Here, I concur with the late social movement scholar, Melucci (1989), that the moment of collective visibility isn’t how social change usually begins. Hence, in the sections that follow I bracket the metaphor of “scaling up” … and try instead to turn up the volume on altogether different forms in which social change might manifest. Moreover, I choose to present this contribution less as a de-construction, and more as a re-construction. This paper is a long-form attempt to do just that. However, I feel its generalized use needs to be challenged, in order to prevent inverting the priority between changes in social “structure” (which are often a consequence of social change having occurred) and the fragile, if ubiquitous, instances in which social change begins to happen in seminal form (Melucci, 1989). The metaphor of scale makes social change sound purely like a matter of logistical coordination rather than of culturally mediated choice, such that if people’s activities were coordinated more efficiently through “new structures”, their behavior would be changed in the desired ways. The notion of “scaling” (up)-when applied to social change-seems inadequate because it is reminiscent of the pre-planned efforts of multinationals to expand their operations (Murray, 2013). His use of the term “scale” did, in fact, supply one such metaphor: how can change … “be achieved at a scale that can have sectoral or societal impacts?”. In view of this, the funder’s question might be reformulated as follows: if, indeed, human beings are constantly transforming their activities, how do we know when that is happening? Perhaps, the funder was asking me for a metaphor to help him visualize how social change happens. This demands a certain kind of work to help get our human activities into view, so that more complex possibilities might become visible for participating in those activities with others (Sfard et al. One of the capacities that defines human beings is the ability to make history, by revisiting their earlier experience and altering their ways of acting together. He was skeptical of my claim that helping individual practitioners make sense of their everyday experience is a contribution to social change-and one he might wish to fund-and not just a form of individual consultation. How do “changes in individuals’ perception … ripple out into society at large”? How can these … “be achieved at a scale that can have sectoral or societal impacts”? These questions landed on my desk, in the form of an e-mail from a funder.
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