Framework For Social Change Research Articles

International discourses of inclusion and their local translation: Teachers' conceptions regarding an integration-inclusion reform in the canton of Bern (Switzerland)

The inclusive paradigm is an international movement promoted by UN agencies such as UNESCO, influencing the educational policies of certain countries. Switzerland is among the countries that have initiated reforms to make their educational system more inclusive. These reforms have implications for teachers. The objective of this article is to report on teachers' conceptions regarding the ongoing integration-inclusion reform in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. A qualitative methodology was employed, based on 13 interviews conducted and analyzed in light of the theoretical framework of social change. The results highlight that, beyond a principled adherence, teachers' shared conceptions are resistant to integration-inclusion. These conceptions reveal inherent tensions within the inclusive paradigm and its development in educational systems susceptible to other international political influences, such as new public management and neoliberalismo.

“A Matter of Long Centuries and Not Years”: Du Bois on the Temporality of Social Change

In light of the summer 2020 protests and their subsequent backlash, questions about the prospective timeline for achieving a racially just society have taken on renewed significance. This article investigates Du Bois’s writings between 1920 and 1940 as a lens through which to examine the temporality of social change. I argue that Du Bois’s turn to the role of white unreason explains the dual temporality of his political vision and the dual strategies that ensue. According to Du Bois, white supremacy is upheld not only by ignorance, but also by white unreason, reproduced through generations of institutional conditioning. Du Bois therefore turns to propaganda for transforming white unreason, thereby making a racially just society possible. But because the transformation of white unreason through propaganda is a slow process, Du Bois argues that Black Americans must ensure their survival through voluntary self-segregation. By presenting us with a framework of social change, Du Bois models how advocates of racial justice might navigate defeat without devolving into defeatism.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION-SHARING SYSTEMS

Social life has been in constant change throughout history. Economic, political, technological and cultural advances have affected all societies at different times. Journalism, too, is a profession that emerged in this change and was renewed within the framework of these changes, and it has a very important role in terms of democratization of society. Over time, factors such as the formation of the capitalist economy, the importance of public opinion and the press, the emergence of the press as a sector and its rapid growth, together with the practical education concern for the field, created the necessary social framework for the emergence of communication science and the establishment of journalism schools. Until today, the number of journalism schools in the world and in Azerbaijan has increased continuously in line with the development of the industry. This increase shows the high demand for journalism education. First, journalism is a social phenomenon and because of this feature, it is not static but in constant change. Society and journalism have developed in mutual relations. The newspaper and the journalist itself are a product of the process of social change and journalism practices are shaped within the framework of social change.

The Role of ICT Laws and National Culture in Determining ICT Diffusion and Well-Being: A Cross-Country Examination

ICT-induced legal and regulatory challenges, including security and privacy risks, are on the rise. Despite that, there is a dearth of research emphasizing the role of ICT laws and understanding its effect on the level of ICT diffusion and the well-being of a country. Drawing on Dror’s law and social change framework, and grounding the discussion on the literature on ICT diffusion, the perspective of perceived risk, Hofstede’s typology of national culture, and the technological determinism theory, this study (1) explores the effect of maturity of ICT laws in a country on ICT diffusion among its citizens and businesses; (2) understands how this relationship is contingent on the national cultural dimensions; and (3) explicates the role of ICT diffusion in promoting the well-being. The research model is examined using publicly available data from 83 countries, and the findings suggest that sound ICT laws are necessary for achieving a greater diffusion of ICTs and improving well-being.

