With a death toll of over 1,100 people from a collapsed clothing factory, the Bangladesh government agreed to allow garment workers to form unions without permission from factory owners. If that isn’t startling enough, in this $20-billion US industry the…
For the first time in my life, I find myself wanting to avoid most political conversations. At times, I feel apathetic, even helpless, when confronted with the political system and ideologies here in Canada. The Conservative, Liberal and New Democratic…
As a feminist who has disallowed inequity to rule her life and a concerned citizen who understands the value of diversity, it is difficult to not become cynical when I read the preponderance of research claiming North America is far…
The recent media attention garnered by Apple’s lack of social purpose and action has raised three questions for me. • When is enough money, enough? • When is the incongruence between our values and our actions enough for us to…
Currently, I am working with a new group of clients who are all transitioning from one career to another. As can emerge, when change is forced upon us, fear of the unknown surfaced for many of them. What can also…
My Socio-technical Systems (STS) writing co-horts and I loosely refer to the current global economic and social environment as the “new normal” — a term we did not invent but are seeing used to define conditions in diverse contexts. As…
Last week a small community hockey team in Neepawa, Manitoba, made the national news when a young man courageously reported incidents of hazing against himself and his seven rookie team members. For those of you who have not experienced hazing,…
While the term ‘generation gap’ often engenders negative relations between age groups, I propose a more constructive way of utilizing each group’s specialized skills. A generation gap is defined as a difference in values and attitudes between one generation and…
http://mtviewclass.wikispaces.com/Gilgamesh On the eve of 2012 — the infamous year dating the end of the Mayan calendar — we are witness to the beginnings of social transformation in The Middle East. I wonder how the Mayan prophecy and these Middle…
Karl Marx espoused that socio-economic systems such as capitalism and democracy produce internal conflicts due to power differences (class struggles) which eventually lead to their implosion. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. [.…
In 2000, Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson introduced us to three distinct cultures co-existing in the U.S. and Western Europe whose distinctions were based on values. The “Moderns” who value money and success tipped in at 50% of the population. …
For most of my professional career, I willingly set aside three to five days a year to meet with my STS-RT (Socio-technical Systems Roundtable) colleagues. The STS-RT is a “global network of business leaders, action researchers, trade unionists, academics, managers…
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