ABSTRACT
The Global Compact has a bold vision: to bring a human face to global capitalism by combining the energies and resources of business, civil society and governments to address major social and environmental problems. Beneath this sweeping vision lies a tangle of difficult detail, requiring real behavioural change on the part of long-established institutions and therefore on the part of individuals. Realisation of the hope embodied in the Global Compact rests on the development of new practices, not just new intentions and new policies, and, as most readers of this chapter will know, closing the gap between ‘espoused theories’ and ‘theories in use’ (Argyris and Schön 1974) is one of the major puzzles of organisational, as well as personal, life. This is essentially a question of learning to do things differently.
