Improving Organizational Social Contexts for Effective Human Services

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony L. Hemmelgarn ◽  
Charles Glisson
Keyword(s):  
Human Services ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Quality And Outcomes ◽  
Improve Service Quality ◽  
Organizational Principles

Emphasizing five basic points, this chapter summarizes what the authors have learned in their development of evidence-based organizational strategies. First, human service organizations vary in their social contexts, and those differences affect the way services are provided. Second, the social contexts of human services can be changed with organizational strategies, and those changes can improve service quality and outcomes. Third, organizational social contexts are essential for innovation because they reflect the power of social systems to promote changes in individual behavior. Fourth, organizational research illustrates that social contexts affect the implementation of best practices to improve effectiveness. Fifth, strategies for improving an organization’s capacity for innovation build upon a century of work on improving organizational effectiveness that has direct implications for human services. This chapter introduces the ARC strategies that include: (1) key organizational principles, (2) organizational components that drive innovation, and (3) mental models to support improvement efforts.

The Role of Mental Models in Organizational Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony L. Hemmelgarn ◽  
Charles Glisson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Models ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Quality And Outcomes ◽  
Improve Service Quality ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Effective Service

This chapter describes ARC’s third strategy of employing mental models. This strategy fosters reasoning and thinking that reinforces the use of ARC’s organizational components and that maintains alignment with ARC’s five principles of effective service organizations. Reasoning and thinking are reflected in the mental representations of work experiences service providers hold, and these mental models guide priorities followed when providing services. Case examples are provided to illustrate work with mental models to influence organizational members’ thinking, reasoning, and subsequent actions to improve service quality and outcomes. This chapter reviews the empirical evidence for mental models, including research from social cognition and neuroscience. The description of this strategy highlights several activities and techniques used to explore and alter mental models. These activities foster examination of implicit assumptions and beliefs that help drive reasoning and thinking toward or away from ARC’s key organizational principles, tools, and desired OSCs.

Building Cultures and Climates for Effective Human Services

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony L. Hemmelgarn ◽  
Charles Glisson
Keyword(s):  
Human Services ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
Organizational Improvement ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Arc Model ◽  
Service Barriers ◽  
Human Services Organizations

This book explains how organizational culture and climate affect the quality and outcomes of human services and describes the Availability, Responsiveness, and Continuity (ARC) model of organizational effectiveness that the authors developed for improving social service, behavioral health, health care, and other human service organizations. The authors summarize decades of practice and research experience, including organizational improvement efforts, randomized controlled trials, and nationwide studies with hundreds of human services organizations. The book provides a balance between the use of empirical data and applied examples in explaining how human services can be improved. By combining numerous case examples and experiential knowledge with decades of organizational research, readers learn about empirically proven approaches tested in real organizations that are supported with case examples of organizational change. The book explains that creating the organizational social contexts necessary for providing effective services requires three types of organizational strategies. These strategies include organizational tools for identifying and addressing service barriers, principles for aligning organizational priorities to guide improvement, and the development of shared mental models among organizational members to support the principles and tools.

Introducing the ARC Organizational Strategies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony L. Hemmelgarn ◽  
Charles Glisson
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Service Organizations ◽  
Mechanisms Of Change ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
Arc Model ◽  
Service Barriers ◽  
Innovation Capacity ◽  
Quality And Outcomes ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Organizational Principles

This chapter describes the ARC model of three core strategies for developing effective human service organizations. These include (1) embedding guiding organizational principles, (2) providing organizational component tools for identifying and addressing service barriers, and (3) developing shared mental models. ARC’s strategies provide the tools and the reasoning to guide behaviors and processes among organizational members that ensure improved service quality and outcomes. These strategies are reviewed as part of ARC’s orchestrated and structured process to improve OSC (i.e., the cultures and climates that influence attitudes, decision making and behavior in organizations). The chapter identifies mechanisms of change that highlight the alignment of organizational priorities with the ARC principles, fostering relationships that provide availability, responsiveness, and continuity, as well as developing innovation capacity to adopt new technologies and approaches.

Personality and Social Contexts as Sources of Change and Continuity Across the Life Span

2018 ◽  
pp. 750-776
Author(s):  
Abigail J. Stewart ◽  
Kay Deaux
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Life Span ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Movement Participation

This chapter provides a framework designed to address how individual persons respond to changes and continuities in social systems and historical circumstances at different life stages and in different generations. We include a focus on systematic differences among the people who experience these changes in the social environment—differences both in the particular situations they find themselves in and in their personalities. Using examples from research on divorce, immigration, social movement participation, and experiences of catastrophic events, we make a case for an integrated personality and social psychology that extends the analysis across time and works within socially and historically important contexts.

scholarly journals Social Inversions and Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (12) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
D. A. Sevost’yanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Hierarchical System ◽  
Mutual Position ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organizational Principle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Organizational Principles

