The Systems Work of Social Change

The Systems Work of Social Change PDF Author: Cynthia Rayner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857454
Category : Social change
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

The Systems Work of Social Change

The Systems Work of Social Change PDF Author: Cynthia Rayner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857454
Category : Social change
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

The Systems Bible

The Systems Bible PDF Author: John Gall
Publisher: General Systemantics Press
ISBN: 0961825170
Category : System theory
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Being the Third Edition of Systemantics, extensively revised and expanded by the addition of several new Chapters including new Axioms, Theorems, and Rules of Thumb, together with many new Case Histories and Horrible Examples.

Making Work Systems Better

Making Work Systems Better PDF Author: Luc Hoebeke
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471942481
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Combines theory with practice to demonstrate how organizations work. Based on a non-hierarchical model of enterprises, it offers a framework in order to recognize the dynamics for successful organizations and to improve performances by highlighting and strengthening these dynamics. Provides excellent guidance for managers, encouraging them to reflect on their own experiences to avoid the chaotic detail of constant change and to concentrate on their true strategic intentions.

Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions

Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions PDF Author: Werner Schirmer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429663986
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Social systems occur in many contexts of social work. This book provides an easy-to-read introduction to systems thinking for social workers who will encounter social problems in their professional practice or academic research. It offers new insights and fresh perspectives on this familiar topic and invites creative, critical, and empathetic thinking with a systems perspective. Through introducing systems theory as a problem-oriented approach for dealing with complex interpersonal relations and social systems, this book provides a framework for studying social relations. The authors present a strand of systems theory (inspired by sociologist Niklas Luhmann) that offers innovative, surprising, and practically relevant understandings of everyday social life, inclusion/exclusion, social problems, interventions, and society in general. Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions should be considered essential reading for all social work students taking modules on sociology and social policy as well as students of nursing, medicine, counselling, and occupational health and therapy.

Work Design

Work Design PDF Author: Adedeji B. Badiru
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1498755747
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Work is all around us and permeates everything we do and everyday activities. Not all work is justified, not all work is properly designed, or evaluated accurately, or integrated. A systems model will make work more achievable through better management. Work is defined as a process of performing a defined task or activity, such as research, development, operations, maintenance, repair, assembly, production, and so on. Very little is written on how to design, evaluate, justify, and integrate work. Using a comprehensive systems approach, this book facilitates a better understanding of work for the purpose of making it more effective and rewarding.

Work the System

Work the System PDF Author: Sam Carpenter
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1608320529
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A Simple Mindset Tweak Will Change Your Life. After a fifteen-year nightmare operating a stagnant service business, Sam Carpenter developed a down-to-earth methodology that knocked his routine eighty-hour workweek down to a single hour—while multiplying his bottom-line income more than twenty-fold. In Work the System, Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it upside down. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to: • Make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever. • See your world as a logical collection of linear systems that you can control. • Manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life. • Stop fire-killing. Become a fire-control specialist! • Maximize profit, create client loyalty, and develop enthusiastic employees who respect you. • Identify insidious “errors of omission.” • Maximize your biological and mechanical “prime time” so that you are working at optimum efficiency. • Design the life you want—and then, in the real world, quickly create it! You can keep doing what you have always done, and continue getting mediocre, unsatisfactory results. Or you can find the peace and freedom you’ve always wanted by transforming your business or corporate department into a finely tuned machine that runs on autopilot!

Communication and Work Systems

Communication and Work Systems PDF Author: Wayne Pace
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527524825
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
This book provides a practical definition and explanation of “communicative behavior” for use in understanding interaction in work settings. It clearly presents a model of the elements of a work system, and summarizes theories that explain how organizations function and how managers work within the work system. It also describes how to recognize and solve both communication and organization problems. Furthermore, the volume analyzes various processes that occur in the work system, such as disseminating and retrieving information, energizing employees to work smarter, using power and empowering others, facilitating groups and work teams, managing conflict and stress, and how to manage knowledge in the organization, among others. The book describes some of the most likely careers that graduates might enter upon graduation. It also highlights a variety of explanations of organization theory, management theory, culture theory, postmodern theory and critical theory so that the full range of ideas about communication and the places where people work and interact are explored.

Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems PDF Author: Donella Meadows
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603581480
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work

Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work PDF Author: Geoffrey Bowker
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317778766
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

Work Systems: The Methods, Measurement & Management of Work

Work Systems: The Methods, Measurement & Management of Work PDF Author: Mikell P. Groover
Publisher: Pearson Higher Ed
ISBN: 1292053364
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
For sophomore or junior-level courses in industrial engineering. Divided into two major areas of study – work systems, and work methods, measurement, and management – this guidebook provides up-to-date, quantitative coverage of work systems and how work is analyzed and designed. Thorough, broad-based coverage addresses nearly all of the traditional topics of industrial engineering that relate to work systems and work science. The author’s quantitative approach summarizes many aspects of work systems, operations analysis, and work measurement using mathematical equations and quantitative examples.