Journal of Management Inquiry

It has become commonplace to examine the externalities of leadership development, emphasizing the need for new skills and abilities such as establishing strategic vision, developing collaborative teams, and managing conflict. This article proceeds from the premise that leadership effectiveness also requires a deeper understanding of self—the inner dimension of leadership. Specifically, the authors (1) trace the evolutionary design of an NTL Institute workshop and the learning from facilitating individual self-awareness and the resolution of behavioral patterns blocking personal leadership effectiveness and (2) provide exemplars of how self-awareness can be incorporated into leadership development programs. However, the authors also raise questions about the willingness of organizations to invest in the integration of externally focused skill development with personal introspection and change.

Scholarly and anecdotal evidence suggests that despite an increasing tolerance for diversity among many Americans, workplace discrimination is on the rise. This article addresses the role that learning, or more specifically barriers to learning, plays in the perpetuation of discrimination. The authors use several organizationally based learning theories to illustrate ways in which firms may fail to learn how to manage diversity challenges effectively, such as a discrimination lawsuit. They conclude the article with two relatively successful learning situations involving the Georgia Power Corporation and the Denny’s restaurant chain, both of which have faced discrimination lawsuits in recent years. They use this discussion to highlight reactive versus reflective learning strategies and how each may lead to successful discrimination lawsuit resolution.

This article advocates that more strategy researchers and managers become engaged in aninteractive, reciprocating research process, the objective of which is building pragmatic strategic management theory. To this purpose, the authors suggest how researchers and managers may engage in theory-building processes in which generalized theories of researchers and contextual theories of managers interactively evolve in a new model of double-loop learning. In particular, the authors suggest the following sequence of activities: (a) Researchers should propose integrative theories thought to be generally applicable; researchers and managers should then consider applicability of strategy theory to specific competitive contexts. (b) This strategic logic is then formulated by managers and applied to specific competitive contexts. (c) The market response leads to refining or to redefining the firm’s strategic logic. (d) The firm’s experience in formulating and in testing strategic logics inform researchers’ efforts to develop new strategy theory.

This article focuses on the role of power in multistakeholder collaboration. It considers this form of organization from a nontraditional, Bourdieun perspective, which has the authors focus on the how of power and on the role of language in the constitution and the exclusion of voice. A case study—a collaboration convened by a scientific task force to resolve an environmental conflict in Canada’s Banff National Park—is introduced, and this is read off against a number of Bourdieu’s concepts, namely capital, field, habitus, and misrecognition, doxa, and symbolic violence. Through such a reading, the article offers insights into elements of both surface and deep-structure power. The article, by focusing on a science-driven, environmental multi-stakeholder collaboration, also challenges common-sense constructions of the environment and raises concerns over the presumed neutrality or nonpolitical nature of both scientific and economic discourse.