Ellen Schall

FROM CONSENT TO MUTUAL INQUIRY: BALANCING DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITY IN ACTION RESEARCH

The Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) program is a joint endeavor between the Ford Foundation, the Advocacy Institute, and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. This paper focuses on the experiences of the Research and Documentation component of LCW – lead by a research team from the Wagner School – during the initial implementation phases of the research. This component formed an inquiry group consisting of both academic researchers and social change practitioners to collaboratively explore and discover the ways in which communities doing social change engage in the work of leadership. We used group relations theory to understand a series of critical dilemmas and contradictions experienced by the coresearchers. This paper identifies four such paradoxes that center around issues of democracy and authority.

APPRECIATIVE NARRATIVES AS LEADERSHIP RESEARCH: MATCHING METHOD TO LENS

This chapter explores the potential of appreciative inquiry for doing empirical work on leadership. We use a framework that matches a constructionist theoretical lens, an appreciative and participative stance, a focus on the work of leadership (as opposed to leaders), and multiple methods of inquiry (narrative, ethnographic and cooperative). We elaborate on our experiences with narrative inquiry, while highlighting the value of doing narrative inquiry in an appreciative manner. Finally, we suggest that this particular framework is helping us see how social change leadership work reframes the value that the larger society attributes to members of vulnerable communities.

The Use of Case Management as a Revitalizing Theme in a Juvenile Justice Agency

Increasingly we are told that organizations and institutions are in crisis. They are less able to meet the expectations which their constitutents and clients place on them. They fail to create conditions for their own staff to do high-quality, productive work and are ill-suited to adapt to rapidly changing environments. Recent best sellers offer both diagnoses and prescriptions for these ills (Peters and Waterman, 1982; Peters and Austin, 1985; Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Kanter, 1983; Iacocca, 1984). In the following paper, we explore in depth one example of the joining of a new leader with a segmented, dispirited organization and look at dynamics of revitalitzation in a public agency. In particular, we examine the interactions between the leader and the staff and the role of a strategic theme as a vehicle for both directing and organizing the turn around. The first author served as a consultant to the Department of Juvenile Justice. The second author had just been appointed commissioner. We begin with a brief description of the agency at the time of the arrival of the new commissioner and explore her first 18 months, looking at the initial shaping of a strategic theme and the difficulties in translating the theme into concrete initiatives to alter the standard operating procedures of the organization. We conclude with a discussion of the learnings from this case.

Principles for Juvenile Detention

Detention is both temporary and transitional. These two facts have served too long as an excuse for not making the most of the time children spend in detention. We have allowed detention, even for children, to be little more than dead time, a time set apart between arrest and action. This paper explores some of what detention is around the country, but more importantly, challenges our notion of what it can be. These children who are locked up after arrest are in trouble with the law, but are also just in trouble. Detention can and should be used as an opportunity to intervene, to reclaim these children for productive lives.