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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/00197859510147058. When citing the article, please cite: Peter Cusins, (1995), “Action learning revisited”, Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 27 Iss 4 pp. 3 - 10.

Action learning is defined as a dynamic syndrome (flowing together) of four primary activities, each of which enhances the others. In practice, experiential learning is given focus by being problem‐oriented. This combination of experiential learning and problem‐solving is supplemented and enhanced by the acquisition of additional relevant knowledge and the support of a co‐learner group. Describes in detail the processes and how they interact, and provides practical checklists for faculty to assess their facilitation performance.

Outlines, with the aid of diagrams, the core concepts of systems theory as a basis for understanding the applications of systems thinking in organizations. Explains ideas like waste, outcomes and feedback in systems terms, and links systems thinking with quality thinking. Once systems thinking is understood, understanding organizational systems and quality management becomes easy. The diagrams and summarized principles are useful for anyone wanting to teach the concepts to others.

Many organizations now utilize action learning, and it is applied increasingly throughout the world. Action learning appears in numerous variants, but generically it is a form of learning through experience, “by doing”, where the task environment is the classroom, and the task the vehicle. Two previous reviews of the action learning literature by Alan Mumford respectively covered the field prior to 1985 and the period 1985‐1994. Both reviews included books as well as journal articles. This current review covers the period 1994‐2000 and is limited to publicly available journal articles. Part 1 of the Review was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning (Vol. 15 No. 2) and included a bibliography and comments. Part 2 extends that introduction with a schema for categorizing action learning articles and with comments on representative articles from the bibliography.

Business strategies are reformulated constantly as organisations respond to competitors’ actions and changes in business technology. Changed strategies require supporting management structures, the design of which is facilitated by knowing the management competencies existing within the organisation. Management developers must identify common competencies that managers need, irrespective of the organisation structure, and fine tune management’s skills to meet the specific requirements of organisational strategies. Suggests how “common” competencies can be identified and a competency framework developed. A competency development approach is shown through action‐learning and sources identified for management developers.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the journal and organizational learning over the years.

The approach adopted is that of providing a viewpoint perspective to look at the concept of the learning organization.

By looking at organizational learning partly from the perspective of a publisher, this will, hopefully, provoke reflections, particularly amongst others engaged in both the delivery and the consumption of practice and study.

The paper is one of a series commissioned by the journal. Its originality stems from the subject‐matter and the authors' interpretation of organizational learning.

This paper outlines the action learning approach in adult education. To begin, it cites some definitions of action learning and describes the characteristics of this andragogical model through contrasting the common barriers and the benefits. The concept of questioning insight is dealt with in the learning equation. The social aspects of learning from each other in a set environment have been emphasized. With the advent of new technology, the future of action learning is highly promising to the learners, their employers, the education providers and the society. Some useful Web sites are included for those who want to approach learning more about the action learning approach.

Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as teacher‐centred, and built around specific technologies that privilege the teacher as the active, dominant and legitimate principal agent in the educational process. This article analyses a set of photographs that represent an ‘alternative’ educational approach to normalised mainstream schooling, to explore the ways such practices might enact pedagogy within different social relations. Butler’s discussions of performativity and Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, offer a theoretical framework for understanding the educative and political work such visual representations of teachers work might perform, in the construction of capacities to imagine what teachers’ work looks like, with implications for capacities to enact teaching. The photographs analysed present a pedagogy in which the teacher is less visibly central and less overtly directive in relation to children’s learning than in normalised pedagogy. Thus, in important respects, they offer material from which to construct a different vision of what teachers’ work looks like, and, consequently, to enact teachers’ work differently. In this article I explore a set of photographs of Montessori methods at Blackfriars School in Sydney in the early twentieth century. I do so in order to establish whether such photographs offer a representation of teaching that differs significantly from conventional ‘normalised’ understandings of teachers’ work. This in turn is intended to inform one part of a transformative agenda to address problematic aspects of contemporary schooling.

Suggests that more and more organizations are attempting to establish a culture of learning that values the knowledge that employees have derived from learning how to perform effectively in the workplace. Reviews recent contributions to the literature on aspects of managerial learning and addresses the question “how do managers learn best in the workplace?” Draws from articles published between 1994‐1996 in eight journals: Executive Development; Journal of Management Development; Journal of Organizational Change Management; Leadership & Organization Development Journal; Management Development Review; Team Performance Management; The Journal of Workplace Learning; The Learning Organization. Focuses on four themes: managerial learning and work; coaching, mentoring and team development; competences, managerial learning and the curriculum; work‐based action learning. Concludes with a summary of the implications for managerial learning.

An imperative of any quality system is the need for training and development of the people who operate the system. Offers a model of how training and development may be integrated into the system and aligned with the business aim of the company and the personal development of the individual.