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Emancipatory Potential of Action Learning: A Critical Analysis

Tara J. Fenwick, University of Alberta, Canada
This article is an early draft of an article which publish on Journal of Organizational Change
Management, 16 (6), 619-632. For the full article and references, please consult the published
source.

Abstract
Action learning methods are popular technologies in programs of organizational learning (OL).
However, from the perspective of critical studies, they are instrumentalist, managerialist,
exclusive in design, decontextualized and a-political. A critical analysis of the oppressive
potential of action learning (AL) is presented along these dimensions. To better realize ALs
emancipatory potential, four enhancements are suggested: 1) focus AL purpose more on workers
interests; 2) confront organizational practices that unjustly marginalize or privilege different
people; 3) acknowledge the complexity, context, and contested nature of learning; and 4)
facilitate AL using democratic power with, not power over, approaches to working with
people towards emancipatory change.

Key words:
Organizational learning, Action learning, Emancipatory learning, Critical management studies

Emancipatory Potential of Action Learning: A Critical Analysis

Introduction
The central problem with organizational learning (OL) from a critical perspective is that it
is most definitely not emancipatory. The overall purpose of OL is, Leavy (1998) explains, to
improve delivery to shareholders. Thus the changes OL seeks are status-quo oriented or selfserving, rather than targeting social transformation. In contrast, emancipatory learning for human
beings is traditionally oriented to purposes of social transformation, social justice and equity: to
form an active civil society and resist exploitation (i.e. by market forces). Foley (2001, p. 28)
defines emancipatory social change as a fundamental departure from dominant practice or
experience . . . [aiming] to free people from some oppression, to free them to take control of their
lives. Thus the very conceptions of emancipatory change and organizational learning, as they are
debated in contemporary literature, appear to be separated by a deep ideological divide.
Amidst the broader field of organizational studies, in which organizational learning is a
recent subset, these critical notions are well-established. Authors employing neo-marxist,
Habermasian, feminist, and other critical orientations have attacked organizational systems,
including management, as oppressive, exclusive and working against broader goals of justice,
community, sustainability and human development (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). Their
analyses, collectively known as critical management studies (CMS), present extensive critique of
the economic ideologies and power relations underpinning organizational structures (Fournier &
Grey, 2000), the discursive practices disciplining and subjugating individuals within these
structures (Townley, 1994), and the legitimacy of management theories and practices (Willmott,
1997). These practices are argued to reproduce processes of privilege and prejudice, ignore
differences and social conflict produced through dimensions of race, class, gender and the nature
of the employment contract, and suppress important questions about whose interests are served
by the organization of work and who is excluded from the construction of knowledge (Alvesson
& Willmott, 1996, p. 11).
In organizational learning studies, however, critical approaches rarely surface, despite the
essentially political nature of organizational knowledge construction and learning initiatives, and
the various calls for more rigorous focus on power and politics in OL (Cooper & Burgoyne,
2000). Setting aside the thorny question about why this should be the case, the present article
attempts to bridge what appears to be an unbridgeable chasm between critical pedagogies and
organizational learning. Can ideological wars be mediated to pursue more emancipatory effects in
organizational learning? Authors in the CMS tradition have suggested incorporating critical
thinking into management education, helping both educators and managers analyse
organizational power-knowledge relations, inequities and oppression, and to question naturalized
structures that shape how people think and act (Willmott, 1997). However, the stirring of critical
thought, even if achievable amidst the dominant market ideologies and management assumptions
structuring contemporary work organizations and business schools, is not the same as
transforming action. This is precisely why the long tradition of critical pedagogy has emphasized
praxis, or critical reflection-within-(collective) action.

