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There are very few people in the world of management development who have not acknowledged the need to evaluate their attempts to influence managers. This has led to many research studies which have been useful and interesting to varying degrees in the situations where they were carried out, but there is a general feeling that evaluation research has failed to provide the breakthrough in management development that was expected of it.

It has recently been suggested that the learning organisation (LO) is dead (Pedler, 2013). The authors make the case here that it is still alive. This paper provides a brief history of LO and organisational learning, follows this with some survey findings, a discussion and an exploration of some related contemporary issues and concludes with an overview and summary of the conclusions.

Survey of practitioners.

From this small survey, whilst some of the 16 respondents are still excited by the idea, a larger group sees the learning organisation as more of a background concept, performed in ways that might not fit with the aspirations of 20 years ago.

The authors started with the question: is the LO idea still alive in 2016? No clear answer emerges. Given the variety of the responses, it is difficult to sum them up in a simple way. The yea-sayer will find plenty of evidence for the LO’s continued existence and relevance, but the nay-sayers will also feel at least partly vindicated. What does emerge clearly arise from the mixed messages, are the opportunities for further research.

This paper calls for further research and suggests useful directions.

LO is still seen as socially useful.

The paper is based on small empirical sample of practitioners who display multivocality on this concept.

The “competence” movement as an approach to education, training and development is based on a belief in defining purpose and outcome in standardized, measurable terms. It parallels other concerns for control, such as performance indicators and standards, and returns to many of the features of the behavioural objectives movement in the 1960s which similarly paralleled management by objectives and various forms of scientific management. The competence movement is contentious but the nature of the debate is not clear. Suggests that the debate can be mapped in three dimensions: micro to macro issues, theoretical to practical issues, and technical to political issues. Explores this by examining the position of the main stakeholders who have an interest in the competence movement. The competence movement tends to attempt to impose a simplifying model of education, training, learning development and work and organizational process, and many of its problems can be seen to result from this simplification such as the reduction of all learning to a single stairway of levels.

The purpose of the paper is to assess the extent to which these practitioners ' perspectives and practices match Willis ' s conception of a Revans “gold standard” of action learning.

This study adopts a qualitative design and methodology based on interviews and the collection of cases or accounts of practice, and upon the analysis of both. This exploratory study draws on 24 cases of academic practice of action learning within higher education (HE) institutions in the UK and 21 cases drawn from practitioners in the UK National Health Service.

Whilst action learning is shown to be a context sensitive and protean methodology, the findings demonstrate that approaches to practice are not as divergent as anticipated. On the evidence of this study, many aspects of action learning practice remain rooted in the principles originally established by Revans, sometimes termed.

The limitations of this study stem from its exploratory nature using small samples in the NHS and HE sectors. Nonetheless, the results could stimulate further empirical research on approaches to the practice of action learning in a range of other contexts.

The study provides a basis on which practitioners can critically reflect on their own professional practices, and a means to review their own purposes in making use of action learning in their work situations.

The study extends earlier research by confirming the persistence of Revans Classical Principles in the present practice across two professional practice contexts.

Learning from experience assumes particular importance at times of fundamental transition because inherited learning becomes irrelevant or misleading. The current fundamental transition is from work for the production of knowledge to work for the production of identify/meaning (mentofacture to spiroculture). The accompanying transition in terms of learning from experience is from individual discovery of personal and environmental realities to collective meaning making. Examines the contemporary concern with “dialogue” as a core process of collective meaning making in organizational learning and proposes a process of meta‐dialogue as an approach to facilitating learning from experience in a way appropriate to the times. Meta‐dialogue involves sharing and reaching an understanding of the ways in which beliefs under discussion in dialogue can be believed to be true or useful.

An evaluation of management development courses for senior officers in the Health Service has been sponsored by the DHSS at the Polytechnic of Central London.

Personnel Review (PR) is a leading human resource management journal. The article endeavors to provide a retrospective of the journal to commemorate the journal's 50th anniversary.

The article employs a variety of bibliometric analysis techniques such as performance analysis, co-authorship analysis, bibliographic coupling, and negative binomial regression to provide a retrospective of PR.

The performance analysis suggests that PR has grown steadily in PR's publications and citations. Though most of PR's contributions originate from Europe, a geographical shift toward global contributions has been witnessed in recent years. Besides that, a culture of collaboration among PR authors has manifested and proliferated over time. Though a third of European studies are qualitative and more than 90% of Asian studies are quantitative, PR studies, as a whole, are moving away from conceptual and qualitative to empirical and quantitative research. Next, the bibliographic coupling of the PR corpus indicates five major themes—namely, human resource management policies and practices; personnel competency, experience, and well-being; career management and employee engagement; strategic human resource management; and organizational culture and workplace environment. Finally, the negative binomial regression reveals that article age, abstract and article length and number of keywords and references significantly drive PR citations.

The article represents the inaugural retrospective of PR.

Addresses the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance (UA), of US and German staffing decisions – but uses a different viewpoint. Discusses and challenges the hitherto accepted meaning of individual positions of countries UA, using Höfstede’s guide. Adumbrates the concept of UA at the two levels of society and organization, linking the two levels. Concludes that low Höfstede UA index does not necessarily mean no or little need for certainty even in France and Denmark.

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 theories.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the history, the present and the future or the learning organization as a concept and a practical approach, from the perspective of Professor John Burgoyne.

This conversation piece follows the development of the concept from its early days into the current debates and the possible directions for future development.

The interview highlights an interesting path the learning organization took in the UK, stemming from a drive for more and better management education, and evolving into a systemic view on various aspects of organizational capabilities, concerned primarily with organizational longevity and adaptability. The thinking behind Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell’s model of a learning company is discussed. Several “hot” topics are identified, either overlooked in the past, or becoming more relevant in the modern world, precipitated by technological and societal changes.

The interview provides an insight into the thinking of one of the best known authors in the field. Understanding of the concept’s evolution path, as well as the influences from other fields such as innovation and CSR, could be useful for practitioners and academics working in the subject area, wishing to identify promising future directions for research and practice.