Editorial

Citation

Cunningham, I. (2007), "Editorial", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2007.08121aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of the journal for 2007. One significant change is that Anne Gimson has been appointed Deputy Editor with the remit to handle authored articles, including having them peer reviewed. This change is designed to continue to develop the journal as a leader in organizational learning and development ideas and practices. Anne has been an active member of the Editorial Advisory Board for some years and her new role will help us to spread the net for new and exciting material for the journal. Anyone with ideas for new articles is welcome to contact her at: anne@stratdevint.com

In this issue you will find material that underscores the need for approaches that are learner-centered and business-centered. Christine Bell kicks off with her piece on “Using employee volunteering programs to develop leadership skills”. She shows how practical programs of this nature can respond both to the needs of the individual and the organization. R. Michael Bokeno continues this theme in his article “Dialogue at work.? What it is and isn’t” and helpfully debunks some myths about dialogue processes. He shows how dialogic modes can provide a wholly different arena for exploring issues affecting individuals and their organizations.

Harry Gray makes the case for “Creating older entrepreneurs” and indicates ways in which organizations and governments can respond better to the needs of older persons. Shelley Morrisette and Mike Schraeder take up the theme of entrepreneurship in the context of the need for business schools to respond better to the requirements of organizations. They make the case for integrating entrepreneurship into business school education in their article “Affirming entrepreneurship: the best hope for organizations”.

The last authored article is by Liz Cornish and Alfredo Fernández-Valmayor on “Women leaders”. They offer advice to women new into a role and argues for organizations to personalize development processes for women.

The review article on “How to learn what you already knew” shows again the need to adopt more learner-centered practices in training and to link these to business needs. “E learning comes of age?” reviews how e learning providers have to be more oriented to the needs of individual learners and of organizations and offers a welcome critique of many of the naïve expectations about the implementation of e learning.

“Moving towards a learning-based organization” provides valuable research evidence on the use of a learning organization approach. The last review piece (“How employees can ease the pain of job losses”) focuses on the important issue of supporting people through downsizing and redundancy and indicates the value of more individually-based approaches such as counseling.

Ian CunninghamUniversity of Sussex. ian@stratdevint.com