GENERAL STRATEGIES FOR EFFECTING
CHANGES IN HUMAN SYSTEMS
Robert Chin, Kenneth D. Benne
(The following is an abbreviated version of the technical and erudite work of Chin and Benne
whose work on planned change is considered seminal. Their backgrounds were social
psychology and educational philosophy, respectively. The change management comic strips
have been added by the Instructor.)
xxx (We) shall limit our discussion to those changes which are planned changes-in
which attempts to bring about change are conscious, deliberate, and intended, at least
on the part of one or more agents related to the change attempt. We shall also attempt
to categorize strategies and procedures which have a few important elements in
common but which, in fact, differ widely in other respects. xxx
One element in all approaches to planned change is the conscious utilization and
application of knowledge as an instrument or tool for modifying patterns and institutions
of practice. xxx In educational practice, for example, technologies of communication
and calculation, based upon new knowledge of electronics-audio-visual devices,
television, computers, teaching machines--loom large among the knowledges and
technologies that promise greater efficiency and economy in handling various practices
in formal education. As attempts are made to introduce these new thing technologies
into school situations the change problem shifts to the human problems of dealing with
the resistances, anxieties, threats to morale, conflicts, disrupted interpersonal
communications, and so on, which prospective changes in patterns of practice evoke
in the people affected by the change. So the change agent, even though focally and
initially concerned with modifications in the thing technology of education, finds himself
in need of more adequate knowledge of human behavior, individual and fundamental
social, and in need of developed "people technologies," based on behavioral
knowledge, for dealing effectively with the human aspects of deliberate change.
The knowledge which suggests improvements in
educational practice may, on the other hand, be
behavioral knowledge in the first instance —
knowledge about participative learning, about
attitude change, about family disruption in innercity communities, about the cognitive and skill
requirements of new careers, and so forth. xxx
Here change agents, (are) initially focused on
application of behavioral knowledge and the
improvement of people technologies xxx.
academy.whatfix.com This line of reasoning suggests that, whether the
focus of planned change is in the introduction of more effective thing technologies or
people technologies into institutionalized practice, processes of introducing such
changes must be based on behavioral knowledge of change and must utilize people
technologies based on such knowledge.
www.pinterest.com A. TYPES OF STRATEGIES FOR CHANGING
Our further analysis is based on three types or groups of strategies, The first of these,
and probably the most frequently employed by men of knowledge in America and
Western Europe, are those we call empirical-rational strategies. One fundamental
assumption underlying these strategies is that men are rational. Another assumption is
that men will follow their rational self-interest once this is revealed to them. A change is
proposed by some person or group which knows of a situation that is desirable,
effective, and in line with the self-interest of the person, group, organization, or
community which will be affected by the change. Because the person (or group) is
assumed to be rational and moved by self-interest, it is assumed that he (or they) will
adopt the proposed change if it can be rationally justified and if it can be shown by the
proposer(s) that he (or they) will gain by the change.
A second group of strategies we call normative-re-educative. These strategies build
upon assumptions about human motivation different from those underlying the first.
The rationality and intelligence of men are not denied. Patterns of action and practice
are supported by sociocultural norms and by commitments on the part of individuals to
these norms. Sociocultural norms are supported by the attitude and value systems of
individuals--normative outlooks which undergird their commitments. Change in a
pattern of practice or action, according to this view, will occur only as the persons
involved are brought to change their normative orientations to old patterns and develop
commitments to new ones. And changes in normative orientations involve changes in
attitudes, values, skills, and significant relationships, not just changes in knowledge,
information, or intellectual rationales for action and practice.
The third group of strategies is based on the application of power in some form,
political or otherwise. The influence process involved is basically that of compliance of
those with less power to the plans, directions, and leadership of those with greater
power. Often the power to be applied is legitimate power or authority. Thus the strategy
may involve getting the authority of law or administrative policy behind the change to
be effected. Some power strategies may appeal less to the use of authoritative power
to effect change than to the massing of coercive power, legitimate or not, in support of
the change sought.
