When being pioneers in embracing technological innovation in not enough, an exploration into French Connection

The onset of the pandemic and it impact on business has not only warranted business thinking of new, interesting and innovating ways in which to engage with consumer. However, has also warranted fashion brands to re-establish their core values and traits that originally made them successful. This conversation of re-evaluation of the core factors of success is now more important ever if key players in the fashion industry are seeking to engage in evolutionary transformation via the assistance of technology in order to survive and indeed retain their mantel of being vanguards for societal change during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. The necessity for business to engage with technology to entice Millennials and Generation Z more successfully is also of paramount concern. This is warranted in order to provide a counter voice to the negative viewpoints, which exist in relation to the perception of the fashion industry being exploitive and un-sustainable. The incumbents in the fashion industry reaction to the emergent change that the pandemic has created, necessitates all industries to make actionable plans now more than ever, in conjunction with understanding that change is an inevitable ongoing reality of all business and emergent radical changes may be what the business world will encounter in the future. However, it is important to acknowledge the resurgence in the fashion industry must be managed and navigated in a holistic manner. This warrants the inclusion all parts of an organisation working in conjunction with designers towards to the attainment of the same goals. Thus, unity of purpose is now more acute that ever by using French Connection as a case study the author proposes a model within which to embark upon the change process. The time for change is now and if organisation views this with opportunity in a positive manner, the results could prove to be favourable.

Leading Change in a Complex Public Sector Environment

Successful organizational change depends on leadership, and this chapter reviews the literature on leadership in different types of public organization change processes. While transformational leadership is typically used more in planned processes of change, distributed leadership often accompanies emergent change processes. A key insight, however, is that the two leadership approaches should be viewed as complementary, depending on the characteristics of the different public organizations’ environments and structures. The bureaucratic structure and primacy of politics, the employment of public service professionals, and the environmental complexity with many stakeholders and complexity in tasks are all factors that affect the effectiveness of change leadership in public organizations. Future studies should address these characteristics in comparative and longitudinal studies that examine the mechanisms through which leadership contributes to the implementation of organizational change.

Emergent Change in a Mexican Midwifery Center Organization Amidst the COVID-19 Crisis

Luna Maya is a Mexican NGO that operates two full-scope midwifery centers in Mexico City and Chiapas, Mexico, providing woman-centered, culturally appropriate midwifery model maternity care on a sliding cost scale. The COVID-19 health crisis has made it necessary for Luna Maya to quickly incorporate safety protocols for out-of-hospital maternity care. Yet many of the emerging guidelines on maternity care have focused on high-income and hospital settings; there are no specific guidelines for such care in out-of-hospital settings in low- and middle-income countries. Thus we have had to create our own, based on best available and emerging evidence. In this article, we describe the guidelines and protocols we have created in response to COVID-19, the international evidence and recommendations on which we base them, and precisely how we carry them out in practice. We also present and analyze the results of qualitative interviews we conducted for this article with eight of our midwives and eight of our midwifery clients. These interviews reveal the tremendous stresses both midwives and pregnant and birthing women are experiencing as a result of the pandemic, their creative adaptations, and the structural flaws, deficiencies, and inequities of the Mexican healthcare system. The article also addresses Luna Maya’s ongoing challenges in continuing to provide care completely outside of governmental support and in difficult economic times, and demonstrates the extreme need for improvements in the Mexican system of maternity care and for full integration of community-based midwives and out-of-hospital birth.

Enacting Reflection: A New Approach to Workplace Complexities

The Problem Change has changed, and workplaces are grappling with new complexities and ambiguities. Human resource development (HRD) scholar-practitioners are called upon to help workplaces learn to navigate these changes; however, traditional approaches have limited utility when dealing with dynamic, emergent change. To address these limitations, scholars have proposed adopting enactive approaches that are rooted in systems thinking and complexity theories, but there is limited understanding of what this means in HRD practice. The Solution This article explores HRD responses to change from an enactive perspective. Enactivism suggests that people create their context through engagement with physical and social environments. From this perspective, reflection is not necessarily “on” experience, as if somehow separate from it. Rather, reflection is active engagement in, by, and through experience. This article aims to expand theoretical understanding and practical applications of enactivism in workplace learning. The Stakeholders HRD scholar-practitioners seeking new options for navigating workplace learning complexities.

Structured Collaboration Across a Transformative Knowledge Network—Learning Across Disciplines, Cultures and Contexts?

Realising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require transformative changes at micro, meso and macro levels and across diverse geographies. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research has a role to play in documenting, understanding and contributing to such transformations. Previous work has investigated the role of this research in Europe and North America, however the dynamics of transdisciplinary research on ‘transformations to sustainability’ in other parts of the world are less well-understood. This paper reports on an international project that involved transdisciplinary research in six different hubs across the globe and was strategically designed to enable mutual learning and exchange. It draws on surveys, reports and research outputs to analyse the processes of transdisciplinary collaboration for sustainability that took place between 2015–2019. The paper illustrates how the project was structured in order to enable learning across disciplines, cultures and contexts and describes how it also provided for the negotiation of epistemological frameworks and different normative commitments between members across the network. To this end, it discusses lessons regarding the use of theoretical and methodological anchors, multi-loop learning and evaluating emergent change (including the difficulties encountered). It offers insights for the design and implementation of future international transdisciplinary collaborations that address locally-specific sustainability challenges within the universal framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

“Change is the Essential Process of all Existence:” Transformation through Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement’s Theory of Emergent Change

During the early years of the American Association of State Colleges & Universities’ (AASCU) American Democracy Project (ADP), a handful of civic-minded leaders in higher education began to grapple with what it meant to teach students to be engaged citizens. The project began with seven initiatives focusing on efforts such as voting, stewardship of land, political engagement, and citizenship to build a foundation for increasing civic literacy, democratic agency, and community engagement among college students (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2019). Membership and participation in ADP grew quickly and it seemed an organic revolution of sorts was building in higher education. Across the country, centers focusing on engaged democracy gained popularity among public institutions, and efforts to develop programs focusing on community engagement became commonplace.