I want to continue the topic I introduced in my last posting:
power-coercive change strategies.
Basically, this type of change is a type that depends on subjects doing
what someone, a change agent, wants them to do in order to avoid experiencing a
punishment.[1] This punishment can take the form of a physical,
financial, emotional, reputational, or other type of harm. As I indicated toward the end of the last
posting, this effort will look at more specific power-coercive strategies. They are non-violent, political power, and
Marxian approaches.
Those change strategies that are referred to as non-violent
have a rich history over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We first encounter the idea of non-violent
change strategy in the writings of Henry David Thoreau in the mid-1800s. But
its first application can be noted in the work of Mahatma Gandhi as he led the
movement that eventually broke the imperial hold that Great Britain had over
India. That movement finally secured
India’s independence in 1947. Since
then, here in the US, the civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin
Luther King, applied many of the strategies inspired by Gandhi in the 1950s and
‘60s.
There
are two prerequisites to this approach:
one, the conditions that are to be changed need to be seen as unjust or
extremely unfair by significant numbers within the relevant population and,
two, the groups or organizations (private or public) in which change is sought have
to be susceptible to some loss which is also, in some way, accessible to the
change faction who can use it as leverage.
So, in the case of the early civil rights movement, a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama proved effective in giving the movement a much needed
symbolic victory and was first to put into prominence a young King who was
elevated to lead the protest.[2] If the goal is simply to implement a change –
change agents satisfied with a change that might not be accepted emotionally by
those who have to live with the change – then a power-coercive strategy is good
enough. But if the change advocates depend
on a moral value rationale for their efforts, they might also want those
subjected by the change to have a change of heart. They might want to create a collaborative
relationship with the subjects. If so,
then power-coercive will not be enough.
Initial change will then have to be followed up with a normative-re-educative
strategy (the subject of my next posting).
The
second type of power-coercive strategy is the political power approach. Political power strategies are those that are
administered by those in authority. Let
us assume, for the purposes of just looking at the dynamics of this type of
strategy, that the change agent is someone in authority and that authority is
accepted as legitimate. Here, the
punishment element can take on several guises.
They can be sanctions, fines, loss of monetary rewards such as grant
moneys, or even imprisonment. But these
types of changes are usually not so clean and simple. Usually, if the change is significant,
provocative, and/or multidimensional, then follow up is needed. For example, such a change might need
training so that the subject will have the skills to implement and perform the
change to satisfactory levels. In those
cases, it is not just a matter of some underling verbally agreeing to do
something differently, but having to engage in time consuming and unpleasant
activities in order to learn a skill or otherwise arrange for restructuring or
some other movement of personnel. If one
adds reluctance of any kind on the part of the subject, one is considering a
costly transitional process. This is not
only costly, but dependent on a certain level of willing cooperation. Again, one is probably talking about
instituting a normative-re-educative addition to the initial change process.
The
third strategy type one can consider under the power-coercive category is the
Marxian approach. This approach
presupposes that in the location in which the change is sought, there exists an
established intellectual “field.” That
is, those involved are under the view promulgated by those in charge, the elites. This field is controlled by class-based elites
(it might be elites who are defined as being ethnic, gender, nationality, age,
or sexual preference based). In
controlling the field, the elites define the parameters of the field. They determine what is legitimate or
not. Marxian aim is to change this very
reality; i.e., the effort is to fundamentally inflict a social change so that
those who are being abused by the existing order will adopt a new class
(ethnic, gender, nationality, age, or sexual preference) consciousness. I wrote of this process of change in earlier
postings when I described and explained the basic argument of Paulo Freire in
his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.[3] Those who advocate this strategy speak of
holding, through this type of consciousness change, truer democratic
values. Whatever it is considered, one
would augment the implementation of changed policy in which a heavy dose of
normative-re-educative efforts to engender the type of consciousness which is being
sought.[4]
As you
can detect, when we talk about any extensive plan of change, a coercive form of
power seems to fall short. In each of
these three more specific approaches, change, in order to be meaningful and
lasting, needs to be supplemented by normative-re-educative processes. My next posting will take a close look at
this other type of change.
[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.
[2]
Actual change in the bus service that had
discriminated against African-Americans was accomplished by a Supreme Court
decision that ordered the desegregation of the Montgomery buses.
[3]
See blog posting, Teaching Aim of Critical Pedagogy, May 11, 2011. Available upon request.
[4]
This type of “education” is not as heavy-handed
as it might sound. You are encouraged to
look at Freire’s approach to education to see what is being considered. This is not to say that in countries where
Marxists have taken power that they have not used drastic and very
authoritarian modes of re-education.
