Toward a psychology of change and innovation.

As psychological theorists move in the direction of stating comprehensive formulations about the determinants of human behavior, they will become increasingly concerned with the nature of social organizations, the ways in which they change, and the consequences of these changes. Work in a Yale clinical training program has highlighted the importance of the culture of the school and its relation to the processes of change and implementation. In another program, the behavior of advice seekers, like that of the advice givers in the Yale program, reflected the importance of man–system relationships and highlighted their complexity. A focus on how systems change over time, particularly in relation to innovation, illuminates both features of the system and how the understanding of individual behavior demands a conceptualization of man–system relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)