1. Empirical-Rational Strategies
A variety of specific strategies are included in what we are calling the empiricalrational approach to effecting change. As we have already pointed out the rationale
underlying most of these is an assumption that men are guided by reason and that
they will utilize some rational calculus of self-interest in determining needed changes in
behavior.
xxx On this view, the chief foes to human rationality and to change or progress based
on rationality were ignorance and superstition. Scientific investigation and research
represented the chief ways of extending knowledge and reducing the limitations of
ignorance. Optimistic view of man and his future was an advocacy of education as a
way of disseminating scientific knowledge and of freeing men and women from the
shackles of superstition. Although elitist notions played a part in the thinking of many
classical liberals, the increasing trend during the 19th century was toward the
universalization of educational opportunity. The common and universal school, open to
all men and women, was the principal instrument by which knowledge would replace
ignorance and superstition in the minds of people and become a principal agent in the
spread of reason, knowledge, and knowledge based action and practice (progress) in
human society. In American experience, Jefferson may be taken as a principal, early
advocate of research and of education as agencies of human progress. xxx
a. BASIC RESEARCH DISSEMINATION OF KNOWLEDGE
THROUGH GENERAL EDUCATION
The strategy of encouraging basic knowledge building and of depending on general
education to diffuse the results of research into the minds and thinking of men and
women is still by far the most appealing strategy of change to most academic men of
knowledge and to large segments of the American population as well. Basic
researchers are quite likely to appeal for time for further research when confronted by
some unmet need. And many people find this appeal convincing. Both of these facts
are well illustrated by difficulties with diseases for which no adequate control
measures or cures are available --- poliomyelitis, for example. Medical researchers
asked for more time and funds for research and people responded with funds for
research both through voluntary channels and through legislative appropriation. And
the control measures were forthcoming. The educational problem then shifted to
inducing people to comply with immunization procedures based on research findings.
This appeal to a combination of research and education of the public has worked in
many areas of new knowledge-based technologies where almost universal readiness
for accepting the new technology was already present in the population. Where such
readiness is not available, as in the case of fluoridation technologies in the
management of dental caries, general strategy of basic research plus educational
(informational) campaigns to spread knowledge of the findings do not work well. The
cases of its inadequacy as a single strategy of change have multiplied, especially
where “engineering” problems, which involved a divided and conflicting public or or
deep resistances due to the threat by the new technology to traditional attitudes and
values, have thwarted its effectiveness. But these cases, while they demand attention
to other strategies of changing, do not disprove the importance of basic research and
of general educational opportunity as elements in a progressive and self-renewing
society. xxx
b. PERSONNEL SELECTION AND REPLACEMENT
Difficulties in getting knowledge effectively into practice may be seen as lying primarily
in the lack of fitness of persons occupying positions with job responsibilities for
improving practice. The argument goes that we need the right person in the right
position, if knowledge is to be optimally applied and if rationally based changes are to
become the expectation in organizational and societal affairs. This fits with the liberal
reformers frequently voiced and enacted plea to drive the unfit from office and to
replace them with those more fit as a condition of social progress.
That reformers’ programs have so often failed has sobered but by no means
destroyed the zeal of those who regard personnel selection, assessment, and
replacement as a major key to program improvement in education or in other
enterprises as well. xxx We do not discount their limited value as actual and potential
tools for change, while making two observations on the way they have often been
used. First, they have been used more often in the interest of system maintenance
rather than of system change, since the job descriptions personal workers seek to fill
are defined in terms of system requirements as established. Second, by focusing on
the role occupant as the principal barrier to improvement, personnel selection and
replacement strategies have tended not to reveal the social and cultural system
difficulties which may be in need of change if improvement is to take place.
c. SYSTEMS ANALYSTS AS STAFF AND CONSULTANTS
xxx other expert workers – systems analysts - more attuned to system difficulties than
to the adequacy or inadequacy of persons as role occupants within the system, have
found their way into the staff resources of line management in contemporary
organizations. xxx
The line management of an enterprise seeks to organize human and technical effort
towards the most efficient service of organizational goals. And these goals are defined
in terms of the production of some mandated product, whether a tangible product or a
less tangible good or service. In pursuing this quest for efficiency, line management
employs experts in the analysis of sociotechnical systems and in the laying out of more
efficient systems. The experts employed may work as external consultants or as an
internal staff unit. Behavioral scientists have recently found their way, along with
mathematicians and engineers, into systems analysis work. xxx
We see an emerging strategy, in the use of behavioral scientists as systems analysts
and engineers, toward viewing the problem of organizational change and changing as
a wide-angled problem, one in which all the input and output features and components
of a large-scale system are considered. xxx
d. APPLIED RESEARCH AND LINKAGE SYSTEMS
FOR DIFFUSION OF RESEARCH RESULTS
The American development of applied research and of a planned system for linking
applied researchers with professional practitioners and both of these with centers for
basic research and with organized consumers of applied research has been strongly
influenced by two distinctive American inventions - the land-grant university and the
agricultural extension system. xxx The land-grant colleges or universities were
dedicated to doing applied research in the service of agriculture and the mechanic arts.