The article focuses on hierarchical and inverse relations in social systems. Hierarchy is the basic form of organization in social systems. Complex hierarchies have the ability to form inverse relationships. Inverse relationships occur when the lower element in social hierarchy becomes the dominant, but formally remains in a subordinate position. In a hierarchical system, there are certain organizational principles that determine the mutual position of the elements. There are several such principles in complex hierarchies. Inversions arise when two or more organizational principles collide in social hierarchy. The developed inversions are a manifestation of internal contradictions in the hierarchical system. The accumulation of these contradictions can lead to the collapse of the hierarchical system. For example, the development of social inversions can cause a revolution in which certain organizational principles in the social system are abolished. But in some cases, resolving of these contradictions leads to another step in the progressive development of the system. Thus, the resolution of contradictions occurs when the subject actually moves to a higher position in the social hierarchy. One of the most important organizational principles that determine the position of the subject in the social hierarchy is based on the educational level of this subject. Increasing the level of education entails the increase of the subject’s social status. However, the position of the subject in the social hierarchy is also determined by other organizational principles. These principles may conflict with the educational organizational principle. As a result, there is a social inversion. Education is a factor that can both generate inversions in the social hierarchy and eliminate them. The development of society is closely connected with the manifestations of the educational organizational principle, with its interaction with other organizational principles in the social hierarchy. The analysis of inverse relations in social hierarchies is an effective research tool that allows to predict and prevent social tension in society.

Personality and Social Contexts as Sources of Change and Continuity Across the Life Span

2012 ◽  
pp. 648-672
Author(s):  
Abigail J. Stewart ◽  
Kay Deaux
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Life Span ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Movement Participation

This chapter provides a framework designed to address how individual persons respond to changes and continuities in social systems and historical circumstances at different life stages and in different generations. We include a focus on systematic differences among the people who experience these changes in the social environment — differences both in the particular situations they find themselves in and in their personalities. Using examples from research on divorce, immigration, social movement participation, and experiences of war, we make a case for an integrated personality and social psychology that extends the analysis across time and works within socially and historically important contexts.

New research frameworks in the study of chimpanzee and gorilla sociality and communication

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam G. B. Roberts ◽  
Anna Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Social Complexity ◽  
Brain Size ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Social Evolution ◽  
Research Frameworks ◽  
New Research ◽  
Large Groups

Group size in primates is strongly correlated with brain size, but exactly what makes larger groups more ‘socially complex’ than smaller groups is still poorly understood. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) are among our closest living relatives and are excellent model species to investigate patterns of sociality and social complexity in primates, and to inform models of human social evolution. The aim of this paper is to propose new research frameworks, particularly the use of social network analysis, to examine how social structure differs in small, medium and large groups of chimpanzees and gorillas, to explore what makes larger groups more socially complex than smaller groups. Given a fission-fusion system is likely to have characterised hominins, a comparison of the social complexity involved in fission-fusion and more stable social systems is likely to provide important new insights into human social evolution

The Social Contexts of Racial Discrimination in Sentencing

1986 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha A. Myers ◽  
Susette M. Talarico
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Social

¿Quién soy yo? Reflexiones teórico sistémicas acerca de la indentidad individual

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Francisco Xavier Morales
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Moral Communication ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

The problem of identity is an issue of contemporary society that is not only expressed in daily life concerns but also in discourses of politics and social movements. Nevertheless, the I and the needs of self-fulfillment usually are taken for granted. This paper offers thoughts regarding individual identity based on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. From this perspective, identity is not observed as a thing or as a subject, but rather as a “selfillusion” of a system of consciousness, which differentiates itself from the world, event after event, in a contingent way. As concerns the definition  of contents of self-identity, the structures of social systems define who is a person, how he or she should act, and how much esteem he or she should receive. These structures are adopted by consciousness as its own identity structures; however, some social contexts are more relevant for self-identity construction than others. Moral communication increases the probability that structure appropriation takes place, since the emotional element of identity is linked to the esteem/misesteem received by the individual from the interactions in which he or she participates.

Entanglements between Agency and Vulnerability in the Phenomenon of Birth. Reflections on Children’s Expressions about ‘Being Born’

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-2020) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Catrin Heite ◽  
Veronika Magyar-Haas
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
Cultural Embeddedness

Analogously to the works in the field of new social studies of childhood, this contribution deals with the concept of childhood as a social construction, in which children are considered as social actors in their own living environment, engaged in interpretive reproduction of the social. In this perspective the concept of agency is strongly stressed, and the vulnerability of children is not sufficiently taken into account. But in combining vulnerability and agency lies the possibility to consider the perspective of the subjects in the context of their social, political and cultural embeddedness. In this paper we show that what children say, what is important to them in general and for their well-being, is shaped by the care experiences within the family and by their social contexts. The argumentation for the intertwining of vulnerability and agency is exemplified by the expressions of an interviewed girl about her birth and by reference to philosophical concepts about birth and natality.

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