In the dominant management discourse, managers and consultants are credited with the ability to move their organisation in a planned, controlled way towards an idealised future. The assumptions underpinning this discourse include the following: organisations are thought of as systems that can be designed and steered in an intended direction; culture is seen as a control system to align employees’ conduct in support of the organisation’s strategy; consultants are viewed as experts in designing and implementing effective and efficient interventions, being on top of the process. These assumptions are grounded in the natural sciences of certainty, in which rational, formative and linear causality are presumed. I argue in this thesis, through a reflexive enquiry of my own practice, that these assumptions do not sufficiently resonate with my experience as an internal consultant on leadership and culture change. I am offering a critique of the dominant way of understanding organisations, culture and control, with the implication of coming to reappraise the involvement of a consultant in processes of culture change. In understanding organisations to be self-organising patterns of human interaction, culture is a social phenomenon, as it continually emerges as social control in the day-to-day local interactions of people making sense of experience. Using webs of significance, present in one’s personal history and in society, people interpret and give order to their life as they negotiate and evaluate their engagements together. In their engagement, participants will negotiate how to functionalise general values in particular situations that involve differences and can cause anxiety or even conflict. In this process of negotiation and evaluation, they are forming and being formed by each other. In this interaction no one is in control, determining in a predictable way what will happen. The participants have an influence that impacts on potential next steps in their interaction. An internal consultant’s involvement is in facilitating these processes of local interaction, enabling participants to have the conversations they tend not to have themselves, perhaps due to the anxiety of the interaction being unpredictable and predictable at the same time while no one is in control of the process or the outcome. A consultant is, as fellow participant, involved in the interaction while forming and being formed by it. He is at the same time detached: by inviting participants to work with and reflect on their experience of engaging, he enables reflexive awareness of what they are involved in together. The internal consultant, through temporary leadership, facilitates the conversation by focusing on the present, and working with differences, allowing the potential for novelty and change to occur. This temporary leadership is not a designated role or the authority of being the expert, but emerges in social interaction, through recognition and acceptance of participants acknowledging the consultant as leader in having a stronger influence than others. I propose that this alternative perspective does not offer a set of techniques, a causal framework to improve organisations in an intended and controlled way, as supposed in the dominant discourse. Rather, the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating enables a better understanding of human interaction processes; of culture emerging as social control and consulting as a social process, within the paradoxes of predictability and unpredictability, of being and not being in control, and of stability and change at the same time. It requires an internal consultant to assume a form of temporary leadership by enabling participants, through reflexive understanding of their experience, to be responsible in a critically aware manner of the ways in which they influence the next steps of engaging.

Effective ELL teaching and learning is profoundly influenced by the teachers’ personal experiences and personalities (Farrell, 2016), their experience as language learners as well as language teachers (Farrell, 2007), and their beliefs about learning and teaching a second language (Farrell, 2015; Farrell & Ives, 2015). This study honored and examined in-depth the often-discounted stories/reflective narratives of our teachers. This paper reports a qualitative cases study that explores three veteran teacher’s reflection on their personal and professional experiences with ELLs for self-discovery over years (Cirocki & Farrell, 2017) so that they can further reflect for their future actions with ELLs (Burns & Bulman, 2000; Farrell, 2007; Farrell & Vos, 2018). Data analysis revealed the teachers’ different strengths and needs in working with ELLs. Four major dimensions (language, culture, culturally and linguistically sensitive pedagogy, and collaborative community) were identified as critical to effective teaching of ELLs and preparation of second language teachers.

Transport Policy in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to the early 1990s has been focused on increasing car use at the expense of investment in public transport services and infrastructure. This has culminated in a poorly integrated public transport network that has seen continued decline in use outside of London. The Competition Act (1998) has exacerbated this, as public operators risked prosecution if they were seen to collaborate. A policy shift in 1998 introduced the concept of Local Transport Plans, Organisational Travel Plans and Quality Partnerships as local policy tools for developing and implementing travel solutions using the planning process. Travel Plans today are viewed by the UK Government as a local delivery tool for transport policy, inspired by the successes in Europe and the United States in changing individual travel behaviour, where the Smart Growth Agenda has emerged as a mass transit based planning response to urban sprawl. In the UK, success in delivering significant modal shift away from private car use has seen limited success, hence the rationale for this research. Using this wider policy context, this research uses the University of Hertfordshire as a case study with the objective to research the development and implementation processes of a Travel Plan. The research conducts a review of travel behaviour within the case study, providing recommendations for implementing alternative interventions to car-based travel. Making use of national policy tools, using insights from both Smarter Travel / Smarter Choice agenda, the research includes the development process of a complex city wide Quality Partnership – a delivery mechanism for travel behaviour change incorporating multiple stakeholders. This thesis uses an embedded and reflective critical realist approach to researching Travel Plans from the perspective of a Travel Plan Coordinator. Through applying a multi-method dimension to empirical data collection, the use of structured quantitative commuter surveys, semi structured qualitative interviews and supporting secondary data sources are all utilised. Using such an approach provides the research with the flexibility for reporting complex social and empirical data, including the researcher’s embedded reflective insights throughout the process. An evaluative matrix ‘lens’ has been developed for reporting back the multitude of factors, including identifying Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators that underpin the success or failure of such travel planning approaches. The research culminates in the development of a Travel Plan for the University of Hertfordshire and a voluntary Quality Partnership for the City and District of St Albans. A conclusion is drawn based on the unique perspective of an embedded reflective researcher as an active practitioner in the field of travel planning. In order to be successful a Travel Plan should feed into the wider quality partnership structures for mutual benefit where multiple stakeholders are able to influence the development of interventions at the local level, which could lead to significant travel behaviour changes. It is argued that this will ultimately help Travel Plans and quality partnerships achieve their key performance objectives and help meet government policy agenda.