Transforming Social Action into Social Change

Improving Policy and Practice

Shana Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351683500
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cohen offers a new framework for analyzing social projects and local social activism. Rather than look at how single projects are designed and managed to evaluate their impact, the approach calls for analyzing fields of social action: policy and politics, institutional behavior, social networks among policymakers and practitioners, and availability of funding and other resources. Combined, they affect the conceptualization of a social problem and the design and practice of social intervention. More broadly, through circumscribing the range of thinking about social problems, they delimit possibilities to generate social change. Analyzing fields also allows for linking macro-level trends in areas like policy to decision-making within individual organizations and the effectiveness of projects at instigating the desired transformation in individual and collective behavior.

Working together, policymakers, individual activists, nonprofit organizations, and staff in public institutions like schools and hospitals can critique and alter fields to challenge more effectively social problems. This collaboration, in turn, affects how social policies are designed and, ultimately, the politics of social change.

Chapter 1

Bridging Policy and Practice

Several years ago, a colleague and I proposed an idea to a government ministry in the United Kingdom. We would partner with the government to create a social fund based on investment from multiple faith communities to support multi-faith social projects. The purpose of the project was to encourage cooperation between faith communities at both the funder and project delivery stages and thus promote constructive engagement in highly diverse urban areas. We proposed funding several projects within a year-long pilot stage, at perhaps a limit of £30,000 apiece, so as to develop models for interfaith work. Yet, after months of delay, the ministry decided to put the project out to tender as a replica of an existing program, which distributed small grants of a maximum of £5,000 to grassroots projects. The organization that won the bid (we decided not to apply) was a single-faith organization experimenting with more involvement in social action, in part to develop a relationship with the relevant ministry.

The trajectory of this idea, which began as a way of encouraging multi-faith engagement with social issues and ended up as a small grants program associated with one faith, reflects the challenge faced by practitioners of influencing policy and, more specifically, funding streams. Conversely, it reveals the power of policymakers and funding bodies over methods of instigating and categorizing social change. Finally, the end result suggests how nonprofit organizations and policymakers build working relationships through government funding and more informal contact. These relationships can reinforce a particular policy agenda, create a hierarchy of organizations based on their political and economic resources, and prioritize certain methods of intervention while undermining or marginalizing others.

This book analyzes social action in a number of contexts to understand how interrelated factors like policy and political ideology, institutional behavior, social networks among policymakers and practitioners, and availability of funding and other resources (such as space—for instance, churches often host winter night shelters) affect the practice of social intervention, and more broadly, possibilities to generate social change. Rather than focus on single projects, however, the book suggests that analyzing patterns across the area of work can reveal how policy and other factors influence the formation and sustainability of what I call here a ‘field of social action.’

More specifically, the book proposes a conceptual framework derived from qualitative research on nonprofit (including community- and faith-based) and non-governmental organizations that links macro-level factors like policy to the expression of social values, generation and communication of knowledge, and decision-making about allocation of resources and design of activities that characterize frontline intervention in a particular area. Analyzing the correlation and contradictions between the context and the experience of project delivery within the framework of a field of social action allows for assessing how the environment affects achievement of policy aims. By investigating how practitioners perceive and act upon issues on the frontline, the framework also aims to provide the basis for developing alternative ideas, and ultimately for disrupting the circular dynamic between political elites and grassroots social action that perpetuate a field (Bruno-van Vijfeijken and Schmitz 2011; Lazar 2012).

In exploring fields of social action, the book makes several arguments. The first is that these fields are distinguishable not only because they are identified with a problem categorized and explained by policymakers and ‘experts’ (see O’Connor 2001; Katz 1995) like homelessness or illiteracy, but also because they are characterized by dominant methods of addressing the particular problem, such as homeless shelters and temporary housing or literacy classes. ‘Field’ here borrows from Bourdieu’s conception (1979/1987) in that fields are sites of competition for appropriate responses to social ‘problems.’¹ David Swartz defines Bourdieu’s notion of fields as “arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize different kinds of capital” (1996, 79). He adds, “Field is a more inclusive concept than market; as a spatial metaphor it suggests rank and hierarchy as well as exchange relations between buyers and sellers” (1996, 79).² In other words, fields of social action possess their own internal dynamic, created through power relations among various actors and institutions. Similar to Bourdieu, a field of social action “contains the principle of its own transformation” (1987: 818) but not just in tension produced by the ‘objective interests’ of those possessing different perspectives. Transformation also occurs in the social experience of delivering a service and its contradictions with the circular dynamic of policy, funding, method of intervention, and categorization and evidence of impact reproducing of the field.

