Am J Community Psychol DOI 10.1007/s10464-013-9620-4

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Channeling Power Across Ecological Systems: Social Regularities in Community Organizing Brian D. Christens • Paula Tran Inzeo Victoria Faust

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Ó Society for Community Research and Action 2014

Abstract Relational and social network perspectives provide opportunities for more holistic conceptualizations of phenomena of interest in community psychology, including power and empowerment. In this article, we apply these tools to build on multilevel frameworks of empowerment by proposing that networks of relationships between individuals constitute the connective spaces between ecological systems. Drawing on an example of a model for grassroots community organizing practiced by WISDOM—a statewide federation supporting local community organizing initiatives in Wisconsin—we identify social regularities (i.e., relational and temporal patterns) that promote empowerment and the development and exercise of social power through building and altering relational ties. Through an emphasis on listeningfocused one-to-one meetings, reflection, and social analysis, WISDOM organizing initiatives construct and reinforce social regularities that develop social power in the organizing initiatives and advance psychological empowerment among participant leaders in organizing. These patterns are established by organizationally driven brokerage and mobilization of interpersonal ties, some of which span ecological systems. Hence, elements of these power-focused social regularities can be conceptualized as cross-system channels through which micro-level empowerment processes feed into macrolevel exercise of social recommendations for theory and designpower, and vice versa. We describe examples of these channels in action, and offer of future action research. Keywords Community organizing
Empowerment
Power
Social regularities B. D. Christens (&)
P. T. Inzeo
V. Faust School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1300 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Introduction Empowerment has been defined and studied as a ‘‘groupbased, participatory, developmental process through which marginalized or oppressed individuals and groups gain greater control over their lives and environment, acquire valued resources and basic rights, and achieve important life goals and reduced societal marginalization’’ (Maton 2008, p. 5). Building on a human ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner 1977), empowerment has been theorized as a multi-level construct with interrelated processes and outcomes occurring at the community, organizational and psychological levels of analysis (Zimmerman 2000). Empowerment at each level is held to be inextricable from empowerment at other levels. In other words, psychological empowerment involves the changes that take place at the psychological level as people participate in groups that are effectively mobilizing for greater citizen control over systems, environments, resources, and rights. These psychological changes are thought to include increased perceptions of agency within sociopolitical structures, as well as the skills and critical perspectives necessary to be an effective participant and leader in social change efforts (Zimmerman 1995; Speer and Peterson 2000). These psychological developments have been found to occur among participants in voluntary associations including, for example, social movement organizations, religious institutions, and mutual help groups (Maton 2008). Such settings can in some cases simultaneously promote psychological empowerment and develop social power. Organizational empowerment has been conceptualized as a multi-component construct (Maton and Salem 1995) with intraorganizational, interorganizational, and extraorganizational components (Peterson and Zimmerman 2004). The extraorganizational component includes implementing

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community actions and disseminating information to influence policy, practice, and resource distribution in the broader community. The interorganizational component involves organizational participation in networks and coalitions. And, the intraorganizational component involves features of the settings that the organization produces, including the forms of social support that participants provide to one another, the degree to which the participants share a common strengths-focused groupbased belief system, the number and variety of roles that are available for participants to play in the organization, and the quality and types of leadership that characterize the organizational settings. A small number of studies have linked these components of organizational empowerment to empowerment at other levels of analysis. Studies that have explored these cross-level influences include one by Peterson and Speer (2000), which found that involvement in different types of voluntary organizations was associated with different levels of empowerment at both the organizational and the psychological levels, and that there was little commonality in these cross-level relationships across organizational types, suggesting the importance of identifying the most relevant organizational types as contexts for understanding multi-level empowerment processes. Some empowerment research has been particularly attentive to the relational dynamics that voluntary organizational settings create at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., Maton and Salem 1995). Yet, most studies of empowerment have treated individuals and organizations as discrete entities, at least for analytic purposes. Still, it is clear that the nature and patterns of relational ties between people and organizations can both facilitate and constrain empowerment processes (Christens 2012). Therefore, although much of the research on empowerment from an ecological perspective has been articulated through ‘levels’ of analysis, there is a need for greater understanding of the roles that relationships and network dynamics play within and across ecological systems. The human ecological perspective posits a series of nested ecological systems: a micro-system encompassing a developing person and the settings in which that person regularly plays particular roles, a meso-system comprising the interrelations of these major settings, an exo-system of institutional structures that influence these settings, and a macro-system that functions as an overarching blueprint containing explicit and implicit rules and norms that govern the functioning of systems and settings (Bronfenbrenner 1977). Neal and Neal (2013) propose identifying and defining these ecological systems through networked relationships, rather than relying on pre-determined levels of analysis (i.e., individual, organizational, community). Building on this work, we propose that relational patterns