A social change theory for interpretation of the migration flows of the Bangladeshi labor emigration

The special features of the Bangladeshi emigrant work force have been considered. The explanation of the reason under the theoretical framework of social change has been presented, on which the neoclassical theory of migration, and, also the push and pull factors theory, cannot clarify the specific distribution of migrants, which is observed. The neoclassical theory of migration has been analyzed, which supposes, that economic factors should determine the choice of a destination country by a emigrant, and it shows how the theory would predict, that the distribution of emigrants should be correlated to the relative average income of the hosting countries. Therefore, the theory is not respected in the case of the Bangladeshi emigration. The network model of migration, even though it partially fixes this problem, can still not explain the emergence of enclaves of Bangladeshi citizens in hosting countries.The theory of social changes, with some modifications originating from the network approach and the “governmentality” approach, might however explain the distribution of Bangladeshi emigrants abroad, and it has been assumed, that this theoretical development sheds light on the studied problem and its causes. According to this theory, the Bangladeshi emigration is one part of a global process, which creates a global civilization from a number of previously independent societies. A consequence of this theory is that the flows of migrants should more or less follow the waves of development of a globalised society, and, therefore, that it should be possible to measure modifications in the trend of globalisation by measuring the variation in the flows of migrants, or in their distribution across regions.

Collective Impact: A Review of the Peer-reviewed Research

ABSTRACTCollective Impact (CI) is a framework for collaborative social change that has gained considerable attention over the past seven years. In this article we review the peer-reviewed academic research on the CI framework to understand what is known about its use. Nineteen articles were located. We identified four themes in the research: A need to adapt CI to the specific context, its technical nature, the importance of relationships, and concerns about power and equity. The literature on the CI framework is in its infancy and as such tends to focus on capacity building or model development. Whilst CI promotes important discussion about collaboration and social change, issues of power, equity and grass-roots engagement require further attention.IMPLICATIONSPeer reviewed academic research on the application of CI is at an early stage and further research is needed.Social workers should carefully consider critiques of CI before adopting this framework for social change.

Imagining the Exceptional Canada: Nation, Art, and Social Change in Canada’s Charitable Sector

This article draws on a case study of the Michaëlle Jean Foundation—a Canadian arts-based charitable organization—to examine processes of national imagining in a charitable sector shaped by neo-liberal capitalism. Utilizing interviews, field notes, and organizational documents, I show how discourses of the nation intersect with the arts to reframe political struggles along culturalist lines, such that social justice optics mask an apolitical and technical model for addressing structural injustice. While foundation-funded artists can engage in creative pushback, I argue that the neo-liberalization of the sector severely limits this national (re)imagining, either shutting it down completely or reconfiguring it in line with a depoliticized framework for social change, further reaffirming dominant mythologies of Canada. With this case-focused analysis, I hope to illuminate how the censorship of resistance in the charitable sector is not always an explicit process driven by the threat of funding withdrawal. Rather, a much more insidious form of depoliticization can occur within charitable sector contexts that have institutionalized and continue to circulate dominant discourses of the nation in their imaginings of better futures—in this instance, through intersections with the arts.

Beyond Food: Placing Animals in the Framework of Social Change in Post-Roman England

Zooarchaeological evidence is combined with anthropological, artistic and historical sources to investigate the role of human-animal interactions during periods of social change in post-Roman England. Data from nearly 500 assemblages covering 1500 years in southern England provide a unique basis to investigate the use of non-livestock animals in diverse areas from cosmology to commodities, companions to status. Results showcase the potential for integrated studies to provide insights into the changing perceptions of animals from creatures that play a role in the afterlife, to those that are earthbound and soulless, to express status and power, to reveal a demand for spectacle and education and to reflect contrasting functions of economy alongside an increasing sentimentality for pets.

“Before Occupy Central, I Wasn’t Concerned”: Examining Participatory Visual Research for Social Change with Hong Kong-based Filipina Youth

This article describes a participatory visual research project with two Hong Kong-based Filipina young women, and explores their understandings of citizenship and civic engagement through cellphilm-making (cellphone + filmmaking), collaborating on the writing of an academic article, and co-presenting research findings at an academic conference in Calgary, Canada. The study finds that Hong Kong’s Occupy Movement encouraged the participants to see themselves as engaged citizens, participate politically in the territory, and work toward social change for ethnic minorities by engaging different audiences through multiliteracy practices in a research for social change framework.

