I am interested in all aspects of organizational communication, but have a special interest in work groups within organizations, the cultures that they build up over time, and the issues that arise from cultural differences among different work groups.

NFPs tend to mimic the perceived best practices of the corporate world. Whether this is appropriate or not, is open to question. I have recently been doing some work on this, using the New Zealand Hospice movement as a surrogate for the not-for-profit sector.

I became a practitioner of IS in manufacturing in the mid 1970s, learning the principles on courses with IBM in Auckland, NZ, taught by good guys like Gordon Miles, Erwin Meyer and David Gardiner. Later, as an empoyee of the Philips organization, I spent three months in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, doing intensive training in MRP II. Subsequently, I was involved in system implementations in the electronics industry, and applied my experience in this field to the dairy industry as well.

Most e-commerce activities fall into one of a fairly small number of business models. New and different models are interesting and I am currently working with an entrepreneur to explore and describe the model behind a truly original enterprise.

In its original purest sense, phenomenology as discussed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger is far too deep for me. It makes my brain hurt. However, there are exponents of this approach to research who have rendered it accessible to people looking for ways to explore human meaning. Among those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude in this regard is Max Van Manen whose excellent site "Phenomenology Online" was enormously helpful to me during the preparation of my own doctoral dissertation.