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and dynamics within and across settings can be conceived as constituting the connective spaces between ecological systems through which cross-system transactions occur. Granovetter (1973) indicates this possibility by stating that the analysis of networks ‘‘provides the most fruitful micro–macro bridge. In one way or another, it is through these networks that small-scale interaction becomes translated into large-scale patterns, and that these, in turn, feed back into small groups’’ (p. 1360). It is this perspective that prompts us to seek to identify the relational patterns in specific settings that likely serve as key cross-system ‘‘channels’’. To this end, we draw on Seidman’s (1988) work on social regularities, which are (in brief) social relations and temporal patterns that link micro and macro level phenomena within a setting, or ‘‘those patterned social processes that across time determine setting- and individual-level outcomes’’ (Seidman 2012, p. 5). The purpose of this article is to identify and describe examples of these patterned processes in action in the context of broad-based community organizing, and to draw on these examples to suggest directions for community psychological theory and research design. Because the goal of community organizing groups is to build power and empowerment (Speer and Hughey 1995), we focus on the social regularities that simultaneously cultivate power within multiple ecological systems. Understanding the influence of relational dynamics across ecological systems from a holistic perspective is a persistent challenge conceptually and methodologically in community psychology. Although the discipline is influenced by philosophical pragmatism, with its focus on holism and mutual constitution through transaction (Dewey and Bentley 1946), it also retains influences of more individualist traditions present in Western psychology (Altman and Rogoff 1987). Social network analysis and other methods adept at capturing context (e.g., GIS, HLM) are enabling more empirical work to approach ‘‘methodological consilience’’ (Luke 2005, p. 198) with a holistic transactional perspective. Yet, many of our conceptual frameworks have not kept pace with methodological advances. Hence, in addition to using analytic methods that can account for contextual influences, it is necessary to continually refine conceptual frames and terminology. Indeed, Gergen (2009) argues that new vocabulary is needed for psychology to move beyond bounded conceptions of self and community to new conceptions that view relationships as primary. Suggestions that are relevant for empowerment processes include descriptions of types of relationships—for example, ‘‘catalytic’’ relationships (p. 47). Furthermore, Gergen suggests descriptions of relational patterns, for example, the art of ‘‘coordinating coaction’’ (p. 31) and ‘‘relationally established trajectories’’ (p. 56) within a ‘‘co-active confluence’’ (p. 49).

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Some research on social capital has utilized relational and social network perspectives for understanding cross-system processes in ways that may be instructive as we consider holistic conceptual and methodological approaches to understanding empowerment. For instance, Small (2009) conducted a mixed-methods study of daycare centers to understand the ways that these organizations create social capital among mothers. The centers offer regular opportunities and incentives for interpersonal interactions between mothers. The types of interactions that the centers encourage are both collaborative and minimally competitive. Mothers who form both stronger and weaker ties through the centers are advantaged both in terms of their subjective well-being and their access to resources. The benefits that the mothers enjoy due to relationships they have formed through involvement with the centers have to do with the networks of trust and mutual obligation that are formed through the organization-related interactions. Moreover, the centers can be said to ‘broker’ relationships with other organizations in the community, connecting mothers with additional information and opportunities, which in some cases allows them to obtain material goods and services. Small’s study highlights the role of the organization in brokerage, a process that Stovel and Shaw (2012) emphasize and define as ‘‘the process of connecting actors in systems of social, economic, or political relations in order to facilitate access to valued resources’’ (p. 141). Studies of social capital are valuable for their relational perspective on cross-system processes such as brokerage. Yet, like most studies of social capital, Small’s (2009) is aimed at understanding the ways that individuals obtain relative social and economic advantages. This is a project that differs in important ways from understanding empowerment processes. Empowerment theory is concerned with building social power to alter societal systems (e.g., educational systems, transportation systems, juvenile justice systems) and policies in order to improve quality of life in communities—rather than understanding ways that people obtain advantages within the social and economic systems that currently exist. There is a need to apply relational and network perspectives to the study of empowerment to understand which of the concepts that have contributed to the study of social capital may be similar in empowerment processes and which may differ. To understand the crosssystem relational dynamics in empowerment processes, then, we must examine community settings that are most intentional and sophisticated about developing social power. Community organizing initiatives are therefore contexts of particular interest.

Community Organizing and Empowerment Community organizing involves local residents coming together to understand common concerns in their communities, investigating possible solutions to these concerns, and taking collective action to change the conditions that create and perpetuate these concerns. Organizing can occur episodically, but in many places across the United States, efforts have taken shape that seek to build more sustainable power in the form of broad-based, multi-issue organizing initiatives that are perpetually working to improve quality of life (Mediratta et al. 2009; Swarts 2008). In many cases, these local initiatives are connected to regional, national, and international networks that provide training and support in implementing a particular model of organizing. The organizing models are akin to blueprints that specify the types of institutions or geographic areas that form the base of local organizing initiatives, the organizational structures and rhythms of activities, the strategies and tactics of social change efforts, and the values that underpin the organizing approach. For instance, social justice is a value that is deeply embedded in most organizing models. The models provide a basic format, but many local organizing initiatives place greater relative emphasis on different parts of a model than others. They also often improvise on models based on their local experience and issues of concern. Many of the largest entities that currently support local organizing are oriented primarily toward organizing through faith-based institutions (Wood and Warren 2002). The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the PICO National Network, and the Gamaliel Foundation are the three largest federations that currently provide support to local congregation-based organizing efforts. The local initiatives that they support are distinguished among voluntary organization types for the uncommon levels of diversity among their members according to race, social class, and theological/ideological orientations (Swarts 2011). The local initiatives work to address issues including education quality, public safety, affordable housing, health care access, fair lending, community development, and many others. A principle of all of the congregation-based models of community organizing—as with many other forms of grassroots organizing—is that the people closest to the problem should be part of the solution to that problem (Stahlhut 2003). These initiatives therefore place a priority on involving local residents and positioning them to lead efforts to address their communities’ most pressing problems. As a result, in addition to the changes that organizing initiatives are able to make in local policies and environments, they have often been noted as contexts that promote positive development and learning among participants

