boards. She has also consulted to a variety of public and private sector organizations. Maryellen Harmon earned her doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has been a science and math teacher; a K-12 administrator; superintendent of schools in Detroit; eo-director of teacher education at Madonna University, Livonia, Michigan; and for the past twenty years, senior research associate at Boston College's Center for
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the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy. She was leader of the Performance Assessment section of the Third International Math and Science Study. Since her retirement from Boston College, her consulting work has enabled her to help teachers create appropriate assessments that demonstrate the long-term positive effects on student learning of alternative designs in curriculum and assessment.
Stuart L. Hart is S.C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and professor of management at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management. Before joining Cornell in 2003, he was Hans Zulliger Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise and professor of strategic management at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, where he founded the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Laboratory. Previously he taught corporate strategy at the University of Michigan Business School and was founding director of the Corporate Environmental Management Program. He is one of the world's top authorities on the implications of sustainable development and environmentalism for business strategy. He has published more than fifty papers and authored or edited five books. His article "Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World" won the 1997 McKinsey Award for Best Article in the Harvard Business Review. With C. K. Prahalad, Hart also wrote the pathbreaking 2002 article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" (strategy+business, 2002). His most recent book is Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems (Wharton School, 2005). Hazel Henderson is a futurist, an evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, a consultant on sustainable development, and author of Beyond Globalization (Kumarian Press, 1999) and seven other books. Her editorials appear in twenty-seven languages and more than four hundred newspapers syndicated by InterPress Service, Rome, New York, and Washington D.C. Her articles have appeared in more than 250 journals, including the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Mainichi (Japan), El Diario (Venezuela), the World Economic Herald (China), Le Monde Diplomatique (France), and the Australian Financial Review. She sits on several editorial boards, including Futures Research Quarterly, The State of
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the Future Report, and E/The Environmental Magazine in the United States, and Resurgence and Foresight, and Futures in the United Kingdom. She co-edited, with Harlan Cleveland and Inge Kaul, The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives (Elsevier Scientific, 1995). She is founder of Ethical Markets Medica, LLC, and serves as eo-executive producer of its television series. ]ason Kanov is Assistant Professor of Management in the School of Business and Economics at Western Washington University. He received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2005. In addition to studying compassion, he conducts research on the nature and impact of experiences of interpersonal disconnection among coworkers. He has published work on compassion in organizations with Jane Dutton, Peter Frost, Jacoba Lilius, Sally Maitlis, and Monica Worline in the Harvard Business Review and American Behavioral Scientist, and in the Sage Handbook of Organizational Studies (edited by Cynthia Hardy, Stewart Clegg, Thomas Lawrence, and Waiter Nord; Sage, 2006). His current research explores the nature and impact of interpersonal disconnection among coworkers. ]acoba Lilius is Assistant Professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University. She received her doctorate in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2006. Her research focuses on the the relational and interpersonal processes that enable people to do high-quality work under challenging conditions. She has published work on compassion in organizations with Jane Dutton, Peter Frost, Jason Kanov, Sally Maitlis, and Monica Worline in the Harvard Business Review and American Behavioral Scientist, and in the Handbook of Organizational Studies (edited by Cynthia Hardy, Stewart Clegg, Thomas Lawrence, and Waiter Nord; Sage, 2006). Ted London is a senior research fellow at the William Davidson Institute (WDI) and on the faculty at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. His research focuses on the intersection of enterprise strategy and poverty alleviation. At WDI he directs the Base of the Pyramid Initiative, a program that generates groundbreaking research and innovative thinking on market-based strategies to serve the four billion people at the base of the economic pyramid. Previously London was on the faculty at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler
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Business School, where he was also director of the Base of the Pyramid Learning Laboratory.
James D. Ludema is professor in the doctoral program in organization development at Benedictine University and a principal in the Corporation for Positive Change. His research focuses on Appreciative Inquiry, organization change and design, Positive Organizational Scholarship, business as an agent of world benefit, and whole-system methodologies for strategic change. His work has been funded by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation. He is author of more than twenty articles, book chapters, and books, including Best Paper Selections. His work has appeared in Human Relations, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Research in Organizational Change and Development, Handbook of Action Research, Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, and Organization Development Journal, among others. Ludema is an active member of the Academy of Management and sits on the editorial board of the Action Research Journal. He has worked around the world with organizations in the corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors, including Merck, BP, McDonald's, John Deere, Ameritech, US Cellular, Northern Telecom, Square D Company, Esse£ Corporation, Bell and Howell, Kaiser Permanente, World Vision, the City of Minneapolis, and many local and international nongovernmental organizations. His most recent book (with Diana Whitney, Bernard J. Mohr, and Thomas J. Griffin) is The Appreciative Inquiry Summit: A Practitioner's Guide for Leading Large Group Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). Andrew R. McGill is director of the Global Leadership in Healthcare Program and the Global Business Partnership at the University of Michigan, where he also serves as an adjunct professor and research scientist. He earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1989. His research focuses on leadership in health care, part of his overall emphasis on global corporate citizenship. His specific interests include applying best practices in organizational learning to health care, developing customer-focused and customer-driven organizations, organizational honesty and trust and their linkage to long-term customer relationships, and cognitive aspects of organizational change, particularly in turbulent environments. He is coauthor (with Noel M. Tichy) of The Ethical Challenge: How to Lead with Unyielding Integrity (Jossey Bass, 2003)
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and (with Noel M. Tichy and Lynda St. Clair) of Global Corporate Citizenship: Doing Business in the Public Eye (New Lexington Press, 1997) and is currently researching a book on leadership in health care.
