This report provides the detailed design of a set of Intelligent Agents aimed at enhancing a Virtual Community Environment to (1) help new members familiarize more rapidly with the virtual community context (people, spaces, knowledge assets, ongoing activities), (2) reduce search costs and increase value creation opportunities for each community members by supporting the efficient identification of relevant spaces, people, knowledge assets, interaction and collaboration opportunities, and (3) stimulate and support

Learning from experience, the cyclical interplay of thinking and doing, is increasingly important as organizations struggle to cope with rapidly changing environments and more complex and interdependent sets of knowledge. This paper confronts two central issues for organizational learning: (1) how is local learning (by individuals or small groups) integrated into collective learning by organizations? and (2) what are the differences between learning practices that focus on control, elimination of surprises, and single-loop incremental “fixing ” of problems with those that focus on deep or radical learning, double-loop challenging of assumptions, and discovery of new opportunities? We articulate these relationships through an analysis of learning practices in high-hazard organizations, specifically, problem investigation teams that examine the most serious and troubling events and trends in nuclear power plants and chemical plants. Our analysis suggests a four-stage model of organizational learning reflecting different approaches to control and learning. LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE IN HIGH-HAZARD ORGANIZATIONS 1

development

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Using literature, online communities of consumption are defined and their dynamics discussed from both members' and organiser's standpoints. Member motivations are elaborated based on psychological, sociological and economic theories. The study concludes that there is readily available common ground between new sociological and economic explanations to characterise economic behaviour in online communities.

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Abstract Many critiques of consensus building have been uninformed about the nature of this practice or the theory on which it was built, though there is extensive literature on both. It is grounded in the theory and practice of interest-based negotiation and mediation. It is not grounded in Habermas ’ concept of communicative rationality, though theorists have found useful illumination in his ideas. Claims are often made about pathologies of consensus building based on cases where the conditions for authentic dialogue recognized by both practitioners and theoreticians were not met. Documentation of cases shows that when these conditions are met, many desirable outcomes occur. The article examines the various critiques, including the claims that external power differentials are deterministic, that lowest common denominator solutions are the outcomes, that valuable tensions are lost in the process, and that agreements are fleeting at best. It shows how and why each of these is not borne out by experience. Consensus building is time consuming and requires skill and training. It is only appropriate in situations of uncertainty and controversy where all stakeholders have incentives to come to the table and mutual reciprocity in their interests.

Business as an Agent for World Benefit (BAWB) is a global inquiry into the human strengths, positive experiences, and hopeful future visions of a humane world at the intersection of business and society. A pilot of the BAWB inquiry was launched in spring, 2002, when the first 178 in-depth interviews were conducted across four continents with positive change leaders from multi-hierarchical perspectives of business. Because the inquiry was launched by a loose affiliation among four convening partners, each of whom reached unbounded and sometimes overlapping constituencies, the BAWB pilot process provides a rich and complex experience through which to increase conversation about positive potential, and ultimately to catalyze the possibility of a change in behavior worldwide. This paper seeks to understand opportunities for using global inquiry and dialogue towards creation of social change. The case study analyzes the pilot phase structures and relationships including how and why they were formed. A fundamental dynamic influencing the project relationships, decisions, and outcomes is the environmental

This dissertation explores the development of purpose in the project definition phase of construction projects. Project definition is the project phase that identifies the needs and values of project stakeholders, and develops appropriate design solutions to satisfy them. Project purposes are constructed through the interconnected relationships of stakeholder needs and values, and the project constraints. Projects comprise diverse stakeholders whose needs and values often conflict given that environments have limited project resources to fulfill all stakeholder interests. While researchers have developed methodologies to systematically process needs into project requirements through structured means, this research focuses on the role of project managers and how they facilitate the collaborative development of purpose. The research adopts the perspective that project definition is a learning process that requires the shared understanding of stakeholder needs and values, in order to resolve them into a collective statement of project purpose. This study is carried out in two distinct phases of research exploration. The first phase examines three building construction projects at a public educational institution. The

I treat the dynamics of interorganizational collaboration from a dialogue perspective. This extends the ‘exploitative ’ and ‘explorative ’ approaches that currently define scholarship on interorganizational collaboration. A dialogue perspective is argued to be particularly useful in understanding interorganizational efforts to tackle systemic issues that are technically as well as behaviorally complex, e.g., global warming. The concept of ‘dialogic capital ’ is then introduced to theorize how, and by whom, the interorganizational dialogue is shaped in a context in which there is little formal authority among the participants. The process of accrual, leverage and growth/decline of dialogic capital is presented and implications for empirical research offered.