What Is Winning?

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.