Mark B. Milstein is lecturer of strategy, innovation and sustainable global enterprise and director of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He teaches and conducts research on strategy, decision making, technology management, and innovation. His writings have appeared in the Academy of Management Executive, Sloan Management Review, Environmental Finance, and Value, as well as various edited books. He consults with a number of multinational firms, small- and mediumsized enterprises, and nongovernmental organizations, including Suncor Energy, the US Army, and Schering-Plough. He received his doctorate in strategic management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also served on the faculty and helped establish the Center for Sustainable Enterprise. From 2004-2006, Milstein was business research director for the Sustainable Enterprise Program at the World Resources Institute, where he oversaw a number of projects and initiatives in the United States, Latin America, and China related to strategy and innovation in the private sector. Sandy Kristin Piderit is associate professor of organizational behavior in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. She earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan. She coordinates and teaches in the management of organizations and people core course sequence for undergraduates, and teaches the core research design course in the doctoral program in organizational behavior. Her research interests are focused on the relational dynamics of organizational and social change. She has published articles on resistance, ambivalence, and other responses to change proposals (in the Academy of Management Review), on the dynamics of addressing gender-equity concerns within organizations (in Administrative Science Quarterly and the Journal of Management Studies), on membership dynamics within boards of directors (in the Academy of Management Journal and Group and Organization Management), and on the dynamics of turnover and team performance within teams with different levels of task interdependence (in Management Science and in Computational and
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Mathematical Organization Theory). She has co-edited (with Diana Bilimoria) a forthcoming book, The Handbook of Women in Business and Management (Edward Elgar). She is currently serving as a Representative-at-Large in the organization development and change division of the Academy of Management, and as an editorial board member for the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Robert E. Quinn serves on the faculty at the University of Michigan Business School. He is one of the cofounders of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. Quinn's research and teaching interests are focused on organizational change and effectiveness. He has published fourteen books on these subjects. He is particularly known for his work on the competing values framework. In recent years he has completed a trilogy of books on personal and organizational transformation: Change: Discovering the Leader Within (Jossey-Bass, 1996); Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Accomplish Extraordinary Results (Jossey-Bass, 2000), and his latest, Building the Bridge as You Walk on It: A Guide to Change (Jossey-Bass, 2004). Leslie E. Sekerka is assistant professor and director of the U.S. Naval Supply Corps Ethics in Action Research and Education Program at the Naval Postgraduate School. She also serves as a faculty contributor to The Business and Organizational Ethics Partnership at the Markkula Center, Santa Clara University. Her publications, focusing on positive change, ethics in the workplace, and peer coaching, have appeared in books and journals, including Advances in Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Organizational Scholarship, Dimensions of Well-Being: Research and Intervention, Business Psychology, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, and the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions. Paul Shrivastava has been Howard I. Scott Professor of Management at Bucknell University since 1989. He has more than twenty years of experience in education and management and as a consultant to major multinational corporations. He received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh and was professor of management at New York University. Shrivastava has published thirteen books and more than one hundred articles in professional and scholarly journals. He served on the editorial boards of leading management education journals, including the Academy of Management Review, the Strategic Management Journal,
Contributors
Organization, Risk Management, and Business Strategy and the Environment. He won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and studied Japanese management while based at Kyoto University. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Christian Science Monitor, and on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. He cofounded and served as president of eSocrates, Inc., a knowledge-management and elearning company, directing its programs to build online learning communities. Nigel Strafford is a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. He earned a master's degree in economics from Miami University, Ohio, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Cornell University. Currently he researches innovations in education at the Intergenerational School, a top-rated Ohio community school. ]ordi Trullen is Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management at ESADE Universitat Ramon Hull (Barcelona, Spain). He holds a master's degree and a doctorate in Organization Studies from the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He holds a master's in business administration from ESADE Business School in Spain. His dissertation explored the role of faculty perceptions in mediating responses to quality evaluations at universities. His research interests include practical wisdom in management, and design research as an approach to accomplishing change. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. A native of Almaty, Kazakhstan, she started her career in the nonprofit sector, serving in various positions in the areas of leadership and organizational development at the Association of Young Leaders of Kazakhstan. This work brought her to the United States, where she received a bachelor's degree in management and another in psychology from Hartwick College. Currently Zhexembayeva's research and consulting interests include positive organizational change, whole-system approaches to organizational development, and corporate social responsibility and sustainability within the context of emergent economies. She also works at the Case Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, where she heads up the World Inquiry and serves as managing editor for the BAWB Innovation Bank.
