Ways of contending : community organizing and development in neighborhood context

Abstract

This thesis explores community organizing by Community Development Corporations (CDCs), the different outcomes achieved by organizing campaigns, and the factors that contribute to their successes and failures. Among organizing outcomes, I focus not only on policy victories and physical or economic improvements to communities, but also on the ways that collective action produces changes in local political institutions. Using rich qualitative and extensive quantitative data from organizing campaigns by ten CDCs, I show how claims about the role of racial and ethnic difference in community, and about the need for conflict in creating community change, find acceptance or resistance from political institutions. While institutional resistance to a campaign's claims about community makes it more difficult for campaigns to succeed, this resistance also indicates the possibility that successful organizing will enact changes to local institutions. I find that CDCs won campaigns (and with success, enacted some type of impact on political institutions) by coordinating mobilization throughout their activities and departments, and by including activists in governance and decision-making.