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(Kieffer 1984). In particular, participation in organizing has been seen as a way to gain the skills, perspectives, and identities necessary for effective participation in civic life (Boyte 2004). Community organizing initiatives can therefore be considered as empowering community settings (Maton 2008). They are distinguished among other such settings by the clarity of their goals of simultaneously building community power and promoting the psychological empowerment of participants (Speer et al. 1995). Empowerment theory provides a framework for understanding behavioral, cognitive, emotional and relational processes and outcomes at the level of psychology (Christens 2012; Zimmerman 1995). As discussed earlier, it also provides a framework for understanding organizational and community-level processes and outcomes (Peterson and Zimmerman 2004). One study that has provided particular insight into multilevel empowerment processes in community organizing is Speer and Hughey’s (1995) exploration of the community organizing model employed by the PICO National Network. The authors examined principles of this organizing model from an ecological perspective, elucidating how the organizing principles contribute simultaneously to the development of social power and empowerment at multiple levels of analysis. For example, the PICO model emphasizes that social power is most effectively exercised through organizations, rather than through individuals. It also emphasizes that power is built through interpersonal relationships. These understandings are likely contributors to the cognitive component of psychological empowerment (i.e., critical consciousness), and they also underpin the organizations’ abilities to exercise power through rewarding and punishing other powerful community entities, shaping public debates, and influencing ideology. As suggested earlier, however, the cross-system transactional channels that exist between the development of community and organizational power and the psychological empowerment of participants are not well understood and limit our capacity for a holistic conceptualization of empowerment theory. Here, we again suggest the shift from predetermined levels of analysis to a more holistic networked approach to observe these channels, how they operate across ecological systems and how they are impacted by the relational patterns occurring in community organizing settings.

Case Example: WISDOM In order to ground our discussion of holistic relational and network concepts on empowerment in community organizing, we now turn to an example case. WISDOM is a statewide organizing federation that supports and connects

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local congregation-based community organizing initiatives throughout Wisconsin. It is an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation. The Gamaliel Foundation is committed to equal opportunities for all people, shared abundance, and stronger communities. Gamaliel organizes with the intention of empowering everyday people to take part in decision-making processes—political, environmental, social, and economic—that affect their lives. Gamaliel organizations have an international reach, with affiliates in 17 US states, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.1 WISDOM operates in a similar fashion to Gamaliel and currently supports ten fully-formed and two emerging affiliates throughout the state by providing training on relationship building, issue development, related action strategies and leadership development. Approximately 145 congregations participate in WISDOM representing over 19 different religious traditions. Building power and collective action around shared concerns drives their work. WISDOM affiliates come together around core values of faith, justice, community, and a belief in intertwined destinies, as evidenced in the following passage of their prophetic declaration. WISDOM Prophetic Declaration: Where Where Where Where Where Where

there there there there there there

is is is is is is

division, we declare unity. hatred, we declare love. lack, we declare abundance. desolation, we declare renewal. discouragement, we declare hope. lack of strength, we declare power!

Local groups engage at least ten congregations in order to become formally affiliated with WISDOM. Congregations become formally engaged with local affiliates through the development of a core team of congregational members that meets monthly. One of the functions of core teams is to involve the broader congregation in organizing efforts. Local leaders, core teams, affiliates, organizers, and statewide leaders communicate regularly through meetings and trainings, and through one-to-one conversations. At both individual and organizational levels, WISDOM members are continuously engaging in capacity building (e.g., training and leadership development) work and moving through the phases of the cycle of community organizing: Assessment (relational one-to-ones, listening campaigns), Research (power analyses, ‘‘power one-to-ones’’), Action/ mobilization (campaign planning and implementation), and Reflection (Evaluation) (see Speer and Hughey 1995; Swarts 2008 for more details on these phases). In addition to providing training to affiliates, WISDOM also supports local mobilization and takes on statewide campaigns. Since the development of its first local group 1

http://www.gamaliel.org/AboutUs.aspx.

