The purpose of this paper is to argue that the perspective of ‘critical realism’ has considerable potential for moving forward the theory and practice of action learning. The paper addresses three questions: (1) Does action learning emphasise the individual or the collective? (2) Can action...

Introduction This paper presents some empirical evidence about the way in which post‐graduate Business School students perceive their future job and career opportunities. In particular, it describes some of the job features which are valued by the student and, by implication, those which are...

This paper is concerned with two questions: 1 What are the kinds of skills and other qualities in managers that contribute to managerial success and performance in various forms? 2 To what extent are these acquired by learning, and what are the sources of such learning? The aim is to propose and...

In our previous paper we developed a taxonomy of managerial skills and qualities; reported a modest research study giving some evidence for the validity of the taxonomy; and presented some further empirical evidence about the sources from which the managers we have investigated acquired these...

In this paper we are concerned with the question: what is it about management development programmes that determines what effect they have, in terms of the learning that people take away from them? This question, and our attempt to contribute to an answer to it, will be of interest to all those...

In this paper, we are concerned with the skills required to transform theories of learning into practice. Research data will be described which identify a range of teaching skills and which start to differentiate the relative importance of different skills in implementing different learning...

The ‘design’ of management development programmes is usually seen by practitioners in the field as a matter of choosing the methods appropriate to the ‘content’ of what they want to teach or the learning they hope to bring about. In a previous paper in this series we have argued that the...

This article studies attitude change and its intention is to emphasise that management education has its impact through influencing attitudes as well as developing instrumental skills—skills in getting things done. The first part presents a research study and its conclusions, the second...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative view of leadership development that acknowledges the likelihood of unintended and contradictory outcomes in leadership work. Helping leaders to engage with contradictions is as important as developing their positive capabilities. A...