Social change design: disrupting the benchmark template

PurposeThis paper aims to propose a new ecological systems-driven framework, underpinned by a relational marketplace lens, for social marketing practitioners to consider when planning and designing programs. The authors contend that behavioural change does not occur in a vacuum and, as such, point to an ecology in which the individual is but one participant in a broader scope of social change activities.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is conceptual and presents the Indicators for Social Change Framework.FindingsThe Indicators for Social Change Framework puts forward a series of “must-have” indicators to consider when designing and planning social marketing programmes. Across identified indicators, the Framework delineates types of marketing actions to consider when planning for individual-oriented change and those required for wider systems-oriented change.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the broadening and deepening of the social marketing argument that reliance on individual behaviour change perspectives is not sufficient to resolve complex social problems that are inherently influenced by wider social forces. In transforming social change design, this paper transitions towards a logic view of social marketing that encourages and supports social change planners to be inclusive of interactions, processes and outcomes of value creation across the wider social marketing system.

Implementing Collective Impact for Food Systems Change: Reflections and Adaptations from Michigan

As Collective Impact (CI) gains popularity across food systems change efforts, few scholars and practitioners have evaluated whether this collabora­tive social-change framework is well suited to food systems work. We begin to answer this question based on our own experience applying a CI model to support statewide goals established in the Michigan Good Food Charter. Our reflections are based on the project’s evaluation findings, internal staff discussions about their CI-based efforts, discussions with other food systems practitioners using CI, and a review of emerging literature where scholars and practitioners evaluate or reflect on facilitating a CI initiative. The Michigan experience largely corroborates what is emerging in the broader criticisms of CI: that limited guidance exists about how to implement various elements of the model, that CI is relatively silent on policy advocacy, and that, unless intentionally integrated, it has the potential to exacerbate, rather than address, inequities. However, our experience and that of other food systems practitioners also suggest that it is possible to transcend these limitations. We argue that groups expecting to make significant improve­ments to food systems can turn to CI as one of many social-change models that can guide their work, but only if lead organizations have the capacity to build trust and relationships between stakeholders and if they can thoughtfully integrate strategies for ensuring policy- and equity-based change.

Evaluating Communication for Development: A Framework for Social Change, By June Lennie and Jo Tacchi (2013, Earthscan)

Evaluating Communication for Development: A Framework for Social Change, By June Lennie and Jo Tacchi (2013, Earthscan)

Framework for Social Change through Startups in India

Capacity of a country to develop new science and transform it into innovative technologies and ramp them into successful, sustainable business that generate revenue, high-quality jobs and promote development is of paramount importance in today's world. Startups are an effective way of doing this. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model and a small startup founded by two or three entrepreneurs can produce and test the feasibility of tens of possibilities for a new business idea. Through grounded research and content analysis the objective is to have an overview of contemporary perspective on startups in India, enhance understanding of startup ecosystems and recognize the framework for social change taking shape due to Indian startups contribution to the national economy. The paper also attempts to understand the key success factors and provides commandments to further foster startups to optimize the social change.

Book Review: Title: Evaluating Communication for Development: A Framework for Social Change

Review(s) of: Evaluating Communication for Development: a Framework for Social Change, by June Lennie and Jo Tacci. Routledge, London, 2013, 189 pages, print-on-demand paperback, A$65.99/NZ$76.99 from TLD Distribution Pty Ltd, phone +612 8778 9999, email enquiries@tldistribution.com.au, website http://www.tldonline.com.au. ISBN 9780415522595

