Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements

Abstract

In developing a micro-level comparative critique of both congregation-based community organizing (CBCOs) and their secular and community-based next of kin, Organizing Urban America paints a much-needed portrait of the grassroots culture of American organizing. Swarts's original analysis of “the factors that constrain and enable” (xv) American social movement organization culture provides a rare glimpse inside low-income urban collective action. Since so much of the scholarship on collective action campaigns has, until recently, been overly influenced by the rational actor mode, Swarts's attempt at giving voice and agency to grassroots local organizers is a welcome corrective. For as she accurately describes, in the traditional scholarly narrative “actors are public officials and other elites, and the role of the grassroots movements is to protest policies initiated by others” (xxvi). But, the reality of what sociologists have come to call “new” social movements is that, far from being simply reactive, these movements are in fact generating the frames for their own contention. In other words, these new social movement actors are themselves active agents of policy creation. Therefore, it is obligatory that we develop a perspective from “below” to counter the dominant traditional discourse from “above.” Our global world increasingly demands scholarly attention on the agency of socioeconomic mid- and low-level actors and on their collective strategic choices. Swarts provides a new American standard for such a focus. In comparing four community organizations over a period of 10 years, her book serves not only as a corrective measure to the inordinate amount of literature on social movements that focuses on leadership at the expense of agency, but as a model for a new style of participatory action research that has too often been discredited, or ignored, by the academy.