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MICAH, established in 1988 in Milwaukee County, WISDOM, established in 2000, has engaged its affiliates in regional issue campaigns addressing economic, racial and social disparities that exist in Wisconsin.2 Affiliates identify issues that unify their members and are encouraged to maintain campaigns separate from statewide mobilization efforts to nurture sustained ownership of organizing work at the local level. Statewide issue-based campaigns are also ongoing and engage the majority if not all of the local affiliates. Each of these issue-based campaigns has a statewide task force that leads the research and action on the issue. WISDOM’s campaigns address social issues such as incarceration, immigration, public transportation, health care availability, and economic justice. The 11 9 15 Campaign for Justice is a current statewide effort to increase funding for treatment alternatives to incarceration (11 9 15 indicates the intent of the campaign to cut the Wisconsin prison population by one half to 11,000 by 2015). Mobilization around this issue emerged from 15 years of local affiliate work around incarceration, substance abuse, and treatment advocacy. This particular campaign example highlights the complexity and sophistication of WISDOM’s work. Over a thousand people have been engaged, including formerly incarcerated individuals, families of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, faith leaders, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector professionals and experts, and elected officials. In addition to playing a key role in preventing a new prison from being built, the campaign has leveraged funding to complete a Health Impact Assessment of treatment alternatives to prison in Wisconsin (Human Impact Partners and WISDOM 2012). Our discussion of WISDOM’s organizing model draws on multiple forms of contact and collaborative inquiry. We have been trained in community organizing (e.g., through local trainings and attending national week-long trainings by regional and national networks). We have engaged in long-term action research collaborations with multiple local organizing initiatives. And we have participated in community organizing initiatives in our own places of residence. At present, we are involved in several actionoriented research projects in which WISDOM is the primary community partner. We are currently collaborating on developing a statewide multi-sector alliance around enhancing health equity through action on the social determinants of health. Alongside this effort, we are working with WISDOM to develop evaluation plans for the alliance’s work. We are also involved in an effort to support community-driven health promotion efforts by 28 local coalitions in our state, and we are working with 2

http://prayforjusticeinwi.org/about-us/.

WISDOM to provide training to local coalitions taking action to promote health in their communities. Through these collaborations, we are gaining a thorough understanding of WISDOM’s priorities, capacities, and approaches to community change. We are collecting and analyzing data through some of these collaborative projects. The current case example, however, does not represent an empirical data analysis. It is instead a form of substantive theorizing (Wicker 1989)—a conceptual framing that relies on intimate familiarity with a particular domain. Our conceptual framing is oriented to understanding the relational and temporal patterns that exist in WISDOM’s organizing model that promote empowerment. More specifically, we are interested in identifying relational patterns that are likely drivers of cross-system empowerment processes. Through our dialogue and collaborative inquiry with WISDOM, we have identified social regularities upon which the organizing model intentionally builds social power and empowerment.

Social Regularities in Organizing The social regularities that underpin WISDOM’s organizing culture help to create the relational and organizational conditions in which power and empowerment can be cultivated, enabling WISDOM to hold powerful community entities accountable, shape public debates, and influence ideology. These regularities also contribute to the deliberate construction and often expansion of social networks. These network changes are engineered both by building the capacity of individual actors and by developing and strengthening ties between actors. The social regularities that occur across organizational activities and settings include listening, reflection, and social analysis. Importantly, these social regularities are not discrete phases in an organizing process as described above, but are patterns that are cultivated throughout each phase of organizing efforts. Listening Listening as a social regularity can be seen through the use of personal stories and one-to-one meetings. Personal stories are sought by WISDOM leaders as a vehicle to understand and mobilize self-interest among participants and key actors in the community. Understanding selfinterest functions to both establish relationships within the network of individual actors and build power through the organization. Organizers and community leaders begin engaging with individual stories through a fundamental relational mechanism of ‘‘one-to-one’’ meetings (see Christens 2010). Organizers identify individuals for

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one-to-ones based on a strong possibility of shared interest, usually after an analysis of power and potential leadership within a particular context (e.g., congregation, city). During a one-to-one, an organizer will meet with a person to listen to their life experiences and concerns. Sometimes referred to as a compassionate or caring conversation, organizers listen for how a person relates to and understands life events and probes for deeper insight of their hopes, fears, passions, and goals. The genuine commitment to listening and the act of honoring an individual’s lived experience builds trust, often providing opportunities for future connections. In this context, experienced organizers also challenge people to examine how they act on their ideals and values. They encourage people to consider bringing their self-interest into the public sphere. In this transition from one-to-one to the public arena, effective organizers, and the leaders they cultivate, differentiate private relationships from public relationships. Private relationships are those that exist in families and friendships and are based on concepts of love and acceptance. Public relationships are intentional, earned, and are based on civic accountability. The process of building public relationships can enhance psychological empowerment while strengthening connections between participants and creating a socially supportive organizational context. In network language, the process of listening to and sharing self-interest between actors begins developing network ties that are characterized by this public relationship. The oneto-ones provide an opportunity to identify actors with whom to establish new ties and either grow the network or contribute to the density of ties (i.e., network closure, cf. Coleman 1988) within it. Using Gergen’s (2009) vocabulary, we might think of these as catalytic relationships. Both the trust and action potential initiated through the relational one-to-one provide organizational capacity for building collective power in the public sphere. WISDOM organizers and leaders identify key intersecting or complementary interests between individual stories to nurture for future action. A key criterion in identifying collective issues is that it must be felt in the hearts and minds of the people. Thus, organizers may encourage people with compelling stories to share them with their core team, or other leaders. In many cases, stories drive the tone of larger public action meetings in different ecological settings. Such public statements draw on and recognize participants’ expertise of their lived experiences, thereby creating a powerful common story to which others can affectively relate. One may apply Gergen’s (2009) relational concept of co-generative action to this process of listening and cultivating a collective self-interest. This collective selfinterest often strengthens bonds among actors across organizing settings and creates opportunities to bridge to other clusters of actors. Weaving individual problems into

