Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

142 ACTION RESEARCH
as ‘task-driven … driven hard … and having to deliver fast on specific
objectives’ (Zamorski et al. 1995: 14).
COMEX was, therefore, attempting to bridge between two distinct
systems concerned with learning – universities and companies – both of
which were already in transition as a result of external pressures to change
their assumptions and practices. The university itself was an employer
partner as well as leading the COMEX initiative, since two of its staff
enrolled as COMEX students. All of the company partners, including the
university, were under pressure at the time to become more efficient and
Peters and Waterman’s book (1982), as well as Senge’s (1993) had established
a climate for seeing successful companies as those where employees
were given opportunities for learning and participation. Yet those same
companies were also engaged in ‘downsizing’, ‘restructuring’, ‘rightsizing’,
‘rationalizing’ and (for public companies) ‘privatizing the service’, which
were all euphemisms for making staff redundant. Whatever their level in
the company, staff were all living with a sense of threat. Dissatisfied with
their own in-house training, but wary of investing in traditional degree programmes
for their managers, some of the COMEX partners bought into the
COMEX vision because they saw it as offering a way forward in an area
where they had great need of radical solutions. These comments taken from
the evaluation present two commonly held views:
COMEX is tailored to our needs, unlike some other forms of institutional
training which usually come in pre-prepared packages.
COMEX will help to produce ‘hybrid managers’, that is, those
with ‘multi-talents, multi-skills, multi-disciplines, people who can
help our organizations move forward, and perhaps even, keep us
existing’.
(Zamorski et al. 1995: 16)
Nevertheless, the deeper level learning offered by COMEX, embedded in
educational rather than training values, was seen as a huge gamble by some,
as this extract from the transcript of the Consortium Group meeting on
23 May makes clear:
There is the issue which came up in our group which is: Would an
employer anyway, want to fund an employee on what you
described as a generic or holistic upgrading (…) programme where
the employer isn’t going to get their employee coming back with
the specific competence-based skills that they would like to see
them upgrading on? – which are very much more focused than
your generic more general skills – which are very useful to the