DOCUMENTING SOCIAL CHANGE

Documenting Social Change

Documenting Social Change

Introduction

This chapter examines the relationship of leadership, such as Johns', and broad social change, such as school desegregation. The chapter challenges assumptions about the causal relationship between leadership and change and suggests that there are many conditions for change and that leadership is its necessary but not sufficient condition. The chapter examines processes of effective leadership for change. Finally, the chapter examines the sometimes-neglected dimensions of change: conflict, the intrapersonal dimensions of change, and the unspecified course that change may take.

Definitions of leadership most often link it to change, explicitly or implicitly. James Macgregor Burns' foundational study of leadership makes “the achievement of purpose in the form of real and intended social change” the litmus test of effective leadership. Following this, Joseph Rost defined leadership with a tweak of Burns' view. For Rost, leadership is “an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes”

Discussion

The changes that came to Prince Edward County, where Farmville is located, differed substantially from Johns' and the strikers' intentions and raised additional questions about intended change and leadership. After Brown, county officials funded the public schools from 1954 to 1959 on a month-by-month basis and only on the condition that they remain segregated. When the federal court ordered Virginia and the county to integrate their schools, county officials withdrew all support for public schools for 5 years! From 1954 to 1964, when funding public and now integrated schools started, African American children, a lost generation, either did not go to school or had to leave the county to do so. Johns left the county shortly after the strike ended because of her family's fear for her safety. In addition, African American teachers and other professionals lost their jobs, and others felt the severe sting of economic reprisal for supporting the children of the strike. Lost among all of these changes remains the original real, intended change of equal books and equal facilities with which Johns and her classmates started and that morphed along the way. Is leadership responsible for the unwanted changes that may occur as a result of its efforts?

The assumption that leadership be judged by the achievement of real intended change may overstate the importance of the achievement of purpose. Is it enough, however, to assess leadership by its intentions? Johns' leadership stimulated other changes. Johns and her classmates did not merely walk into the history of the civil rights movement; they stoked the passions of racism and racial subordination. How do we account for the myriad factors and complex history involved in a particular event that extends beyond any person's intention or even understanding?

Leadership, Change, and Complexity

The simplicity of Kurt Lewin's formula of organizational change, “unfreeze, change, and refreeze,” summarizes a far more complex system of change as he understood it. His field theory suggests that understanding a problem requires placing it within a system of as many relevant and interdependent elements as we can ...