The challenges of change in human service organizations: Identity, values, and narratives

I examine the ways in which individual and collective identity and values shape, and are shaped by, the process of planned organizational change in the context of health and human services. Human service organizations are key players in efforts to improve the wellbeing of impoverished communities and have been seen as having a potentially important role to play as mediators of social change. With diminishing resources and increased community need, human service organizations have been stretched in their capacity to meet the ever-increasing needs of an expanding and diversifying underclass and have been able to do little to address the root causes of problems. For many, this has signaled a need for fundamental---or second-order---change in the field. Conceptualizations of first- and second-order change processes have been widely explored in the management literature in relation to for-profit organizations but have rarely been applied to the context of human services. Based on a new conceptualization of paradigmatic change as a third-order of change, this dissertation addresses this gap through a contextualized, two-year, qualitative study of change processes in two human service organizations engaged in a project aimed at shifting the paradigm of human services. Based on a transactional-ecological framework, the study suggests that (1) identity is implicated in first-, second- and third-order change processes in decisive and clearly identifiable ways, (2) effective first-order change processes---which include identity development and identification---provide stability and are preconditions for third-order or paradigmatic change, and (3) dissonance can be a trigger for third-order change if it is linked to a discrepancy between institutionally based values and the outcome of human service practice. The study also suggests that institutional level values, beliefs, and practices that are enforced through regulatory and funding bodies and/or competing institutional narratives may be a constraint for leaders and may limit the extent to which some human service organizations can engage in third-order change. Finally, the study highlights the role of complexity in the process of identity transformation at both the individual and organizational level.