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patterns that are felt and understood collectively as community issues is a process that builds a foundation for future strategic engagement and action, a process discussed further below. Thus, listening as a relational pattern contributes to the development of a thoughtful relational network where ties characterized by trust, accountability, and mutual self-interest can channel power across ecological systems. Reflection Reflection as a social regularity is developed purposely in community organizing settings. Reflection is both one of the four phases of the cycle of community organizing, and a regularity that occurs in each respective phase. As a standalone phase, reflection is best described as evaluation, after an action occurs organizers are quick to publicly gauge successes and areas of improvement with an eye towards organizational growth. As a feature of each phase, reflection helps to ensure that the practices of members affirm a culture of organizing. For example, as early as the first one-to-one meeting with a new participant, organizers begin leadership recruitment and development by informally observing their capacity and readiness to engage in organizing. WISDOM also provides continuous interactive training and leadership development and intentionally builds organizational capacity to exercise power. Once an active member, yearly in-depth trainings provide leaders with the language and organizing tools necessary for building power and public relationships. Participants are carefully selected and invited to attend particular trainings by organizers or leaders within member organizations. It is a rare occasion that an organizing group would have an open training, as only participants that seem to be a good fit are matched to trainings that will appropriately challenge them and agitate them towards action. Even seasoned WISDOM organizers participate in these trainings to continuously grow and critically reflect on their skills and relationships. Structured leadership opportunities also exist for building and internally practicing leadership, such as congregation-level core team membership and organization-wide standing committees and task forces. Many of these settings regularly rotate specific roles and responsibilities, establishing inclusive opportunity role structures in the organizing process that allow each member to play a diversity of roles (e.g., chairing a meeting; being the note-taker; being the person to ask a key question of a decision-maker) over time. This abundance of roles contributes not only to member engagement (see Christens and Speer 2011), but also contributes to the establishment of new interpersonal ties within WISDOM’s organizational contexts, and strengthens connections across sub-groups in the network.

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Aside from formal training and leadership, members, organizers and leaders of WISDOM engage in regular peer coaching, accountability, and reflection for ongoing learning. All points of the organizing process involve reflection in relationship with others. At a micro- level, for example, reflection may involve a discussion about what someone has the capacity to accomplish or how they might approach a problem differently. As local WISDOM leaders openly practice self-reflection and learning with others in their congregations and core teams, they build trust and encourage others around them to do the same. In addition, this process normalizes the notion of asking for and providing critical feedback and its vital role in personal and organizational growth. The calculated practice of reflection is a relational pattern within the organization that builds the capacity for engaging and strengthening the ties of public relationships. Organizing models stress that individuals are inclined to back down when faced with seemingly insurmountable power, and that it is in relation to one another and through accountability and agitation that individuals can draw on the strength collective self-interest and overcome such barriers. When teams and issue task forces come together for collective action, they maintain the reflective learning culture of the organization. As discussed previously, as groups, they actively evaluate what they are learning through experience and how they can be more effective in their collective actions. Organizers will often play the agitating role in these settings, as they do in a one-to-one, to more effectively move thinking to action. Because participants are encouraged and trained to critically reflect on their own actions, reflection at the collective level can be generated quickly and strategically, even with broad participation across weak ties (i.e., the art of coordinated coaction). Reflection therefore characterizes and shapes dyadic interpersonal ties and the organizational culture. These types of relationships that balance trust and caring with accountability and evaluation are important features of capacity for social change organizations (Polletta 2002). Hence, often in a reciprocal fashion, this social regularity of reflection contributes to psychological empowerment while building organizational power for strategic and nimble action in the public sphere. Social Analysis WISDOM’s work may appear to only be issue-focused to outside observers, yet the role of issues in the organizing process also functions as a platform to establish and deepen the social regularity of critical analyses of social conditions. For community organizers, the analysis is rooted in the experiences and stories of local people as uncovered through listening and one-to-one meetings, yet it extends to

broader understandings of the causal chains that produce social problems and the economic and political contexts in which these occur (Keddy 1997). In this way, organizing efforts work to build a group-based belief system (Maton and Salem 1995) that, in Mills’ (1959) terms, links private troubles with public issues. Among participants in its organizations, WISDOM organizers and leaders deliberately develop a common language to make concepts and principles more readily accessible and resonant in discussions among members. Much of this shared language draws on the organizing principles of Alinsky-style organizing (see Alinsky 1971) and on faith traditions (see Jacobsen 2001). For example, ‘‘agitation’’ describes the process of challenging someone else to critically consider how ideals or goals translate into action. ‘‘Issues’’ are specific targeted social changes towards which WISDOM mobilizes its research and action. ‘‘Selfinterest’’, as described earlier, is what links personal stories and values with the larger issues facing the community. ‘‘Power’’ is the ability to act, and is derived from either organized people or organized money (Alinsky 1971). When a person becomes involved with one of the organizing initiatives that comprise WISDOM, they learn these terms, as well as the language of a systemic approach to thinking about social problems and solutions. Through collective reflection, they learn to critically analyze issues, contexts, and strategies for building power and taking collective action. Principles of organizing are also discussed in detail. For instance, WISDOM leaders are clear that they are not ‘‘doing for people’’, but are ‘‘doing with people’’. They are clear that in their dealings with decision-makers (a.k.a., ‘‘power people’’), they are making no permanent friends and no permanent enemies (Alinsky 1971). This shared language and group-based belief system not only permit coordinated action, but also contribute to strong group identification within organizing initiatives (Swarts 2011). Collaborative movement through the organizing process fosters organizational power through a shared social analysis. One-to-ones, research visits, research actions (‘‘power one-to-ones’’), public meetings, and power analysis are all organizing tools used to establish and animate public relationships to build or alter the conditions of power. WISDOM leaders (staff and experienced volunteers) facilitate this movement through the phases of community organizing, agitating other participants to encourage group reflection and action on complex issues. Organizers ‘‘cut’’ issues from abstract social problems into concrete, actionable matters. As specific community issues of common concern are identified in this way, a collective frame for discussing and analyzing social and political conditions that create and perpetuate these issues does as well. Through collective identification of systemic causes of public issues that are felt privately, the development of

