Leaders are in the unique role of not only designing change initiatives but also enacting and communicating them. Managing change requires strong leadership and an understanding of how organizational change occurs. Managing change requires more than simple planning. The significant human element of change resistance needs to be addressed to ensure success. Successful change management is more likely if leaders: create a definable strategy – define measurable stakeholder aims, create a business case for their achievements, and cultural issues affecting the progress of the associated work; communicate effectively; empower employees – devise an effective education, training, or skills upgrading scheme for the organization; counter resistance; and track progress.
” (Mises 1962; Nozick 1974; Hayek 1979). Neoliberalism generally also includes the belief that freely adopted market mechanisms is the optimal way of organising all exchanges of goods and services (Friedman 1962; 1980; Norberg 2001). Free markets and free trade will, it is believed, set free the creative potential and the entrepreneurial spirit which is built into the spontaneous order of any human society, and thereby lead to more individual liberty and well-being, and a more efficient allocation of resources (Hayek 1973; Rothbard 2004). Neoliberalism could also include a perspective on moral virtue: the good and virtuous person is one who is able to access the relevant markets and function as a competent actor in these markets (Thorsen and Amund 2006). He or she is willing to accept the risks associated with participating in free markets, and to adapt to rapid changes arising from such participation (Friedman 1980). Individuals are also seen as being solely responsible for the consequences of the choices and decisions they freely make: instances of inequality and glaring social injustice are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions (Nozick 1974; Hayek 1976). If a person demands that the state should regulate the market or make reparations to the unfortunate who has been caught at the losing end of a freely initiated market transaction, this is viewed as an indication that the person in question is morally depraved and underdeveloped, and scarcely different from a proponent of a totalitarian state (Mises 1962). Thus understood and defined, neoliberalism becomes a loose set of ideas of how the relationship between the state and its external environment ought to be organised, and not a complete political philosophy or ideology (Blomgren 1997; Malnes 1998).
As a vehicle of neoliberalism, Disaster Capitalism precipitated the lacklustre responses to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in the United States. Naomi Klein brought to the fore and popularized the notion of Disaster Capitalism. In her book The Shock Doctrine (2007), she described Disaster Capitalism as the “political economic processes that take advantage of mass trauma to impose neoliberal capitalist economic policies, facilitating the redistribution of wealth and exacerbating socio-economic divisions.” Other authors have aptly elucidated the concept as well. Disaster Capitalism is defined as “national and transnational governmental institutions’ instrumental use of catastrophe (both so-called natural and human-mediated disasters, including post conflict situations) to promote and empower a range of private, neoliberal capitalist interests” (Maldonado and Schuller 2016: 62). Disaster Capitalism is as much about the pre-disaster exclusion of a certain group of people from participating equally in the economic system, as it is the capital-driven strategies for recovery and rebuilding (Edwards 2016: 1). Disaster Capitalism constitutes of two parts (Maldonado and Schuller 2016: 62). Non-profiteering, which is the first, is the process whereby public agencies direct resources to private entities. The second part consists of radical policy reforms. These reforms are referred to by Antonio Donini (2008) terms as world ordering (Maldonado and Schuller 2016: 62).
Naomi Klein identifies the Chicago School of neo-liberal economics and its iconic figure Milton Friedman as providing the framework for disaster capitalism (Edwards 2016:1). It was Freidman’s own belief that “[i]f a government activity is to be privatized or eliminated, by all means do so completely. Do not compromise by partial privatization or partial reduction.” Friedman contended that doing so will only enable those most negatively affected by the reforms to eventually succeed in forcing reversals (Freidman 1990: 11- 14).
Klein compares covert electroshock experiments carried out by C.I.A operatives in the 1950s to the “shock therapy” of economic reform being formulated at the Chicago School of Economics by Milton Friedman. The application of electrodes to stubborn patients to help facilitate “reprogramming” could also be applied to Keynesian economies in need of rapid market liberalization.
Klein locates the origin of this ‘disaster capitalism’ in Latin America in the 1970s. The concept of shock therapy incorporated into economic reasoning by Klein had its root in crude electric shock treatments for patients diagnosed with mental disorders. Rigorously employed in the former Soviet Republics, the logic of shock therapy was to use the disarray inherent to regime change to advance economic reorganization (Sachs 1995; Haynes and Husan 2002). As opposed to piecemeal reforms, shock therapy suggested rapid and radical transformations of economic policies (Friedman 1990; Popov 2000). Using the shock therapy analogy, disaster capitalism utilises disasters to predicate radical capitalist economic policies (Ott 2012). Naomi Klein (2007:49) furthers that “every time a new crisis hit – even when the crisis itself is the direct by-product of free-market ideology – the fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social and economic engineering.” Klein continues to explain that “each new shock is midwife to a new course of economic shock therapy” (49). For Klein, shocks, which come in the form of wars, financial crisis, coup d’état, terrorists attacks, and natural disasters, are taken advantage of by reform-minded technocrats, politicians and transnational capitalist forces to pursue neoliberal economic policies. Disaster capitalism thus relies upon a series of interrelating shocks: The initial shock is the disaster event. This leads to public shock, characterized by fear and disorienta