These colleges and universities develop research programs in basic sciences as well
and experimental stations for the development and refinement of knowledge based
technologies for use in engineering and agriculture. xxx local organizations of adult
farm men and women and of farm youth (provided) both a channel toward informing
consumers concerning new and better agricultural practices and toward getting
awareness of unmet consumer needs and unsolved problems back to centers of
knowledge and research. xxx
2. Normative-Re-educative Strategies
of Changing
www.pinterest.com xxx
Intelligence is social, rather than narrowly
individual. Men are guided in their actions by
socially
funded
and
communicated
meanings, norms, and institutions, in brief by
a normative culture. At the personal level,
men are guided by internalized meanings,
habits, and values. Changes in patterns of
action or practice are, therefore, changes,
not alone in the rational informational
equipment of men, but at the personal level,
in habits and values as well and, at the socio-cultural level, changes are alterations in
normative structures and institutionalized roles and relationships, and perceptual
orientations. xxx
a. IMPROVING THE PROBLEM-SOLVING CAPABILITIES OF A SYSTEM
This family of approaches to changing rests on several assumptions about change in
human systems. Changes in a system, when they are reality oriented, take the form
of problem solving. A system to achieve optimum reality orientation in its adaptations
to its changing internal and external environments must develop and institutionalize its
own problem-solving structures and processes. These structures and processes must
be tuned both to human problems of relationship and morale and to technical problems
of meeting the system’s task requirements, set by its goals of production, distribution,
and so on. System problems are typically not social or technical but actually sociotechnical. The problem-solving structures and processes of a human system must be
developed to deal with a range of socio-technical difficulties and organizing the
relevant processes of data collection, planning, invention, and try out of solutions,
evaluation and feedback of results, replanning, and so forth, which are required for
the solution of the problems. xxx
b. RELEASING AND FOSTERING GROWTH IN THE PERSONS
WHO MAKE UP THE SYSTEM TO BE CHANGED
Those committed to this family of approaches to changing tend to see the person as
the basic unit of social organization. Persons, it is believed, are capable of creative,
life-affirming, self- and other-regarding and respecting responses, choices and actions,
if conditions which thwart these kinds of responses are removed and other supporting
conditions developed. xxx Maslow has worked out a similar idea in his analysis of the
hierarchy of needs in persons. If lower needs are met, higher need-wanting actions will
take place. McGregor has formulated the ways in which existing organizations operate
to fixate persons in lower levels of motivation and has sought to envision an
organization designed to release and support the growth of persons in fulfilling their
higher motivations as they function within the organization.
We have presented the two variants of normative-re-educative approaches to changing
xxx both approaches emphasize experience-based learning as an ingredient of all
enduring changes in human systems. xxx
(P)ersonal growth approaches put (emphasis) upon the release of creative responses
in persons being re-educated. Problem-solving approaches also value creativity,
though they focus more upon the group and organizational conditions which increase
the probability of creative responses by persons functioning within those conditions
than upon persons directly. xxx both believe that creative adaptations to changing
conditions may arise within human systems and do not have to be imported from
outside them xxx
3. Power-Coercive Approaches to Effecting Change
It is not the use of power, in the sense of influence by one person upon another or by
one group upon another, which distinguishes this family of strategies from those
already discussed. Power is an ingredient of all human action. The differences lie
rather in the ingredients of power upon which the strategies of changing depend and
the ways in which power is generated and applied in processes of effecting change.
Thus, what we have called rational-empirical approaches depend on knowledge as a
major ingredient of power. In this view, men of knowledge are legitimate sources of
power and the desirable flow of influence or power is from men who know to men who
don’t know through processes of education and of dissemination of valid information.
Normative-re-educative strategies of changing do not deny the importance of
knowledge as a source of power, especially in the form of knowledge-based
technologies. Exponents of this approach to changing are committed to redressing the
imbalance between the limited use of behavioral knowledge and people technologies
and widespread use of physical biological knowledge and related thing technologies in
effecting changes in human affairs. In addition, exponents of normative-re-educative
approaches recognize the importance of noncognitive determinants of behavior as
resistance or supports to changing -- values, attitudes and feelings at the personal
level and norms and relationships at the social level. Influence must extend to these
noncognitive determinants of behavior if voluntary commitments and reliance upon
social intelligence are to be maintained and extended in our changing society.
