Race and Social Change
A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action
1. Edition May 2017
384 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
A powerful study illuminates our nation's collective civic fault lines
Recent events have turned the spotlight on the issue of race in modern America, and the current cultural climate calls out for more research, education, dialogue, and understanding. Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action focuses on a provocative social science experiment with the potential to address these needs. Through an analysis grounded in the perspectives of developmental psychology, adaptive leadership and complex systems theory, the inquiry at the heart of this book illuminates dynamics of race and social change in surprising and important ways. Author Max Klau explains how his own quest for insight into these matters led to the empirical study at the heart of this book, and he presents the results of years of research that integrate findings at the individual, group, and whole system levels of analysis. It's an effort to explore one of the most controversial and deeply divisive subject's in American civic life using the tools of social science and empiricism. Readers will:
* Review a long tradition of classic, provocative social science experiments and learn how the study presented here extends that tradition into new and unexplored territory
* Engage with findings from years of research that reveal insights into dynamics of race and social change unfolding simultaneously at the individual, group, and whole systems levels
* Encounter a call to action with implications for our own personal journeys and for national policy at this critical moment in American civic life
At a moment when our nation is once again bitterly divided around matters at the heart of American civic life, Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action seeks to push our collective journey forward with insights that promise to promote insight, understanding, and healing.
Introduction
1. A Personal Quest
2. Introduction to Classic Social Psychology Experiments
3. Understanding Systems, Part I: Systems Dynamics
4. Understanding Systems, Part II: Development Towards Complexity, Fractals, and the Hidden Process Driving Social Change
5. The Separation Exercises
6. Findings at the Interpersonal and Intergroup Levels
7. The Whole System Level of Analysis
8. Lessons for the Real World Part I: Understanding Systems Thinking and the Process of Awakening
9. Lessons for the Real World Part II: On Power, Control, and the Interconnectedness of Our Inner and Outer Worlds
10. The (Dual) Call to Action
References
Appendix A: Research Methodology Overview
Appendix B: Sample Questionnaire
Appendix C: Codes Related to Research Question #1
Appendix D: Exercise #1:Responses to Question #2
Appendix E:Responses to Question #4:
Appendix F: Quantitative Attention Distribution Charts by Exercise
Appendix G: Qualitative Data Related to Question #3
Acknowledgments
Index