441
Index
abortion debate, 397-400, 406, 408, 414 Abrahams, Ralph, 71-72 ACE (Alliance for a Caring Economy), 50-52 ACT (advanced change theory), 364-65 actionable knowledge, 388,410-15 actualization, hierarchies of, 44 adaptability, 305 Aditya, R. N., 356, 358 Adler, Mortimer, 69 advanced change theory (ACT), 364-65 aesthetics of transformative cooperation, 19-20, 388-417 actionable knowledge and, 388, 410-15 appreciation, 405-6,414-15 dialogue, transformative, 413-14 disruption, 412 forgiveness, 40 8-10 generative metaphor intervention at Medic Inn, 394-97, 403, 406, 407,408,412,414
incremental reorientations, 412, 414-15 narrative, use of, 397-402, 412-14 personal narratives, PCP facilitation of pro-life/pro-choice advocates sharing, 397-400, 406, 408,414 philosophy of aesthetics, 392-94 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 20, 401-2,403,406,40G408,412 surrender, 403-5, 411 Tefen, miracle at, 427 transactional view of cooperation vs., 389-91 vivid experience, 391-92 wonderment, 406-8,412 affirmation, 347 Afghanistan war, 80 Agarwal, Bina, 38, 39 agricultural biotechnology, 361-63 AI. See appreciative inquiry Alegria, Rosa, 76 Alliance for a Caring Economy (ACE), 50-52
444
Index
alliances, next-generation. See transformative partnerships Altman, Daniel, 61 American Leadership Forum, 221, 228,229-30,231 Annan, Kofi, 425 appreciation, aesthetic of, 405-6, 414-15 appreciative inquiry (AI) in case studies of transformative cooperation, 223, 230, 232 leadership, as means of studying, 336-39,340,342 positive emotions and, 13-14, 151-53, 156-59, 160, 165 appreciative leadership, 342-43 Araps, Tim, 338 Arbaugh, J. B., 283, 284 Archer, M., 264 Arendt, Hannah, 394, 398, 407-9, 412,414 Argyris , Chris, 278 Arnell, Arden, 338 Arvari River Parliament, Alwar District, Rajasthan, India, 219-20, 220228-29,232,234,236-39 Axelrod, Robert, 389 balancing loops or feedback patterns, 173-79 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 404-5 banality of evil, 407-8 Banathy, B. H., 274 Banerjee, Nirmala, 39 Bank of Sweden/Nobel Prize in Economics, 11, 62-63, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75 banks and banking central bank policies, 61-63, 66, 68, 70 Equator Principles, 206-7, 210, 211
Barrett, Frank J., 19-20, 45, 347, 388-417, 431 Bartunek, Jean, 16-17, 262-89, 432 Bass, B. M., 347 Batra, Ravi, 61 Baumeister, R. F., 300 Bausch, Pina, 223-24 BAWB. See Centre for Business as an Agent of World Benefit Beck, C. J., 147 Belton, Sharon Sayles, 337, 338, 345-46 Benesh, Yoel, 203-4 Benner, Patricia, 118 Bergmann, Barbara, 39 Bergson, H., 403 Bielaczyc, K., 264, 266, 275 Bilimoria, D., 359 biotechnology crops, 361-63 Black, J. S., 359 Blair, Tony, 61 Blanchard, K., 343 blended learning solutions, 254 Block, P., 344 The Body Shop, 18, 254, 338, 341, 356 Boland, R. J., 262, 278, 428 Bolton, John, 78 Boserup, Esther, 76 Bouwen, R., 348 Boyatzis, Richard, 45 Brach, Tara, 139 Bradbury, Hilary, 19, 39, 374-87, 432 brain science and economic theory, 70-71,73 Brandt, Barbara, 39 Brazil Porta Alegre, 64, 72 Quatro Varas, 222, 227, 229, 236, 238-39 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 76 broadening, cognitive, 159-60
Index
Brower, H. H., 283-84, 351 Brown, Ann L., 264,265,267,273, 275-78,280,281,285 Brown, ~endy, 133-35 Bruce, Judith, 38 Bryman, A., 346 Buddhism compassion in, 110, 139-41, 142, 144-47 "no striving," 127-28 selflessness and, 13, 135-38 burial site, Honokahua, Hawai'i, 8, 218-19,22~229,230,234,236,
238,239 Burke, Kenneth, 127, 129, 132, 147 Burns, James McGregor, 4, 347 Burns, Larry, 337, 338 Bush, George ~., 78 business as agent of world benefit, 424-26 Business as an Agent of ~orld Benefit (BA~B). See Centre for Business as an Agent of ~orld Benefit Businesses for Social Responsibility, 50 Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, 77 Calvin, ~- H., 239 Camargo, Aspasia, 76 Cameron, Kim S., 45 Campione, J. C., 276-78, 280, 281, 285 Canada, Healthy Babies, Healthy Children program (Ontario), 48-49 Canal to Canal habitat-conservation initiative, 221, 230-31, 232, 237 capitalism, inclusive. See inclusive capitalism Capra, Fritjof, 59 Cardona, P., 351
caring labor. See under partnership economics case studies, 14-15 American Leadership Forum, 221, 228,229-30,231 Arvari River Parliament, Alwar District, Rajasthan, India, 219-20,22~228-29,232,234,
236-39 Canal to Canal habitat-conservation initiative, 221, 230-31, 232, 237 design research in education, 267-69 Equa1Exchange,208-9,210,211 Equator Principles, 206-7, 210, 211 Honokahua burial site, Hawai'i, 8,218-19,22~229,230,234,
236,238,239 IBM & ~orld Community Grid, 205-6,212 Innovation Bank (See Innovation Bank) Noisette's sustainable property development model, 207-8, 211 Peace~orks, 203-4, 210, 211, 212 PII (Positive Innovations, Inc.) math literacy project, 220, 227, 229, 230.237.238, 239 Pina Bausch Tanztheater ~upper tal, 223-24 Proctor & Gable water purification system, 204-5, 210 Quatro Varas, Brazil, 222, 227, 229,236,238-39 SIGMA (See Social Innovations in Global Management (SIGMA) project) Transport LTL, 222-23, 227, 230, 232,239 Caza,Arran, 14,170-91,432
445
446
Index
central bank policies, 61-63, 66, 68, 70 Centre for Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB) AI interview guide, 337 Innovation Bank (See Innovation Bank) International Online Conference, 196 World Inquiry, 196 change deep, 181 dynamics of reactivity/resistance to, 173, 175-79 ego and identity and resistance to, 176-77, 180 fire fighting approach to, 179 organizational, 182-86 responsive acceptance of, 180-82 strategic innovation and change management, 353-56 chaostheor~ 71,73 charismatic leadership, 347 Chichilnisky, Graciela, 76 Chodrun, Pema, 138, 141 Christian compassion, 139 Clinton, Bill, 76, 361 eo-creation of meaning and leadership, 345-49 "co-opetition," 59 Cobb, P., 269, 271, 272, 273 coding methodology leadership studies, 339-40 SIGMA project, 224-25, 243-46 cognitive broadening, 159-60 Cohen, Ben, 204 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 393, 403-4 collaborative learning, 256 Collaborative Visualization, Learning Through (CoVis), 267-68, 270-71, 280 Collins, Allan, 264, 265, 266, 275
