The management of change has become characterized by an atheoretical pragmatism, overfocused on the political aspects of the change process. Emerging interest in the learning organization provides an occasion to remedy this, by developing a theory of change which is more congruent with the requirement to build learning capacity within organizations. The result should be to place learning theory more centrally within the theory of planned organizational change. This should also reinvigorate action research by defining a wider range of learning technologies and perspectives. The argument is developed by first reviewing theories of learning employed in organizational change. The notion of communities-of-practice is then developed as a core concept to highlight the paradoxical processes of inertia and change centered on groups. A series of examples is then drawn from a recent action research project in order to illustrate the possibilities for applying learning theory. Finally, a research agenda is set out for exploring the role of communities-of-practice, with some preliminary observations from a study of small-medium enterprises.

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 Boardroom reward continues to attract controversy, despite the structural changes in corporate governance arrangements over the past decade. This study responds to Pettigrew's (1992) call to eschew over-ambitious attempts to demonstrate causality in the area of executive management and firm performance, in favour of redressing the overwhelmingly prescriptive bias in the literature. A simple but important task is to 'begin to provide some basic descriptive findings about boards and their directors', and open up 'the black box of board behaviour' -in this case, that of board remuneration committees. Interpretations of comparative market signals play a part in deliberations between the leading actors responsible for determining executive directors' salary, bonuses and other emoluments. But the position is more deeply textured than the reified influence of (global) market forces sometimes implied in the normative literature. The study reported, based on qualitative interviews, taps in to the nuances of decision taking in respect of boardroom reward management, including remuneration committee members' reactions to corporate governance reforms. Such initiatives locate non-executive directors in the role of intermediaries in the principal-agent relationship, explicitly assigned to resolve the conflict of interest inherent in boardroom remuneration systems, while simultaneously they are expected to play a team role as board members responsible for the overall strategy and operation of the company. The study is indicative: an attempt to open up research questions around the context and process of boardroom reward management that earlier analyses may have ignored or overlooked.

In the United States in the last few years there has developed a notion of “strategic human resource management” (HRM). As with other high‐sounding phrases in the management of people, first reactions are likely to divide between “let's have some of it” to “it won't work here”, with the latter possibly predominating. Where American pragmatism inclines towards trying new things to see if they work, British pragmatism tends to mean sticking with the actual and the evidently possible. Nevertheless, reviewing ideas which run ahead of practice can, on occasion, be useful in suggesting new possibilities. This article will review the implications of “strategic HRM” and ask whether it has any relevance to some of the issues which currently exercise personnel managers in the UK — notably, decentralising the personnel function and increasing workforce flexibility.

The concept of the 'learning organization', with its roots in self-development and actionlearning, has recently caught the imagination of many organizations and researchers. However, emerging definitions are creating ambiguity. There is, therefore, a need to add substance to them, and widen our understanding of what the concept means, by concentrating on what is meant by 'learning', and focusing on exactly how adults learn. Understanding and facilitating adult learning in organizations is, by and large, a confused activity that fails to connect with an individual's other experiences and needs, and with what modern psychology and research have to teach us. In particular, learning and skills need to be linked to the questioning of purpose and value in an organization.