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Am J Community Psychol Table 1 Social regularities in community organizing act as cross-system channels for power and empowerment Ecological systems

Social regularities (Relationally and temporally patterned social processes that determine individual and setting-level outcomes)

Power and empowerment

Listening

Reflection

Social analysis

Micro-system (person and the settings in which they regularly play particular roles)

People form new ties (‘‘public relationships’’) with other residents and congregational members through one-to-one meetings, and identify others’ self-interest

People convene in dyads and in groups after meetings to critically assess members’ skills, relationships, and organizational strategies

People build understanding of the roles that social power plays in maintaining or addressing inequities

Advancement of psychological empowerment.

Meso-system (interrelations among major settings)

Participant leaders are trained (and train others) in conducting one-to-one meetings within and across settings. Public relationships are formed across organizational and institutional entities, as well as demographic and geographic divides

Reflection is cultivated as a norm across community organizing settings, enabling members to build trust, strategically develop leaders, and maintain a shared culture of public self-reflection

In various configurations, participants work to collectively trace social problems to their root causes. New groups (e.g., task forces) are configured to lead issue campaigns

Development of shared language, group identity, and participatory and leadership niches that strengthen potential of groups to powerfully engage in interorganizational public relationships for collective action

Exo-system (institutional structures that encompass the major settings)

Congregational and neighborhood networks achieve greater closure through organizational brokerage. Private troubles can be identified as potential issues for organizing campaigns

Reflection is practiced collectively at a network level, allowing the organizing initiatives to adapt quickly and strategically during issue campaigns

Institutional arrangements, policies, and practices are critically analyzed for their effects on communities. Strategic action is taken on concrete issues of common concern

Expanded ability to exercise social power: (e.g., define parameters of public debate, garner resources, influence policy, and shape institutional practices)

Macro-system (‘‘blueprints’’ of norms and rules that govern institutions and settings)

Self-interest, accountability, and other features of public relationships are enacted in the public sphere, demonstrating new possibilities for civil society

Organizing initiatives function as learning organizations with broad public participation, modeling generative and reflective practice and participatory culture

Oppressive societal structures and practices that are otherwise obscured to the public are questioned and challenged publicly and repeatedly

Community empowerment (broad norms of participation, existence of coalitions, pluralistic leadership over resource distribution that can redefine narratives and practices)

new network ties is facilitated among a constellation of community actors. Thus, the regularity of social analyses establishes a common language, norms, and set of understandings around the process of organizing as well as the ultimate purpose, which is to ensure that everyday people realize their own power in the process of changing the conditions of existing power.

Networks of Public Relationships as Cross-System Channels Community organizing groups like WISDOM and its affiliates have a primary goal of improving community well-being through building and maintaining grassroots community power. To do this, they aim to change power relationships within communities. The organizing models that they employ have evolved based on their effectiveness in achieving these goals. The social regularities described

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in the last section (listening, reflection, and social analysis) emerge during the course of implementation of the organizing model, and can be considered transactional empowerment channels. The patterns build and alter relational ties that are characterized by elements of public relationships. The application of relational and network perspectives can help us to observe how these public relationships channel social power and empowerment. Table 1 describes this channeling across ecological systems. Consider the following two illustrations of the operation of these channels. Private Troubles Become Public Issues Through Brokered Public Relationships As discussed, through concerted listening to each other’s personal stories, participants in community organizing initiatives seek to clarify their own self-interest and identify that of others in their communities. This is

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accomplished through the development of a broad set of public relationships. Participants are encouraged not to conflate self-interest with selfishness, but to acknowledge that everyone has interests, and that bringing these interests into civic life is responsible public expression of one’s dignity as a member of society. Examples of the selfinterests of participants in organizing often include keeping their families healthy, safe, well educated, employed, and financially secure. Through reflections on shared values and collective actions, participants are encouraged to become more critical about the specific community conditions that would be required to serve these self-interests. Individual and group reflections situate members’ selfinterests within the larger sociopolitical context of the community. As participants continue to listen to one another’s stories in one-to-one meetings, they build a broader set of public relationships that allows them to more effectively frame their self-interest in terms of the issues facing their community. For instance, if many people in a community are facing foreclosure on their homes, the relationships built through one-to-one conversations link pressing public issues to individual members’ private struggles. These public relationships represent ties that are intentionally brokered in the implementation of an organizing model that encourages members to regularly conduct oneto-one meetings and develop leadership to assert one’s selfinterest in collaboration with others. To build and sustain a powerful organization without large amounts of money, organizing seeks to develop a diverse base of broadly networked resident leader/expert/advocates on community issues. The networks that are built through this process are often geographically bounded. Members tend to build public relationships with their neighbors, with other members of their congregations, and, albeit less frequently, with local decision-makers. Although they sometimes develop into close personal friendships, the stated goal of a public relationship is gaining an understanding of another person’s story and self-interest and facilitating possible action. Hence, mutual understanding, earned trust, and accountability to address important community issues are qualities that come to characterize the ties within these networks. As ties multiply within intraorganizational networks, they contribute to the motivations of emerging leaders to advocate for the issues that threaten their interests and those of their fellow community members. They provide members with a firm and personalized grasp of the most pressing issues in their communities. These processes can be conceptualized as expanding the self-interest of participants in organizing across ecological systems. In other words, while a member’s self-interest may begin as concern about their own job or their children’s education,

