How Change Happens

Some changes take hold, while others don't. Why do some movements soar while others stagnate or fizzle? Take tobacco. Just a couple of decades ago, people smoked pretty much everywhere in the U.S.-at work, on airplanes, in hospitals. Today, the harmful habit has been dramatically reduced. How did so many people abandon this highly addictive, extremely enjoyable-even celebrated-behavior? Just as Americans stopped smoking, they also started stockpiling guns. Gun laws today are more lenient than ever, and just like cigarettes just a couple of decades ago, now firearms are everywhere-glorified on movie and TV screens, legally owned, easily purchased, and openly carried in most states. LGBT rights advocates also achieved a dramatic shift in recent years: From a time when most states were passing laws to ban same-sex marriage-and President Bill Clinton had signed the federal Defense of Marriage Act defining it as only for heterosexual couples-today marriage equality is the law of the land. As President Barack Obama declared love is love. How did U.S. society get to a place where it celebrates gay weddings, bans smoking in most places, and openly carries pistols and freely stockpiles military-grade weapons? During this same timeframe, what did we do to so decisively cut acid rain at the turn of the 21st century, but now can't seem to make a dent in carbon emissions? Who is most responsible for the resounding successes of certain movements like gun rights, tobacco control, drunk-driving reduction and global polio elimination? The answer is not what you might think. How Change Happens explores the leadership approaches, campaign strategies, and ground-level tactics used in a range of modern change campaigns. By examining social and environmental movements that have peaked in spectacular fashion from the 1980s through the 2010s, the author shows how and why these movements reached their goals. The book also explains why other recent campaigns can't seem to make as much headway, such as Occupy Wall Street, carbon climate action, and gun violence prevention. And it explores implications for newly emerging causes, such as #MeToo/Time's Up, Black Lives Matter, the Fight for Fifteen minimum wage campaign, and more. Written by Leslie Crutchfield-an authority on social change-with support from a research team at Georgetown University's Global Social Enterprise Initiative at the McDonough School of Business, the book unpacks the histories of a range of modern change campaigns. The author learns that winning movements and also-rans alike started out with a mixed bag of factors that influenced their trajectories, and no single political ideology or set of religious values has dominated. Movements, she finds, aren't so much destined to succeed as they make their destinies come true.