Change in Systems: Theory and Implications

Abstract

Counselling psychologists are being asked, increasingly, to intervene on problems of human functioning that relate to cultural values held by groups, under the banner of social justice. However, counsellor education tends to privilege the dimensions of paradigms that deal with reality and how we can know it (ontology, epistemology, methodology), over the dimension that deals with values (axiology). Using a grounded theory approach to existing texts, this work is an attempt to integrate systemic thinking with recent developments in the social sciences related to change processes. Three questions are addressed: (1) What is the nature of the relationship between self and culture? (2) How is this relationship relevant to issues of systemic change? And (3) What are the implications for the field of counselling psychology? The literature suggests that culturally-situated moral identities are at the interface between self and society, and that these identities impact change processes in systems.