Abstract
Happily, Empowering Workers & Clients for Organizational Change accomplishes fully the aim that its editors set out to achieve: equipping low-power employees and organizational constituents to alter or transform the human service agencies in which they work, volunteer, or pursue help. The seasoned social workers and educators who have crafted this book, Marcia B. Cohen and Cheryl A. Hyde, in creating this invaluable volume of essays, drew on decades of experience in organizational practice and change initiatives, on the complex and multidisciplinary scholarly literature of organizational transformation, and on expert practitioners and students of the processes of changing organizations from below.
This volume of essays gathered by Cohen and Hyde is suffused with a feminist and democratic commitment to building respectful and active partnerships between human service workers and their clients as they together pursue greater degrees of organizational justice and responsiveness to the needs and strengths of clients. The fertile and fresh case studies by veteran and student practitioners of organizational change driven by low-power workers and clients offer strategies and tactics galore for the reader who is interested in making minor and major dents in the armor of bureaucratic inertia and inflexibility.
Each essay is carefully pruned to make sure that maximal professional, practice, and conceptual wisdom is delivered in a compact format. For the fast-paced social worker or human service worker who finds all-too-little time to read, the compressed quality of the essays is a blessing. For the social work or human service educator and student, the concise entries are equally appealing.
The force-field analysis, an analytic tool useful to any organizational change agent who seeks to assess organizational allies and foes, as well as conditions external and internal to organizational life that favor or cloud the likely success of a proposed change initiative, plays a major role in the overarching conceptual framework of the book and of many of its component parts. In devising the force-field analysis by adapting concepts from physics to social science, social psychologist Kurt Lewin, during the first half of the 20th century, bequeathed to low-power workers, activists, organizational constituents, and researchers a template that will be of use for many centuries to come.
By attending closely to the dynamics, structures, cultures, and contexts of human service and public service organizations, Cohen and Hyde and other authors in the book provide questions, themes, and analytic frameworks that can be deployed in agencies of any size, auspices, or field of practice. Though the book is clearly designed for low-power worker and clients, midlevel organizational actors can also find considerable value in the essays.
Given that the great preponderance of management, leadership, and organizational change literature focuses on large corporate entities, it is especially fortunate to be able to add Cohen and Hyde’s edited collection to one’s personal or professional library. Their book spotlights the nonprofit and public spheres of human service, social work, and mental health care.
One obvious gap in the book is the absence of authors and insights from regions of the English-speaking world that lie outside the United States and Canada. A few organizational change specialists from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, the British-speaking Caribbean, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Asia, Ireland, Europe, and Great Britain might have been tapped for contributions that would have enriched the book further.