Collins, James, 8 Collopy, F., 262, 278, 428 communication and trust, 304-5 compassion, 12-13, 107-26 Buddhism and, 110, 139-41, 142, 144-47 building OCC through individual acts of, 109, 119-22 Christian, 139 generative nature of, 111 healing potential of, 110 human nature, as fundamental to, 110 OCC (organizational capability for cooperation) and, 107-9, 119-23 positive emotions created by, 109, 114-15 practice of, 146-47 quality of interpersonal connections and, 109, 112-14 resources created by, 109, 111-15 sangha or practice community, 140, 144-47 selflessness and, 110, 138-47 (See also selflessness) shared values and beliefs, strengthening, 109, 116-17 skills, cultivation of, 109, 117-19 social fabric, maintaining, 110-11 transformative cooperation through, 141-47 trust and, 109, 112 competition favored over cooperation in economics, 56-62 computer power grid sponsored by IBM, 205-6, 212 Confrey,]., 268-69, 280 Conger,]. A., 337 control and leadership, 182, 187 conversational coherence, 348 conversational learning, 234-35 conversations-for-possibility, 348
Index
"cool fuel" initiative, 379 Cooley, C. H., 130 cooperation aesthetic view of, 390-91 (See also aesthetics of transformative cooperation) transactional view of, 389-91 transformative (See transformative cooperation) Cooperrider, David L., 3-21, 45, 158,201.342-43,418-30,432 Copernican revolution, 393 corporate social responsibility (CSR), concept of, 163-64, 198 cost reduction routines, 91-92 CoVis (Learning Through Collaborative Visualization), 267-68, 270-71,280 Cox, C. Keith, 18-19, 333-63, 432-33 Coy, Peter, 71 cross-cultural leadership, 356-59 CSR (corporate social responsibility), concept of, 163-64, 198 cultural DNA, concept of, 73 Cunningham, William T., 316 customer service, 47, 161 Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 60 Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai, 65 Dalai Lama, 107, 123 Daly, Herman, 39 dance company, transformative cooperation in, 223-24 Darwin, Charles, 56, 58, 62, 297, 298 D'Augelli, Tony, 137 Dawkins, Richard, 375, 377-78 De Kock, Eugene, 402 deep change, 181 Dehler, G. E., 155 Denmark. See Nordic nations
Dennett, Daniel, 378 Dennis, Dave, 227 Derrida, Jacques, 409-10 Descartes, Rene, 393 design research in education, 16-17, 262-89 case studies, 267-69 collaborating with teachers in,
271-72 components of, 266-67 conduct of, 269-78 development of, 264-66 FCL model, 276-78, 280 the ideal type, 274-78, 280-82 implications of, 278-86 iterative nature of, 272-74 methodological issues, 282-85 nature of design approach to research, 263-64 piecemeal innovations, avoiding, 281-82 progressive refinement, 266 reciprocal teaching procedure, 275-76 sample logic vs. replication logic in, 282-83 transformative cooperation fostered by, 285-86 designing transformative cooperation, 4, 16-18, 153, 428-29 Dewees Islands, SC, 208 Dewey, John, 265, 388, 393-94, 404, 406,408 dialogue leadership and, 347-48 partnership and, 211 transformative, 413-14 disruptive innovations, encouraging, 97-99,412 DNA, cultural, 73 DocuCom project, 19, 374-75, 380-87
447
448
Index
Dodge, G. E., 352 Dogen, Eihei, 127, 137, 138, 140, 146 doing, ways of, 226, 231-32 domination model of economics, 29-31,44 Dommenge, Pam, 338 Doty, Mark, 391-92 Dutton, Jane E., 12-13.45, 107-26, 352,421,422,423,433 Dyck, Loren R., 15, 215-46, 423, 425,433 Dyer, K. M., 352 Earth Charter, 81 Earth Pledge, 237 Eccles, Sir John, 421 economics, 11-12,56-83. See also partnership economics; sustainability central bank policies, 61-63, 66, 68, 70 colonizing tendencies of, 73-75 competition favored over cooperation, 56-62 cultural dynamics, 29 evolutionary theory and, 56-59 fiduciary responsibility, 376-77 globalization and, 64-66, 80-81 GNP and GDP projections, correcting, 75-80 inadequacy of traditional economic models, 21-22 mathematics and, 70, 71-72 Nobel (Bank of Sweden) Prize in, 11, 62-63, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75 "rational economic man" concept, 70-72 scientific status of, 72 social innovation of markets, history of, 66-70 total productive systems in industrial societies, 72-73
transformative partnerships affected by, 297-301 The Eden Alternative, 338 education and transformative cooperation, 16-18. See also design research in education; transformative learning academic economic theory, 41-44 caring labor, valuation of, 36 cost vs. investment, treatment as, 62, 78-79 DocuCom project as learning experience, 382-84 math literacy project, 220, 227, 229, 230.237.238, 239 Educational Development Center, 266 efficiency routines, 91 ego and identity change, dynamics of resistance to, 176-77, 180 psychological and sociological theories of, 129-32 selflessness (See selflessness) Eichmann, Adolph, 407-8 Eisler, Riane, 10-11, 59, 72, 421, 433-34 elementary schools and design research. See design research in education Elgin, Duane, 333 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 388 emotions feeling, ways of, 226, 229-30 positive (See positive emotions) employees, caring for, 47-48 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 354, 355 EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), 354, 355 Epstein, Mark, 13, 129, 135-36, 137 Equa1Exchange,208-9,210,211
Index
Equator Principles, 206-7, 210, 211 equity in partnering ventures, 304, 310-15 ErieCanal,221,230-31,232,237 ethical leadership, 359-65 European Union (EU), 59, 80 evil, banality of, 407-8 evolution of human capacity for cooperation, 56-59 evolutionary forces affecting transformative partnerships, 297-301 evolutionary routines. See under inclusive capitalism fair trade, Equal Exchange promoting,208-9,210,211 fairness, importance of, 304 Fazio, Antonio, 68 FCL (Fostering Communities of Learners) model, 276-78, 280 feedback patterns or balancing loops, 173-79 feeling, ways of, 226, 229-30. See also positive emotions feminism and selflessness. See under selflessness Ferber, Marianne, 39 fiduciary responsibility and sustainability, 376-77 Fineman, S., 155 Finland. See Nordic nations fire fighting, 179 Focus: HOPE, 18, 290, 316-18 Folbre, Nancy, 39 Forbes, T. M., 293, 302 forgiveness, aesthetic of, 408-10 Fostering Communities of Learners (FCL) model, 276-78, 280 Foucault, Michel, 416 Fourier, Charles, 42 Fox, Justin, 71
