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A common concern raised in opposition to Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is that a focus on life-giving images in organizations tends to suppress negative voices. It is supposed that AI sees little value in skeptical, cynical, or negative perspectives. However, when AI is properly understood, all voices – both positive and negative – are seen as essential to the life of organization. The challenge is to create an atmosphere in which the cynical voice, rather than perpetuating dysfunction, can be tapped to build generativity. This chapter describes how to accomplish this objective through the use of analogic inquiry, thus exploring the focus on generativity that is central to AI.

Our aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to review briefly the history of the hermeneutic traditions; second, to examine its influence in organization studies. We begin with a review of hermeneutic philosophy including ancient Greek origins and Biblical hermeneutics. We then delve more deeply into the work of 20th-century hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, to demonstrate how hermeneutics became a field that is concerned not only with texts but also with verbal and nonverbal forms of action and the preunderstanding that makes any interpretation possible. Finally, we explore how hermeneutic philosophers claim that interpretation is the mode by which we live and carry on with one another. In the third section, we suggest that the field of organizational studies has discovered the relevance of hermeneutic theory, a rarely explicitly acknowledged debt. In particular, we outline the influence of hermeneutic theory on several figural areas, including culture, sensemaking, identity, situated learning, and organizational dialogue.

This paper presents a framework to study organizational change using the metaphor of ritual. Concepts of myth and ritual facilitate understanding of change interventions. A qualitative study of Appreciative Inquiry helped answer the question: what mechanisms or processes explain the effect of the Appreciative Inquiry Summit? Four mechanisms, based on qualitative interviews and anthropological and sociological theory, explain why the AI Summit produces organizational change: (1) internal dialogue: recognizing a positive dimension and new vocabulary at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels of analysis; (2) communitas: the mechanism whereby new relationships form due to relational anti-structure; (3) commitment: how organization members cognitively and cathectically commit to the organization; and (4) longitudinal repetition: how sustained and continuous change involves repetition of ritual practices and the recognition.

What is now known as the Canning Industry commenced on the 30th January, 1810, when Montalivet, the French Minister of the Interior, wrote to Francois Appert and informed him that his—Appert's—new process for preserving foods was assured of success and thereby granting to the process the official recognition of the French Government. Official recognition also carried with it a money grant of twelve thousand francs—about £500 in those days—Appert won this prize on the principle of “Delhi taken and India saved for one rupee eight annas”—and died in the year 1841 a comparatively poor man and the founder of one of the world's greatest industries. As a result of the warlike operations in which it had been engaged, multitudes of sick and wounded were thrown on the hands of the French Government, and scurvy was terribly prevalent in the fleets. Hence the French Government gave a public notice that it would award a prize to anyone who should discover a cheap and satisfactory method of preserving foodstuffs, without either drying or pickling, so that they could be kept for a long period and still retain the natural flavour and other characteristics of the fresh product. Appert had worked at and perfected his process during the preceding ten or fifteen years and had thoroughly assured himself of its practicability. He was therefore well prepared to demonstrate the details before the Board of Arts and Manufactures of which Board Gay Lussac had been a member since the year 1805. The report of this body to the Minister of the Interior was entirely favourable, as was also that of General Caffarelli, the Maritime Prefect of Brest. Caffarelli had found that soups and vegetables prepared by Appert's process had retained their goodness after three months' bottling, and he had been able to supply what seemed to the diners to be fresh vegetables in mid‐winter. It need hardly be said that Appert's process for preserving foods is the one in use now. Appert, however, knew nothing of the principles on which his process depended, nor did anyone else at that time. He supposed putrefaction to be due to the action of the air alone. In this view he was supported by the great authority of Gay Lussac who, it will be remembered, imagined atmospheric oxygen to be the cause. Appert at the request of the Minister of the Interior wrote a short book on the subject—a practical treatise explaining the methods of preserving animal and vegetable substances. This book was almost at once translated into several languages. It would seem that one of the chief advantages that Appert hoped the French people would gain by his invention was the saving of sugar. Up to that time the only means of preserving fruit other than by drying was to immerse the fruit in strong syrup made with cane sugar, and sugar was almost impossible to obtain in France at that time owing to war conditions. He also says that the French Government wished to draw “the utmost advantage from the productions of our soil in order to develop our agriculture and manufactures, and to diminish the consumption of foreign commodities” ! This is exactly what we in this country are trying to do now in the building up of a trade in canned food, a hundred and twenty years later. The English translator of Appert's work complacently observes:—

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

APPARENTLY, informed gossip has it that the transfer of the Library Association's own library to the British Library is all agreed (at the time of writing) bar the actual signatures to a document of sale.