Change! Combining analytic approaches with street wisdom

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where a panel discussion on "Change" is being recorded for broadcast on ABC Radio National Big Ideas. The panelists, Dee Madigan, Mark Stafford Smith, Grant Wardlaw, Lindell Bromham and Gabriele Bammer are authors of the book "Change! - Combining Analytic Approaches with Street Wisdom", published by ANU Press. The book is available free Online.

Dee Madigan talked about how advertisers were using neurological research to find out exactly how emotions motivate consumers.

The panel then moved on motivations to act on climate change. There was discussion of if the analysis techniques developed by intelligence agencies for the cold war are applicable to today's terrorist groups. It seems to me that the terrorists have learned to use social media, but the military have not and are unhappy that their new enemy is not playing by the rules. There was a comment that universities were not good at complex problems. But in engineering and computer science we now teach students to work in teams and deal with human issues.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Introduction

• 1. An Approach to Understanding Change

Part 2 Perspectives

• 2. A Politician’s View of Change
• 3. Responding to Global Environmental Change
• 4. Teleology, Cyclicality and Episodism: Three competing views of change in international relations
• 5. Change is Central to Sociology
• 6. Advertising and Change: Message, mind, medium, and mores
• 7. Media Advocacy for Public Health
• 8. Is the Intelligence Community Changing Appropriately to Meet the Challenges of the New Security Environment?
• 9. Evolutionary Change: Nothing stands still in biology
• 10. Demographic Change: How, why and consequences
• 11. Conceptual Change and Conceptual Diversity Contribute to Progress in Science
• 12. Mental Illness and Psychiatry Have Seen Substantial Change—But There is Still a Long Way To Go
• 13. Education Reform: Learning from past experience and overseas successes
• 14. Ten Lessons from Changing Policing Organisations
• 15. Change Management in Materials Conservation
• 16. Change and Continuity in Anthropology: Examples from Christianity and from the situations of contemporary Indigenous Australians
• 17. Learning about Change Through Industrial Open Innovation in the Fast‑Moving Consumer Goods Sector
• 18. Increasing Interest in the Economic Determinants of Structural, Technological and Climate Change
• 19. Visual Fine Art: Documenting change, influencing change, and subjected to change

Part 3 Synthesis

• 20. Improving Research Impact by Better Understanding Change: A case study of multidisciplinary synthesis
• Contributors