This article proposes that action learning, as an approach to organizational learning, can
enable the praxis that holds most potential for emancipatory change at both individual and
organizational levels. Action learning (AL) has become a popular set of technologies in which
groups are facilitated through an inquiry process to solve an organizational problem. The learning
is informal and experiential; occurring through directed experimentation in practice, critical
reflection and dialogue rather than through formal, classroom training. However as later sections
of this article will show, from a critical studies perspective AL is characterized by serious gaps,
and perpetuates conceptual problems endemic in much organizational learning theory. Critical
analysis of these issues suggest that AL may be radically enhanced, so to speak, to be more
emancipatory. The final section of the article describes four proposed enhancements: 1) greater
focus on the workers problems and interests; 2) greater attention to organizational practices and
relations that unjustly exclude or privilege individuals or groups; 3) a process that acknowledges
the complexity, context, and contested nature of learning; and 4) facilitation that uses democratic
power with, not power over, approaches to working with people towards emancipatory
change.
Action Learning Technologies in Organizational Learning
Here, OL is understood generally as learning by an organization that . . .produces
change, real or potential, after a shift in the relationship between thought, organizational action
and environmental response (Gherardi & Nicoloni, p. 46). The specific focus here is upon the
human development of individuals and groups through practice-based learning, usually at local
sites of activity. OL theory has moved a long way from early conceptions of behavioral change
and knowledge acquisition. As Leavy (1998) has summarized, more recent literature concedes
that (1) the nature of learning is not generic; (2) learning has deep layers; (3) learning involves
tacit knowledge and implicit learning processes that are not clearly described in OL literature;
and (4) learning occurs differently in the generation of different forms of knowledge. There is
increasing emphasis on the social construction and enactment of knowledge and on strategic
organizational learning as ecological, fluid, integrative and activity-based (Kuwada, 1998).
However the general movement from an epistemology of [knowledge] possession to one of
practice (Easterby-Smith, Crossan & Nicolini, 2000, p. 788) leaves important questions
unresolved about the linkages between social aspects of learning and individual mental processes.
A complex model proposed by Crossan, Lane and White (1999) is one example of this situated
perspective worked out in organizational contexts. They describe organizational learning as a
tension between exploration, or new knowledge, and exploitation, or using already-developed
knowledge, through both psychological and social processes (intuiting, interpreting, integrating,
and institutionalizing) that link cognition with action at individual, group, and organizational
levels. Fundamentally this debate is about the learner-workers relationship to what is learned and
where (environment, activity, group culture, language, technology involved, and so on).
In the world of practice, these socio-cultural, practice-based, organization-driven
understandings of OL have materialized in a variety of technologies calling themselves action
learning (AL). Originating in writings of Reg Revans (1980), AL has become a popular method
of organizational development, embracing a wide variety of approaches (Elden & Chisholm,
1993). While these approaches vary according to the degree of inquiry, critical reflection,
management control, and technical problem-solving incorporated in an AL initiative, they have in
common certain characteristics. That is, typically a group of people works collaboratively to

address an actual organizational dilemma. Facilitators usually help with the problem analysis,
group data collection and mapping, formation of action strategies and their experimentation to
address the problem, and attendant learning. Reflective activities may be deployed to help people
question and reframe their action process, analysis, or underlying assumptions. Thus, as
Marquardt (1999) explains, in action learning individuals create both knowledge and solutions
for the organization, while forming social networks that can continue generating knowledge.
A case study of AL for leadership development in a public sector organization conducted
by Bowerman and Peters (1999) demonstrates the inevitable conflict between organizational
expectations of visible, value-added outcomes, and the nature of learning experienced by
participants. Significant informal and experiential learning develops in a recursive process that is
highly differentiated among individuals. Its outcomes are not necessarily visible, testable, or
completely developed at the time the organization wants evidence, argue Bowerman and Peters.
Their study reveals interesting tensions between managers and workers interests, different
understandings and valuing of knowledge, and the difficulties of imposing an instrumentalist
approach on the complex process and contested purposes of organizational learning.
Critical Perspectives on Action Learning Technologies for Organizational Learning
The problem, as Willmott (1997) has argued, is that AL does not fundamentally challenge
prevailing organizational structures of inequity, nor address the contradictory power relations that
may altogether obstruct emancipation in organizations. Critical studies center power as a core
issue. To understand human learning we must, from a critical perspective, understand the
structures of dominance that express or govern the social relationships and competing cultural
practices within the organization. Widely diverse fields of critical studies have turned their
attention to workplace learning including historical materialism, critical feminism, critical
pedagogy, poststructuralism, anti-racism, labor education, post-colonialism, technoculture theory,
and others. While heterogeneous in philosophy and method, these share a common belief: that
politics are central to human cognition, activity, identity, and meaning. Emancipatory educators
claim that when mechanisms of cultural power are named, ways and means to resist them appear
(Allman, 2001; Freire, 1970). Collective action is key; when cultural resistance through collective
action is combined with critical analysis on power relations and structural oppression, people can
explore unexpected, unimagined possibilities for work, life, and development.
Giroux (1992) writes that emancipatory learning informed by critical studies can open
spaces to discern new futures, craft new identities and seek social alternatives that may be
obscured by current dominant ideologies, discourses and struggles. This sounds very similar to
Senges (1990) understanding of organizational learning as expanding the capacity to create the
future we really want. However those critically suspicious of this notion in Senges and other
managerial-oriented OL literature ask, just who is included in this we? In any learning efforts
towards social reconstruction, critical studies perspectives put priority on issues of voice, agency,
positionality, power asymmetries, identity politics, conflict and above all, questions about whose
interests are being served (Schied et al., 2001). Applying these perspectives to action learning for
organizational learning yields four issues, discussed in turn in the following paragraphs.

