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Systemic Practice and Action Research, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 2002 (°
C 2002)

Editorial

Welcome to issue Volume 15 Number 2 of Systemic Practice and Action Research.

Four papers are included in this issue. The first, by James E. Leeman, is titled,
“Applying Interactive Planning at Dupont: The Case of Transforming a Safety,
Health, and Environmental Function to Deliver Business Value.” Leeman used
Interactive Planning in the process of transforming the Safety, Health, and Envi-
ronmental (SHE) function. Four major findings were that (a) SHE professionals
transformed from independent to interdependent workers; (b) performance im-
proved by about 50%; (c) enabling factors were participation and personal com-
mitment, while disabling factors were organizational turbulence and lack of recog-
nition; and (d) organizational learning flourished among SHE professionals and
tacit SHE knowledge became explicit on the factory floor.
The second paper, called “Interactive Management: An Emancipatory
Methodology,” is presented by Gary C. Alexander. His paper introduces a model
that reflects Freire’s humanizing pedagogy. The method is a vehicle to empow-
erment for people and communities to control their own destiny. The model is
Interactive Management and a derivative called The CogniScope System.
Mandlenkosi S. Makhanya asks, “What Do Teacher’s Do: A Qualitative
Analysis of the role of the teacher.” Our author sees the role of teachers in the
classroom as constituting a sociological problem. Accordingly, the objective set
for the article is to understand teaching life and to discover how teachers construct
meaning of their role in the classroom. A qualitative methodological framework
was employed to address the question in the paper’s title through an investigation
from the perspective of teachers themselves.
The closing paper, called “Purity and Danger of an Information Infrastruc-
ture,” is offered by Eric Monteiro and Vidar Hepsø. They critically assess
deep-seated assumptions and images of an information infrastructure, namely,
its need to be uniform, tidy, and nonfragmented.

Robert L. Flood, Editor

Isles of Scilly, UK
E-mail: Robertflood@compuserve.com

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1094-429X/02/0400-0083/0 °
C 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation