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Toyota's success in the automotive industry has been attributed to many factors, one of which is their systematic company‐wide problem‐solving approach. While Toyota's structured framework for thinking through problems may offer some interesting insight, it is speculated that how they develop and train their managers to share this thinking with their employees is the key to implementation. The purpose of this paper is to share these issues.

This work utilizes a new and novel technique to examine how Toyota trains and develops their managers to support problem solving. A form of data mining will be used in this research combined with Singular Value Decomposition to mathematically analyze organizational documents from Toyota.

The findings of this research show that the role of management is essential to the successful application of problem solving at Toyota. Results indicate that managers are trained to provide more intense coaching early on the front end of problem solving, specifically in step 2 problem breakdown, so that decision making and involvement of employees can occur more naturally in developing countermeasures.

This research method is solely based on mathematical and statistically analysis of organizational documents to reveal important and latent criteria critical for effectiveness.

This paper provides new insights and understanding of Toyota's 8‐step problem‐solving process. The role of management has been identified as an essential element in coaching and developing employees in the implementation of a company‐wide, systematic problem‐solving methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the drivers that allow for enhanced personal productivity of knowledge-based workers in Central London focusing on the physical and social environment as well as worker’s individual preferences.

A closed-ended questionnaire was sent to employees of eight professional companies (Consultancy, Financial and Media Services) based in Central London. Of the 500 questionnaires sent, 213 were successfully completed and returned, representing a response rate of 42.6 per cent.

The findings from this trial study show that comfort, convenience, IT connectivity, good design and working to a specific time scale were strong drivers of personal productivity. Knowledge workers prefer a flexible range of office settings that enable both a stimulating open and connected work environment, knowledge sharing, collaboration, as well as quiet concentration locations, free of distractions and noise. It was also found that moves of knowledge workers into open-plan office space (and especially fee earners) is normally met with initial resistance. However, there is normally greater acceptance of open space after experiencing an actual move into open-plan, with benefits improving teamwork and communication being highlighted. The research also stresses that office design considerations need to be closer aligned with knowledge worker’s overall well-being and individual psychological needs.

Limited to Central London offices and self-assessed evaluation of productivity drivers within the knowledge worker’s office environment.

Corporate real estate managers and office occupiers, designers and facilities managers can use the findings as part of their workplace strategy by providing a range of flexible workplaces that allow the knowledge worker a place for greater personal productivity through the provision of a well-designed collaborative office environment alongside private and quiet working spaces. Developers and landlords should also be aware of these requirements when taking their decisions.

This paper focuses specifically on the high-productivity knowledge-based work environment, demonstrating that there is a need to consider the collaborative physical and social environment and the individual preferences of knowledge workers to ensure enhanced personal productivity and well-being within the office. This can be achieved through the provision of a well-designed office space that allows for open, connected and comfortable work environments, as well as opportunities to use dedicated concentration spaces that are free of distraction. It was also shown that hot-desking was unanimously disliked by knowledge workers.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

WITH eloquence which we cannot imitate, or repeat, the national loss has been sufficiently expressed by others. It is true, Kipling and William Watson being dead, and Alfred Noyes silent, the poets have not risen to the height of a great occasion, but that is by the way. Our own tribute to the late King must be based on his work for libraries, since any other tribute is general to a whole Empire. Kings can have few hours in which to read and yet some of the stories, true or apocryphal, of King George V. touch upon his reading. He showed, however, a closer interest of late years in libraries than any other of our monarchs has done, and at the opening ceremonies of the National Central Library and the Manchester Public Library he uttered words which are the best slogans that libraries have received. Even if he did not write them—a matter which we have no right to affirm or deny—his utterance of them gave them the royal superscription. We repeat them, as they cannot be too often repeated:—

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the original articulation of Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry (AI), as well as well as the enormous impact and reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary we have decided to issue a reprint the early article by David L. Cooperrider and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with contemporary comments embedded. To be sure the comments offered are brief and serve principally to add points of emphasis to ideas we may have too hurriedly introduced. My comments – placed in indented format along the way – are focused on the content and themes of furthermost relevance to this volume on organizational generativity. In many ways I’ve begun to question today whether there can even be inquiry where there is no appreciation, valuing, or amazement – what the Greeks called thaumazein – the borderline between wonderment and admiration. One learning is that AI’s generativity is not about its methods or tools, but about our cooperative capacity to reunite seeming opposites such as theory as practice, the secular as sacred, and generativity as something beyond positivity or negativity. Appreciation is about valuing the life-giving in ways that serve to inspire our co-constructed future. Inquiry is the experience of mystery, moving beyond the edge of the known to the unknown, which then changes our lives. Taken together, where appreciation and inquiry are wonderfully entangled, we experience knowledge alive and an ever-expansive inauguration of our world to new possibilities.

This article presents a conceptual refiguration of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline's steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.