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ECPR General Conference 2014, 3-6 September 2014, University of Glasgow Marko Nousiainen Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä marko.k.nousiainen@jyu.fi

Participatory governance and professional radicalism –

Two historical variations of community organising

Abstract

This paper explores the limits and possibilities of participatory politics with genealogical and historicist research. It presents two variations of “community organising” in which involvement of local communities is a central means of handling juvenile delinquency, poverty and other social problems. These interrelated but differing conceptions are Clifford Shaw’s sociological thought with its governmental application, the Chicago Area Project, started in the 1930s, and Saul Alinsky’s work in the 1940s and 1970s. The first case tells how community involvement was based on sociological knowledge on communities deployed as a means of social change. The second illustrates how community organising may be understood as a tool for emancipation and widening of democratic politics. This examination helps to understand how participation and citizen involvement in governance can be understood both as a consensual effort to solve social problems and as inherently conflictual and political action, a fight for a more equal society.

Keywords: Alinsky, Saul; Chicago school; genealogy; participation; Shaw, Clifford

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Introduction

The involvement of communities and the empowerment of citizens in the realization of various

political goals is currently a very popular governmental strategy. Barbara Cruickshank (1999) has

examined such strategies from the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality and described them

as technologies of citizenship instead of enhanced freedom. With participation and empowerment

power seeks to create active citizens, people capable of independent and responsible conduct of

their conduct. Thus power works through the subjectivities of citizens rather than against it.

(Cruickshank, 1999: 68-9.) In a very similar vein, many other scholars approaching contemporary

modes of governing from a Foucauldian perspective attach participatory governance practices using

communities or other micro-moral domains for the responsibilisation of citizens to the neo- or

advanced liberal art of governing as governmentalised modes of communitarianism (see Delanty,

2003: 87-90; Rose, 1996; Miller and Rose, 2008). Nevertheless, the roots of such modes of

governing are neither in the age nor thought popularly seen as neoliberal, as the current paper

argues.

This article deplores the roots of such a participatory technology of citizenship that is non-judicial

and non-economic but social (see Procacci, 1989) and linked to a normative concept of community.

It seeks to offer new insight for the political interpretation of such governance trough a genealogical

and historicist examination of community organising in the USA. Through discussing the social

scientific origins of community organising and through depicting its two historical variations, the

current paper seeks to give us heuristic means to understand different aspects, problems and

possibilities of participatory governance. Especially it explains why it is possible to see

conservative well as radical democratic goals and values attached to policy participation; why it is

seen simultaneously as exercise of social control and community empowerment (Delanty, 2003:

88).

Genealogy is an approach that follows Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired historical method. It

examines historical processes but is not interested in history for its own sake only. Rather, it seeks

to find new and inventive ways to approach contemporary phenomena – and especially to challenge

such taken-for-granted ideas which govern the present. Genealogy is thus a critical use of history.

(Foucault, 2000: 369-91; Helén, 2005.) By studying the history of contemporary discourses and

practices, it is possible to show how these are dependent on certain historical contexts, struggles,

circumstances or rationalisations – i.e. contingent and political. A genealogical analysis disputes

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any universal notion of truth, moral principles, human nature etc., and seeks to find out the

conditions that have made such ideas possible. (Helén, 2005.) As Mark Bevir (2010: 427) has

written, the genealogical (or radical historicist) notion of history has a strong emphasis of

nominalism, contingency and contestability. Alongside this critique-enabling function, genealogical

examinations may have practical value as they relativise objects previously considered natural and

enable us to see alternatives.

The work presented in this paper is a genealogical examination of certain governmental strategy

that seeks to deploy citizen participation and local community as a tool for solving social problems.

Thus, it is not a history of political mobilization in general nor a history of 20th century American

sociological thought. Instead I examine what kind of scientific knowledge community organising

was based on, and what kind of historical circumstances gave birth to it. Bevir (2010: 434) defines

“a tradition” such ideational background against which individuals come to adopt certain web of

beliefs and which influence the beliefs they are likely to adopt. Thus “a tradition” is similar to “a

discourse” as a concept. The main theme of this work is the development of the intellectual or

discursive tradition I call community integration/disintegration in the early Chicago school

sociology and the two participatory strategies of government1 it produced.

Firstly, I will discuss the sociological roots of community organising in Chicago, the scietific effort

to understand social problems and to solve them in partnerships with local communities by reading

certain classical works in Chicago school sociology. Especially Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s classical

work on Polish immigrants and Shaw’s studies on juvenile delinquency were important texts in this

history. After that, I will interpret Saul Alinsky’s work and his notion of radical community

organising for the political empowerment of the underprivileged. Lastly, I will discuss what kind of

value genealogical work could have for the examinations of contemporary community organising

projects.

The idea of community disintegration is sometimes seen as the intellectual basis of the Chicago

tradition of community action or organising, and thus the conservative and radical variations of

organising are lumped together (e.g. Cortes, 1997; Cazenave, 2007: 45). This article clarifies this

picture by examining how the concept of community came to be thought as a means of social

1 When speaking of “government” I use the term in a Foucauldian fashion: not as a synonym of state institutions but as any effort to conduct the citizens’ conduct in order to enhance their wellbeing, health or security.

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intervention and how Alinsky can be seen as a critic of this intellectual tradition. It depicts, thus,

what are the alternative strategies any policy of community involvement is likely to face.

