Improvement is fundamental to the competitiveness of networks and requires the participating firms to collaborate in identifying and introducing changes. This book presents collaborative strategic improvement as a cycle of activities in which firms in a network can engage together. Drawing on actual cases, authors link this cycle with disciplined action learning as a means of building upon experience generated through collaborative action. They describe how a network can learn from experience and deploy that learning in the marketplace.

This book explores the challenges of sustainable agri-food supply chains. It presents and discusses nine cases of organizational innovation, covering different phases of food production and facing different challenges, by proposing alternative models to the traditional paradigm of scale and leverage to design supply chain in these industries.

Volume 30 of Research in Organizational Change and Development brings together contributions from colleagues around the globe with powerful insights and potentially relevant impact for researching and practicing organization change and development during and post the pandemic.

Research Methods for Operations Management, second edition is a toolkit of research approaches primarily for advanced students and beginner researchers but also a reference book for any researcher in OM. Many students begin their career in research limited by the one or few approaches taken by their department. The concise, accessible overviews found here equip them with an understanding of a variety of methods and how to use them, enabling them to tailor their research project to their own strengths and goals. The more seasoned researcher will find comprehensive descriptions and analyses on a wide variety of research approaches. This updated and enhanced edition responds to the latest developments in OM, including the growing prominence of services and production of intangible products, and the increasing use of secondary data and of mixed approaches. Alternative research approaches are included and explored to help with the early planning of research. This edition also includes expanded literature review and analysis to guide students towards the next steps in their reading, and more detailed step-by-step advice to tie theory with the researcher’s own practice. Including contributions from an impressive range of the field’s leading thinkers in OM research, this is a guide that no-one embarking on an OM research project should be without.

Action research is a term used to describe a family of related approaches that integrate theory and action with a goal of addressing important organizational, community, and social issues together with those who experience them. It focuses on the creation of areas for collaborative learning and the design, enactment and evaluation of liberating actions through combining action and research, reflection and action in an ongoing cycle of cogenerative knowledge. While the roots of these methodologies go back to the 1940s, there has been a dramatic increase in research output and adoption in university curricula over the past decade. This is now an area of high popularity among academics and researchers from various fields—especially business and organization studies, education, health care, nursing, development studies, and social and community work. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research brings together the many strands of action research and addresses the interplay between these disciplines by presenting a state-of-the-art overview and comprehensive breakdown of the key tenets and methods of action research as well as detailing the work of key theorists and contributors to action research.

The third edition of The SAGE Handbook of Action Research presents an updated version of the bestselling text, including new chapters covering emerging areas in healthcare, social work, education and international development, as well as an expanded ‘skills’ section which includes new consultant-relevant materials. Building on the strength of the previous landmark editions, Hilary Bradbury has carefully developed this edition to ensure it follows in their footsteps by mapping the current state of the discipline, as well as looking to the future of the field and exploring the issues at the cutting edge of the action research paradigm today. This volume is an essential resource for scholars and professionals engaged in social and political inquiry, healthcare, international development, new media, organizational research and education.

Organizations change, usually driven by strategies, yet strategic management and organizational change are generally understood as separate domains in the business world. This book integrates the behavioural dynamics of learning, change and strategy at and across individual, team, interdepartmental, group and organizational levels. This new edition emphasizes what can be done in organizations to enable strategy to be effective and to help organizations to change and learn. Central to the book is a reflexive engagement approach through inviting the readers to apply concepts to their own organizational situations and via reflective exercises. The authors also offer cases from a wide range of organizations, from universities to steel and digital businesses. This practical book addresses managers, consultants, students and researchers and provides specific orientation to assist each readership group to learn from its own perspective.