France creche programs, 49 infant mortality rates and GDP compared to Kuwait, 40 Fredrickson, Barbara, 13-14, 45, 114,151-69,426,434 Freeman, R. E., 210 Freeplay Energy, 338, 356 Freire, Paolo, 133, 252 Freud, Sigmund, 129 Friedman, Milton, 8, 26, 198 Fry, Ronald E., 3-21, 45, 201, 348, 418-30,434-35 Fuji, 309 Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, 80 fundamental state of leadership, 172-73, 179-82 future, past, and present, interplay between, 235-40 Gable, S. L., 300 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 392, 393, 403 Galvin, Bob, 337, 338 game theory, 73-74,389-91,392 GDP (gross domestic product) projections, correcting, 75-80 gender issues domination model of economics, 29,30-31 economic research into, need for, 40-41,53n2 in economic theory, 42-43 leadership, 43 measurement of economic productivity, 37 new economic inventions and, 35 policymaking in government and business, 38-39 property law and custom, 37-38 valuation systems for economic productivity, examining, 27-28
449
450
Index
General Motors, 337, 338 generative metaphor intervention at Medic Inn, 394-97, 403, 406, 407, 408,412,414 generative possibilities for transformative cooperation, 18-20 AI and, 336 compassion, generative nature of,
111 the ideal type in educational design research, 274-78 Gergen, K. J., 347 Gergen, M. M., 347 Ghanim, Abdullah, 204 Giddens, A., 233 Gilligan, Carol, 265 Gittell, J. H., 108 Gladwell, M., 233 Glimcher, Paul, 73 Global Compact, 64, 81 Global Marshal! Plan, 76, 80, 81 global public goods, providing for, 81 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), 64-65 Global Transition Initiative, 66 globalization economics affected by, 64-66, 80-81 leadership and, 356-59 role of transformative cooperation in, 424-26 GNP (gross national product) projections, correcting, 75-80 Goleman, Daniel, 45 Gomez, L., 267-68, 270-71, 280 Gottman, J., 300 Graen, G. B., 351 gratitude, 161-62 Gray, Barbara, 13, 17, 127-50, 435 Green Light Program, 354 Greenleaf, R. K., 343 Greenspan, Alan, 66
Gregersen, H. B., 359 gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP) projections, correcting, 75-80 Groteluschen, Ralph, 338 grounded theory, 224, 232, 339-40 Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound,309 Gulati, R., 295, 306 habitat-conservation initiative, 221, 230-31,232,237 Hagen, R., 281, 282 Hamilton, Craig, 4-5 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 145-46.147 Haraway, Donna, 13, 132, 135, 142-43, 148n1 Harman, Willis, 7, 12 Harmon, Maryellen, 16-17, 262-89, 435-36 Hart, Stuart L., 12, 84-103, 436 Hawai' i, Honokahua burial site, 8, 218-19,22G229,230,234,236, 238,239 Hawken, Paul, 39 Hayek, Friedrich, 66 Heaphy, E. D., 352 Heidegger, Martin, 401, 408, 412 helpfulness and positive emotions, 161-62 Henderson, Hazel, 11, 39, 56-83, 421,436-37 hierarchies of actualization vs. domination, 44 high-quality connections (HQC), 351,352-253 high schools and design research. See design research in education Hitler, Adolph, 30 Hogan, Prances, 400 holistic embodiment pedagogy, 256-59
Index
Honokahua burial site, Hawai'i, 8, 218-19,22G229,230,234,236, 238,239 hooks, belle, 252 Horsch, Robert B., 338, 361-63 Hotz, Robert Lee, 73 House, R. J., 356, 358 Howard, Anita, 220, 227, 229, 230.237.238, 239 HQC (high-quality connections), 351,352-253 Hubbard, Barbara Marx, 4 human capital in postindustrial economies, 25-27 Hunt, J. G., 352 Ibarra, Herminia, 143 IBM,205-6,212,309 ICONS (International Conference on New Indicators of Sustainability and Quality of Life), 76 the ideal type in educational design research, 274-78, 280-82 identity and ego change, dynamics of resistance to, 176-77, 180 psychological and sociological theories of, 129-32 selflessness (See selflessness) ILO (International Labour Organisation), 64, 81 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 11,5G61, 70, 74, 75,77-80,85 inclusive capitalism, 12, 84-103 beneficiaries of capitalism, 85-86 challenges to and opportunities for, 88-90 gap between rich and poor, possible responses to, 86-88 revolutionary vs. evolutionary routines, developing importance of, 84-85, 87-88
new revolutionary routines, 93-100 problematic nature of evolutionary routines, 90-93 incremental reorientations, 412, 414-15 India, Arvari River Parliament, Alwar District, Rajasthan, 219-20, 22G228-29,232,234,236-39 Industrial Revolution, 68-69 Infiniti, 320-22 Inglehart, Ronald F., 40-41 innovation and change management, strategic, 353-56 Innovation Bank, 14-15, 195-215, 425 business-in-society innovation scale, 202-3 case studies derived from, 202-9 development of, 195-97 lessons learned from, 209-12 mutual benefit, concept of, 201-2 relationship between business and society, discerning, 197-200 innovations, disruptive vs. controlled, 97-99 intent of business to elevate society, 211-12 interdisciplinary scholarship, importance of, 422-24 International Conference on New Indicators of Sustainability and Quality of Life (ICONS), 76 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 64, 81 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 11,5G61, 70, 74, 75,77-80,85 Iraq war, 60, 80 Isabella, L. A., 293, 302 Isen, Alice, 45 Jacobs, Jane, 59
451
452
Index
Jain, Devaki, 39, 76 Japan, caregiving exchange program in, 32 Jaworski, Joseph, 221 Jericho Principle, 309 John Deere, 338 Johnson, M., 281, 282 Josaitis, Eleanor, 316 Joseph, D., 264, 266, 275 Joyce, James, 410 Judge, W. Q., 309
Kannon (Boddhisvata of compassion), 140 Kanov, Jason, 12-13, 45, 107-26, 421,423,437 Kant, Immanuel, 393, 403 Kanter, R. M., 294 Kasten, V., 309, 310 Kaul, Inge, 76 Keats, John, 393 keiretsu model of cooperation, 309 Kellermanns, F. W., 283 Kellogg Leadership Studies Project, 335 Kelso, Louis 0., 69 Khema, Ayya, 138, 144.145 Khomeini (Ayatollah), 30 Kiuchi, Takashi, 39 Knott, John L., 207 knowing, ways of, 226, 230-31 knowledge, actionable, 388 knowledge, aesthetic. See aesthetics of transformative cooperation Kodak,254,309 Kolberg, Lawrence, 265 Korten, David, 39 Kropotkin, P., 201 Krugman, Paul, 39, 75 Kuhn, Thomas S., 60 Kuwait, infant mortality rates and GDP compared to France, 40
Kydland, Finn E., 63 Lachance, A., 268-69, 280 laissez-faire economics, 58 Langert, Bob, 18, 338, 354-55 Larson, A., 311 Laszlo, C., 362 leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, 350-51 leadership, 14, 18-19 ACT (advanced change theory), 364-65 AI (appreciative inquiry) as means of studying, 336-39 alternative approach to, 171-73 American Leadership Forum, 221, 228,229-30,231 appreciative, 342-43 charismatic, 347 control in, 182, 187 creativity and control, need for balance in, 187 cross-cultural, 356-59 dialogical, 347-48 ethical, 359-65 fundamental state of, 172-73, 179-86 gender issues, 43 globalization and, 356-59 grounded theory as means of studying, 339-40 HQC (high-quality connections), 351,352-253 intermittent nature of, 187-88 meaning, eo-creation of, 345-49 new leadership theory, 346-47 new theories and approaches, need for, 333-36 normal state of, 172, 173-79 organizational interaction and, 182-86 partnership economics, 43