Focusing Purpose on Managers and Organizations Interests

Largely emanating from fields of business/management, and despite the influence of
CMS writers, OL literature still tends to be managerialist in its target audience and assumptions,
without acknowledging the politics of who is designing, facilitating, and assessing managing
the learning. The focus tends to be its instrumental process, understanding how organizational
learning occurs, and how it might occur more effectively. Rarely is the question posed, learn
what, and for whose benefit? Since the 1980s when the link between learning and organizational
competitiveness was suggested, any discussions of learning purpose have centered most on
whether to focus on innovation or diffusion/absorption of knowledge, on breakthrough or
incremental innovation (Crossan et al., 1999), on generative or adaptive learning (Leavy, 1998).
The human capital theory underpinning OL ignores the significance of social and cultural
capital in peoples learning (Baptiste, 2001). It deflects critique from structural organizational
problems shaping workers activity and ability, and scapegoats workers supposed learning
deficits as the weak link in productivity. In actuality, any causal link between workers learning
and organizational capacity has yet to be empirically proven (Coffield, 1999). Furthermore, in
demanding explicit confessional critical reflection of its employees, OL processes conscript for
the organizations purposes the most private aspects of individuals worlds -- their minds, hearts
and even their souls (Fenwick, 2001). In all, OL policies and initiatives may become the very
mechanisms of control and even oppression from which they are supposed to emancipate.
Excluding or Marginalizing Individuals and Groups
OL literature distinguishes organizational or individual levels of learning (Crossan et al.,
1999), but beyond this, includes little recognition of diversity. Learning abilities, cognitive styles
and organizational status affected by ones language, class, race, gender and so on all
considered significant in emancipatory learning are not often discussed in OL theory. Feminist
analyses have shown organizational knowledge to be gendered,, differentially valuing and
rewarding individuals experiences and skill (Meyerson & Kolb, 2000)
In initiatives such as action learning, the invited participants are those who conform to a
norm implicit in OL discourses: full-time knowledge-reliant workers committed to continuous
learning. These are usually the professional/managerial elite whose learning power and stock of
learnings are considered most valuable to their employing organizatio. Non knowledgegenerating workers are usually excluded, or relegated to occupational health and safety or
technical skills training. These include so-called low-skill workers, the less articulate, the less
educated, the low literate, the learning disabled, or indeed those expressing critical views. Even
when they are invited, the learning activities may be exclusive in design, difficulty level and
timing (Schied et al., 2001). Part-time and contract workers, as well as off-site teleworkers are
often excluded from OL activities such as action learning because lower returns are anticipated
from investment in their human capital (Baptiste, 2001). From a critical perspective, OL
agendas are focused most towards and thus function to secure the continuing privilege of those
who already are the most educated, enjoying most access to learning opportunities.
Understanding Learning in Simplistic Ways
While AL literature increasingly has recognized the complexity of learning processes, it
still upholds concepts that have been widely critiqued in fields of critical studies, cognition, and

