From the Stable State to total Disruption?

We live in chaotic times and I have been trying in recent weeks to map how various authors have tred to make sense for us of the changes which our societies have been experiencing simce I was a boy. My drafts never seem to finish but I am reasonably content with the new one I now present - From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies (with a short 14-page version being available here) 

My own focus has tended to be on the institutional and political aspects of change – but as this paper has developed I realised that I had largely neglected the technological and commercial aspects of change. And, as more and more titles have appeared about the pending collapse of the western system. I have included these – as well as samples of the scientific writing which suggests that, in the face of the complexity of the world, we all require a huge dash of humility.

Table One suggests these are the key fields of writing – and offers a few examples

The Level	The Focus	Example
1 individual	Psychology Self-help,	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan 1995
2. techno-logical	Engineering and economic	The Discoverers; Daniel Boorstin (1983) The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2014 (on creativity) The Technology Trap; Karl Frey (2019) Rethinking Humanity James Arbib and Tony Seba 2020
3 organisation -al	2.1 Commercial – managing change, Organ Development	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982 Managing Change in Organisations Colin Carnall (5th edition 2007) Management challenges for the 21st century Peter Drucker (2001) Managing Change; Bernard Burnes (2004)
	2.2 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)
	2,3 Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and B Crosby (2015)
4 societal	Social change complexity, the adaptive cycle	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) Panarchy – understanding transformations in human and natural systems N Gunderson and C Holling 2002
5 Networked	The dynamic between the levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1993 The Rise of the Network Society; Manual Castells (1996) The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman 2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

I have already drawn attention to the fact that there are few papers on the all-embracing nature of change. It is a subject which is highly compartmentalised and table 1 of From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies is the core which describes each of the schools of writing