through the organizationally-brokered broadening of their networks with other residents, their self-interest tends to expand to encompass the local employment conditions and the local public school system. These types of brokerage could be considered catalytic brokerage (Stovel and Shaw 2012) since they link actors together in public relationships that are frequently transformative for both actor and network. By transmitting personal information and stories and fostering a shared critical analysis of local community conditions, these networks of public relationships are key conduits between components of organizational empowerment (i.e., social support, group-based belief system) and cognitive and relational components of psychological empowerment (i.e., critical awareness and bridging social divisions to exercise social power). Public Relationships Allow Everyday People to Mobilize Ties with Powerful Elites Community power structures can be thought of as dynamic networks among those who occupy important institutional roles (e.g., mayor, CEO, university president, foundation director, police chief), as well as those who play important roles brokering relations between these institutions (Mills 1956; Neal and Neal 2011). People who occupy these prominent positions in local communities are typically relationally embedded within dense networks comprised of other prominent local decision-makers. Their relationships to each other involve mutual obligations, negotiations of personal and institutional self-interests, and accountability to the outcomes of such negotiations. It is uncommon for residents who do not themselves occupy positions of prominence to engage directly in negotiations concerning the priorities of important community institutions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Though residents may encounter and interact with local decision-makers, their relationships with these representatives of powerful institutions are not likely to be characterized by a sense of mutual obligation and accountability. In the organizing model that WISDOM employs, these local decision-makers are referred to as ‘power people’ or ‘people in power’. An imperative of the local organizing initiative is for members to be ‘in relationship’ with these power people. The concept of public relationships guides the group’s efforts to build mutually accountable relationships. As the group identifies the issues that will become the focus of the organizing efforts (e.g., growing levels of incarceration, predatory lending), they hold meetings with people in power called ‘power one-to-ones’. These power one-to-ones are similar to the ‘research action’ meetings described by Christens and Speer (2011). They involve small groups of volunteer leaders (and often a staff organizer) in a WISDOM affiliate and one local

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decision-maker. The group leading the power one-to-one identifies themselves as representatives of thousands of other families and congregations who share their concerns. They inquire into the decision-maker’s own analysis of the issue, possible solutions to the issue, and the barriers to achieving these solutions. To conclude the power one-toone, the group asks the decision-maker to identify other important people with whom the group should be in relationship if they want to make change on this issue. Power one-to-ones are typically followed by brief group reflection among the organizing participants. As issue campaigns progress, the relationships between volunteer leaders in the organizing effort and people in power deepen. These representatives of the larger group engage directly in the kinds of discussions of institutional priorities and policies that are ordinarily limited to those in elite networks of community power, which can be said to have high levels of network closure. Due to the organizing effort’s emphasis on rotating roles and responsibilities (i.e., establishment of inclusive opportunity role structures), these relationships with power people are not brokered by individual leaders in the organization. Instead, many people become directly involved in these inter-organizational bridging relationships. This can be conceptualized as organizationally-driven brokerage, allowing actors who might not otherwise be able to mobilize a tie3 to do so. In the case of the people and issues with which WISDOM works, attempting to mobilize ties with decision-makers without the social power of the organization would not produce the desired influence. Organizationally-driven brokerage in the form of power one-to-ones offer the possibility of individual participants in WISDOM organizing initiatives exercising power that would not otherwise be available to them, thereby channeling the social power built within micro- community settings across ties to exert influence in exo- and even macro-systems.

Summary, Conclusions, and Future Directions Community organizing initiatives cultivate sets of social regularities that are intended to enhance empowerment and build social power. This article has presented a conceptual analysis of relational patterns in one community organizing model. We argue that these patterns are key to developing public networks that enable cross-system empowerment processes. Members form relational ties through one-toone conversations to understand each other’s self-interests and to challenge one another to take public action in 3 See Small (2009) and Lin (1999), who argue that having a relational tie is not the same as being able to mobilize that tie to obtain resources or take other actions to improve conditions.