Expanding the memory catalogue: Southern African women's contributions to memory-work writing as a feminist research methodology

abstractMuch memory-work writing traces its origins to a systematic process of collaborative inquiry on female sexualisation undertaken by a group of feminist women in Germany in the 1980s. Other feminist researchers have since built on this work to explore gender and women's lived experiences. While a good deal of this work has continued to be collective, there is also more recent feminist memory-work writing that draws on ‘individual’ memories. From the outset then, memory-work writing has been positioned as an explicitly feminist methodology. To date, international scholarly conversations about memory-work writing as a feminist methodology have tended to be illustrated by exemplars from the academic ‘North’ – Europe, the USA, and Canada. We consider a range of exemplars of southern African women's written memory-work – as presented in published literature and unpublished theses and dissertations – that we see as contributing to a transnational ‘catalogue’ of methods for provoking feminist memory-work writing. We draw on this work to identify some generative strategies for, and features of, feminist memory-work writing. Our discussion also explores the potential significance and challenges of using such a methodology in southern African contexts, particularly in the context of a social change framework.

Gender in the Migratory Process

This paper argues for treating gender as a key category in the understanding of migratory processes. Starting with an illustration of the absence of women in mainstream migration research, it presents the debate on this phenomenon and its development from a focus on women to one on gender. Through discussion of the debate on current migration phenomena it is demonstrated how gender can be used in a conceptual framework which includes various levels (micro, meso and macro). The paper advocates the analysis of migratory processes within a broader framework of social change.

Blackness beyond witness

The article posits that philosophy’s visual bias has limited exploration of the ways in which sound, and the awareness of sound, offers an alternative framework for social change. It moves from sight to sound and from visual witnessing to sound-based wit(h)ness to illustrate the implications of sound as a form of political resistance. Combining insights from the work of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas with elements of the Black Vernacular tradition, it articulates the ways in which the blues, jazz and work songs evoke distinctive sound-based wit(h)ness to perform philosophical interventions by destabilizing the status quo, offering a nonphenotypical account of black solidarity, and transforming what counts as work.

International Survey on Advanced-Level Social Marketing Training Events

The rising popularity of social marketing as a framework for social change has resulted in an increased demand for advanced-level social marketing training. As a result, an online survey was conducted in early 2007 to identify the social marketing training needs of social sector professionals. A convenient sample of 477 respondents from 33 countries (but primarily from the United States and Canada) responded to the online survey. Respondents expressed an interest in learning a variety of topics. “Audience analysis” was ranked the highest followed by “sustainability of change.” Benefits from and barriers to attending training events were identified. The primary motivation of the respondents to attend a training event was to apply concepts directly to initiatives on which they are currently working. The preferred format of training and other such details were also investigated. Findings from this survey should help trainers and institutions that offer face-to-face training events better respond to advanced-level training needs in the field of social marketing.

Social Activists: Lessons for Community Psychology

In a graduate class in community psychology, each student studied the lives and achievements of social activists. This article integrates the work and accomplishments of 5 social activists into a conceptual and methodological framework for social change within community psychology. These activists worked on issues including national liberation, women's suffrage, the rights of migrant workers, and community development. The methods used by these activists are particularly relevant to the field of community psychology. The article discusses the implications of the work and accomplishments of these social change agents.

Murray Bookchin and the domination of nature

Bookchin's social ecology explores the narrative of domination and hierarchy. He argues that today's environmental crisis reflects a link between the human domination of nature and the domination of human by human. Hierarchy, as the pivot of such domination, is viewed as a psychology which permeates and corrodes not only social life (as reflected in class, gender, ethnic and other relations), but nature as well. Bookchin, seeking to replace hierarchy with cooperation by devolving power and autonomy to the individual in community, produces an eco‐anarchism. Bookchin argues for the interpenetration of the human and the natural, seeing humans as ‘nature rendered self‐conscious’. Since evolution is viewed as a dialectic privileging participation, differentiation and spontaneity, community becomes both the means and ends of an ecological society. The critique in this paper explores the autonomy‐community tension in Bookchin as well as the broad political implications of Bookchin's framework of social change.