Index
personality associated with, 17071, 185-86 positive emotions and, 185 redefining purpose of, 341-45 relational, 351-52 relational dynamics of, 170-91 research topics in, 340 servant leadership, 343-44 as state of being, 171, 186 stewardship, 344 strategic innovation and change management, 353-56 transformational, 34 7 transformative cooperation promoted by, 349-53 Transport LTL, 223 universal nature of, 186-87 visionary, 34 7 for world benefit, 333-63 learning, generally. See education and transformative cooperation Learning Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis), 267-68, 270-71,280 Lederhausen, Mats, 338 Lee, T. W., 339 legitimacy and corporate reputation, routines focused on increasing, 92 Lento, E., 267-68, 270-71, 280 "letting go," 403 Levitt, T., 198 Levy Institute, 61 Liedtka, J. M., 305, 311 lightwave technologies (photonics), 65-65 Lilius, Jacoba, 12-13, 45, 107-26, 421,423,437 Litow, Stanley S., 206 Lloyd, Cynthia B., 38 LMX (leader-member exchange) theory, 350-51 Loh, B., 268, 280
London, Ted, 12,84-103,437 Long Term Capital Management, 73 Losada, M. F., 162 Loye, David, 40, 43, 53n2 Lubetzky, Daniel, 203 Ludema, Jim, 18-19, 333-63, 438 MacAvoy, T. C., 293, 302 Maclntyre, Alasdair, 389, 390, 410-11 Mandela, Nelson, 401 March, James, 4, 390, 428 markets, history of social innovation of, 66-70 Martins, L. L., 283 Marx, Karl, 23, 297 "materials pooling" initiative, 379 mathematics design research in education, 268-69 economics and, 70, 71-72 literacy project, 220, 227, 229, 230.237.238, 239 Max-Neef, Manfred, 39 Me Gill, Andrew, 17-18,290-329, 438 McCullough, M., 161-62 McDonald's, 18, 309, 338, 354-55 McKee, Annie, 45 meaning, leadership and eo-creation of, 345-49 measurement of economic productivity, 36-37 Medic Inn, 394-97, 403, 406, 407, 408, 412, 414 medicine and transformative professional learning, 255 memes, 19 defined,377-78 DocuCom and, 382, 384, 385 SoL Sustainability Consortium as context for generating and transmitting, 380
453
454
Index
success or failure of, 374-75 men and women. See gender issues Mendel, Gregor, 297 metaphor, use of, 394-97 MHS (Midwestern Health System), power of compassion at. See compassiOn Middle East, peace in, 418-20 Midwestern Health System (MHS), power of compassion at. See compasston Millennium Development Goals, ll, 56,60,76,78, 81,361 Miller, S., 281, 282 Milstein, Mark, 12, 84-103, 439 Minangkabau (East Sumatra), 29 Monsanto, 338, 361-63 Monterrey Consensus, 76, 80 Morrison, A. J., 359 multiparty partnership and dialogue, 211 mutual benefit, concept of, 201-2 Myrdal, Alva, 76 Nadeau, Robert, 70 Nae'ole, Clifford, 239 narrative, use of aesthetics of transformative cooperation, 397-402,412-14 dialogicalleadership, 348 Innovation Bank, 195 pro-life/pro-choice advocates, PCP facilitation of sharing of personal narratives by, 397-400 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 401-2,412 Nash, John, 74, 362 Nazis and Nazism, 401, 407-8, 414-15 Nelson, Julie, 39 neuroscience and economic theory, 70-71, 73
Neville, Mary Grace, 222, 227, 229, 236,238-39 new leadership theory, 346-4 7 new skill sets, encouraging, 96-97 Newton, Isaac, 58, 62, 73 next-generation transformative partnerships. See transformative partnerships Nietzsche, Friedrich, 134, 406 Nobel, Alfred, 62 Nobel, Peter, 62, 63, 72 Nobel (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economics, 11, 62-63, 69, 72, 73, 74,75 Noisette's sustainable property development model, 207-8, 211 Nonaka, Ikujiro, 302, 303 Nordic nations caregiving programs, 49 caring work, value of, 33 education and caring work in, 36 parental leave in, 32 partnership model of economics in, 29 Singapore's maternal mortality rates and GDP compared to Finland, 40 social policies and prosperity of, 35-36 women's role in government and business in, 39 Norgaard, Kari, 40, 43, 53n2 Norris, Pippa, 41 Norway. See Nordic nations Nuremberg Trials, 401 OCC (organizational capability for cooperation), 107-9, 119-23 Okamura, Shoshaku, 127-28 Ontario, Canada, Healthy Babies, Healthy Children program, 48-49
Index
organizational capability for cooperation (OCC), 107-9, 119-23 outcome, transformative cooperation as, 233 Owens and Minor, 309 Panama Canal, 221, 230-31, 232, 237 parental leave, growing incidence of, 32 Pareto, Vilfredo, 62, 70 Parmalat, 59, 68 participant system histories (PSHs), 226-27 partnership economics, 10-11, 21-55 academic theory, new paradigms in, 41-44 alienation of caring labor, 22-25, 27-29 customer care, concept of, 4 7 demonstration of benefits to business and government leaders, 46-52 domination model vs., 29-31, 44 employees, caring for, 47-48 gender-specific research, need for, 40-41,53n2 inadequacy of traditional economic models, 21-22 leadership, 43 measurement of economic productivity, 36-37 new economic inventions, need for, 31-33, 34-36 organizational structures, 44 policymaking in government and business, 38-39, 48 postindustrial economies, human capital in, 25-27 programs, movements, and organizations encompassing, 48-52 property law and custom, 37-38
steps leading to development of, 33-34 valuation systems, examining, 27-29 vocabulary, expansion of, 45-46 partnerships multiparty partnership and dialogue, 211 transformative (See transformative partnerships) past, present, and future, interplay between, 235-40 PCP (Public Conversations Project), 19-20,397-400,406,408,414 Pea,R.,267-68,270-71,280 peace, transformative cooperation in business as force for, 418-20 PeaceWorks, 203-4, 210, 211, 212 pedagogy. See education and transformative cooperation Perkins, John B., 75, 79 personal narratives. See narrative, use of personalization of transformative learning, 256 Pet Zone, 338 Peterson, V. S., 39 Petrick, J. A., 359 Phillips Partnership, 345-46 philosophy of aesthetics, 392-94 Phipps, C., 333-34 photonics (lightwave technologies), 65-65 Piaget, Jean, 265 Piderit, Sandy Kristin, 3-21, 201, 418-30,439 Pietila, Hilkka, 39 PII (Positive Innovations, Inc.) math literacy project, 220, 227, 229, 230.237.238, 239 Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal, 223-24
455
