Marilynn

Sounds like an interesting study! When you have some findings, please contact me if you’d like to share them in a story for Organizational Perspectives!

Janet

My Dissertation topic is concerned with how anxiety is identified in the classroom. My premise is that reaction to influences outside the classroom are brought into the classroom. Anxiety is a reaction process. Unless the instructor catches the behavior the student is most likely to have a unfulfilled learning experience. Brookfield, Tinto and Freire all talk about how the classroom should be setup for critical thinking to occur but they also acknowledge the influences outside the classroom that need to be dealt with.

Louis Uchitelle, wrote “The Disposable American: Layoffs and their consequences” it chronicles the impact of the last 20 years effect of mergers and acquisitions on the workers that experienced layoffs. I propose that the reaction and survivor mentality from those events are brought into the classroom. A movie that chronicles the patterns of what corporations try to do without consequences is called, “The Corporation”. Corporations do whatever they get away with and figure the fine is less expensive than the monetary gains from the act itself. It has been accepted behavior for over 20 years.

Maybe now with so much change happening in the country, room can be made for a change in instruction that with acts come consequences to an individual and to the community they reside in and the examples can be shown, e.g. MCI, Madoff, World Com. We have lived under the mantra “come be taught by experts”, but can those experts teach and can they convey leadership. It is easy to teach the functionality of a balance sheet and income statement. It is harder to teach how leadership towards shepherding the company into a strong position, with consideration of the company itself, employees and community it resides in can be of service to the sustainability of all involved.

Hasty decision making is not a learned behavior, it is a reaction. I would like to see more information regarding the study to support the trend of hasty decisions. There are many factors that could contribute to a decision being perceived as made in hast. Are we fully aware of all the details influencing this perception? I cannot support the alteration of the leadership curriculum without an extensive analysis supported by the appropriate literary experts.

School for Scoundrels, a review from Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Krugman-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=school%20for%20scoundrels&st=cse