| This book is the result of some experiences I’ve had during the last 10 years, teaching repertory grid technique to a variety of audiences. There have been two main kinds of trainee. The first has comprised my direct students at Luton Graduate Business School, managers studying for MBA and MSc degrees on a part-time basis, and young graduates on the full-time masters programme. There have also been undergraduates, here and there, from the education and the management departments. All par for the course, one imagines, for a technique which presents itself as a mental-mapping and decision-making aid.
The second group, you might feel, is rather surprising. It comprises members and affiliates of the Occupational Division of the British Psychological Society, as part of their continuing professional development programme; psychologists and counsellors in some UK and Irish universities; and psychologists working for the Employment Service. Shouldn’t psychologists, the very people who ought to be well informed about cognitive structures, mental maps, and decision-making technique, already know all this?
You could be right, but by and large they don’t, and for two reasons: academic attitudes and simple availability.
About the Author
Devi Jankowicz is Professor of Constructivist Managerial Psychology at the University of Luton. He has been using repertory grids in a variety of occupational and managerial applications for 30 years. He used to specialise in psychometric testing until it was suggested to him that talking to people in their own language might be more valuable than talking to them in psychologists’ language, and this book is written in that spirit. As well as being useful in his work as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, this perspective has been particularly fruitful in his personal research on knowledge transfer across cultural boundaries between the West and the post-command economies of Central Europe. |