learning theory (Fenwick, forthcoming). These include linear progressive notions of learning
such as freezing, unlearning, and relearning, and mentalist individualistic understandings such as
critical reflection on experience. Critics such as Michelson (1996) and Sawada (1991) challenge
these views as simplistic and reductionist in presuming that knowledge is extracted and
abstracted from experience by the processing mind. This view ignores the possibility that
knowledge is constructed within power-laden social processes, that bodily experience,
environment and knowledge are mutually determined, and that experience itself is knowledgedriven and cannot be known outside socially available meanings. Gender, race, and class
dimensions, all usually ignored in the AL discourse, create important distinctions among
individuals in what holds meaning for them and how they construct these meanings.
Doing Change To People
The emancipatory dimension of OL typically appears in references to empowerment,
helping people to change. Much-debated is the assumption that one can, or ethically is entitled to,
cause another to change beliefs. Would-be empowerers create for themselves a space of control,
and tend to delimit empowerment in ways that leave intact their own positions and resources. For
example, the voices of learning organization sculptors (Watkins and Marsick, 1993) are not
self-reflexive: the leaders beliefs and problems that may themselves need changing are typically
bracketed out. This obscures the agendas of the very voices calling for continuous learning and
empowerment of others.
But a deeper issue is the central flaw in understanding change (including learning and
emancipation) as something done to people, by someone, in a way that is controlled and
managed. AL, for example, requires participants to open themselves to transformative change.
But the process may be facilitated by managers who do not normally include themselves in this
transformation. A recent study (Schied et al., 2001) found that when an employee draws attention
to some contradictions or inaccuracies that emerge in the AL process itself, that person is targeted
as a problem learner requiring remediation. Participants do not need to experience such overt
displays of power to recognize when an activity has set them up to be measured and disciplined
through empowerment.
Enhancing the Emancipatory Potential of Action Learning
But among these multiple barriers to emancipatory change through action learning, areas
for reform can be discerned. Willmott (1997) suggests a critical action learning, one that
explores ways to challenge organizational practices and ideologies that institutionalize
exploitation and subjection. But is emancipation within organizations even possible, given the
fundamental systems of labor division and control that constitute capitalist organizations? That is,
can critical pedagogy, such as an emancipatory form of AL, ever be reconciled with the
essentially functionalist purposes of OL?
Emancipation itself, embracing concepts of empowerment and liberation, is a contested
term, and must be delimited before answering this question. According to critical educators,
emancipation ranges from expansion of ones own perspectives and possibilities, to visible social
transformation. For Allman (2001), an eminent neo-Marxist educator, emancipation includes
mutual respect (developed as people support one another in transformative processes),
commitment to reading the world critically and acting where possible to change it, honesty,
vigilance and passion for justice. Herbert (2002) argues that five facets of empowerment are

possible for participants in action learning processes: capacity-building (increased sense of

mastery in their work, and accomplishment of outcomes most valuable to them), facilitation
(increasingly controlling the AL practices and processes), advocacy (learning to better advocate
for themselves and their wants), illumination (engaging in self assessment, and applying
knowledge developed through AL to improve their work life), and liberation (enhancing their
power of self-determination, and freedom from oppressive arrangements). The point of critically
reflective learning combined with collective action, or praxis, is to identify the larger problems in
our work lives and environments, often which we help create and sustain, and to work together to
make local productive changes in dysfunctional patterns or dehumanizing conditions.
Studies of emancipation realized through action learning processes have found that while
AL generates conflict and struggle, the outcomes can be fruitful from both an OL perspective of
organizational improvement and a critical perspective of challenging oppressive practices. One
study of two UK firms using participatory action research highlighted the tensions in meaningmaking between different organizational levels (Gold, Smith & Rodgers, 2001). The researchers
concluded that these struggles, balanced within a reflective infrastructure and orthodox strategic
planning processes, afforded the greatest strategic learning opportunities for workers and
management, including challenges to privileged voices and the fairness of institutionalized
practices. Meyerson and Kolb (2000), in advancing a dual agenda of addressing gender equity
while increasing organizational effectiveness through AL, found real difficulty in sustaining their
gender focus. Of their three-layered approach of critique (of dominant gendered discourses and
processes), experimentation (with concrete changes to interrupt gendered practices and improve
work effectiveness), and narrative generation (constructing collective stories of the change
process), the latter proved to hold the most promise for change. Critical analysis of the change
narratives to make assumptions explicit, and active encouragement of subversive narratives,
helped generate the gender awareness objectives driving the project.
These examples do not deny the ever-present dark side to action learning within an OL
context. Action learning processes can easily be used to mask exploitative purposes, particularly
if the outcomes are driven more by economic rather than human imperatives. Questions about
voice and authentic participation are suspect when the fundamental power inequities driving
organizational decision-making and supervision -- including the processes of AL remain intact.
Furthermore, the fact that the worker is always visible in AL processes, vulnerable to discipline
and subjugation by being known (i.e. by managers and HR personnel), is problematic even in the
re-articulation of a critical AL offered further on.
A fully collaborative vision of all organizational members working side by side to
challenge those structures sustaining the organization, following the emancipatory model of
community-based activism, is not only delusional, but also perpetuates the myth of unitary
interests and ideologies which historically has generated worker alienation. The emancipatory
potential of AL lies in a modification rather than radical transformation of its approaches.
Contradictions are inevitable, and struggle must be encouraged and mediated if both
organizational learning and emancipatory outcomes are to be realized. Four practical suggestions
towards a more critical AL are offered below, all entailing a shift from certain interests and
processes characterizing contemporary OL theory to a more radical position.

