In today’s world of global wicked problems, constraints and imperatives imposed by an external and uncertain environment render strategic action a quite complex endeavour. Since the 1990s, within community initiatives and philanthropic projects, the construct of Theory of Change has been used to address such complexity. Theory of Change can be defined as the systematic and cumulative study of the links between the activities, outcomes, and context of an intervention. The area of focus for this paper is to explore whether Theory of Change can support more strategic approaches in design. In particular, the paper examines how Theory of Change was applied to DESIGNSCAPES - a project oriented, among other things, toward offering a supporting service for all those city actors interested in using design to develop urban innovation initiatives that tackle complex issues of broad concern.
This paper critically reviews the action research paradigm that has evolved over the last 50 years within and outside The Tavistock Insitute, with reference to radical shifts in the social construction of medicine and health that are occurring as a result of the transition toward the "information society." The medical domain has been chosen as an appropriate space within which to review the action research paradigm because it bridges both the past and future of the Institute. The paper firstly considers the original conception of action research and sociotechnical systems, and the role of consultants, in relation to Foucualt's analysis of power relations, social control, and "dividing practices." It then describes and analyzes recent developments in the field of medicine and healthcare service provision that, on the one hand, offer opportunities for increased self-management and control by consumers over physical, social, and emotional "self-hood" and on the other could lead to further social surveillance and the domination and subjectification of the individual. Drawing on recent work using innovative models of action research in the field of HIV/AIDS, the paper concludes by discussing ways in which action research could harness developments in information and communication technologies to maximize individual and collective engagement in new forms of organizational and social relations.
This article explores the usefulness of Contribution Analysis to understand and assess the outcomes and impacts of emergent, large-scale and transformational change processes. As these take place over long periods of time and at national if not supra-national scale, they amplify some of the key challenges complex interventions pose to evaluators, most notably that of the emergence of activities and outcomes. While Contribution Analysis is discussed in the literature as useful for the evaluation of complex change processes, it is not usually recommended for experimental and emergent interventions. This article draws on the authors’ experience of using Contribution Analysis in one such case and explores the relative merits of the method for large-scale/transformational change interventions generally.
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