Neoliberal discourse dominated education policy for decades and fueled reform movements with lasting effects. Through a critical lens this qualitative case study explored policy direction, the influences that shaped multiple years of reform initiatives and the impact of these changes in one Canadian province. Data sources including policy…

Research on school restructuring provides little evidence that teacher-student-principal relationships are changing. Staffs may be confusing structural with normative thinking, which requires them to reflect critically about their schools as work places. Suggests that school-constructed theories in practice that promote critical thinking and…

Instructionally, schools tend to be "weakly normed" organizational systems in which teachers bring relatively little pressure upon each other to change and/or improve their classroom performance. Because teachers tolerate a wide range of behavior among their colleagues and are reluctant to offer criticism of each other, those responsibile for…

This paper explores the dynamics of managing collective problem solving and decision making, and the application of tools and strategies to deal with the emergent complexity of systems in which educators work. Schools and educational programs are complex adaptive systems that respond to changes in internal and external environments. Functioning…

Issues in understanding organizational change from an interpretive viewpoint are explored in this paper, which discusses two perspectives for viewing organizational responses to their environments: (1) "environment" as an open concept (i.e., how "environment" is defined by participants in a given organization); and (2)…

Chaos theory provides a useful mental model for guiding change as leaders garner the energy from unpredictable events for realizing transformation goals. The paper considers chaos theory as a framework for managing school change toward Total Quality Management work cultures. Change is possible to manage when plans are made and then followed by a…

This document contains three papers from a symposium on international perspectives on human resource development (HRD). The first paper, "Human Resource Development Practices in American and Chinese High-technology Companies in Taiwan" (Hsin-yi Chen), uses quantitative and qualitative data on HRD practices in high-technology companies in…