What do we mean when we talk about change? part V of a series

We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which, curiously, are totally uninterested in each other - dealing with the individual, the organisational and the societal respectively (forgive the last term but “social” does have a rather different meaning from activities relating to a particular society).

·         the first field draws on psychology and tends to be interested in things like stress;

·         the second in the management of organisational change (but divided by their respective focus on companies, the public sector and the NGO field);      

·         the last in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change” 

Capacity development is one of the few approaches which recognises the importance of all three – although, in reality, its focus is on training and it never ventures into the dangerous field of social change. It’s only in the past year or so that some people have dared challenge this (see last 2 titles of “networked” level of table).

 I had a post at the beginning of the year on this subject - but the lack of interest each of these fields takes in one another is so remarkable that it’s worth updating the post and integrating it in what has become one of my series 

This (updated) table tries to reduce these 4 fields of writing to a few milestones.

The Level	The Focus	Example
The individual	Self-help, psychology	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan  1995
The organisational	Commercial – managing change, Organ Development	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982 Managing Change in Organisations Colin Carnall (1990) Management challenges for the 21st century Peter Drucker (2001)
	Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Change here – managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain ; John Connolly et al (2021)
	Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and B Crosby (2015)
The societal	Social change	Change the World Robert Quinn (2000) Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)
networked	The dynamic between the 3 levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1993 The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)