“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action”

                 - Thomas Huxley (1877)

By any measure, at the turn of the new millennium we find ourselves awash in change. We also find ourselves drowning in information. The industrial revolution has given way to the information revolution, as more and more of us become collectors, creators, and consumers of information. The media and the Internet have fueled this revolution, aided by computational and communication technologies driven by Moore’s Law of steadily increasing computational power at a decreasing cost. Courtesy of the Internet we also find ourselves in the age of participation, where, as one anonymous critic put it, “everyone is an author, everyone is a critic, and editorial quality is an afterthought.”

While this revolution has brought a quality and quantity of information to our fingertips that would have been inconceivable just a generation or two ago, it has also challenged our individual and collective ability to stay afloat in a sea of blogs, spin, and dubious quality. Moreover, making sense of our social, organizational, and political worlds becomes more difficult as both the volume of information and the number of purveyors of information increase exponentially.

The Library of Congress catalogues tens of thousands of professional and academic journals of all stripes: some current, many long dead. Given all this, any person or institution seeking to add to this cacophony should have a good reason for doing so. We think we have one in the Journal of Social Change. For the information revolution has been accompanied by a variety of social changes as well. Greased in part by information flows that are increasingly frictionless, major social and political institutions are changing before our eyes. For example, the forces of globalization are rendering national borders and sovereignty less relevant while the fiat and influence of global corporations grows. New information technologies and flows play a major role in driving globalization. Similarly, new ideas, technologies, practices, even tastes are far less embedded in local regions or cultures than they used to be, fueled in part by the flow of information. In short, we are in the midst of social changes of every kind: both those we recognize, and those we barely comprehend at this point in time. Some of these changes have the potential to transform all our lives in very profound ways.

Making sense of these social changes is the domain of this publication. We will explore the structure and process of social change at all levels. As noted in our editorial statement, the Journal is devoted to theoretical advancement and applied research on social change. But as Huxley suggests, the creation of knowledge through the act of theoretical development and empirical research is not sufficient. In spite of the many benefits brought to us by a wealth of new technologies and information sharing, we still live in a world full of social problems. Poverty, war, racism, repression – these are just a few of the longstanding and intractable problems facing our national and global society that still defy resolution. We not only need credible, quality scholarship and science about these pressing social problems. We also need research that translates into practice,ideas that translate into solutions, and knowledge that translates into action. In short, we need practically oriented social change research that helps to improve the human condition, and that serves as the intellectual basis for progressing people, groups, organizations, cultures, and society toward a more positive future.

This journal exists to provide a venue for disseminating such research. We launch our journey in this issue with five papers that focus on both macro and micro issues in modern social change. These papers were presented at the first Walden Conference on Social Change in October, 2005, and subsequently revised for the Journal. In the first paper, Don Fausel steps into the wide and controversial debate on globalization by considering it from broad historical and critical perspectives, exploring both the risks of rampant globalization and the opportunities globalization affords for positive social change. In the second paper, Mark Gordon continues with the global theme, drilling down into a close examination of corporate social responsibility in Thailand.

Education, the great leveler, is a major force in social change, and the next three papers chronicle social change at three different levels in the educational establishment. Sean Quinn considers the growing trend of using adjunct faculty to supplement or even supplant traditional faculty in the higher education setting, and the challenges faced by these part-time, even transient faculty. Roberta Liebler profiles community college administrators as social change agents, and identifies ways in which continuing education can help further the professional development and influence of these individuals. Finally, Al Lockett and Monica Jones consider how technological innovations are changing K-12 education, and whether instructional technology can help improve the learning outcomes of students at risk of failure.

We hope you enjoy our first issue, and we invite your comments, suggestions, and particularly your contribution of theory and research that informs action towards positive social change.

Volume 1, 2006