Linda Myrsiades

Race-ing representation : voice, history, and sexuality

This collection takes on the problem of representing race in the context of a master language and culture. These essays discuss this problem in terms of the ongoing struggle to redefine the self as speaker, that is, to re-construe our understanding of history, sexuality, and speech itself in a continuing battle for self-definition. As a totality, these essays explode the notion of race as a natural boundary between groups and pose a variety of possible constructions that force us to accept race not as a category, but as a practice. Kostas and Linda Myrsiades have brought together scholars whose varied essays explore the issues of voice, history, and sexuality in such diverse venues as detective fiction, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the witches of Salem, the Harlem Renaissance, and the work of Toni Morrison, demonstrating that resistance to race-ing is both meaningfully engaged as a cultural possibility and rewritten as a linguistic practice.

Meeting sabotage: met and conquered

One of the most valued management skills is the ability to function effectively in such small group decision‐making settings as meetings. Nevertheless, studies admit that little is definitely known about what makes meetings effective, so that meeting leaders often have to operate on assumptions or conflicting evidence even as they recognize that the move toward team‐based organizations has created a special need for meeting facilitation skills. Presents techniques for running meetings based on the results of experience gained working as a meeting consultant at the international headquarters of an insurance corporation in the northeastern USA (referred to as Alifo). Covers a 12‐month period during which 58 managers, supervisors, and executives participated in a meeting analysis survey, attended training sessions, and evaluated meeting simulations. Based, in addition, on meeting observations, minutes, and transcripts, communication reports, and interviews with company managers, several conclusions were reached about the meeting process, leadership behaviors, and group participation at Alifo.

Looking to lead: a case in designing executive education from the inside

The need to give force to change efforts is a problem of importance to all organizations. This paper addresses change efforts that are reinforced by in‐house executive education programs, in particular those that occur in educational institutions. Tracing the development of an in‐house executive education effort in a state university, this case study begins with the President’s cabinet meeting that endorsed the training that was to take place. It takes us through the process of how that training was designed, implemented, evaluated, and subsequently modified and then compares the results of the program to findings in the executive education literature. The study concludes that the program as conducted reinforces three critical aspects of effective executive education: that it be intimately tied to anticipating and causing industry change, that it focus on the centrality of active distributive leadership, and that it engage participants in activities that translate into action plans linked to actual organizational outcomes desired by the institution.

Using information management systems to study modern Greek folklore

The Karagiozis, Greek shadow puppet theater performance derived from a sixteenth century Turkish model, is an interactive performative event rather than a static text treated in isolation from its extended environmental and immediate performative contexts and thus requires critical shifts in the research approach one uses. A method of collating data that could handle the differences of multiple variants became necessary. Such a method had to effectively test the transformational growth of the form given the influence of irrational forces, had to organize a large number of variables as well as a substantial body of texts, and had to operate at the smallest level to insure that findings were confirmed or disconfirmed in the most exhaustive and comprehensive way possible. That method was to be found in information management systems, specifically Asksam and Notebook II.