The sociological roots of community organising

An important root of community organising is the idea that social problems, especially crime, are

not problems of individual morals only but larger social phenomena in which the relations between

people are significant. Even if this kind of perspectives were already developed by the French 19th

century social thought, for example Durkheim (Snell 2010, 60; Procacci, 1989; Rabinow, 1989), the

Chicago school sociologists in the early 20th century made a significant contribution to how the

concept of community came to be thought as a means of social intervention. Apparently the city of

Chicago offered a fertile ground for the development of this kind of thinking. And the sociologist to

form these scientific examinations into a practical project of governance in the early 1930s was

Clifford Shaw, the researcher of juvenile delinquency working in the Illinois Institute of Juvenile

Research.

The growth of the city of Chicago in the 19th and the early 20th century was very rapid. When in the

1840s Chicago was a small town of some 4500 inhabitants, in the year 1930 over 3.3 million people

lived there. As in other cities in the United States, this growth meant very large immigration. For

instance, in 1920 42.2 percent of the inhabitants of Chicago was born abroad, and an overwhelming

majority originated from families in which at least one of the parents was an immigrant. These first

or second generation immigrants formed 72 % of the city’s total population. Of those born outside

the USA, the largest group were the Poles (17 %), the second largest were the Russians (especially

the Russian jews) and Lithuanians (15%), and third were the Germans (13,9 %). (Shaw and McKay,

1931: 23–5.) Because immigration was so broad it, naturally, had consequences for the social

structure of the city. Especially it meant that social turmoil, for example crime and industrial

conflict, was frequent and that the immigrants formed peculiar groups within the city. Thus, it was

natural for the Chicago school sociologists to concentrate on social problems and to see society as a

mosaic of separate communities.

As for example in Durkheim’s view of social science, social organisation and order were the

scientific fields of inquiry in which the Chicago school sociologists directed their interest. Also

similarly, their aim was a positivist change in society. (Snell, 2010.) The school was heavily

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influence by the American pragmatist philosophical tradition and also links to German idealism are

known (Engel, 2002; Cortese, 1995; Delanty, 2003: 52).

In 1918 William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1974a: 1, 36–7) criticised the earlier “practical

sociology” or “common sense social theory” in their classic work The Polish Peasant in Europe

and America, and wanted to develop a more scientific and systematic research of social phenomena.

Their explicit aim was to create such a science that could control society and enhance its wellbeing

in the same manner as natural sciences enhanced industrial production. The purpose of sociology as

a science should then be the unveiling of social laws and causal relations. Thomas & Znaniecki

(1974a: 38) acknowledged, nevertheless, that this task was much more difficult in the field of social

relations than in natural sciences. In addition to the discovery of social facts, all things that impact

the individuals’ subjective ways of thinking (e.g. personal experiences) would have to be taken into

account in order to explain their behaviour. And the need to understand the subjective ways of

thought led Thomas and Znaniecki to develop the life-history method which aimed in getting

information about the researched individuals’ values and attitudes as well as the cultural and

historical circumstances that form them. Thomas and Znaniecki (1974b: 1832–4) wrote that life-

records were the best material for social research as they were nuanced and concrete enough to

enable the accurate depiction of social institutions. A life-record material could be produced

through autobiographical accounts written by informants, or interpreting other written sources

concerning their “inner life”. (Zaretsky, 1996: x; Thomas & Znaniecki, 1974b: 1907.)

The concepts of social values and attitudes gave the theoretical and methodological foundation to

the new science of society. Thomas and Znaniecki (1974a: 21, 31-2) assumed that the values shared

by individuals and the respective attitudes and norms control their behaviour. The systems of values

constitute social institutions which in turn constitute social organisation and, ultimately, all social

groups:

”… The rules of behaviour, and the actions viewed as conforming or not conforming with

these rules, constitute with regard to their objective significance a certain number of more or

less connected and harmonious systems which can generally be called social institutions, and

the totality of institutions found in a concrete social group constitutes the social organization

of this group. And when studying the social organization as such we must subordinate

attitudes to values as we do in other special cultural sciences; that is, attitudes count for us

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only as influencing and modifying rules of behaviour and social institutions.” (Thomas and

Znaniecki, 1974a: 32–3.)

Societies – as organised social groups – were for Thomas and Znaniecki in the last analysis based

on values and attitudes controlling behaviour. Therefore they saw communities with homogeneous

values very important. Ultimately only shared values made society possible and enabled everything

that comes with it. Thomas and Znaniecki (1974b: 1825) wrote that the social institutions

constituted by common values are the “only barrier which now stands between the mass of Polish

immigrants and complete wildness”. For the sake of consistency it must be concluded that this

should apply to all other social groups as well, in addition to Poles!

In other words, Thomas and Znaniecki saw the enactment of a social order that would control the

conduct of individuals autonomously of law or the state (as a coercive apparatus) as the objective

for the new science of sociology. Thus this aim was not very far from other early sociologic

thinkers across the Atlantic. In the early French sociology the governability of democracy was a

central theme and the great promise of sociology was enacting a social solidarity, a moral order that

would render modernity governable and end the instability marked by the problem of poverty and

consequently the threat of revolution. (Procacci, 1989; Rabinow, 1989.) For the Chicago school the

symbol of the problematic of modernity was, in addition to poverty, the figure of a delinquent.

