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For some years the author has grappled with the various trends and fashions which have always appeared to pervade the world of the organisation development specialist. It has become fashionable to ensure that one is au fait with as many “recently published” approaches as possible, in order to appear that one is abreast of progress made by those regarded as innovative among their peers.

A recent training programme for senior and middle managers of Leeds Business School is examined. Following a five‐week assessment and diagnosis period, which included a two‐day outdoor activities course, participants were able to draw up their own plan of development which met specific identified needs, drawing on the resources of Leeds Business School. The effect of the programme has been to create a number of “development champions” for further staff development.

Perhaps no other obligation is as critical to the stability of a society than that of maintaining the integrity of government. For a government to function effectively, the public must be governed by leaders in whom they can put their trust. It is, in short, the most rudimentary concept of self‐government, although it may not be shared throughout the world. If government leaders, elected, appointed, anointed or even those who have seized their position of power by brute force, are perceived by the people they govern as untrustworthy, the stability of the respective society is effectively undermined. One need only go to countries like Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Guatemala, Nigeria or the Eastern European countries, to witness this cause and effect relationship.

This paper aims to help develop an understanding of how complexity theory may be applied to an understanding of leadership and organizational dynamics and contributes to the growing body of literature in the same subject.

Stacey's theory of complex responsive processes is used to analyse leadership and organizational dynamics in an unusual example of an organizational simulation exercise on an MBA programme.

This article shows how the theory of complex responsive processes may offer the potential to understand episodes of emergent, and potentially creative, forms of organization and leadership. It demonstrates how to recognise and work with the qualities of participation, conversational life, anxiety, diversity, and with unpredictability and paradox.

This paper complements previous articles in LODJ that seek to use complexity theories in the analysis of leadership and organizational dynamics. It demonstrates how an analysis from the perspective of complex responsive processes differs from that of complexity theories that focus on systemic rather than process thinking and that do not incorporate insights from psychology and social theory.

Discusses the importance of bringing to the awareness of all employees the “unwritten ground rules” (UGRs) that operate in an organization. UGRs can be used to transform an organization’s culture to a new set of ground rules that directly reinforce behaviours that contribute to strategic organizational objectives and excellent customer service. Defines and describes unwritten ground rules and then discusses their relevance to customer service and the achievement of organizational objectives. Examples of negative and positive unwritten ground rules that were described by staff to be at the core of their organization’s actions are provided. Provides a model that defines unwritten ground rules in four quadrants of organizational activities and suggests that all four quadrants need to have effective ground rules for an organization to succeed. Finally, it provides an UGR change process that involves seven elements for changing the UGRs to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives and a truly “balanced scorecard”.

“Corporate planning” is the term which, perhaps more than any other, epitomises the adoption of business management techniques by the public sector. In Britain, with massive local government reorganisation in 1974, many librarians were forced to come to terms with such techniques whether they liked it or not. Of course, in its purest sense corporate planning applies to the combined operation of an entire organisation be it local authority, university, government department or industrial firm. However, in this paper I do not intend discussing “the grand design” whereby the library is merely a component part of a greater body. Rather, it is my intention to view the library as the corporate body. It is a perfectly possible and very useful exercise to apply the principles of corporate planning, and the management techniques involved, to the running of a library or group of libraries. Indeed, many librarians have already done this either independently or as their part in the corporate plan of their parent organisation.

This paper aims to examine how the work of Ruth Simpson and the subsequent collaborations have contributed to understanding of the gendered constructions of meritocracy, as they apply in organizations.

This paper is a personal analysis of the work of Ruth Simpson and her colleagues and the way in which her work has resonated with me and influenced our joint collaborations. The key questions our work has addressed, both when we work together and with others, include how merit is constructed. Is it gendered? How does it influence organizational outcomes? How is merit recognized? Is merit “performed”? Key theoretical constructs and frameworks are used to address these issues; including, gendered organizational structures and regimes (Acker, 1990; Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Gherardi and Poggio, 2001), the gendered nature of meritocracy (Thornton, 2007; Sommerlad, 2012, Brink van den and Benschop, 2012) and the performance and “stickiness” of meritocracy (Ashcraft, 2013, Bergman and Chalkley, 2007).

The paper reveals alternative ways of interrogating the discourse of meritocracy. Usually taken for granted, as an objective and fair mechanism for the allocation of scarce resources, the concept is examined and found to be much more contingent, unstable and subjective than had previously been considered. The gender-based implications of these findings are assessed.

The implications of the work are to broaden the field and develop frameworks within which we can understand more clearly the way in which merit is understood. Through the work we have done, we have highlighted that merit far from being an objective measure of ability is deeply rooted in contextual and we argue, gendered understandings of contribution, worth and desert.

The practical implications are that firms can no longer rely on discourses of meritocracy to evidence their commitment to equality and fairness. They will need to go further to show a direct link between fairness in the design of processes as well as fairness in the outcomes of these processes. Until these objectives are more clearly articulated, we should continue to shine a light on embedded inequalities.

The social implications are that a call for wider societal understanding of meritocracy should be made. Rather than simply accepting discourses of merit, key constituent groups who have not benefitted from the prevailing orthodoxy should seek to examine the concept and draw their own conclusions. In this manner, the author develops societal mechanisms that do not just purport to ensure equality of outcome for all; they achieve it.

This paper offers an examination of the development of ideas, how we can learn from the work of influential scholars within the field and, in turn, through collaboration, advance understanding.