This chapter investigates how different scene styles inhabit different spaces of a coalition. Following scene style presents a new angle on what makes or breaks a coalition. Indeed, disagreements over style can weaken a coalition. Sparks flew as a clash of styles at two Housing Justice (HJ) coordinating committee meetings. After those episodes, the HJ coalition fractured as several HJ ally organizations withdrew their representatives and energies from the coalition's work. Field evidence suggests that these decisions emerged from an ongoing commitment to a style of action — in this case, a community of identity. The chapter argues that HJ advocates had a different kind of disagreement about framing from what the entrepreneurial model highlights. A close look at several dramatic HJ meetings shows that advocates' deeper clash was over what framing is for to begin with.
{"title":"Why Follow the Style, Not Just the Organization?","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.9","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter investigates how different scene styles inhabit different spaces of a coalition. Following scene style presents a new angle on what makes or breaks a coalition. Indeed, disagreements over style can weaken a coalition. Sparks flew as a clash of styles at two Housing Justice (HJ) coordinating committee meetings. After those episodes, the HJ coalition fractured as several HJ ally organizations withdrew their representatives and energies from the coalition's work. Field evidence suggests that these decisions emerged from an ongoing commitment to a style of action — in this case, a community of identity. The chapter argues that HJ advocates had a different kind of disagreement about framing from what the entrepreneurial model highlights. A close look at several dramatic HJ meetings shows that advocates' deeper clash was over what framing is for to begin with.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115991975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.
{"title":"How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.12","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113995001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter studies how advocates “construct” social problems through claims making. Claims are demands, criticisms, or declarative statements that actors make in relation to public debate. By definition then, claims makers publicize problems for collective problem-solving. Claims making is thus a crucial part of civic action. Claims making happens in the context of not only a style of interaction but also a set of conventional categories for making claims. A discursive field provides those basic symbolic categories that advocates on multiple sides use to make claims about a problem. Scene style keeps some ways of talking about social problems outside the discursive field altogether, and relegates others to marginal enclaves or subordinate status inside the field. Following the action of claims making in the Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalitions, one can learn how a discursive field works.
{"title":"Who Can Say What, Where, and How?","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.11","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter studies how advocates “construct” social problems through claims making. Claims are demands, criticisms, or declarative statements that actors make in relation to public debate. By definition then, claims makers publicize problems for collective problem-solving. Claims making is thus a crucial part of civic action. Claims making happens in the context of not only a style of interaction but also a set of conventional categories for making claims. A discursive field provides those basic symbolic categories that advocates on multiple sides use to make claims about a problem. Scene style keeps some ways of talking about social problems outside the discursive field altogether, and relegates others to marginal enclaves or subordinate status inside the field. Following the action of claims making in the Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalitions, one can learn how a discursive field works.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127898877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter discusses how advocates for social change act. Advocates spend much of their time writing position papers, raising money, enduring meetings, or running educational workshops. All these activities fit within the usual definition of a social movement: collective action that challenges institutional authorities to redistribute resources, remake policy, or bestow social recognition. In the last several decades, studies of both the showier and more backstage kinds of movement activity share something else that may seem simply like common sense, but should not. Researchers often assume that social advocates are goal-oriented operatives. In this view, social advocates are like savvy business entrepreneurs. Style has a powerful effect on social problem-solving efforts. This study looks in depth at the workings of two scene styles, both of which are common in US advocacy circles. Acting as a community of interest, participants treat each other as loyal partners pursuing a specific goal limited to an issue for which they share concern. In a setting styled as a community of identity, in contrast, participants assume they should coordinate themselves as fellow members of a community resisting ongoing threats from the powers that be.
