William Van Buskirk

Organizational Stories as a Window on Affect in Organizations

Research on organizational culture has provided much needed subtlety in understanding organizational events. However, it has a cognitive bias which leaves implicit the treatment of emotional phenomena. Organizational stories can provide a window on affect in organizations if we view stories as symbolically embedded appraisals of wellbeing. Presents an illustrative case to demonstrate how such enquiry might proceed.

Management Skills in Action: Four Teaching Models

Business schools across the country have demonstrated an increasing interest in teaching management skills in undergraduate and graduate programs. This article describes four models for skills courses based on existing courses. It includes for each course (a) an overview, (b) a statement of philosophy and pedagogy, (c) unique features, and (d) facilitator and student responses. The four models are then discussed as a group, and issues related to skill learning are raised.

Poetry as Deep Intelligence A Qualitative Approach for the Organizational Behavior Classroom

In this article, the authors argue that poetry provides a valuable if overlooked resource to the organizational behavior professor. The authors describe a workshop designed to evoke students’ innate poetic metaphors to enable a more lively engagement with course material. Because many of students’ personal, private, and emotionally charged experiences parallel the various topics in the text, the authors find that the organizational behavior course is particularly amenable to this approach. Finally, the authors present a qualitative assessment, conducted by them, in which students assess the workshop experience in their own words. Students find that the workshop adds complexity, surprise, and excitement to personal issues, transforms the climate of the classroom, and provides an energized backdrop against which the course makes sense in terms that are both personal and deep.

Caring, Voice and Self‐reflection

Presents a case description of a non‐profit educational agency whose organizational culture is based on the feminist values of caring, voice and self‐reflection. Grounded theory analysis of intensive interviews, focus groups, observations and organizational documents reveals how these values are embodied in the organization′s management practices and change processes. The case strongly suggests that a commitment to feminist values can prove highly generative of a wide range of desirable organizational competences.

Finding Your Questions: Final Exams for Reframing Knowledge

Authors’ Note: The first author can be contacted at La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA 19141. For indeed, the whole sum of what may be said about questioning is comprised in [sic] this: it ought to set the learners (to) thinking, to promote activity and energy on their part, and to arouse the whole mental faculty into action, instead of blindly cultivating the memory at the expense of the higher intellectual powers. That is the best questioning which best stimulates action on the part of the learner; which gives him a habit of thinking and inquiring for himself; which tends in a great measure to render him independent of his teacher; which makes him, in fact, rather a skillful finder than a patient receiver of truth. (Josiah Fitch, 1879)

Enhancing Sensitivity to Organizational Symbols and Culture: An Experiential Approach for the Classroom

Competency in understanding and managing cultural aspects of the corporation has been identified by many scholars as an increasingly important management skill. This article identifies an important component of that skill as a sensitivity to how local organizational symbols shape ones cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. This article sketches a masters of business administration course designed to enhance sensitivity of practicing managers to the symbols that surround and shape them.Competency in understanding and managing cultural aspects of the corporation has been identified by many scholars as an increasingly important management skill. This article identifies an important component of that skill as a sensitivity to how local organizational symbols shape ones cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. This article sketches a masters of business administration course designed to enhance sensitivity of practicing managers to the symbols that surround and shape them.

The Poetic Workspace

Traditional management education has been widely criticized for an overemphasis on rational, analytic, arms-length approaches to the detriment of softer, more intuitive capacities. Most critics agree that today’s management students are overdrilled in the routines of calculation and analysis, but underprepared for the dynamic and turbulent settings in which managers often find themselves. The arts-based movement has emerged as a corrective to these tendencies. The core of this work involves the transformation of the classroom into an “aesthetic workspace” in which student learning is enhanced through dynamic encounters with art-objects. This article extends the notion of aesthetic workspace to the realm of language itself. It describes a “poetic workspace” in which metaphor is leveraged to create holistic connections between personal insights, appreciation of others, and the content of the course.