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Positive Deviance Leading and Coping with Social Change

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change

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Abstract

Positive deviance is an approach that leverages on the already existing solutions in the community. By scaling the available solutions, it can bring about social change incrementally. When drastic social change caused by conflict or epidemic occurs, positive deviance can help cope with the situation to move forward. For the incremental social change, this chapter shows three cases, which documents examples from Vietnam, Uganda, and Pakistan. Social change in Vietnam started in small villages at the micro-level but grew to be a nation-wide movement, causing a macro-effect in about a decade. Other two cases, however, remained as a micro-level social change. A future challenge lies in how to progress from the micro-level to macro-level. For the drastic social change and ways of coping with it, a case from Japan is presented. It is also a social change at the micro-level, so similar efforts are necessary to plant it as a seed for it to cultivate into the community and beyond. To overcome this challenge, a big data approach has been proposed and applied in the field of development activities in low- and middle-income countries. This data-powered positive deviance approach could speed up the process of identifying and understanding positive deviance by reducing time, labor, and cost. To make the product of this approach more valuable, a new lens of evaluating the effect of “social change” is necessary to go beyond just looking for behavior change in the target activities at the micro-level.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Community and Global Health, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Ing Cherng Ong, Jennifer Lisa Sakamoto & Masamine Jimba

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  1. Ken Ing Cherng Ong
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  2. Jennifer Lisa Sakamoto
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  3. Masamine Jimba
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Correspondence to Masamine Jimba .

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Ong, K.I.C., Sakamoto, J.L., Jimba, M. (2023). Positive Deviance Leading and Coping with Social Change. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_69-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_69-1

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87624-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87624-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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