Erica Gabrielle Foldy

Research suggests advances in students’ multicultural competence following multicultural counseling training. Increasingly, however, multicultural counseling courses have emphasized self awareness, which has increased the affective demands of these courses and student resistance to learning the material. This paper proposes a pedagogical model to enhance multicultural counseling training that attends both to content and process variables that may impact classroom learning. Its fundamental premise is that psychological safety, the belief that the classroom is safe for taking interpersonal risks, must be present for increasing knowledge and awareness around the charged, and often taboo, topics of race and culture in multicultural counseling training. The model integrates research from psychology, education, and management, including identity threat, culture-centered teaching practices, racial identity, and learning frames. The authors conclude with implications for classroom teaching.

Attention to the relational dimensions of leadership represents a new frontier of leadership research and is an expression of the growing scholarly interest in the conditions that foster collective action within and across boundaries. This article explores the antecedents of collaboration from the perspective of social change organizations engaged in processes of collaborative governance. Using a constructionist lens, the study illuminates the question how do social change leaders secure the connectedness needed for collaborative work to advance their organization's mission? The article draws on data from a national, multi-year, multi-modal qualitative study of social change organizations and their leaders. These organizations represent disenfranchised communities which aspire to influence policy makers and other social actors to change the conditions that affect their members' lives. Narrative analysis of transcripts from in-depth interviews in 38 organizations yielded five leadership practices that foster strong relational bonds either within organizations or across boundaries with others. The article describes how these practices nurture interdependence either by forging new connections, strengthening existing ones, or capitalizing on strong ones.

In summary, these exemplary non-profit organizations were often very strategic in how they framed problems, solutions and the people they served. This suggests that public organizations could also be more deliberate in their framing processes. Organizational leaders might want to talk explicitly about the shifts they are trying to create, and whether these fit together or act at cross purposes, in addition to how well they match the organization’s goals and mission. Prompting cognitive shifts is at the heart of public leadership.

This chapter describes an approach for teaching reflective practice in the action science/action inquiry tradition. We offer a theoretical background for our approach and then break it down into three key stages: (1) understanding the social construction of reality; (2) recognizing one's own contribution to that construction; and (3) taking action to reshape that construction. We articulate key concepts (e.g. the ladder of inference and competing commitments) and tools (e.g. the change immunity map and the learning pathways grid) for each stage. We end with suggestions for assignments that integrate learning across stages and concepts. In short, we offer a conceptually grounded set of concrete practices for teaching reflective practice.

A traditional view of scholarly quality defines rigor as the application of method and assumes an implicit connection with relevance. But as an applied field, public administration requires explicit attention to both rigor and relevance. Interpretive scholars' notions of rigor demand an explicit inclusion of relevance as an integral aspect of quality. As one form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry illuminates how this can be done. Appreciating this contribution requires a deeper knowledge of the logic of narrative inquiry, an acknowledgement of the diversity of narrative approaches, and attention to the implications for judging its quality. We use our story about community-based leadership research to develop and illustrate this argument.

The Collaborative raises three areas in which more dialogue would be useful. First, they express a desire for more data about how I was seen by my informants of color. They use that point to raise broader questions about validity: How can I, as a white person, know what is not being said by my informants of color? How can I be sure that my informants were candid with me, given the ‘strong taboos that prohibit revealing oneself . . . to the white world'? Second, they point out that my dissertation research was not emancipatory or mutual: it was a relatively traditional qualitative design, with a clear demarcation between researcher and researched. Finally, they raise the concept of ‘critical humility' and the spirit of inquiry in doing this work. I will address each of these areas in turn.

Public-sector organizations tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse than private-sector organizations, leading to the challenge of enhancing heterogeneous work group effectiveness. Recent work suggests that a group's "diversity perspective," or set of beliefs about the role of cultural diversity, moderates diverse group performance. One perspective, the integration and learning perspective, argues that heterogeneous groups function better when they believe that cultural identities can be tapped as sources of new ideas and experiences about work. However, simply holding the integration and learning perspective may not be sufficient. Research on general group learning has shown that it requires particular behaviors and cognitive frames. This article integrates recent work on diversity perspectives with long-standing research on team learning to propose a conceptual model of learning in culturally diverse groups. It suggests that both the integration and learning perspective and more generic learning frames and skills must be present.

This reader uses an alternative approach to gender at work to provoke new thinking about traditional management topics, such as leadership and negotiation. Presents students with an alternative conceptual approach to gender in the workplace. Connects gender with other dimensions of difference such as race and class for a deeper understanding of diversity in organizations. Illustrates how traditional images of competence and the ideal worker result in narrow ways of thinking about work, limiting both opportunity and organizational effectiveness. Provokes new ways of thinking about leadership, human resource management, negotiation, globalization and organizational change.

Non-profit and for-profit organizations are both engaging with the opportunities and challenges of a demographically diverse workforce. However, their different missions, structures and constituencies can result in varied approaches to addressing difference. This paper, based on broader dissertation research, compares the intentions and experiences of two small organizations, a for-profit and a non-profit, both of which reemphasize inclusion as a guiding principle. However, they manifest these principles in very different ways, with divergent implications for their employees' experiences at work.

Handbook of Action Research draws together the different strands of action research, reveals their diverse applications and demonstrates their interrelations. The text articulates an emergent, participatory worldview that will challenge the modernist paradigm and value system.

This far-reaching volume, in illustrating the latest approaches in social inquiry, moves the field forward with innovative insights and participatory practices. It grapples with questions of how to integrate knowledge with action, how to collaborate with co-researchers in the field, and how to present the necessarily "messy" components of such participative research in a coherent fashion. The organization of the volume reflects the many different issues and levels of analysis represented.