Editorial: Organizational Matters

W H AT E V E R O U R BAC K G R O U N D or training, working with children and young people means working with, and within, complex, social, legal, and relational networks. For some of us a core clinical model may offer basic principles from which to work organizationally, some may have developed particular expertise in working with or consulting to family and or professional systems, whereas others may find themselves in roles as managers where they have to implement organizational policies that do not fit well with their own models or values. Wherever or however you work we hope that this special section will provide an interesting read, resonance with your work dilemmas and ideas to take into your professional setting. The first undergraduate studies conducted by one of us in the late 1970s included a small but influential dose of organizational psychology. At that time, many institutions were investing in training programmes for staff, however, we were being taught to beware a ‘hero-innovator’ model of change. Geogiades and Phillimore (1975) in their now seminal paper argued that ‘organisations such as schools and hospitals will, like dragons, eat hero-innovators for breakfast’ (p. 315). Their paper was written in the context of the efforts being made at that time to change the care of very disabled people (then described as the severely retarded) in large institutions through the training of experts in behaviour modification. They asked if training is (was) ever the complete answer to practice innovation, and introduced some alternative strategies for bringing new ideas into institutional care. Their idea that any programme of change needs to have an organizational strategy at its heart will be familiar to contemporary practitioners, and the earlier quote, about becoming breakfast fodder, may be familiar to many. However, we wondered what a rereading of this seminal paper would offer us today and how, if at all, the pragmatic ideas presented by Giorgiades and Phillimore (1975), which were based on the organizational theories of the day, would connect with more contemporary ideas and, in particular, our special section contributions. In this editorial we would like to use the ideas from their original article as a springboard. In the course of the discussion we hope to generate some semantic polarities (e.g. Campbell & Groenbaek, 2006) about organizational thinking along which readers may like to position themselves as they read. In this way we hope to generate some reflexive connections between this earlier work, the writing of more recent organizational thinkers, the articles presented in the section and readers’ ideas about organizations. Georgiades and Phillimore’s (1975) article challenges the idea that an organization can be changed by training individual members alone, an idea that they argue was