The Organization Dimension of Global Change

Abstract

This is our hope: to sketch the conceptual outlines for an expanded field of inquiry into the organization dimension of global change more clearly, coherently, and urgently than has been done before. Today, a vital and pioneering latticework of global social change organizations (GSCO) is spreading across continents, involving people from every nation, in an unprecedented attempt to forge a new vision of the world's cooperative capacity. The people-centered GSCO, we submit, is one of the more important social innovations of the past half-century and is one of the greatest unrecognized resources in the world today. In spite of its rapid proliferation in number, scope, and planetary significance, the GSCO has been largely overlooked in leading organizational and administrative science journals of the discipline. An expanded focus to include "the organization dimension of global change" will, we believe, open up exciting vistas of learning and will compel changes in our current theories of human organization, management, and processes of change. The purpose of this special series of seven articles (to be published in Human Relations over the next three issues) is to inaugurate such discovery by: (1) inviting broad reconsideration of the field's priorities; (2) generating a new discourse into the paradigm shift needed to move the systematic study of the GSCO from the periphery closer to the center of the social-organizational sciences, and (3) proposing that study of the GSCO offers all of us the chance to fashion a social science of vital significance to a sustainable planetary future.

Keywords

social innovation global social change organizations appreciative inquiry

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