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radical change within?

Eric Crump
wleric@showme.missouri.edu
11 Oct 96

Mike Salvo asks how do you demonstrate that "radical change within the institution" is desireable?.

That's a question and a half, something worth gnawing on a bit. It may, for instance, contain a paradox. Radical change? Institution? Do those terms cancel each other out?

Probably so. The possibility of radical change initiated from within is likely an illusion we have to maintain to ward off despair. Radical change maybe doesn't come from within institutions but from outside and all around. Institutions only change dramat ically when and after society in general has made a dramatic shift.

Which isn't to say that the 'outside' where change foments isn't located in an institutional venue. The internet, for instance, was created by people who were working for the government, for universities. They were within, but their work was without. In a sense, they were charged with creating something that fit the institutions' conception of acceptability (a robust communication network with built-in catastrophe survivability, something that would contribute to the survival of institutions), but they ac tually created a global electronic environment for communities, not something the institutional will had required or would necessarily have sanctioned, had it known.

The internet, the radical-est creation of institutional resources, was an accident.

So it may be that Mike's question could be recast:


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