Other difference was that the basis of social order was the notion of local community. In the context

of the American city, a mosaic forged by massive immigration, it was more difficult to picture a

uniform nation state as the reference point of social solidarity than in the French republican

tradition.

The Polish Peasant was probably the volume that made the greatest impact on the evolution of the

Chicago school. On top of the rigorous empirical examination of society connected to theoretical

insight, its central innovation was a properly sociologic want to examine the relation between the

individual and her social environment and to understand why individuals sometimes act in a

problematic way. (Zaretsky, 1996: xiii; Cortese, 1995.) In this book, the writers’ main thesis was

that the traditional culture of Polish peasants had a strong sense of community in which family and

village were very significant. In America on the contrary, the dominant culture was more

individualistic which challenged the traditional values. Modernisation, in general, and the manifold

and dynamic environment of the American city, in particular, led to the deterioration of the

traditional social institutions and morality and thus weakened social solidarity. For example, the

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social control that was a central feature of life in a Polish rural village was not possible in a city

environment that enabled anonymous action. Simultaneously, the immigrant community offered

few possibilities for the development of new shared values and institutions. This kind of

disintegration of social institutions offered the explanation for antisocial behaviour for Thomas and

Znaniecki (1974b: 1825–7). Subsequently, nearly all social problems (e.g. crime, domestic

violence, poverty) could ultimately be seen as the consequences of a life isolated from community

support and control (Zaretsky, 1996: xiii). These ideas were largely accepted by the Chicago school

sociologists, and the idea of disintegration of communities, signifying the problematic of modernity,

became a sort of paradigmatic assumption, an accepted starting point for many later studies striving

to understand social problems (Zaretsky, 1996: ix, xiv). Another impact of The Polish Peasant was

that the Polish immigrant population became a central object of research and social policy

experiment in Chicago.

The detailed case-study became the hallmark of the Chicago school (Janowitz, 1967: vii), and its

central premise was the Thomas theorem: If men define situations as real, they are real in their

consequences (Deegan, 1988: 122; Shaw, 1966: 3). The school borrowed form pragmatist

philosophy a critical attitude towards the notion of rationally calculating cognition and argued that

reality is socially constructed and individuals constantly create and recreate their roles (Cortese,

1995). Knowledge and human understanding were seen as ultimately tentative and hypothetical, as

socially constructed concepts emerging with a communal examination (Engel, 2002: 52). Perhaps it

is the pragmatist philosophy and its notions of a socially or symbolically constructed self, faith in

the underlying benevolence of people, as well as the assumed need for greater democracy and

participation (see Delanty, 2003: 52; Deegan, 1988: 106, 249) what ultimately enabled the study of

cultural values and meanings to be transformed into a practical project of government.

The notion of community defined as a basic building block of social order was not confined to

Thomas and Znaniecki’s work but it was central to many later Chicago sociologists, as well. For

example Robert Park (1967c: 114–8) and Ernest Burgess (1967b: 143–7), the most famous scholars

of the Chicago school, discussed the meaning of community in their writings. To them, community

meant, firstly, the inhabitants of certain geographical area. Secondly, community was seen as a form

of social organisation. This kind of organisation was, on one hand, ecological: a system of

geographically defined characteristics and functions. On the other hand, community meant an

organisation of economic action. Thirdly, community was a unit of cultural and political

organisation that contained the customs and norms which control individual impulses. For example

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art, religion, and politics were factors of cultural communality through which individuals take part

in social life. Community was thus understood a shared consciousness on which collective action

was founded.

Community also meant the “instinctive understanding” of a spontaneously grown social order

among people who live near to each other (see Park, 1967: 7). It was not seen as an object of

empirical study but as a necessary condition of social reality. Thus, a community with uniform

values was understood as a normative description of the social environment people should naturally

live in. The homogeneity of values and norms was an ideal that many scholars accepted as the

starting point of their explanation concerning social ills. For example, the researchers of juvenile

delinquency Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay cited Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s notion of vital

community in their report on the causes of crime.

”The community is vital when social opinion concerns itself with all matters, outside

happenings or individual acts, which possess a public interest, when its attitude toward these

matters are consistent and able to reach approximate unanimity, and when any common action

considered necessary to solve the situation is defined by social opinion it is carried on in

harmonious cooperation.” (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1974b: 1171; op. cit. Shaw and McKay,

1931: 99.)

Such a normative idea of unanimous communities enabling collective action can be seen as a

marker of the discursive tradition of community integration/disintegration. The Chicago school

community discourse also shared the pessimism typical to other early sociological community

theorizing (Delanty, 2003: 15): the invaluable foundations of moral order were endangered by

modernization.

Even if it was not an object of research itself, the ideal notion of a harmonious community could be

compared to the empirical findings gathered in the city – for example statistical knowledge on the

distribution of juvenile delinquency, child mortality, tuberculosis, truancy, use of welfare services,

etc. (Burgess, 1967a: 50–1; Shaw and McKay, 1931: 26, 385; Shaw and McKay, 1969). And

because the distribution of social ills showed a clear spatial pattern, the concept of community

seemed empirically relevant, too.

