Salvation and Survival on Skid Row: A Comment on Rooney

Abstract

The article by James F. Rooney (b) last year on skid row makes an important contribution on a little-known subject in a major journal of our discipline. While it is not the first article on the subject in a prominent social science journal, it broadens the theoretical context suggested in earlier work by extending the distinctions between formal and informal goals (Blau), or official and operative goals (Perrow), to cover a logical extremity of such classical ideas in organization theory: namely, the organization that succeeds by failing.' The skid row rescue mission, as Rooney demonstrates, is a clear example of this phenomenon, but by no means the only one. One cannot fault him for his theoretical interpretation, or for any of the data offered in the lengthy ethnographic description leading up to the theoretical discussion and justification in the final third of the article. I do respectfully suggest, however, that Rooney has needlessly encumbered his article, particularly the descriptive portion of it, with an underlying theme of power inequity and superior-inferior relationships. The effect, I think, is to exaggerate greatly the perniciousness of the hapless mission leaders and preachers, while underestimating both the resourcefulness and the guile of many skid row denizens.2 Much of this unintentional distortion derives, I think, from a lack of reference in the article to any natural comparison groups in the description of the missions and their typical modus operandi. By natural comparison groups here I mean other religious enterprises (including regular churches) and other agencies dealing with a skid row clientele. The comparison Rooney does make, at the end of the article, between missions and other kinds of organizations that succeed through failure, is appropriate enough for theoretical purposes; but it has the effect also of lifting the missions out of their natural contexts to a level of abstraction that reveals only part of the existential reality. The characterizations offered under these circumstances, about what the men have too little of, or about what the missions do too much of, leaves the reader to wonder about the implied but unanswered question, Compared to what? Where the mission as religious organization is concerned, for exam-