456
Index
Plato, 392, 393 poetic wisdom, 407 Polanyi, Karl, 58, 68, 302 policymaking in government and business, 38-39, 48 Poonamallee, latha, 219-20, 227, 228-29,232,234,236-39 Porto Alegre, Brazil, 64, 72 positive emotions, 13-14, 151-69 AI (appreciative inquiry), 13-14, 151-53, 156-59, 160, 165 benefits of, 153-55 cognitive broadening and, 159-60 community growth and development resulting from, 163-64 compassion creating, 109, 114-15 essential importance of, 426-28 leadership, fundamental state of, 185 in organizations, 155-59 relational strength of organization and, 160-63 transformative cooperation and, 151-53 Positive Innovations, Inc. (PII) math literacy project, 220, 227, 229, 230,237,238,239 positive organizational scholarship (POS), 422-24 positive psychology, 45, 151, 155, 15~305,406,422,434
"post-autistic economics," 60 postindustrial economies, human capital in, 25-27 Postrel, V., 262 poverty caring labor, alienation of, 23-24 Quatro Varas, Brazil, case study, 222,22~229,236,238-39
Powley, Edward H., 222-23, 227, 230,232,239
practice community or sangha, 140, 144-47 Prague Declaration on Humanizing Globalization, 81 Prahalad, C. K., 12 Prescott, Edward C., 63 present, past, and future, interplay between, 235-40 prisoner's dilemma, 74-75, 389 pro-life/pro-choice debate, 397-400, 406,408,414 process, transformative cooperation as, 5-7, 233 Proctor & Gable water purification system, 204-5, 210 product-market portfolio, changing, 99-100 productive difference, 348 professional learning, transformative, 254-56 Progress Portfolios, 268, 280 progressive refinement, 266 project-based transformative learning, 255 project memes. See memes property development Noisette's sustainable property development model, 207-8, 211 Ritz-Carlton and Honokahua burial site, Hawai'i, 8, 218-19, 227, 229,230,234,236,238,239 property law and custom, 37-38 PSHs (participant system histories), 226-27 psychological and social forces affecting transformative partnerships, 297-301 psychological approaches to selflessness, 129-32 Public Conversations Project (PCP), 19-20,397-400,406,408,414 Puerta, Mauricio, 224
Index
PuR, 204-5 Putzel, Roger, 279, 280 quality-of-life measures for GDP, 37 Quatro Varas, Brazil, 222, 227, 229, 236,238-39 Quinn, Robert E., 14, 45, 170-91, 297,299,364-65,440 Rader, M., 406 Radinsky, J., 268, 280 Ramos, Myra Bergman, 252 Rand, Ayn, 66 "rational economic man" concept, 70-72 rationalist view of cooperation as transaction, 389-91 Rato, Rodrigo, 80 Reagan, Ronald, 61 realistic mathematics education, 269 reciprocal teaching procedure, 275-76 Reich, Robert, 39 Reis, H. T., 300 relational dynamics of transformative cooperation, 12-14, 226, 227-29. See also compassion; leadership; positive emotions; selflessness relational leadership, 351-52 revolutionary routines. See under inclusive capitalism RFKD (relating, feeling, knowing, doing) dynamic, SIGMA project, 226 Richards, J. A., 403 Ring, P. S., 305 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 76 risk reduction routines, 92 risk taking and trust, 304 Ritz-Carlton and Honokahua burial site, Hawai'i, 8, 218-19, 227, 229, 230,234,236,238,239
Robert, Karl-Henrick, 39 Roddick, Anita, 18, 337-38, 341-42, 356 Rogoff, Kenneth, 79 Romantic movement, 393 Romme, Georges, 262, 264, 278-79 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 60, 62 Ruis Arauz, Maria Elisa, 221, 23031,232,237 Ryman, J. A., 309 Sachs, Jeffrey, 39, 75 Sahtouris, Elisabet, 59 sangha or practice community, 140, 144-47 Sarbin, T., 413 Schindler, Oscar, 414-15 Schon, Donald, 263, 274, 278 Schoorman, F. D., 351 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 69 Seiling, Jane, 45 Sekerka, Leslie, 13-14, 114, 151-69, 426 self, sense of change, dynamics of resistance to, 176-77, 180 psychological and sociological theories of, 129-32 selflessness, 13, 127-50 Buddhism and, 13, 135-38 compassion, 110, 139-41, 142, 144-47 "no striving," 127-28 compassion and, 110, 138-47 feminism and, 13, 132-35 practice of, 146-47 provisional "no self," developing, 143-44 psychological and sociological approaches to, 129-32 sangha or practice community, 140, 144-47
457
458
Index
transformative cooperation and compassion, 141-47 Sen, Amartya, 39 Sen, Gita, 39 servant leadership, 343-44 Sheva, Vandana,39 Shor, Ira, 252 Shrader, G., 267-68, 270-71, 280 Shrivastava, Paul, 16, 249-61, 440-41 Siemens, 309 SIGMA. See Social Innovations in Global Management (SIGMA) project Simon, Herbert, 263, 278, 390 Singapore, maternal mortality rates and GDP compared to Finland, 40 Singh, Rajendra, 227, 229 skills and skill sets compassion and cultivation of, 109, 117-19 revolutionary routines for inclusive capitalism, 96-97 Sklar, Holly, 39 Slaughter, Richard, 59 slow death phenomenon, 175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183 Smith, Adam, 42, 57-58, 62, 64, 66, 68,297 Smucker, Tim, 338, 349-51 social and psychological forces affecting transformative partnerships, 297-301 social Darwinism, 58 social fabric, role of compassion in maintaining, 110-11 social innovation of markets, history of, 66-70 Social Innovations in Global Management (SIGMA) project, 215-46 conversational learning, 234-35 development of, 216-17
doing, ways of, 226, 231-32 feeling, ways of, 226, 229-30 further research possibilities, 240-41 knowing, ways of, 226, 230-31 methodology and coding system, 224-25,243-46 participant system histories (PSHs), 226-27 past, present, and future, interplay between, 235-40 process vs. outcome, 233 propositions emerging from, 232-33 relating, ways of, 226, 227-29 RFKD (relating, feeling, knowing, doing) dynamic, 226 summary of case studies, 217-24 theoretical issues emerging from, 233-39 tipping points, 233-34 social movement theory, 133 Social Responsibility in Business movement, 50 social sciences selflessness, sociological approaches to, 129-32 study of full spectrum of human behavior in, 57 Social Venture Network, 50 society, role of business in, 424-26 CSR (corporate social responsibility), concept of, 163-64, 198-200 discernment of, 197-200 intent to elevate world, 211-12 multiparty partnership and dialogue, 211 mutual benefit, concept of, 201-2 positive emotions, 163-64 stakeholder approach to, 210, 228 strengths of business, using, 212
Index
