Trans-organizational management: the new frontier for social work administrators

This paper has presented a basic thesis: we cannot rely on institutional rearrangement as our primary vehicle of systemic change. By doing so, we would be repeating the mistakes of the 1960s by instituting changes that will not result in fundamental and log term improvements to societal human services systems. Change can only flow from recognition that there are two types of management that must co-exist: institutional and trans-organizational. In public and nonprofit social work agencies, the former is almost the sole focus of administrative knowledge and skills. Slowly, all the human services (Jaeger, Kaluzny & Magruder-Habib, 1987) are beginning to concentrate on trans-organizational systemic arrangements. Increasingly, social work administrators are acquiring knowledge++ and ability in trans-organizational management. It is a prerequisite for the fundamental systemic changes required by the new demographics of the next decade and the next century.