1) Focus AL purpose more on workers interests.

Workers interests, including managers, begin in their experiences at work, as well as at
home and other sites. Critical views advanced by Foley, Freire, Giroux, Grey, Willmott and
others represented here suggest that people need first to understand their own experiences and
knowledge, including what they perceive to be their interests and problems in the organization.
AL offers a useful approach to make workers informal and incidental learning the stuff of
organizational learning:
What happens in workplaces and how people make sense of what happens must become
the curriculum. Using critical and mobilizing pedagogies, workers experiences must be
put back to them so that they can analyse them collectively in an open-ended critical way.
(Foley, 2001, p.94)
A worker-centered approach to AL would start with workers articulation of their
experiences and learning, move to problem-identification from those experiences, then gradually
to critical analysis of forces contributing to these problems (both external and internal to the
organization and to individuals), and finally to action projects to address these problems. An
emancipatory AL process might adapt a Freirian problem-posing approach(1970).. Facilitators
would work directly from workers narratives of their collective and personal experiences to
understand how workers make meaning, and what is important to them in the everyday practice
that constitutes their informal and incidental learning. Content is developed around these
generative themes of workers interests and culture, and put back to them in codes that pose
problems related to local procedures, beliefs, norms of interacting, language, and so on. These
problems are analysed critically in terms of broader systemic forces, discourses and power
relations, as well as how individuals and groups behaviors help create their own problems.
Workers, in dialogue with each other and facilitators, experiment with local actions to
address these problems. The scope and focus of action varies according to the intensity of
individuals investment in change and dissatisfaction with existing condition, and the availability
of resources (including facilitation or some sort of reflective forum). Contextual constraints
include the organizations cultural stability, leadership structures and attitudes, and precedents for
change. Struggle to balance emancipatory initiatives with diverse investments, resources,
organizational context and timing is inevitable. The facilitators role is to help make this struggle
explicit, or as Meyerson and Kolb (2000) suggest, to focus participants on generating and
critically analysing narratives of the change process. In this praxis, the focus of workers interests
can insistently be foregrounded.
2) Confront organizational practices that unjustly marginalize or privilege different people.
Emancipatory learning starts with critical analysis of ones experiences, locating both the
areas of greatest negative and positive emotion, as well as perceptions of injustice, ambiguity, or
tension. Then one links this analysis with a critical examination of larger cultural forces, to help
make critical sense of personal experiences. Action learning that invokes emancipatory change
borrows from these critical pedagogy processes, helping individuals to trace the politics and
constraints of their contexts for learning. Facilitators of critical action learning raise questions
about how power relations function. They especially examine how, in a particular sphere of
organizational life, meanings are produced in ways that reward some as normal, and marginalize
or erase others.