Socrates, 392 SoL Sustainability Consortium, 374, 375,378-80,382-84 Soros, George, 39 Soto Zen Buddhism, 138, 143, 147, 148n2 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 20, 4012,403,406,40G408,412 Spekman, R. E., 293, 302 Spencer, Herbert, 58 Spirituality and Business movement, 50 splitting, design research in education on,268-69 Srivastva, Suresh, 45 stakeholder approach, 210, 228 Starbucks, 309 Stear, Rory, 338, 357-58 Steffe, L. P., 274 stewardship, 344 Stiglitz, Joseph, 39, 75 Stiller, Robert, 8 story. See narrative, use of Strafford, Nigel, 15, 214-46, 423, 425,441 strategic alliances, 291. See also transformative partnerships strategic innovation and change management, 353-56 strengths of business, using, 212 Strober, Myra, 39 "Sugarscape," 72 surrender, aesthetic of, 403-5, 411 sustainability, 11, 19, 375-78 across multiple companies, 374, 384-86 compassion, renewable resources created by, 109, 111-15 defining, 199-200 DocuCom project, 19, 374-75, 380-87
evolution and human capacity for cooperation, 56-59 fiduciary responsibility and, 376-77 globalization and, 64-66, 66, 80-81 indices for, 64-65, 199 memes for (See memes) Noisette's sustainable property development model, 207-8, 211 resources for transitioning to, 66, 67 SoL Sustainability Consortium, 374,375,378-80,382-84 success and failure in, 374-75, 384-85 transformative learning and, 251 Sweden. See Nordic nations Sweden, Bank of, and Nobel Prize in Economics, 11, 62-63, 69, 72, 73, 74,75 Tajfel, H., 130-31 Takeuchi, Hirotaka, 302, 303 Taliban, 30 Tan, H. H., 351 tax codes, 48 Taylor, Eric, 401-2 technology-enabled transformative learning, 253-54 Teduray (Philippines), 29 Tefen (Israel), miracle in, 419-20, 427, 429n1 terrorism, 80, 88 Thatcher, Margaret, 61 Thayer, L., 184 Theobald, Robert, 26 Thomas, Bill, 338 Thompson, P. W., 274 Thoreau, Henry David, 127, 130 3M HealthCare, 309 tipping points, 233-34
459
460
Index
Toffler, Alvin and Heidi, 429n1 Toshiba, 309 total productive systems in industrial societies, 72-73 transactional view of cooperation, 389-91 transformational leadership, 34 7 transformative cooperation, 3-21. See also more specific topics, e.g. education and transformative cooperation 2003 conference on, 3-4, 9-10, 195-96 business and society, at intersection of, 7-9 case studies in, 14-15 compassion and, 141-4 7 defining, 4, 5, 107-8, 151-53, 219, 250-51 design research fostering, 285-86 designing, 4, 16-18, 153, 428-29 economics, critiques of, 11-12 in education, 16-18 as generative possibility, 18-20 leadership promoting, 349-53 new vocabulary, need for, 421 OCC (organizational capability for cooperation) and compassion, 107-9, 119-23 as outcome, 233 peace, as force for, 418-20 POS (positive organizational scholarship), 421 positive emotions and, 151-53 as process, 5-7, 233 relational dynamics of, 12-14, 226, 227-29 transformative dialogue, 347 transformative learning, 16, 249-61 alternative pedagogies, 260-61 blended learning solutions, 254 business models used in, 260
collaborative, 256 content of, 256, 259-60 definition and characteristics of transformative learning, 251-53 definition of transformative cooperation and, 250-51 faculties, role of, 259-60 formats for, 259 holistic embodiment pedagogy, 256-59 motivation, importance of, 256 personalization of, 256 professional learning, 254-56 project-based, 255 sustainability and, 251 technology-enabled, 253-54 transformative partnerships, 17-18, 290-329 commitment of partners to, 319 domestic vs. international, 294 economic waste minimized through, 307-10 equity and fairness in, 304, 310-15 failures of, reasons for, 292-301 financial rewards in, 318-19 Focus: HOPE as example of, 18, 290, 316-18 foundations of, 295-97 growth of, 292 Infiniti, problems arising with, 320-22 initial establishment of, 310 Phillips Partnership, 345-46 power issues, 319-20 success of, reasons for, 295-97, 311-12 transparency, importance of, 3014,309-10 triad of appositional forces, dealing with, 297-301 trust, role of, 295, 304-7
Index
unyielding integrity, building, 315-22 transparency in transformative partnerships, 301-4, 308-9 Transport LTL, 222-23, 227, 230, 232,239 TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), South Africa, 20, 401-2, 403,406,40G408,412 Tremont Hotel, 395-96, 406, 414 triple bottom line, 376-77 Trullen, Jordi, 16-17, 262-89, 441 trust compassion and, 109, 112 in economic theory, 73-74 in partnering ventures, 295, 304-7 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa, 20, 401-2,403,406,40G408,412 Turner, J. C., 130-31 Tutu, Desmond, 401 Uhl-Bien, M., 351 unionized company (Transport LTL), transformative cooperation in, 222-23,22G230,232,239 United Nations Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to, 78 Conference on Environment and Development, 237 Global Compact, 64 GNP and GDP national accounts, 78 Millennium Development Goals, 11, 56, 60, 76, 78, 81, 361 peacekeeping efforts, 80 Principles of Responsible Investing, 64 United States, caregiving programs in, 49-50 UPS, 309
valuation systems for economic productivity, examining, 27-29 values caring labor, valuation of, 36 compassion as strengthener of shared values and beliefs, 109, 116-17 economic productivity, valuation systems for, 27-29 van Aken, Joan Ernst, 262, 270, 278 Van de Ven, A. H., 305 variety of perspectives, revolutionary routines encouraging, 93-96 Vickers, G., 406 Vico, Giambattista, 393, 407 violence caring labor, alienation of, 24 global cooperation in controlling, 80-81 transformative cooperation in business as force for peace, 418-20 visionary leadership, 347 vivid experience and aesthetics, 391-92 Vygotsky, Lev, 265 ~addock,Sandra,
198-99 Rick, 337, 338 ~aring, Marilyn, 37, 39, 76 ~ashington Consensus, 60, 61 water purification system, Proctor & Gamble, 204-5,210 ~egmans, 47 ~eick, Karl, 428 ~elborn, R., 309, 310 ~elsch, M. A., 155 ~elzel, Christian, 41 ~ertheimer, Stef, 419, 427, 429n1 ~hitney, Diana, 45 ~icks, Judy, 335 ~ilber, Ken, 59 ~irth, Louis, 21 ~agoner,
461
462
Index
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 421 Wolfowitz, Paul, 77 women. See gender issues wonderment, aesthetic of, 406-8, 412 Wordsworth, William, 393 World Bank, 57, 61, 75, 77-78, 85, 348 world benefit. See also Centre for Business as an Agent of World Benefit business as agent of, 424-26 leadership for, 333-63 World Business Academy, 50 World Commission on Environment and Development, 9
World Community Grid, 205-6, 212 World Economic Forum, 425 World Inquiry into Business as an Agent of World Benefit, 196, 202 World Social Forum, 64, 72 World Trade Organization (WTO), 57, 61, 78, 85 Wright, Robert, 424-25 WTO (World Trade Organization), 57, 61, 78, 85 Young Presidents Association, 8 Zen Buddhism. See Buddhism Zhexembayeva, Nadya, 14-15, 195214,423,425,431