This book focuses on the enigmatic relationship between men and women, and in particular on the subordination of women by men in the work place. The main points of departure are that subordination is a relational phenomenon and should therefore be approached in a relational context and that the dynamics of relational behaviour primarily evolve through dialogue. The project facilitated and encouraged women and men to engage in more than 100 discussions about their daily relationships, carried out in the context of an intra- and inter-organizational action research project involving three organizations: a nuclear power plant, a school district and a postal district in a province of Sweden. The object was to allow for better mutual understanding and respect from an Irigarayan view where a substrate allows men and women to regard each other in their subjectivity without 'reducing the other to same'. The reflective and analytical nature of this study shows the dynamics of the discussions and their effects on the interpersonal and organizational level.Ingrid Ljungberg van Beinum, D. Soc. Sc., studied at the universities of Uppsala and Leiden. She has lived and worked in Sweden, England, Holland, India and Canada.

Searching explains how to make the fundamental cultural change required for a desirable sustainable future. It describes the ‘two-stage model’ of open-systems social science in action and covers two major methods: the Search Conference for strategic planning and community development; and the Participative Design Workshop for the genotypical design and redesign of organizational structures. The result of nearly 50 years of integrated conceptual and practical development, Searching shows that by replacing 200 years of mechanistic assumptions with concepts and principles which accurately capture human and social realities, these methods generate intrinsic motivation and release human potentials for change. Starting with the building blocks of this internally consistent theoretical framework, Part I explains the interrelations and shows how the power of the methods for achieving this cultural change is generated. Part II of the book describes the methods and illustrates their flexibility by discussing some of their most common variations.