{"title":"A New Sociology of Civic Action","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how advocates for social change act. Advocates spend much of their time writing position papers, raising money, enduring meetings, or running educational workshops. All these activities fit within the usual definition of a social movement: collective action that challenges institutional authorities to redistribute resources, remake policy, or bestow social recognition. In the last several decades, studies of both the showier and more backstage kinds of movement activity share something else that may seem simply like common sense, but should not. Researchers often assume that social advocates are goal-oriented operatives. In this view, social advocates are like savvy business entrepreneurs. Style has a powerful effect on social problem-solving efforts. This study looks in depth at the workings of two scene styles, both of which are common in US advocacy circles. Acting as a community of interest, participants treat each other as loyal partners pursuing a specific goal limited to an issue for which they share concern. In a setting styled as a community of identity, in contrast, participants assume they should coordinate themselves as fellow members of a community resisting ongoing threats from the powers that be.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133942899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter looks at scenes from the two main coalitions (Housing Justice and Tenants of South Los Angeles) to show just how different their campaigns were and why that matters, even though both fought for affordable housing. Accomplishments make sense only inside strategic arcs; scene style shapes the strategic choices advocates make. Scene style inflects the meaning of particular strategies and goals as well as winning itself. The chapter presents two trajectories of collective problem-solving that unfold on varying timelines, toward tentative and evolving goals. The two coalitions and their trajectories reveal different trade-offs that go with each, differently styled line of action. None of this is to imply that goals and outcomes themselves do not matter. In fact, accumulating evidence shows that different styles do shape outcomes that matter to advocates and the scholars who study them. There is much more to find out about how style contributes to outcomes as scholars usually treat them. The point is that one learns valuable and practical things when one understands particular outcomes in the context of strategic arcs that make those outcomes more, or less, meaningful to advocates and their constituencies.
{"title":"What Is Winning?","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwj2.10","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at scenes from the two main coalitions (Housing Justice and Tenants of South Los Angeles) to show just how different their campaigns were and why that matters, even though both fought for affordable housing. Accomplishments make sense only inside strategic arcs; scene style shapes the strategic choices advocates make. Scene style inflects the meaning of particular strategies and goals as well as winning itself. The chapter presents two trajectories of collective problem-solving that unfold on varying timelines, toward tentative and evolving goals. The two coalitions and their trajectories reveal different trade-offs that go with each, differently styled line of action. None of this is to imply that goals and outcomes themselves do not matter. In fact, accumulating evidence shows that different styles do shape outcomes that matter to advocates and the scholars who study them. There is much more to find out about how style contributes to outcomes as scholars usually treat them. The point is that one learns valuable and practical things when one understands particular outcomes in the context of strategic arcs that make those outcomes more, or less, meaningful to advocates and their constituencies.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124100653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-08DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691177519.003.0011
Paul R. Lichterman
This concluding chapter presents the practical findings on coalitions and social advocacy. It argues that civic action is not intrinsically good or bad, polite or risky, enlightened or reactive, humane or hateful. Neither is it necessarily a substitute for governmental action; in the United States, growth in civic action has accompanied growth in governmental initiatives. Civic action comes with no guarantees. Los Angeles housing advocates fought for more power over decisions about housing made, or allowed, by local government and private developers. When governments institute new policies to address social problems, such as through affordable housing mandates, it is often because of the pressure of civic action. Yet civic action is not necessarily always “progressive.” Sometimes people engage collective problem-solving with the goal of reducing citizen steering power.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Paul R. Lichterman","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691177519.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691177519.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter presents the practical findings on coalitions and social advocacy. It argues that civic action is not intrinsically good or bad, polite or risky, enlightened or reactive, humane or hateful. Neither is it necessarily a substitute for governmental action; in the United States, growth in civic action has accompanied growth in governmental initiatives. Civic action comes with no guarantees. Los Angeles housing advocates fought for more power over decisions about housing made, or allowed, by local government and private developers. When governments institute new policies to address social problems, such as through affordable housing mandates, it is often because of the pressure of civic action. Yet civic action is not necessarily always “progressive.” Sometimes people engage collective problem-solving with the goal of reducing citizen steering power.","PeriodicalId":385441,"journal":{"name":"How Civic Action Works","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127218037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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