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The geographical (or ecologic) examinations showing that problems were consistently concentrated

in certain neighbourhoods, enabled social ills to be seen as community problems. Especially

problematic communities were found in the inner city. These “zones in transition” were located

near commercial and industrial centres. (Burgess, 1967a: 50–1.) In Chicago this kind of slum areas

were located near the actual business centre, but as well near the southern steel industry area (the

Bush) and the meat packing district (Back-of-the-Yards) on the southern bank of Chicago River

(e.g. Pacyga, 1989). The inhabitants of the slums were mostly immigrants who chose their place of

residence near their countrymen and thus formed culturally and ethnically relatively homogenous

populations that differed form the rest of the American society (e.g. Park, 1967a: 9–10). Above all

the tradition of community integration/disintegration explains why, despite the relative ethnic and

cultural homogeneousness of the immigrant community, the assumed lack of homogeneity was

found as the reason for social problems.

For the history of participatory strategies of government the most influential work was Shaw and

McKay’s studies on juvenile delinquency and how they revised the Thomas & Znaniecki’s idea on

social disintegration. Especially Shaw and McKay took as their starting point the earlier observation

on how modern environment changed the relations between parents and children. When the

community in Polish rural villages supported parents’ authority over their children, in the USA this

social control collapsed. As well, children were able to reach economic autonomy younger than in

the old country, and parents lacking language skills had turn to their children for help in managing

their every-day affairs which, according to Thomas & Znaniecki, could lead the children to assume

“a real or imagined” superiority compared to their parents. (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1974b: 1650–1,

1974a: 709–11; Shaw and McKay, 1931: 104.) Inevitably, modern environment made the control of

children more difficult.

When there was a clear discrepancy between the values of the old country – to which the parents

were accustomed – and the values of the new country – to which the children were accustomed –

conflicts in families were obvious. This led to domestic violence and the disintegration of solidarity

in families which, in turn, was seen to drive especially the boys away from home and to peer groups

where they were completely without adult control. And it was easy to adopt criminal values and

skills in the peer group. (Shaw and McKay, 1931: 5–8, 111–5.) This kind of explanation for

delinquency was presented also in Shaw’s ([1930] 1966) classic work, The Jack-Roller, that told the

life-history of a Polish immigrant boy Stanley and his gradual orientation toward a criminal career

in the slum Back-of-the-Yards.

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Shaw added empirical evidence on the social origins of juvenile delinquency to the tradition of

community integration/disintegration. He – alone and together with McKay – showed how

delinquency was a culturally transmitted mode of action that had its roots in the slum environment.

Shaw and McKay provided a lot of evidence to support this view. Firstly, most of the young

offenders brought to justice were caught in the company of others (Shaw and McKay, 1931: 194–

5). Secondly, the delinquents shared certain traditions, common norms and codes of conduct (Shaw

and McKay, 1931: 241). Thirdly, there was a visible pattern in the evolution of the typical criminal

career: it started with shoplifting and other petty crimes and advanced towards a more demanding

crime. Crime was a learned mode of action in which the older would advise the younger (Shaw and

McKay, 1931: 202-14). On basis of the records on youngsters arrested together, it was in fact

possible to depict “a chain of masters and apprentices” that continued unending as far in history as

the records had been kept (Shaw and McKay, 1969: 175).

Chicago Area Project

It is easy to imagine how promising prospects these studies offered for an intervention aimed to

tackle the delinquency problem: If crime is a social phenomenon also its preventions should strike

at the social forces causing it. If the main reason for the problem is disintegration and the resulting

deficiency in the ability to organise and act collectively, the logical solution is community

organising geared to building new institutions. In the early 1930s Shaw started the Chicago Area

Project (CAP), an endeavour to experiment with the sociologic knowledge in order to reduce

delinquency (Short, 1969). The application of sociology to control society was not Shaw’s original

idea, but many writers before him had called for action. (e.g. Park, 1967: 109–10; Thomas and

Znaniecki, 1974b: 1825–6). Especially Burgess (1967b: 142) criticized the earlier social work, e.g.

settlements, for insufficient scientific basis: Instead of helping the underprivileged, neighbourhood

work should understand and manipulate the social forces underlying modernity. Nevertheless, it

was Burgess’s student, Shaw, who forged these ideas into a coherent governmental strategy built on

imaginable solution to the problems of modernity that the new sociologic knowledge made

possible.

Shaw and others wrote in 1937 that the objective of CAP is the “fullest possible neighbourhood

participation” and “making the neighbourhood conscious of the problem of juvenile delinquency

and collectively interested in the welfare of its children and active in promoting programs for such

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improvements of the community environment as will develop in the children interests and habits of

a constructive and socially desirable character” (op. cit. Schlossmann and Sedlak, 1983: iii). CAP

sought to cure social ills by promoting common values and standards of behaviour as well as by

enhancing collective solidarity and developing a sense potency and confidence (Schlossmann and

Sedlak, 1983: 43, 55). In other words, it tried to produce certain kind of subjectivity that would

encourage self-help measures in the development of the communities. This kind of “will to govern”

didn’t concern only the children living in the slums but adults as well.

