Towards the well functioning community : the development of Anton Makarenko and Maxwell Jones' communities

Abstract

Anton Semyonovich Makarenko (1888-1939), the developer of Soviet collective education, and Maxwell Jones (1907-1990), the pioneer of the English therapeutic community, succeeded, each in his own quarter, in creating educational and therapeutic communities which have had wide international and historical influence on practice and theory of education and psychiatric health care. In this study I have tried to survey the developing processes and the preconditions (societal, communal, and personality of the developer) of Makarenko and Jones' communities. I have also compared the developing strategies used by Makarenko and Jones with the well-known and widely applied Organization Development methods: Grid OD, Management by objectives, and Management by results. Remarkable similarities in the development of Makarenko and Jones' communities have made possible for me to outline the development model which I call the process centered developing strategy of organizations. This strategy is supported by my own experiences at the boys' reformatory of the city of Jyväskylä, Finland, in the seventies.