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Chris Argyris

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Chris Argyris is a theorist and practitioner of organisational development. For more than 50 years, he has written, taught and acted as a consultant in helping people and organisations to learn. He has published over thirty books and a large number of articles, many written with a high degree of scientific rigour, but his focus has always been on research that can be applied within organisations – a strong “commitment to the development of actionable knowledge” (Argyris 2003, p. 1190). He has described the starting point of his work as follows: I began my career with a dedication to reducing injustices. The injustices that intrigued me were those that inhibited the expansion of liberating alternatives. Soon I narrowed my focus even further to those injustices created by human beings when they were acting to reduce the injustices. The more that I studied these phenomena, the more I found myself studying processes that were self-sealing, compulsively repetitive, and non-interruptible and changeable by the very people who created them. (Argyris 2003, p. 1178).

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References

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© 2009 The Open University

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Ramage, M., Shipp, K. (2009). Chris Argyris. In: Systems Thinkers. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-525-3_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-525-3_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-524-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-525-3

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