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Ronald Fry, Frank Barrett, Jane Seiling, and Diana Whitney (Editors) Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Transformation: Reports from the Field. Westport, CT: Quorum, 2002, 320 pages, $65.00.
Since I heard David Cooperrider give a talk on appreciative inquiry (AI) at the Academy of Management Conference in Cincinnati in 1996, and digested all the material he so generously mailed to me, I have been intrigued with the approach. That's not really very surprising, because, not only does the approach focus on the positive, an optimistic view of human beings and their constructions, but it is considerably more stereotypically feminine than most organization development approaches. It is feminine in its emphasis on positive and life-giving forces, and feminist in its disavowal of "hard" (masculine) science. Organization development has a tendency to continually invoke its connections to science both by explicitly saying it is a science and by advocating the collection of quantitative data. So, although appreciative inquiry emphasizes the analysis of data, it is qualitative data, in fact peak performance stories, and the analysis is thematic. From my experience as both practicing psychologist and mother, I have developed a base of tacit knowledge to which this approach has an inherent appeal. Elimination of deficits, or a problem-- based approach, is not effective for creating change in humans or their institutions and organizations. Eliminating a deficit just widens the gap that was identified in the first place, leaving a bigger hole. The critical question is always, what do you replace the deficit with?
This question has become even more compelling over the past few months. If, in 1988, "the time was ripe for the discipline of organizational behaviour to venture outside its own culture of pessimism" (Srivastva & Cooperrider, 1990), in the post-World Tade Center devastation of 2002, one could argue that it has become critical for survival. Gergen (1995) has suggested that the "cultural consequences of... deficit discourse" are the sustenance of unequal power relations, erosion of community, weakening of action, and progressive enfeeblement of individuals. This certainly touches a nerve in many feminists who were involved in "consciousness raising" where they experienced epiphanies related to the sharing of discrimination stories. It was an important step in the women's movement, but it was essentially negative, and often, on...