When an important premise in the project was the assumed slum dwellers’ lack of ability to

organise and to act collectively for common good, neighbourhood participation was an

understandable tactical choice. Organising people to act collectively hits at the very core of the

problem. In addition, it was thought that since “natural” social environment directs people’s

behaviour, also the intervention should be seen as a part of it (Kobrin, 1959: 22–3). That is why the

project had to be targeted at adults as well. Furthermore, it was thought that people will only

participate to the kind of collective action which they have possession of and which they find

meaningful in their own terms. Therefore it was seen important that the organisations CAP wanted

to found should be autonomous and controlled by the inhabitants themselves. The role of the expert

was only to advice and support the participants on their road to social change. In order to be

effective, the project should make the inhabitants want the change and to act in order to carry out

the actual work. (Kobrin, 1959: 22–3; Schlossmann and Sedlak, 1983: iv.) Even if the participants

held the power in the founded organisations, they were also targets of indirect influence. CAP

wanted to change the values and attitudes of the participants, and the means used were negotiation

and persuasion.

CAP managed to found a dozen community committees with slightly differing programmes. A

central strategy in community organising was to arouse interest among local leaders.2 In addition,

the project wanted to train and hire local inhabitants as employees; the knowledge on local culture

and customs was seen important. The autonomy of the participants was respected, as well, and the

decisions they had made were accepted even if the sociologists leading the project had a different

opinion3. The committees organised recreational activities for children and youth, carried out self-

2 This was not Shaw’s original innovation since Burgess (1967b: 153) had suggested it already in 1925. 3 According to Kobrin (1959: 25) this was not common since the leaders of CAP were highly respected by locals and thus could influence their decisions.

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help projects in order to develop the neighbourhoods, and mediated between the law enforcement

and the young. (Kobrin, 1959: 24–6; Short, 1969: xlix–l; Schlossmann and Sedlak, 1983: 33.)

Dominic Pacyga’s (1989) account on the Russell Square Community Committee (RSCC) in a South

Chicago’ steel industry area, the Bush, gives us an example of what kind of pragmatic action

community organising in CAP was. The first difficulty was to get the local Polish catholic parish

interested in co-operation. The priest of the parish had a great influence in the neighbourhood but he

was at first sceptical towards the project. After the priest and the sociologists reached an agreement,

the parish became an important supporter to the RSCC (Pacyga, 1989: 165–6). RSCC organised

voluntary work and gathered funds, started a Boys’ Club, formed links to the local youth, built a

summer camp centre, ran a library, employed young gang members, and helped community

members freed from prison. Since it was able to raise funds and voluntary work for the benefit of

children, even in the middle of the great depression, RSCC may be considered the most successful

of the CAP’s committees. (Pacyga, 1989: 171–6, 179.)

With CAP, Shaw forged the strategy of community organising as a participatory mode of curing

social ills through re-enacting social order and solidarity destroyed by modernity. Thus it can be

seen as a sociologically founded technology of citizenship, a way of deploying community as a

means of producing active and socially minded agents that would help and control their neighbours.

This strategy differed from earlier social work as it was based on sociological ideas on the origin of

social problems. It did not provide social services for the poor, but wanted help the poor to help

themselves in an autonomous organisation. It also bears an interesting resemblance with the

technology of social insurance that, according to Ewald (1991: 209), was adopted as the foremost

mode of governing social ills in the late 19th century Europe. First of all, community organising is a

technology of solidarity aiming to help those who have fallen in distress. In place of judicial mode

of action, it seeks to enhance the citizens’ feelings of solidarity. Yet, unlike social insurance, it

contains the minimum (or no) elements of inter-community redistribution. In addition, it is a moral

technology growing out of the normative notion of community as a moral order. Like social

insurance, community organising is, thus, also a political technology as it seeks to create new

groupings of interest based on assumed interdependence. But is not based on contractual order or

right as social insurance is, but it was made possible by a sociological imagination on an organically

grown social order in geographical proximity. (cf. Ewald, 1991: 206-207.) Despite the local control

and bottom-up character of the strategy, it nevertheless reflects the pragmatic faith in scientific

expertise and education: the aim of an organiser is to use knowledge in order to change the values

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and attitudes of the community members and make them act for the common good. Thus the

participant is simultaneously an active agent and an object of government.

The most apparent flaw in this strategy – and one for which Shaw was criticized already in the

1930s (Schlossman & Sedlak, 1983: 17) – is that it concentrates on local level and turns a blind eye

to the larger structural inequalities evident in a capitalist society. As this variation of community

organising strives for harmonious cooperation, it implicitly hides political aspects of social

problems from sight. The underlying tradition of community integration/disintegration blames the

poor – or their assumed lack of shared values and norms – for their condition, but without blaming

anybody individually. Also the tradition is inherently conservative: it considers any change in the

traditional values as potentially dangerous as this change disintegrates social institutions, the very

foundation of organised society.

Community organising as radicalism

Another strategy of organising communities to solve social problems was presented in Saul

Alinsky’s work. He was an American civic activist and a self-proclaimed professional radical who

developed the tactics and theories of community action and organising in Chicago together with

Shaw and others. This variation can be seen to address the most obvious deficiency in Shaw’s

notion of community organising: the lack of political insight concerning social ills. The variation

Alinsky presented illustrates, first and foremost, why community organising is often attached to

radical democratic ideas.

