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Introduction
There is an inherent danger in developing a substantive ToC, because it can easily morph into a panacea as the only way of pursuing social change for all situations. Still, there is a need for having something that can contribute assist in plotting the directionality of social change experiments, without be/coming prescriptive in how and what this should be done. In other words, there is a need for ToC which can help with exploring the vectoring of change - with the praxis hereof being determined by the contextual conditions encountered in specific situations. This, in turn, may depend on the relative strengths of prevailing State + Market forces and how they are being experienced and perceived by human actors (depicted below).
Social change in formative contexts
There are never views from nowhere; but always from somewhere (Nagel). What his means for using any qualitative research methods, is that they will always be shaping and being shaped by the formative socio-institutional contexts within which they are normally embedded. So, e.g., it is to be expected from using narrative-based approaches, that they will affect / being affected by the kinds of socio-institutional contexts within which they are being produced and shared. In reality, these socio-institutional contexts can refer to both state and market 'forces' at play shaping / being shaped by peoples' sense of agency (having control over these forces), which can range widely from little, or no, control to possessing lots of control - with varying degrees in between. The adjacent picture depicts something of the internal dynamics which can occur simultaneously between four different kinds of socio-institutional contexts within the two force fields (Lewin) of the state and the market. Strictly speaking these pictures should be over-layed and not necessarily placed next to each other (2-D view). Also, what is still missing here is a similar graphic depicting of the physical environment / nature, for an even more multi-layered (3-D) representation of the complexity of the challenges we are facing.
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