To effectively promote change in organizations and communities, specific strategies or action guidelines and some tactical steps for effectively carrying out these strategies are offered for people who work in human service agencies. The book is useful to both practitioners in the field and upper-division graduate students. The action guidelines, derived from basic social science research findings, are general principles that may be used by a variety of people concerned with organizational and community change. Four principles of intervention, or action guidelines, are considered: promoting an innovative service or program, changing the goals of an organization, increasing participation in organizations and groups, and increasing effectiveness in role performance. Each chapter presents and analyzes one of the four action guidelines. The general format of the four guideline chapters is similar, containing an introduction to the practice problem, action principles derived from research on the problem, illustrations of implementation, quantitative findings from practitioner logs, practitioners' views of problems and prospects, and getting started--thoughts for initiating action and a log for listing first steps. A final chapter draws conclusions and suggests further steps. (Author/JR)