Alinsky was a second generation immigrant of Russian Jewish background, and he studied

sociology in the University of Chicago under Park and Burgess (Engel, 2002). Alinsky’s thinking is

crystallised in his two books, Reveille for Radicals published originally in 1946 and Rules for

Radicals published in 1971. Both volumes are practical guides to radical community organising that

build on Alinsky’s personal experience on actual work with communities. Even if Alinsky probably

considered himself rather an activist than a theoretical thinker, his work, nevertheless, illustrates a

certain kind a view on communities. He has been labelled “a reluctant community theorist” by

posterity (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1982).

In the 1930s Alinsky worked as Clifford Shaw’s assistant in CAP. He had a project that sought to

introduce youngsters from the Bush to the academic opportunities the University of Chicago

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provided. In 1938 Shaw assigned him to organise the Back-of-the-Yards slum, the meatpacking

district made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraking work The Jungle. The area was

mostly populated by Polish immigrants and it had a very bad reputation. The experiences with the

Back-of-the-Yards Organizing Council (BYOC) led Alinsky to forge a new variation of the

participatory strategy of governing and also to a break with Shaw. BYOC united the church and

organised labour to battle against meatpacking industry. Even if the endeavour was successful, it

was contrary to the consensual strategy Shaw was experimenting with. Back-of the-Yards was had

more difficult problems than the other slums in Chicago, and to mach the challenge Alinsky’s

strategy had to be more radical. (Engel, 2002: 52; Pacyga, 1989: 162, 179; Schlossmann and

Sedlak, 1983: 73-4, 101.) Especially the emphasis of conflictual and political mode of action

distinguishes Alinsky’s notion of community organising from the other early developers of

governmental use of participation. He criticised the earlier strategy for concentrating solely on the

theme of social disorganisation and for the lack of comprehensive understanding on the political

and economic forces affecting the lives of slum-dwellers (Alinsky, 1941).

In Reveille for Radicals Alinsky criticised what he called a segmented understanding of social

problems inherent to the previous efforts to enhance community welfare through community

councils. Alinsky (1969: 57) stated that such programmes problematically treat social problems as

independent of all other problems. In developing this criticism, he departed from the standard

sociological tradition of community integration:

“From a functional point of view the problem of youth (or any problem) cannot be viewed as

an isolated phenomenon. Similarly neither can any specific problem of youth be understood or

studied as a problem apart and unto itself. A conspicuous example of this sort of segmental

thinking is to be found in our usual studies of delinquency and crime. Crime can properly be

viewed only as one facet of a problem of social disorganization. The opening of the door on

the study of crime confronts one with a broad vista of social disorganization. Such aspects of

this dreary scene as unemployment, undernourishment, disease, deterioration, demoralization,

and many other including crime itself, are simple parts of the whole picture. … A sound

approach to the field of crime would therefore involve an approach to all of these other

problems which are part and parcel of the etiology of crime”. (Alinsky, 1969: 57.)

The logical consequence of such a broad understanding of social problems is that “any intelligent

attack” on a problem must consider other “facets of social disorganisation” as well. Alinsky

15

criticises the conventional community councils for the lack of this kind of inclusive approach and

for offering “supervised recreation, handicraft classes and character building” instead of tangible

solutions to the intertwined social problems. What a feasible intervention should offer is “jobs,

higher wages, economic security, and health among other things”. These things are important to

everybody but they, nevertheless, are controversial in nature. Alinsky stated that they lead us into

“the most merciless arenas of struggle of capital and labor”. That is why the action to enhance

social conditions in the slum must be courageous and militant. Helping the people in the slum,

which Alinsky defined as a “dirty, miserable, and diseased human junkyard full of frustration and

despair”, must be aimed to organising “the people to rebel and fight their way out of the muck”.

Other kinds charities, based on less comprehensive explanations of social problems, are only

superficial and trivial ameliorations. (Alinsky, 1969: 57-9.) With this kind of intertwined

understanding social problems can be seen as deficiencies of democracy: a central cause of social

problems is that the underprivileged have less means of defending their interest. Even if Alinsky

sometimes used the vocabulary typical to the tradition of community integration, he did not

circumscribe the causes of social problems to the crumbling of shared values.

In his later work, Alinsky adopted even a more critical stance towards the causes of social issues

presented by the early Chicago school. He wrote that communities are never disorganised, but also

passive people suffering from deprivation and discrimination have a community pattern: they are

organised to apathy and non-participation (Alinsky, 1971: 115–6). This view was enabled by

William Foote Whyte’s (1981) study on Italian slums (originally published in 1943) which was one

of the first sociological studies that did not take social disintegration as its starting point.

Nevertheless, Alinsky’s notion of community is quite similar to his contemporary community

organisers: it is the immigrant neighbourhood of the1930s and 1940s American city. Community

meant for Alinsky, as it did for Chicago school sociologists, a basic building block of social order, a

uniform entity which has shared customs, interests and ethnic identification. These are understood

as social forces that support or prevent political action and as available means for the activation

effort. (Alinsky, 1941: 798; Alinsky, 1969: 78, 80.) Alinsky’s strategy – as Shaw’s before him –

was ultimately based on the assumed community characteristics and thus he saw it important to

understand local culture. He has been criticized for neglecting the changes that happened in the

social structure in the cities in the latter half of the 20th century (Reitzes and Reitzes, 1982: 266).

