Reforming human services: change through participation
"In this book the authors try hard not to downgrade the continuum of work-related problems. The authors stress this continuum by surveying the highlights of recent organizational reform, including (as reviews must) the "classics" that have inspired reformers. This book is in part a primer or a summary recapitulation of today's trends in organizational change theory and experimentation. It is also a blueprint, and as such, contains a prescription or "model" of planned change. The prescription is eclectic. It combines elements of what are now the "mainline" work reform strategies (job enrichment, quality of work life, and action research) into a package that we hope is coherent and deployable. In this book the authors contend that workers work best and most contentedly, that they are most apt to exercise ingenuity and decency and helpfulness, when they have a voice in shaping organizational goals and defining their own jobs. This ideal condition--which the authors call "grass-roots management"--is neither utopian, nor revolutionary, nor hard to create. The authors shall outline how organizational democracy can be achieved, and how it has to varying degrees--been attained. The authors shall suggest why the strategy works--why, in fact, it must work. In this connection, the authors assume that strategies vested in "classic management" have been tried and found wanting. Reasons for the shortfall are many: some have to do with changing needs or expectations, some with needs we have known but ignored. The reason (whichever it may be) is academic, because manifest needs of workers, whether they are new or "discovered," are intense and irreversible. If we ignore workers' needs, we violate human nature. And nature (as the commercial points out) has a way of avenging itself when it is violated"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)
