Ronald J. Stupak’s research while affiliated with The Harvard Drug Group and other places

Construction of new facilities in the healthcare arena is an ongoing, almost daily, occurrence. The desire to build wisely and effectively is evidenced at the Anne Arundel Medical Center which has attracted healthcare executives from all over the country who come to view, analyze, and experience the beauty, utility and interdependencies of the buildings and facilities that constitute “the AAMC campus.” However, too often these executive visitors and benchmarking experts tend to focus on the technical, architectural, engineering, concrete aspects of the hospital, while naively overlooking and/or giving short shrift to the more critical behavioral dynamics of the construction process. The ultimate success of any building project requires a clear understanding by the leadership of “where people are coming from,” so that both the design and the development of the final product can be brought under the synthesizing umbrella of patient care, clinical excellence, individual safety, and community responsibility. Not only must the leadership determine and drive the strategic thrust toward the final outcome; in addition, they must make sure that they allow significant colleagues to be actively, operationally, and symbolically engaged in a process that ends up in a structural outcome that everyone is proud to own, to see, and to inhabit.

The contemporary forces impacting teachers and teaching are capable of becoming an overwhelming, uncontrollable wave of disaster or an opportunity for proactively redesigning teaching at a higher level of commitment, performance, and relevance to make and shape critically important intellectual and societal contributions for the future. This symposium aims to galvanize the teachers in post-secondary education to reject the deadly viruses of reactive fear, credentialed complacency, and intellectual rigidity in their current stages and replace them with proactive options, alternatives, and designs. More specifically, this Introduction clarifies why the respective articles were commissioned to appear in this symposium based on the reasons, concerns, and observations that stimulated the Editor to pursue and design a symposium on teaching in the social sciences. The concluding contention of this Introduction is that all teachers can, and must, influence the events in both their personal and professional lives by actively immersing themselves in the values, visions, and cultural anchors of their profession, discipline, craft, society, and belief systems. There is no doubt in the Editor's mind that the symposium presentations will add much substance that will help make all of us great teachers. “What in context beguiles, out of context mortifies.” David Wayne

This article reveals that teaching is applicable to far more than just traditional settings of scholarship. It demonstrates the effective (though usually unwitting) application of modern adult learning theory and technique to the effective development, change, and administration of organizations.

The authors believe that health care and the courts, through their commitments to positive purpose, are the fundamental keepers of life and liberty in American society. In fact, they postulate that the power of positive purpose works in every sector—public, private, and not-for-profit. More specifically, by the use of data, operational examples, and cases, this article shows how high performing hospitals, courts, and other organizations make optimism tangible by developing concepts, theories, and policies based on positive values. Effective court and hospital leaders take the abstractions and hopes of wishes and dreams and make them concrete and operational in a caring, sensitive, and humane way. Increasingly with the new generation of employees, loyalty and motivation are based more on affirmative values anchored in empowerment, participation, involvement, and spirituality than on cash. Leaders in health care and the courts must possess and be able to communicate a clear set of positive values to these individuals. Consequently, the authors show that we in health care and the court arena can influence the events in our personal lives and in our organizations’ lives by making the values, visions, and cultural anchors in our organizational settings the foundations of performance. Strong leadership that ties the organizational goals to uplifting values based on a committed sense of optimism is the key to confronting creatively the philosophical, strategic, organizational, and operational changes necessary to improving the institutional effectiveness of health care and the law as we move into the new millenium. As reflective-practitioner leaders, it is our responsibility to be the catalysts and role models for our professional colleagues by retaining, communicating, and demonstrating a profound sense of optimism and a high level of performance in judicial and health care organizations.

Too many colleges and universities continue to remain archaic in their outdated administrative structures anchored in faculties that are too self-satisfied and too self-centered to take a lead in bringing about mutual accountability systems and behaviors on their respective campuses. More specifically, numerous liberal arts colleges continue to spend too much time looking inward, planning too much from memory rather than from imagination, suffer from faculty hubris and indifference, and do not demonstrate the market sophistication needed to be viable and visible, let alone excellent, in the changed economic world of the past decade. Therefore, in order to accentuate the contextual anchors, communication techniques, practical realities, benchmark comparabilities, sophisticated interdependence, marketing concepts, and mutual accountability required to move beyond mere survival, this article will describe, develop, and delineate “perception management” as a strategic design and action agenda for turning passive reactions into proactive realities at liberal arts colleges in particular and the public sector in general.

A thin but important line needs to be drawn between a theory creating political reality and one describing political reality. This distinction is at the core of what continues to divide political theory: The question is whether political scientists should strive for theories that describe reality in the tradition of science, or should they attempt to develop theories that describe reality in terms of what ought to be changed or remain the same. Regardless of one's side on this "is" versus "ought" issue, there are common concerns beyond constructing reality that must be addressed: namely, power, ethics, organizations, and context. Clearly, one lives by means of theories; therefore, we hope that this article gives all participants involved in the "is/ought" dialogue a better understanding of what a theory is, how it can be used, how it can be abused, and its impact on political analysis.

Involvement in formulating, implementing or evaluating public policy initiatives, regulatory requirements, or executive/legislative interaction provides a rich opportunity for "reflective practitioners" of public policy to inform the outside community on how the government really operates. However, their close involvement in the process requires a multifaceted methodological approach to ensure objectivity and clarity. The combination of participant observation and case study offers such a vehicle. This approach may create an expanded qualitative methodological vehicle for reflective practitioners to inform students of public policy by breaking out of the confining and simplistic "iron-triangle" model, as well as adding "substantive flesh" to the "stark skeletons" of systems analysis, operations research, rational incrementalism, and logical positivism. Though the search is for objectivity in the social sciences, this does not mean that one is required to become a cybernetic machine or to pursue the study of politics and policy to the exclusion of the involved actor's perspective. The development of this article will hopefully add behavioral, operational, and methodological legitimacy for the reflective practitioner's input to the existing academic, journalistic, and impressionistic literature on the policy-making process.

In order to understand both the man and his contributions, this symposium is an attempt to construct an operational code based on the historical records and the data of W. Edwards Deming. Operational code is defined as those Deming guidelines and actions believed to be essential for the effective productivity of high performing individuals and organizations. It is assumed that these Deming rules and principles have general applicability to public and private organizations in the USA, and throughout the world. Because today one hears more discussion of the views of commentators and less discussion from the practitioners themselves, the thrust of this symposium is with the use of personal power and the elaboration of Deming’s compositions, books, letters, correspondence, and personal lectures on the management process as interpreted by both professional managers and Deming scholars. This development of an operational code hopefully will add critically important dimensions and synergy to the many biographical, historical, and eulogistic materials on Deming scattered in various journals, archives, and libraries.