Influence of noncognitive determinants of behavior must be exercised in mutual
process of persuasion within collaborative relationships. These strategies are oriented
against coercive and non-reciprocal influence, both on moral and pragmatic grounds.
What ingredients of power do power-coercive strategies emphasize? In general,
emphasis is upon political and economic sanctions in the exercise of power. But other
coercive strategies emphasize the utilization of moral power, playing upon sentiments
of guilt and shame. Political power carries with it legitimacy and the sanctions which
accrue to those who break the law. Thus getting a law passed against racial imbalance
in the schools brings legitimate coercive power behind efforts to desegregate the
schools, threatening those who resist with sanctions under the law and reducing the
resistance of others who are morally oriented against breaking the law. Economic
power exerts coercive influence over the decisions of those to whom it is applied.
Thus federal appropriations granting funds to local schools for increased emphasis
upon science instruction tends to exercise coercive influence over the decisions of
local school officials concerning the emphasis of the school curriculum. In general,
power-coercive strategies of changing seek to mass political and economic power
behind the change goals which the strategists of change have decided are desirable.
Those who oppose these goals, if they adopt the same strategy seek to mass political
and economic power in opposition. The strategy thus tends to divide the society when
there is anything like a division of opinion and of power in that society.
When a person or group is entrenched in power in a social system, in command of
political legitimacy and of political and economic sanctions, that person or group can
use power-coercive strategies in effecting changes, which they consider desirable,
without much awareness on the part of those out of power in the system that such
strategies are being employed. A power-coercive way of making decisions is accepted
as in the nature of things. The use of such strategies by those in legitimate control of
various social systems in our society is much more widespread than most of us might
at first be willing or able to admit. xxx
When any part of a social system becomes aware that its interests are not being
served by those in control of the system, the coercive power of those in charge can be
challenged. If the minority is committed to power-coercive strategies, or is aware of no
alternatives to such strategies, how can they make headway against existing power
relations within the system? They may organize discontent against the present controls
of the system and achieve power outside the legitimate channels of authority in the
system. Thus teachers’ unions may develop power against coercive controls by the
central administrative group and the school board in a school system. They may
threaten concerted xxx disregard of administrative rulings and board policies or they
may threaten work stoppage or a strike. Those in control may get legislation against
teachers’ strikes. If the political power of organized teachers grows, they may get
legislation requiring collective bargaining between organized teachers and the school
board on some range of educational issues. The power struggle then shifts to the
negotiation table and compromise between two competing interests may become the
expected goal of the intergroup exchange. Whether the augmented power of new,
relevant knowledge or the generation of common power through joint collaboration and
deliberation are lost in the process will depend on the degree of commitment by all
parties to the conflict to a continuation and maintenance of power-coercive strategies
for effecting change.
a. STRATEGIES OF NONVIOLENCE
Mahatma Gandhi may be seen as the most prominent recent theorist and practitioner
of nonviolent strategies for effecting change, although the strategies did not originate
with him in the history of mankind, either in idea or in practice. Gandhi spoke of
Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience as one important influence in his own approach
to nonviolent coercive action. Martin Luther King was perhaps America’s most
distinguished exponent of nonviolent coercion in effecting social change. A minority (or
majority) confronted with what they see as an unfair, unjust, or cruel system of coercive
social control may dramatize their rejection of the system by publicly and nonviolently
witnessing and demonstrating against it. Part of the ingredients of the power of the
civilly disobedient is in the guilt which their demonstration of injustice, unfairness, or
cruelty of the existing system of control arouses in those exercising control or in others
previously committed to the present system of control. The opposition to the
disobedient group may be demoralized and may waver in their exercise of control, if
they profess the moral values to which the dissidents are appealing.
Weakening or dividing the opposition through moral coercion may be combined with
economic sanctions--like Gandhi’s refusal to buy salt and other British manufactured
commodities in India or like the desegregationists’ economic boycott of the products of
racially discriminating factories and businesses. xxx
b.
USE OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS TO ACHIEVE CHANGE
Political power has traditionally played an important part in achieving changes in our
institutional life. And political power will continue to play an important part in shaping
and reshaping our institutions of education as well as other institutions. Changes
enforced by political coercion need not be oppressive if the quality of our democratic
processes can be maintained and improved.