Another trait that links Alinsky to the strategy based on the tradition of community

integration/disintegration is his urge to find and use local leaders. Alinsky (1969: 64-6) wrote, that

16

local communities are organised around local or natural leaders. These may be local businessmen,

priests, or even gangsters, but nevertheless they represent the community and its people. These are

the leaders whom the locals trust and who they have elected or selected as their representatives in

one way or another. The important thing to any community organising project is to get these

representatives to participate and support the effort, since only the people’s own leaders can

actually build a real “People’s Organisation”.

Like a true pragmatist, Alinsky thought that the experienced deficiencies in community unity can be

worked through different tactics. He presented a variety of means for this: persuasion, pressure, or

even what he calls the manipulation of social situations – indirect pressure targeted at the leader’s

friends or family (Alinsky, 1969: 110). Even if some community groups or leaders can be hostile to

each other, Alinsky thought that face-to-face interaction in a common organisation will sooner or

later lead them to find common interests and strategies (ibid.: 86-88). This conviction means that

political conflicts within communities are, in the last analysis, irrelevant since communities as

homogenous groups have a common rational interest to fight against larger oppressive forces. It

follows consistently the notion of community dependent on the context of the early 20th century

American city. Alinsky (1969: 88) even wrote that conservative people whose ideologies might at

first sight seem contrary to the equalising and democratizing mission of community organisation are

to be mobilised as well. When they are involved in a progressive endeavour their ideas are going to

change. In the end, a rational conflict of interests among the members of a community seems

impossible.

Since social problems were seen ultimately of a political origin, Alinsky defined the enhancement

of democracy, equality and human dignity as his foremost objectives. To him, democracy meant

progress, political and economic equality and mass participation in decision-making. Nevertheless,

democracy was not an absolute value, but rather he saw it as the best means for the achievement of

certain important principles which were also the basis of Judaeo-Christian civilization: equality,

justice, freedom, peace, and respect for human life. Anomie and political passivity, on the other

hand, meant the death of democracy. (Alinsky, 1969: 25–6, 192–3, 1971: 12, 47.) Alinsky’s

assessment concerning the state of democracy in America of his time was very pessimistic. The

central message of his book Reveille for Radicals was that saving democracy necessitates the quick

activation of all radically minded actors. Even if many of Alinsky’s ideas can be seen as more or

less socialistic he also differentiated himself of Marxism and especially the dogmatic notion of

dialectical materialism (Alinsky, 1969: xii-xiii; Alinsky, 1971: xiii).

17

Unlike Shaw’s notion of community organising, Alinsky’s aim was to organise the poor as a

political force in the struggle over power. A strong dualism depicts his thinking. On one hand there

are the poor, or “Have-Nots”, who are oppressed and subjugated by the political and economic

elites. On the other hand, the elites are called with many names: the political machine, the City Hall,

the system, the tycoons, or the establishment. The clash between these two poles constitutes

political action in Alinsky’s thinking and politics can be reduced to the relations of struggle

between “the Haves” and “the Have-Nots”.4

Alinsky’s thought follows a certain populist mode of reasoning that operates with the notion of

uniform “People” and builds it an antagonist relation to the establishment. The People is an entity

with the common interest of resisting the oppression of the elites. The task for the organiser is to

establish a “People’s Organization” with a programme produced by the community and serving its

needs. With this organization the People can be mobilized as a political force and may be able

defend their interests effectively. The main content of Alinsky’s two volumes is in the practical

advice on how the People’s Organization may be started and how it should act in order to be an

effective pressure group against the selfish interest of the elites.

The mission of the People’s Organisation is to change the status quo. Therefore, Alinsky’s strategy

strikes at the most obvious shortcoming of Shaw’s consensual strategy: its lack of political vision.

Alinsky (1969) wrote that:

”The building of a People’s Organization is the building of a new power group. The creation

of any new power group automatically becomes an intrusion and a threat to the existing power

arrangements. It carries with it the menacing implication of displacement and disorganization

of the status quo.” (Alinsky, 1969: 132.)

In other words, the People’s Organisation strives for the fulfilment of certain political goals by

organising communities as a political force. The organisation fights social ills especially by

applying many kinds of non-violent means of pressure, even if it may also adopt self-help measures.

Alinsky (e.g. 1971: 139, 143) talks of organising strikes, demonstrations, picket lines, boycotts, and

campaigns, as well as more unconventional means of pressure. Conflict does not belong to the

4 Of course Alinsky acknowledges that there is a third group in between, “the Have-a-Little, Want-Mores”, but this is to him a relatively meaningless group from the perspective of political action and democracy.

18

relations between the members of the People’s Organisation, except when the organiser fails to

project the frustration of the people to an external enemy- to “rub raw the sores of resentment”.

Alinsky’s organisation is a tool for political struggle, not its arena.

Nevertheless it is interesting that the emphasis of conflict apparent in Alinsky’s texts does not only

mean a fight against oppressive forces, a step towards some harmonious existence in the future. In

his later work, Alinsky (1971: 59) wrote that “[a] free and open society is an on-going conflict,

interrupted periodically by compromises – which then become the start for the continuation of

conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.” Understanding conflict as an important condition of

democracy legitimizes Alinsky’s own conflict strategy. If conflict is the ordinary state in a free

society, then the poor surely have as good grounds as every other societal group to take part in

political struggle for their interests. Asking somebody to give up the defence of her interests for

some collective motivation is basically an undemocratic demand. On the other hand, this

understanding of conflict – more that any other trait in Alinsky’s work – highlights the progressive

line of his thought. In comparison, Shaw’s notion of society was inherently conservative: it saw

conflicts only as potentially dangerous phenomena disintegrating the very foundation of social

order. Therefore, any kind of change in values or norms, and eventually relations between societal

groups, could be seen as dangerous. Alinsky’s view, in contrast, leads to a dynamic society in which

political action and demands are legitimate and an ordinary trait of democracy.

