The field of behavioral science has been marked by the development of a plethora of empirically derived client-specific technologies for treating a wide range of human problems. In contrast, there has been a relative paucity of conceptual models regarding the application of these techniques to the more complex arena of human services. Thus,…

Political governance and quality management are often contested concepts, meaning different things to different people; and often their meanings have shifted historically. The collapse of the governance system behind the iron curtain countries triggered an avalanche in international politics and instituted new governance and management system to…

Families First is a NSW Government strategy that aims to improve the effectiveness of early intervention services supporting families and communities to care for children. Its implementation is the joint responsibility of the five NSW Human Services agencies: the NSW departments of Community Services (DoCS); Ageing, Disability and Home Care…

In recent years, career theory and practice has been challenged to revise and reinvigorate itself in order to remain relevant in the post-modern world. The most fundamental challenge is to produce an identity for career practice that is congruent with the post-modern world (Watson & McMahon, 2005). Career research is facing a similar challenge as…

Given the rhetoric and practice of systemic change in the last decade, we studied (a) the level to which the systemic change is able to penetrate, (b) the areas which the systemic change is able to impact, and (c) the coherence among various curricular and instructional components in the context of systemic change. Using hierarchical linear…

Chaos theory, dissipative structures analysis, and complexity theory have all been used in various branches of the sciences to examine patterns of change in complex systems. This paper considers how educational theory and research can benefit from changes in scientific fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, geology, and economics…

The history of American early care and education shows the episodic nature of the emphasis accorded young children. In the absence of any single focus, the profession is faced with multiple problems, multiple rationales, and multiple responses occurring simultaneously. Several new approaches to early care reform have been undertaken by different…

This paper examines the many assertions made in the health communication literature about the importance of communication as an essential process in promoting effective health care. If these assertions are true then researchers should be able to demonstrate the ways that communication influences the accomplishment of health care goals--how…

At the same time that education faculty face challenges to renew and deepen their commitment to teacher education, the arenas for research, teaching, and service are also changing. New types of partnerships are emerging between universities, schools, and communities. The kind of far-reaching change that is needed to deal with new situations…

Chaos offers educational communications and technology new systems' tools and ideas; i.e., it provides the system with a deterministic "I don't know" state within which new activity patterns can be generated. Previous characterizations and paradigms of systems stated that simple systems behaved in simple ways, complex behaviors implied complex…

This paper reviews family therapy with chronically dysfunctional families including the development of family therapy and current trends which appear to give little guidance toward working with severely dysfunctional families. A theoretical stance based upon the systems approach to family functioning and pathology is presented which suggests: (1)…

A policy system design that can benefit from the dynamics of small group behavior without suffering from the adverse effects associated with group thinking, in which the members of small groups acquire a concurrence seeking tendency, is comprised of three subsystem functions: (1) a sub-system normative function which requires that small groups be…

Expressing the need for a description of communication that is equally applicable to all the social sciences, this report develops a general model of the communication process based upon the principle of convergence as derived from basic information theory and cybernetics. It criticizes the linear, one-way models of communication that have…

Argues that human urban social complexity has been made possible by social evolution rather than biological evolution, and that this social evolution has had to counter individual selfish tendencies which biological evolution has continued to select as a result of the genetic competition among the cooperators. (Author/JM)