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accordance with their interests. Through listening, they build numerous relational ties within the organization that establish trust, convey personal stories relevant to community issues, and build networks of accountability for action on these issues. Individually and in groups of varying sizes, members cultivate a norm of self-reflection and an organizational culture that can adapt rapidly through collective reflective practices. This allows members to bridge sub-groups within the organization, and permits rapid reconfiguration and bridging of structural holes (see Burt 1992) in intraorganizational network structures. And, through development of shared language, mutual accountability, and agitation, members engage one another in experiential learning processes that connect their shared concerns about local issues with an overarching critical understanding of the root causes of those issues. The public relationships thereby nurture a group-based belief system that does not attribute symptoms of social problems to individuals or families, while enhancing the critical skills and perspectives on social power that are key to psychological empowerment. The concept of public relationships guides much of the empowerment-promoting relational work in organizing contexts. Yet, as we have emphasized, this relational concept plays different roles in the different settings that constitute community organizing meso-systems. Among members of an organizing initiative, public relationships play key roles in expanding the self-interest of participants—in effect, making private people more public. In contrast, in relationships with powerful local decisionmakers, the same concept of a public relationship is key to allowing ordinary members of the organizing initiative to build and mobilize their ties with powerful decision-makers. Hence, what is casually described as a public relationship in community organizing is shorthand for a set of ‘‘temporal social interdependencies’’ (Seidman 1988, p. 14) that characterize organizing settings as empowering community settings. In theoretical terms, our analysis suggests specific relational qualities and patterns that build cross-level channels between organizational empowerment and empowerment processes at other levels of analysis. We see the identification and description of such patterns as a first step in following Seidman’s (1988) recommendation that community psychologists ‘‘try to understand the role that social regularities play in the ecology of settings and mesosystems’’ (p. 21). Similarly, this approach can enhance understanding of the nature of social network ties that bridge micro-systems to establish meso-systems and even to potentially impact and change exo-systems (Neal and Neal 2013). Progress is needed on this front across many types of empowering community settings (see Maton 2008). Methodological advances (for example, in

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longitudinal, multi-level, social network, and mixedmethods analyses) offer promising directions for enhancing our abilities to analyze processes and outcomes in dynamic settings. Yet, obtaining the richness of data necessary to even partially reflect the complexities of these settings will remain very difficult. We therefore view substantive theorizing (see Seidman 1989; Wicker 1989) as an important facet of ecologically oriented research, alongside empirical analyses. Comparisons of regularities across empowering community settings are likely a route to understanding how different levels and components of empowerment interact as holistic processes. The foregoing conceptual discussion of social regularities in community organizing provides insights that can inform future inquiry designed to illuminate relational patterns in empowerment processes. First, future research designs should consider that ties between participants (actors) in empowering community settings can be characterized and operationalized in many ways. Common social network measures such as frequency of interaction, communication, or information and resource exchange may miss important relational dynamics in empowerment processes. Relational qualities evident in community organizing processes include trust, accountability, agitation, caring, reflection, perceptions of shared self-interest, and a common social analysis. These relational characteristics might be useful ways to assess relationships for network analyses of empowerment processes. Second, the number and strength of ties should not always be interpreted as indicators of progress in empowerment processes.4 For example, a public relationship in organizing assumes no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. This means that ties characterized by public relationships may change based on the issue(s) being addressed by the organizing initiative. Dynamics within these networks might not be accurately interpreted through the use of typical measures of centrality and density to indicate development of greater social power. Third, network and relational perspectives can shift ecological conceptual frames from multiple levels of analysis to cross-system dynamics. Using Neal and Neal (2013) as a point of departure for observing ecological systems as networked holds promise for studies of empowerment. As our analysis of community organizing has suggested, a network perspective also holds promise for identifying social regularities that animate these ties across ecological systems. Fourth, alongside new conceptual work, new vocabulary is needed to provide holistic conceptual frameworks for empowerment processes. As demonstrated, some of this vocabulary can be drawn from 4

Studies of social capital have emphasized a similar concept through identification of the importance of—for example—structural holes and weak ties (Burt 1992; Granovetter 1973).

relational sociology (e.g., Emirbayer 1997), studies of social capital (e.g., Small 2009), social network analysis (e.g., Neal and Neal 2011), and relational psychology (e.g., Gergen 2009). Fifth, future research should examine changes in relational patterns over time. Development and change are central to ecological systems theory (Barker and Wright 1949). The cross-system channels discussed in this article may be useful for analyzing empowerment processes and interventions by tracking network changes across ecological systems over time (Hawe et al. 2009). For example, studies can consider how actors in a meso-system intentionally develop public relationships with an actor in an exo-system (e.g., a decision-maker) with the intent of influencing policies or practices, and how these network changes influence the exo-system or even the macro-system. This avenue for network analytic research can build more detailed understanding of how power and empowerment connect to goals of systemic social change. Finally, brokerage and mobilization of ties are important phenomena to identify in empowerment processes (see Lin 1999; Small 2009; Stovel and Shaw 2012). These agency-oriented phenomena within networks have the potential to illuminate dynamics that capture the essence of empowerment and the exercise of social power (see Christens 2012). Identification of the relational patterns that are operating across multiple levels of analysis within empowering community settings holds promise for enhancing community psychology theory, research, and practice. In practical terms, as we increase our understanding of the specific social regularities that can promote and mediate empowerment processes across ecological systems, we become better able to translate these practices to other settings, organizations, and contexts that are seeking to empower participants and transform systems (see Wright 2013). Indeed, it is our hypothesis that many other community settings and voluntary organizations could become more effective as empowering settings through translation and implementation of similar patterns to those that we have highlighted within WISDOM’s community organizing model. Likewise, there is great potential for enhancing the effectiveness of organizing initiatives and other efforts to promote community engagement and systems change through the use of action research designed using ecological and social network perspectives.

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