Changes in policies with respect to education have come from various departments of
government. By far the most of these have come through legislation on the state level.
Under legislation, school administrators have various degrees of discretionary powers,
and policy and program changes are frequently put into effect by administrative rulings.
Judicial decisions have played an important part in shaping educational policies, none
more dramatically than the Supreme Court decision declaring laws and policies
supporting school segregation illegal. And the federal courts have played a central
part in seeking to implement and enforce this decision.
Some of the difficulty with the use of political institutions to effect changes arises from
an overestimation by change agents of the capability of political action to effect
changes in practice. When the law is passed, the administrative ruling announced, or
the judicial decision handed down legitimizing some traditional practice, change agents
who have worked hard for the law, ruling, or decision frequently assumed that the
desired change has been made.
Actually, all that has been done is to bring the force of legitimacy behind some
envisioned change. The process of re-education of persons who are to conduct
themselves in new ways still have to be carried out. And the new conduct often
requires new knowledge, new skills, new attitudes, and new value orientations. And,
on the social level, new conduct may require changes in the norms, the roles, and the
relationship structures of the institutions involved. This is not to discount the
importance of political actions in legitimizing changed policies and practices in
educational institutions and in other institutions as well. It is rather to emphasize that
normative-re-educative strategies must be combined with political coercion, both
before and after the political action, if the public is to be adequately informed and
desirable and commonly acceptable changes in practice are to be achieved.
c. CHANGING THROUGH THE RECOMPOSITON AND
MANIPULATION OF POWER ELITES
The idea or practice of the ruling class or a power elite in social control was by no
means original with Karl Marx. What was original with him was his way of relating
these concepts to a process and strategy of fundamental social change. The
composition of the ruling class was, of course, for Marx those who owned and
controlled the means and process of production of goods and services in a society.
Since, for Marx, the ideology of the ruling class set limits to the thinking of most
intellectuals and of those in charge of educational process xxx, rationales for the
existing state of affairs, including its concentration of political and economic power, are
provided and disseminated by intellectuals and educators and communicators within
the system.
Since Marx was morally committed to a classless society in which political coercion
would disappear because there would be no vested private interests to rationalize and
defend, he looked for a counterforce in society to challenge and eventually to
overcome the power of the ruling class. And this he found in the economically
dispossessed and alienated workers of hand and brain. As this new class gained
consciousness of its historic mission and its power increased, the class struggle could
be effectively joined. The outcome of this struggle was victory for those best able to
organize and maximize the productive power of the instruments of production - for
Marx this victory belonged to the now dispossessed workers.
Many of Marx’s values would have put him behind what we have called normative-reeducative strategies of changing. And he recognized that such strategies would have
to be used after the accession of the workers to state power in order to usher in the
classless society. He doubted if the ruling class could be re-educated, since reeducation would mean loss of their privileges and coercive power in society. He
recognized that the power elite could, within limits, accommodate new interests as
these gained articulation and power. But these accommodations must fall short of a
radical transfer of power to a class more capable of wielding it. Meanwhile, he
remained committed to a power-coercive strategy of changing until the revolutionary
transfer of power had been effected.
Marxian concepts have affected the thinking of contemporary men about social change
both inside and outside nations in which Marxism has become the official orientation.
His concepts have tended to bolster assumptions of the necessity of power-coercive
strategies in achieving fundamental redistributions of socio-economic power or in
recomposing or manipulating power elites in a society. Democratic, re-educative
methods of changing have a place only after such changes in power allocation have
been achieved by power-coercive methods. Non-Marxians as well as Marxians are
often committed to this dictum.
In contemporary America, C. Wright Mills has identified a power elite, essentially
composed of industrial, military, and government leaders, who direct and limit process
of social change and accommodation in our society. And President Eisenhower
warned of the dangerous concentration in power in substantially the same groups in
his farewell message to the American people. xxx normative-re-educative strategists
of changing must include power elites among their targets of changing as they seek to
diffuse their ways of progress within contemporary society. And they must take
seriously Marx’s question about the re-educability of members of the power elites, as
they deal with problems and projects of social change. xxx
Those committed to the advancement of normative-re-educative strategies of changing
must take account of present actual concentrations of power wherever they work. This
does not mean that they must develop a commitment to power-coercive strategies to
change the distribution of power except when these may be necessary to effect the
spread of their own democratically and scientifically oriented methods of changing
within society.
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