School of Human & Organization Development

• Institute for Social Innovation (formerly Center for Innovation in the Non-profit Sector)
• Coordinated Management of Meaning
• Creative Longevity Initiative
• Information Society and Knowledge Organizations
• Research Integrity: Models & Practices

Summary: ISI establishes a unique blend of research, intervention, and graduate education initiative to work with nonprofit executives, boards and philanthropists to develop and evaluate innovative practices that balance needs in three core areas - management, program evaluation and change, and alliances with business, government and other nonprofits. Fielding's faculty, mid-career students and alumni of the school's doctoral, master's and graduate certificate programs have long served as valuable resources for nonprofits throughout the country. Consequently, they have been and continue to provide an exciting blend of research and service to enhance the operation of nonprofits and to further our understanding of nonprofit operation.

Publications/presentations:
Mattare, M. (2004). Cultural transitions at the Library: Mary's cookies served in the kitchen again! OD Practitioner, 36 (2), 9-13.

McClintock, C. (2004). Using narrative methods to link program evaluation and organization development. The Evaluation Exchange, IX (4), Winter 2003/ 2004. Tenth-Year Anniversary Issue: Promising Practices. Published by the Harvard Family Research Project, hfrp@gse.harvard.edu

McClintock, C. (2004). Integrating program evaluation and organization development. In. A. R. Roberts and K. R. Yeager (Eds.). Evidence Based Practice Manual: Research and Outcome Measures in Health and Human Services (pp. 598-606). New York: Oxford University Press.

McClintock, C. and Rowe, W. (2003). Integrating skill sets: Results from a graduate certificate program in evaluation and organizational development. American Evaluation Association. Reno, NV.

Campbell, M. and McClintock, C. (2002). Shall we dance? Program evaluation meets OD in the nonprofit sector. OD Practitioner, 34 (4), 3-7.

McClintock, C. (2002). Panel Chair and Presenter. The future of non-profit and foundation evalution: A systemic linkage of program evaluation and organizational development. American Evaluation Association. Washington, D.C.

Bushnell, D., Berthgold, K., Agger-Gupta, N., (2002). Building Social Capital and Organizational Capacity in Community-Based Nonprofit Organizations Through Appreciative Inquiry. OD Practitioner, 34 (4), 14-19.

Johnston, L. F., (2001). Maximizing Donor Value: Key Satisfaction Drivers for Major Donors to Nonprofit Organization, Doctoral Dissertation. Fielding Graduate University. (UMI Publication # 3059656).

Funding: Funding provided by The James Irvine Foundation and The Sara Miller McCune Foundation.

Contact: Charles McClintock - cmcclintock@fielding.edu

Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) [back to top]
Barnett Pearce, PhD
School of Human & Organization Development

Summary: The "coordinated management of meaning" (CMM) is generally thought of as one of the most comprehensive and distinctive theories of human communication. According to Barnett Pearce, "Although I was the first to actually use that clumsy phrase in print, and Vernon Cronen (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and I are generally thought to be the co-developers of it, it is the product of over 30 years of development by people around the world." In company with the philosophical positions of pragmatism, Bateson's social ecology, and Wittgenstein's analysis of language games, CMM focuses on patterns of social interaction rather than propositions, and privileges participant's rather than spectator's ways of knowing. Calling this "the communication perspective," it suggests that valuable insights and, more importantly, ways of acting into situations can be developed by close analysis of what people actually do and say in interaction with each other. A number of distinctive concepts and models have been developed to explore three questions: 1) how are the events and objects of our social worlds made in patterns of communication? 2) what are we making now by what we are doing and saying with each other? and 3) how can we make better social worlds?

Publications/presentations:
Pearce, W. Barnett & Kearney, Jeremy, Eds. (2004). Coordinated management of meaning: Extensions and applications. Human Systems, 15: whole issues 1, 2 and 3.

W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce (2003). "Taking a communication approach to dialogue," in Anderson, R., Baxter, L. & Cissna, K. (Eds.) Dialogue: Theorizing difference in communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

W. Barnett Pearce (2002). "New Models for Communication: Shifts from Theory to Praxis, from Objectivism to Social Constructionism, and from Representation to Reflexivity," pp. 197-208 in Dora Fried Schnitman and Jorge Schnitman (Eds.) New Paradigms, Culture and Subjectivity. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press.

Contact: Barnett Pearce - bpearce@fielding.edu

Creative Longevity Initiative [back to top]
Valerie Bentz, PhD
School of Human & Organization Development

Summary: The Creative Longevity Initiative is a new project which encourages and supports research and practice endeavors focused on enhanced and productive aging. A most significant demographic change over the next several decades is the increased proportion of the population who will be over age sixty. In the predicted increased lifespan, the "new middle age" will be from age sixty to eighty. Graduate faculty, students, and alums will work together in this initiative to seek ways of supporting creative longevity initiatives through tuition fellowships, awards, and publications.

Funding: Support from Mr. Frank Jankovitz.

Contact: Valerie Bentz - vbentz@fielding.edu

Information Society and Knowledge Organizations (ISAKO) [back to top]
Dottie Agger-Gupta, PhD, Jeremy Shapiro, PhD, Shelley Hughes, MA, Robert Silverman, PhD, Fred Steier, PhD
School of Human & Organization Development

Summary: This project has been developed to examine the human and organizational impact of information and communication technologies and the organization and management of information and knowledge, in the context of the larger social and policy issues involved in the informatization of society.

Publications/presentations:
Shapiro, J. Daniels, R., & Crafts, L. (2004). Multiple Realities, Selves, and Places Among Users of the Ubiquitous Internet. To be presented at Association of Internet Researchers conference in Sussex, England.

Shapiro, J. (2003). Digitale Simulation: theoretische und geschichtliche Grundlagen. Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie. XVII.

Shapiro, J. (2002). Interdisciplinary Knowledge Integration and In­tellectual Creativity. In M. J. Lopez-Huertas (ed.), Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Organization for the 21st Century: Integration of Knowledge Across Boundaries. Proceedings of the Seventh International ISKO Conference. Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2002.

Shapiro, J. & Hughes, S. (2002). The Case of the Inflammatory E-mail: Building Culture and Community in OnLine Academic Environments. In Kjell Rudestam and Judith Schoenholtz-Read (eds.), Handbook of Online Learning: Innovations in Higher Education and Corporate Training. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Funding: Support from an anonymous gift and Fielding Graduate University

Contact: Jeremy Shapiro - jshapiro@fielding.edu

Research Integrity: Models & Practices [back to top]
Robert Silverman, PhD
School of Human & Organization Development

Summary: This project explores research integrity in the social sciences by focusing on norms and values evident through the practices of editors and peer reviewers for journals in different epistemological locations. Both tacitly and explicitly, field-based colleagues, in the persons of editors and peer reviewers, are co-authors of manuscripts that are submitted for review. In addition to querying about specific cases of academic malfeasance, this research is interested in discovering the relationship between such review patterns and the primary authorships' logics in use in establishing a higher sense of research integrity, that is, one that transcends such traditional but inappropriate practices as fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism. It is claimed, then, that research integrity is a multi-level accomplishment that includes the engaged practices of individuals in addition to the prime authorship of research papers.

Publications/presentations:
Silverman, R. Journal Peer Review and its Relation to Research Integrity. To be presented at The Third Office of Research Integrity Research Conference, San Diego, Nov 12-14, 2004.

Funding: Support from Fielding Graduate University.

Contact: Bob Silverman - rsilverman@fielding.edu