People

Oğuz N. Babüroğlu holds the ARAMA Chair of Action Research at Sabancı University, İstanbul, Turkey, and is the Founding Manager of ARAMA Participatory Management Consulting since 1995. He received his PhD in 1987 at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Social Systems Sciences. He specializes in transforming large-scale systems toward new generation models within the action research perspective and has published in the leading journals within this line of inquiry. His publications have appeared in journals such as Journal of Action Research, Human Relations, Systems Practice and Action Research, and Organization Studies, largely on topics within the Emery–Trist perspective. He has worked with organizations over 1,500 action research projects ranging from large corporations to civil society institutions, government agencies, and municipalities; has helped design three universities from ground up; and has set up 15 corporate academies in Turkey as well as in Europe, United States, Russia, and the Middle East. His numerous workshops paved the way for Turkey to meet with participatory methods and made Search Conference a category name. “Ortak akıl” which is used in his search conferences to translate “common ground” into Turkish, is popularized in business and political environments of Turkey.