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The purpose of this study is (1) to determine the need for a creative program of interaction among the various community agencies, and (2) to determine the sound processes to be used in bringing about desirable social change through interaction among the agencies. Improving social conditions that affect the welfare of youth in the community is the primary concern of this study.

This dissertation delves into using entropy, a fundamental concept in thermodynamics and information theory, for analyzing social dynamics. Entropy relies on a probability distribution over states, which is crucial for quantifying social systems’ complexity, unpredictability, and self-organization behavior. Through an interdisciplinary approach encompassing social physics, agent-based modeling, and sentiment analysis, the research investigates the role of entropy and its underlying probability distribution in three key areas: residential segregation, financial systems, and sentiment fluctuations in online social networks. By integrating entropy-based models that leverage the probability distribution over states, the research aims to enhance the understanding of complex social phenomena and provide practical insights for policymakers, urban planners, and social media ex- parts. The findings demonstrate the potential of entropy as a unifying framework for studying social sciences, economics, and digital social systems, highlighting the growing relevance of probability distributions in decoding patterns of social dynamics. The dissertation contributes to the theoretical basis for modeling and predicting the complexity of social networks using entropy and its associated probability distribution, with significant implications for various domains.

As China is undergoing a great social transformation, urbanization has brought millions of domestic migrants into Beijing. After the 2008 Olympics, long term Beijingers have started to express their hostility against the overwhelming population of domestic migrants. This thesis seeks to enlarge our understanding of the nature and dynamics of this local hostility in Beijing, as a case study of the construction of prejudice that results from social change. It is illustrated under a combined framework of Durkheim’s theories of social change and anomie, Allport’s theorizing about prejudice, and Elias’s writings on insiders and outsiders. In order to answer how and why local hostility happened recently in Beijing, I located my ethnographic research on a grassroots organization consisting of long term Beijingers. There are three main findings. First, social change provides the invention of new traditions and norms that long term Beijingers were able to adopt before migrants came and had the chance to get settled. This enabled long term Beijingers to express their hostility by claiming that the migrants were “uncivilized”. Second, urbanization and a series of urban reforms not only brought migrants into the city, but also disturbed the existing lifestyles of the long term Beijingers and made them feel relatively deprived. Nostalgic sentiments aroused among long term Beijingers blamed outsiders for their perceived deprivation. Thirdly, the civic participation that the grassroots organization encouraged did not significantly reduce their prejudice against outsiders. Instead, local hostility was veiled by active participation and was believed to be legitimate because of the support of the local power structure, the mainstream media, and by other government policies.

The purpose of the study was to find causality for poor social change in the pharmaceutical industry in South Africa. Top, middle, and lower-level management respondents, including the CEOs, were studied in 11 pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. Human resources managers selected the participants randomly in such a way as to ensure a 60%-40% split between affirmees and non-affirmees. Participants responded to three questionnaires: the leadership questionnaire to determine if effective or appropriate leadership styles were being used with the respondents given their levels of readiness (ability and willingness to do the required tasks), the organisational climate questionnaire to determine what areas of the companies needed improvement, and the social change questionnaire to determine the problematic aspects of social change within the companies. Participants completed the questionnaires during a designated 45-minute period in their respective company headquarters. A clinical psychologist was in attendance to answer any questions. Prior to participating, respondents received cover letters, and the psychologist provided detailed explanations of the study. The main findings were (a) a mismatch in leadership style in affirmee-led organisations that was normally problematic; (b) differences in existing organisations compared to desired organisations; and (c) problems in the dimensions of support and attitude toward change in the mismatch group, which was the affirmee-led organisations. The conclusion was that, although external factors should be the drivers for transformation and also affect leadership style, leaders must be able to adapt their style to fit the readiness level of their followers. In addition, a proposed model for transformation in the pharmaceutical industry, based on the findings from the study and the literature review, was presented. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2007.