Participative Transformation: Learning and Development in Practising Change

In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.

About the Author

Dr Roger Klev is Head of Leadership Development at Reinertsen AS and Associate Professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has over 25 years combined research and teaching with very direct involvement in organizational and strategic change in a variety of companies and is a published author and conference speaker. Morten Levin is Professor of Organisation and Work Science at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He holds graduate degrees in engineering and in sociology. And has held research, teaching and examiner posts at universities throughout Scandinavia and at Cornell in the USA. Levin has directed four large Ph.D.programs in action research. He has won awards for teaching and authored award winning papers, journal articles and several books.