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Gervase Roy Bushe: Progressing Ideas and Practices to Make the World a Better Place

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The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers

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Abstract

Gervase R. Bushe, for four decades and counting, has explored, challenged, and evolved the field of organizational change. His passion and conviction flow from a desire for more organizations to become places where people have opportunities to make free and informed choices so that they are engaged to give their very best in the work they do. This thread is evident throughout every strand of his work, each manifested as a contribution to create collective, participative engagement methods for organizational change. His work to build useful, relevant change theory and practice spans the disciplines of organizational design, appreciative inquiry, leadership, and organization development (OD).

With a rich lineage in personal and organizational development, Bushe’s influences span the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and wider system domains. This eclectic, integrated understanding – in theory and in practice – appears throughout his work, and the complementarity between these builds over time. The two latest examples are the widely used Clear Leadership method and program; and his paradigm shifting work to frame the emerging new threads of OD with the term now becoming known as Dialogic OD. As well as these recent integrated contributions, Bushe has also made incisive contributions within particular areas, perhaps the best known being his work from the earliest days of appreciative inquiry to help define, test, refine, and amplify its power and effectiveness as a method. Tracking and fanning, synergenesis, amplification, generativity, and generative images are all ideas born out of this work, and they have returned over time in Bushe’s work on leadership and Dialogic OD. Less well known but highly regarded in academic circles is his early work on parallel learning structures.

Bushe’s strong grounding in both experiential laboratory education such as T-groups and the action research tradition, have influenced his work consistently, giving a clearly recognizable trademark to his contributions, perhaps best summed up as human, accessible, highly practical and progressive.

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References

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Further Reading

  • Bushe, G. R. (1988a). Developing cooperative labor-management relations in unionized factories: A multi-case study of quality circles and parallel organization within joint QWL projects. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 24, 129–150.

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  • Bushe, G. R. (1988b). Cultural contradictions of statistical process control in American manufacturing organizations. Journal of Management, 14, 9–31.

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  • Bushe, G. R. (1998). Power and the empowered organization: The design of power in highly adaptive organizations. Organization Development Practitioner, 30(4), 31–43.

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  • Bushe, G. R. (2001). Self-differentiation: The missing ingredient in leadership. Organization Development Practitioner, 33(2), 41–47.

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  • Bushe, G. R. (2002). The inner core of leadership. Leader to Leader, 25(Summer), 37–41.

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  • Bushe, G. R. (2010). Being the container in dialogic OD. Practicing Social Change, 1(2), 10–15.

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  • Bushe, G. R., & Chu, A. (2011). Fluid teams: Solutions to the problems of unstable team membership. Organizational Dynamics, 40(3), 181–188.

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  • Bushe, G. R., & Gibbs, B. (1990). Predicting OD consulting competence from the MBTI and stage of ego development. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 26, 337–357.

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  • Bushe, G. R., Havlovic, S. J., & Coetzer, G. (1996a). Exploring empowerment from the inside-out, Part 2. Journal for Quality and Participation, 19(3), 78–84.

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  • Bushe, G. R., Havlovic, S. J., & Coetzer, G. (1996b). Exploring empowerment from the inside-out. Journal for Quality and Participation, 19(1), 36–45. [One of 22 articles selected for the 1996 Anbar Management Hall of Fame from over 13,000 articles reviewed from the 400 leading management journals world wide.]

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Roffey Park Institute, Horsham, West Sussex, UK

    Tom Kenward

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  1. Tom Kenward
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Correspondence to Tom Kenward .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education and Human Development, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

    David B. Szabla

  2. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    William A. Pasmore

  3. The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Mary A. Barnes

  4. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Asha N. Gipson

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Kenward, T. (2017). Gervase Roy Bushe: Progressing Ideas and Practices to Make the World a Better Place. In: Szabla, D.B., Pasmore, W.A., Barnes, M.A., Gipson, A.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52878-6_69

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