The last two postings of this blog reviewed and cursorily
explained two general strategies for change in social environments. To add context: in this blog, I am currently looking at the
question of implementing change in organizational entities. To do this, I am reviewing some selected social
science literature to help me express what it takes to successfully institute
sought after change. My overall concern
is to address which organizational elements have to change in order to have a
specific organization, a school, become a place that is run in a federalist
fashion. That is, a fashion in which the
staff, students, and related community members, especially parents, are
collaborating in the various processes that make a school run. This is beyond what usually exists today in
which there are structural elements for collaboration, but true collaboration
is missing.
My ultimate concern is that a federalist based curriculum in
civics is enhanced, if not made possible, by a school community that lives its
organizational life under the guise of federalist tenets. This is based on the idea that there is such
a thing as the “hidden curriculum.” A
hidden curriculum is composed of those aspects – either in its structures,
processes, and/or functions – of an educational organization that is not part
of the formal curriculum but, nevertheless, has an educational effect on the
students of that school. Usually, this
teaching process occurs as students experience the specific modes of operation
and other distinguishing aspects of the school they attend. For example, how teachers of the school co-operate
with each other or don’t co-operate sends messages, usually unintended, to
students about how workplace expectations exist in the real world. These behavior patterns very often teach
students, and those types of messages that compose the hidden curriculum are
just as influential as the content in textbooks or lectures, if not more
so. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a
fool’s notion. What we do in front of
young people has equal, if not more, power over how they see and know the
world. The point being: if a civics curriculum is set to use
federation theory as its guiding construct by which its content is chosen, that
choice would be enhanced if the school, in its operations, adopts an overall
federalist approach in how it runs its business. Given the dominance of a natural rights view
of politics and governance – including the governance of organizations –
schools today are in need of social change if they are to be run more in the
mode of federalist principles. It is
this latter concern that necessitates those committed to federalist theory to
look at and become familiar with change theory.
This posting follows a set of postings that reviewed two overall
strategy types dedicated to instituting change:
empirical-rational strategies and power-coercive strategies. This posting will begin to address a third
general type, normative-re-educative strategies. As with the other postings, this one will
rely heavily on the work of Robert Chin and Kenneth D. Benne.[1]
I sort of introduced some of the ideas of the normative
re-educative strategies when I described more specific forms of the
power-coercive strategies in my last posting.
There, I pointed out that if, in using power-coercive strategies, the
aim were to institute complicated and/or long developing change, power-coercive
strategies would have to be supplemented with normative-re-educative ones. This proviso indicates the first assumption
one makes when selecting a normative-re-educative strategy: the sought after change is profound and/or
extensive. In turn, this situation calls
for more than merely seeking changes in knowledge, information, or intellectual
rationales. What is needed instead, or
in addition, is a change in the way the subjects of the change value, feel, or
hold relationships; i.e., what is sought is a change in the normative
orientations that are present in the existing environment which can be within
and/or without the organizational space.
Change is dependent on getting some or all of the people involved to
“see,” to some extent, that space differently – a tall order indeed.
Chin and Benne, in their presentation of these normative
strategies, depend on several iconic social thinkers: Kurt Lewin and Sigmund Freud, on whom I will
report in my next posting. But before
sharing some of their thoughts, let me mention another contributing source:
John Dewey.
This philosopher/educator’s contribution is the notion that
people are not passive learners. They
learn from doing and as such, one needs to take into account the active
learning processes that are derived from a person interacting with his/her
environmental resources. People are
constantly anticipating and attempting to further or thwart developments in
their social environments. They are not
simply receptors of the physical and social dynamics around them. This is probably heightened when one is
considering social environments, as in organizational life. In this sense, intelligence is social. More broadly, a person trying to engage or
otherwise deal with that social reality must recognize the existence and
influence of a normative culture which is made up, in part, of norms, habits,
and values. Over time, these become
internalized by the individuals involved.
In turn, if meaningful change is sought, these elements have to be
accounted for if success is to be achieved.
Such elements transcend the rational and are usually a product of heavy
emotional investment – often beyond the conscious level and into the
subconscious level of those so invested.
This, among those involved, goes beyond reason to an “intelligence”
which has its own modes of invention, development, and testing procedures. This is what is referred to when one hears, “we
have our ways of doing things.” These
can be major obstacles to change and is what being “institutionalized”
means. Such entrenched factors,
internalized factors, cannot be merely forced out by legal coercion or a system
of marginal rewards and still maintain the integrity of the organization – such
as a school. The subjects of change have
to first, need to feel the need to
change – and feel it honestly – and then go about the often painful process of
change which can be disorienting and threatening on many levels. Normative-re-educative strategies are about
dealing with this level of change.
I will next look at the contributions of Lewin and Freud. Needless to say, of the three types of
strategies, the one most inclined to institute the changes necessary to truly
form a “federalist” school is known as normative-re-educative.
[1] Based on the theoretical work: Chin, R. and Benne, K. D. (1985).
General strategies for effecting changes in human systems. In W. G. Bennis, K. D. Benne, and R. Chin
(Eds.), The Planning of Change (pp.
22-45). New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
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