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Empowering Workers and Clients for Organizational Change, by Cohen, M. B., & Hyde, C. A.

Change and empowerment are common themes in the social work literature. Arguably, much of the scholarship on theories and strategies of change is directed at the individual or family level, sometimes to the neglect of theorizing change at the levels of organizations, cultures, and policies. Marcia B. Cohen and Cheryl A. Hyde’s new text, Empowering Workers and Clients for Organizational Change, thus makes a useful contribution to the literature by issuing a theoretical and practical approach to organizational change from a social work perspective. Drawing on the social work profession’s commitment to the values of self-determination and social justice, this book focuses on the notion of change from below—that is, change driven by clients, consumers, constituents, and/or front-line workers. The book is organized into three sections, with Part I outlining frameworks and theoretical foundations for change in human service organizations, Part II providing organizational change case studies from a diverse range of agency and social service settings, and Part III describing an organizational change paper assignment for MSW students and providing three examples of actual student papers. Part I consists of four chapters, written by the authors/editors Cohen and Hyde, with Brett A. Seabury also contributing to Chapter 4. The section begins with a description of the types and characteristics of human service organizations, emphasizing the concept of organizational culture. The second chapter focuses on power and empowerment, describing some of the ways in which even low-power actors such as clients and direct practice workers can and do influence organizations. Empowerment is conceptualized as “both process and outcome . . . associated with self-efficacy, awareness, control, participation, advocacy, and change,” all central themes of the book (p. 29). Drawing most significantly on the work of Brager and Holloway (1978, 1993), force field analysis is introduced in Chapter 3 as a technique for planning for organizational change. The ethics of organizational change are addressed in Chapter 4, applying a social justice perspective to change tactics, which are categorized as collaborative, the least conflictual approach;