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A groundbreaking examination of Saul Alinsky's organizing work as it relates to race. Saul Alinsky is the most famous—even infamous—community organizer in American history. Almost single-handedly, he invented a new political form: community federations, which used the power of a neighborhood’s residents to define and fight for their own interests. Across a long and controversial career spanning more than three decades, Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation organized Eastern European meatpackers in Chicago, Kansas City, Buffalo, and St. Paul; Mexican Americans in California and Arizona; white middle-class homeowners on the edge of Chicago’s South Side black ghetto; and African Americans in Rochester, Buffalo, Chicago, and other cities. Mark Santow focuses on Alinsky’s attempts to grapple with the biggest moral dilemma of his age: race. As Santow shows, Alinsky was one of the few activists of the period to take on issues of race on paper and in the streets, on both sides of the color line, in the halls of power, and at the grassroots, in Chicago and in Washington, DC. Alinsky’s ideas, actions, and organizations thus provide us with a unique and comprehensive viewpoint on the politics of race, poverty, and social geography in the United States in the decades after World War II. Through Alinsky’s organizing and writing, we can see how the metropolitan color line was constructed, contested, and maintained—on the street, at the national level, and among white and black alike. In doing so, Santow offers new insight into an epochal figure and the society he worked to change.
This book assesses the construction of citizenship as an identity, a performance, and a shared rationality.
This comprehensive guide to research, sources, and theories about nonviolent action as a technique of struggle in social and political conficts discusses the methods and techniques used by groups in various encounters. Although violence and its causes have received a great deal of attention, nonviolent action has not received its due as an international phenomenon with a long history. An introduction that explains the theories and research used in the study provides a practical guide to this essential bibliography of English-language sources. The first part of the book covers case-study materials divided by region and subdivided by country. Within each country, materials are arranged chronologically and topically. The second major part examines the methods and theory of nonviolent action, principled nonviolence, and several closely related areas in social science, such as conflict analysis and social movements. The book is indexed by author and subject.
Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little information about the crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly needed historical context, these essays reframe today's "underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology" echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and, inevitably, the nation as a whole. How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail together.
A study of the unique impact of participatory and representative democracy on policy outcomes at local, state, and national levels.
In cities across the US, grass-roots organizations are working to revitalize popular participation in disenfranchised communities by bringing ordinary people into public life. This book examines the techniques used to achieve these goals.
Local nonprofit organizations are often small, loosely structured, and democratically governed, and therefore do not fit conveniently into traditional theories of organizational behavior that are rooted in administrative science and bureaucratic structure. Treating community organizations as parts of larger systems--organizational fields or ecologies and communities--this collection of papers presents various perspectives on local nonprofit organizations from the standpoint of organizational theory. The essays draw on an array of methods and theoretical approaches taken from population ecology theories of organizations, laying the foundation for the structural analysis of community organizations.
A path-breaking book--the first to examine the evolution of community organizing in U.S. cities. While embracing mobilization, the contributors acknowledge the challenges inherent in globalization and the norms and values that shape contemporary American culture. Still, they reaffirm that community organizing has an important role to play as part of a broader progressive movement.