Critical questions of cultural analysis are crucial if an action learning process is to avoid
reproducing existing relations. For example, In this organization, what discourses are most
visible and accorded most power by different groups? Where are the conflicts among discourses?
How are people represented differently within the organizations texts (documents, signs, images,
important terms)? What borders define territories in this site, and who is outside or inside? What
identity is constructed for people within these borders, and what consequences ensue for
transgressors? What cultural capital is accorded dominant status in this organization, and what
group controls it? The object is partly to unmask oppressive practices and forms of resistance.
But further, analysis may help expose unheard voices that are unjustly marginalized or privileged,
in both covert and overt organizational practices. Action learning is one vehicle, joining
representatives from various groups, through which to explore the possibility of introducing more
inclusive practices and involving diverse groups in OL projects.
3) Acknowledge the complexity, context, and contested nature of learning.
Contemporary theories of learning and cognition representing socio-cultural,
psychoanalytic, linguistic and complexity orientations have illustrated dimensions of learning not
often recognized by OL writers: (1) that organizational learning is embodied (not a solely
reflective process where rational mind excavates bodily experience to create knowledge); (2)
that individuals and what they construe to be their experiences are constituted among
communities of texts and relationships; (3) that knowledge resides in participative networks of
action (in which individual actors, human and non-human, cannot be isolated); (4) that the
conscious reflective mind is more limited than OL theory and AL methods acknowledge -individuals actively resist important knowings and desires, even their own; and (5) that
environment and identity co-emerge in enactments of cognition. Pedagogical approaches
suggested by these wide-ranging learning theories (Fenwick, forthcoming), can help enhance the
mentalist reflective focus that often dominates AL approaches.
AL initiatives also need to address important issues of context affecting workplace
learning, identified by Beckett and Hager (2002): pervasive change and crisis; difference and
diversity; and the particular and local. In practical terms, early problems identified for action may
prove irrelevant or low priority as organizational circumstances change. AL processes ought to be
continually monitored by participants, and modified or discontinued as necessary. Further, AL
should be planned to include inter-organizational as well as intra-organizational learning groups
and boundary spanners. Environmental affordances and limitations, as well as conditions
conducive to guided participation, can all be examined and addressed by AL participants
following strategies suggested by Billett (2001). Generally, Bowerman and Peters (1999) suggest
preparation is crucial for all AL participants, especially managers, for the slow, non-linear
learning processes and the unpredictable activities and challenges generated through critical
reflection on action.
4) Facilitate AL using democratic power with, not power over, approaches.
Action learning derives from a form of radical education called participatory action
research (PAR). The word participatory is significant, denoting a power with role for the
facilitator working alongside learners for mutual growth. PAR is recursive and iterative in
process: as participants together debate, critically analyse, and explore problem(s) through action,

the issue often changes or refocuses. Finger and Asn (2001) promote PAR as a form of social
learning through organizational change. They suggest strategies for educators to join with others
in a three-phase process (becoming aware, clarifying conceptions, and developing alternatives) to
counter what they portray as urgent threats to the social ecology of organizations. In particular,
they argue for replacing the learning metaphor of developing people with one of participating
with them -- in projects, vision-making and grass-roots movements towards sustainable
communities.
Applying such ideas to AL, helping people to collectively critique and act to change their
organizational environments by starting with their personal experiences, has been argued
throughout this article as an approach to emancipatory change. Through this process people can
work to identify their own negative learning (i.e. learning to be discouraged, to not trust, to
resist evaluation) and foster their own productive learning (i.e. how to act on their problems, and
how to influence what is done to them). The extent to which this process is truly empowering
relies on the extent to which facilitators work in solidarity with organizational members. This sort
of solidarity is:
educators using their power to create educational situations in which learners can exercise
power . . . Instead of making pronouncements about what they can do for learners, [they]
have come to ask themselves and their learners, What can we do, with you? (Foley,
2001, p. 28)
Conclusion
Critical perspectives on learning are completely clear about its purposes: social
transformation through emancipation of individuals and groups from limited or oppressive beliefs
and structures, towards a more just, equitable, life-giving and sustainable world. Through a
critical studies perspective AL is, like much organizational learning theory, essentially
conservative, oriented to sustaining the prevailing power relationships by focusing on managers
and organizations interests rather than workers interests, with vague or instrumental purposes
and simplistic understandings of learning.
But AL carries considerable emancipatory potential, within certain existing organizational
structures. This could be better realized by deriving issues from workers interests and daily
learning experiences, and using more critically-oriented, democratic power with facilitation that
critically views its own role. This advocates for more holistic AL, that appreciates the complex,
contextual and often conflictual dimensions of the new workplace. Any learning initiatives in
organizational contexts, especially those with emancipatory intentions, will necessarily reflect
multiple contradictions and compromises in different contexts. Herberts (2002) study of several
AL initiatives in the Australian National Training Authority led her to conclude that, while AL
can be used in varying degrees of emancipation as a process for social change or reinforcing the
status quo, the extent to which it can address fundamental power relations may be contingent and
contextual. In periods of crisis or high anxiety, environments where decision-making has
historically been concentrated in a small circle of senior management, or structures characterized
by rigid hierarchies, such as high-reliability organizations, overly-ambitious radical initiatives
may lead to hostile polarization and shut-down, rather than dynamic conflict opening creative
negotiations. This speaks to the importance of caution and strategy in timing, and tempering the
degree, scope and specific target of challenge to organizational practices according to context.

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