Despite of this emphasis of conflict, Alinsky’s idea of community organising has aspects which can

be interpreted as a governmentalised use of communities and which reflect the pragmatist

philosophical roots of the Chicago school. In addition to political struggle, the People’s

Organisation seeks to educate the slum dwellers. Alinsky defines the education of people as a

central trait of democratic society and the fulfilment of the people’s democratic potential requires

enlightening them. This education does not, however, mean only increasing the skills and

knowledge of the poor, but rather it is a process in which their attitudes are forged more democratic.

As well, hostilities between different groups with in the community need to be altered through

increasing face-to-face interaction. When groups representing different experiences and interest are

gathered to act together in common organisation, mutual understanding will increase. This, in turn,

will lead to new definition of social questions and to the increase of their political significance. And

by changing the attitudes of the natural leaders, the attitudes of the whole community are altered.

(Alinsky, 1969: 155-8.) Alinsky does not seem to think, thus, that the organiser will find the People

ready for the fight for equality and democracy. On the contrary, he writes, that community members

19

may have quite undemocratic – e.g. racist – attitudes (Alinsky, 1969: 170). Also self-interest may

often be the original motivation for taking part in the People’s Organisation. The task for a

community organiser is to create situations in which undemocratic attitudes can be changed. The

goal of education in the community organisation is to educate democratic citizens who are capable

of co-operation and who esteem solidarity.

Alinsky’s variation of the strategy of community organising emphasised indigenous interests,

political action and a more comprehensive understanding on the forces that create social problems

(Engel, 2002: 61;Alinsky, 1941). Despite the differences, this variation continued the same

pragmatist tradition emphasising social construction that informed the Chicago school (Engel, 2002:

63). The American city and its immigrant community can be seen as an important historical

condition for the feasibility of both of the variations. Along the tracks Alinsky laid down,

community organising today is often attached to radical democratic ideas (e.g. Ledwith, 2011: 91-

5). This separates most strikingly Alinsky from his less famous predecessors. Unlike Shaw and his

fellow sociologists, Alinsky himself was a member of the problematic group of second generation

immigrants. He was not a Pole, but belonged to the second biggest group of immigrants in Chicago.

This may have made him more sensitive to the economic and political conditions (i.e. segregation,

racism, exploitation) of the immigrant community than what the middle-class sociologists were.

Conclusions

The participatory technology of citizenship developed by Shaw did not remain an individual

experiment but was the basis for many later projects of government. As a national scale tool of

public administration it was reintroduced in the 1960s anti-poverty programme War on Poverty

(Janowitz, 1967; Cruikshank, 1999). In a somewhat similar manner, also the EEC poverty

programmes were already in the 1970s and 80s aimed in enacting a social order through the concept

of social exclusion and participatory projects (see Silver, 1994). Today, such governmentalised

communitarian strategies may be more common than ever before: For example Putnam’s (2000)

notion of social capital, and the concern over its disintegration, became the basis for many kinds of

political endeavours in the turn of the millennium. And recently many projects varying form rural

development (Nousiainen & Pylkkänen 2013) to the British policy schemes of Third Way (Rose,

2000) and Big Society (Hancock et al., 2012) are trying to deploy communities for the enactment of

an autonomous moral order producing responsible citizens. Perhaps the idea of endangered social

20

bonds, norms and values still provides us convenient ways to explain (and strategies to act upon)

such behaviour we find hard to understand.

Various contemporary strategies of government that operate through communities or other micro-

moral domains for the responsibilisation of citizens have been described as neo- or advanced liberal

modes of governing (Rose, 1996; Miller and Rose, 2008). As the present examination has shown,

such strategies are not new and could as well be called sociological as liberal. These strategies do

not strive only to the enhancement of rational and calculating subjectivities but also see man as a

social creature that acts in a social environment. On top of individual interest, also feelings of

solidarity are fostered – even if through schemes that contain the minimum elements of

redistribution. However, these strategies have indeed become more advanced and diverse since the

days of the Chicago school as Miller and Rose (2008: 210–215) have shown. Probably the long

history of experimenting with this kind of a social mode of governing, and bitter disappointments

related to its radical and conservative variations, have revealed many needs for improvements (e.g.

see Moynihan, 1969).

Yet, it is important for the contemporary students of participatory governance to notice that such

technologies of active citizenship are not politically uniform. In addition to enacting social order

that controls individual impulses and thus pacifies social relations, also radical democratic ideas are

often attached to it. Ironically, Alinsky turned the anti-revolutionary aims of the early sociological

thought upside down and transformed the community organising strategy as a (non-violent) means

of shaking up the status quo. Especially the two differing variations have in different combinations

been present in many later project of community organising which enables community organising

to be simultaneously regarded as a conservative and a radical technology. Perhaps it is just this

variability that explains the strategy’s popularity over the last century.

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