Book Review: The Planning of Change
| Published date | 01 December 1969 |
| Date | 01 December 1969 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000486586900200411 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
AUST. &N.Z. JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (Dec., 1969): 2, 4 247
Book Reviews
The Planning of Change (Second Edition),
Warren
Bennis, Kenneth Benne and
Robert Chin (Eds.), Holt Rinehart &
Winston, New York, 1969; 618 pp. and
index, $A9.45.
CRIMINOLOGISTS will be challenged by
the one pervasive assumption of this
collection:
I am tempted to believe
that
what
we
call necessary institutions
are
often no
more
than
institutions to which we have
grown accustomed. In
matters
~f
social constitution,
the
field of
pOSSI-
bilities is much more extensive
than
men, living in
their
various societies
are ready to imagine. (p. 579)
Whilst this radical insight is developed
in nearly every paper we should remem-
ber
that
it was Alexis de Tocqueville who
put
it thus clearly at a time when the
House of Lords was formulating the
Macnaughten Rules!
The small-group focus of
the
first edition
published in 1961 has been extensively
broadened towards purposeful change in
institutions. The book now includes
imaginative and practical material to
stimulate most enabling professional
workers. Professional radicals, on the
other hand, are themselves likely to be
stimulated to change after pondering on
as little as
the
very detailed and useful
diagram, charting "Strategies of Deliberate
Changing" (p. 58), along a continuum
from the rational-empirical mode through
normative -re-educative to
the
power-
coercive mode.
It is unrealistic to expect practitioners
to initiate change in correctional agencies
with any persistence. But it is both
realistic and necessary to expect some
understanding at
two
levels. First, a
minimal level of sympathy
to
the
inevitability of change, especially insofar
as this involves on-going selection from
inherited traditions and practices, will
decrease the resistance to opening-up the
"field of possibilities". At the second level
is
the
insight that, in organisational growth
as in personal change, a third
party
not
directly involved in an organisational or
emotional sense can be useful just by
that
fact.
The first lesson
learnt
by a police
cadet, articled law clerk or a student
social worker is
that
he will be most
helpful to his clients when he is
"not
too
emotionally involved". One very valuable
feature of this collection is
that
it provides
numerous examples from business and
public service practice for
the
use of
external consultants' to develop effective
management. For
better
or for worse
the
correctional field has external consultants
in criminologists who, of course, have to
establish
that
consultative expertise and
not
"purity
and virginity of theory" (p. 4)
is their strength.
"The expert", according to George Kelly
in the introductory essay, inevitably
"stands
with
a foot in knowledge and a
foot in power
...
"(p. 17) and embodies
these inherent conflicts. The search for
areconciliation of such "Roots of Planned
Change" (Chapter 1 in
Part
1) takes the
reader through 43 examinations of theory
and practice to focus on "Value Dilemmas
of
the
Change Agent" (Chapter 11 in
Part
4). Here Alvin Gouldner's concluding
essay provides astrong and sympathetic
echo to university criminology:
"It
would seem
that
social science's
affinity for modelling itself
after
physical science might lead to instruc-
tion in matters other
than
research
alone. Before Hiroshima, physicists also
talked of value-free science; they, too,
vowed to
make
no value judgments.
Today
many
of them are
not
so sure.
If we today concern ourselves
exclusively with the technical pro-
ficiency of
our
students and reject all
responsibility for their moral sense, or
lack of it, then we may someday be
compelled to accept responsibility for
having trained ageneration willing to
serve in afuture Auschwitz." (p. 617)
Such ambitious breadth of content can-
not possibly be matched by equivalent
depth in
the
one volume. In
the
intro-
ductory notes to
the
whole collection, and
to each of the four parts,
the
editors'
points of reference, mainly in social
psychology,
are
sketched too rapidly for a
reader or study group starting "cold".
The freedom of the editors' language (and
one or
other
of them is an author in one-
quarter of all papers) can be exciting but
it demands
that
readers cope with
threshold images like ''. human
behaviour is like a centipede, standing on
many legs . .
.tt
(p. 6).
The following responses to a sequence
of papers subjectively selected are,
appropriately, unfinished:
• Carl Rogers' "Characteristics of a
Helping Relationship" taken from his book,
On Becoming a Person, now almost
ten
years old, improves on re-reading. When
Rogers was in Australia five years ago
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