Organizational Generativity ─ The Appreciate Inquiry Summit and a Scholarship of Transformation

Part of a series on appreciative inquiry as an approach to organizational and human development and as a theory of positive change processes in human systems, this volume focuses on generative knowledge and organizational life, collective action and the appreciative inquiry summit method, and sustainable inter-generative dynamics. The 19 chapters are by scholars and practitioners from North America and Europe, and in the first section, they consider the idea of generating new ideas that change the way people think, focusing on whether appreciative inquiry is about generativity or positivity, the role of shadow dynamics in human systems and polarities in general, how the generative potentials of knowledge and idea work can be advanced, how to apply generative processes of organizing, whether generativity implies more than opening the world to new possibilities, and whether there are specific values, character traits, or visions of the future in the idea of generativity, as well as why it is important to advance the concept and its connections to social constructionist thought. The second part addresses advances in the method that brings a system of stakeholders together in a forum to work on shared tasks, and the final part presents case studies from various companies on how appreciative inquiry evokes a generative stance and action, with discussion of transformative innovations that occur when organizations explore the intersection of business and society, how appreciative inquiry has inspired the business community to embrace generative language and increase awareness of the larger system in which it operates, transformative innovations in the public sector and in the context of community building, and concepts of intergenerational and multigenerational and generativity in the context of inter-generationalism. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation c2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)