The second argument of the book is that fields of widely diverse substantive concerns—for instance, homelessness and interreligious understanding—can be analyzed using the same conceptual framework because they are generated by the same factors: policy and politics, social networks, availability of material resources, and national and local institutional behavior. These factors produce both similar organizational approaches to designing, managing, and assessing services across fields and shared methods of intervention within fields (Kamat 2004; Wright and Noble 2012; Petras 1999). This is not to dismiss the local specificities of the context or as Cadena-Roa et al. write (2011),

We should move from thinking in terms of a general environment and start thinking in terms of specific environments or, even better, of specific fields of interaction between a given association (or sets of associations), and significant stakeholders, competitors, and institutions.

(18)

The point is that the kinds of stakeholders and external actors, from schools to local governments to private foundations, remain consistent across locations.

The focus on services and how a social problem is conceptualized and addressed differs from the substantial literature that debates isomorphism among nonprofit organizations. This literature, based on an original theory by Dimaggio and Powell (1983), examines trends in similarity or diversity across organizational forms, with the current consensus that diversity prevails in the sector (see, for example, Leiter 2005). Rather than concentrate on the relationship between context and organizational form, analyzing a field of social action aims to understand the links among context, organization, the conception of a social problem, and the interventions designed to address the problem. By utilizing the concept of a field, and thus including an investigation of reproduction, the analysis explores the association between conceptions of problems and services, on the one hand, and organizational characteristics and sustainability, on the other.

Across fields, organizations utilize common methods of evaluation and categorizations of productivity and value, such as outputs (attendance or use) or outcomes (measurement of improvement or change, such as higher literacy rates). As a number of scholars have noted (Green 2014; Green and Mosse 2011; Hickey and Mohan 2004; 2005; Lewis 2014), in implementing the agenda of funding bodies, organizations adopt the discourse of concepts of intervention such as ‘empowerment’³ and incorporate training in their work that defines the orientation of staff skill development. More practically, confronted with funding body requirements, staff face pressure to limit overhead costs and concentrate collection of data on specific aspects of service delivery and use, such as completion of a program, that may not in fact account for factors critical to service effectiveness (see Chapter 2).

The ability to compare fields can be attributed to supra-national policies like the Millennium Development Goals or, their successor, the Sustainable Development Goals, which have established transnational objectives and national programs, whether launched by governments or other funders. This capacity is also due to the increase in funding bodies that have projects in multiple locations, either cities or countries; shared rules across these bodies regarding funding cycles, project design and delivery, and evaluation methods and reporting; and common training approaches that affect organizational management.

For example, United Way in the United States established a ten-year initiative in 2008 to halve the number of young people who drop out of high school.⁴ This objective became part of funding priorities, targets, and generation of information in United Way’s relationship with partnering local organizations. In its evaluation of one related initiative, ‘Family Engagement For High School Success’ (funded by AT&T), the Harvard Family Research Project (now the Global Family Research Project, and without the affiliation with Harvard)⁵ mentions that it “worked closely with United Way Worldwide to chart the grantee planning process, which is divided into three parts: defining focal populations, identifying outcomes, and developing strategies to achieve these outcomes.”⁶ To conduct the evaluation and produce outputs like a toolkit and several reports, the project created “a milestone document to measure progress” and a “structured form to collect data from grantees as they complete each phase of the planning process.”⁷ The data was used to “help grantees construct clear and specific goals, strategies, and activities that are aligned with their desired outcomes.” In other words, the funding body (AT&T), the organization running the program (United Way), the evaluator (Global Family Research Project), and local partners all engaged with the same forms and thus collection of data and the same circular process of linking goals to activities and then back to outcomes or achievement of goals. This dynamic underpins the formation and characteristics of a field; in this case, high school dropout prevention.

Similarly, the Moroccan national government’s 2012–2015 program to combat illiteracy, particularly among rural women, has a target of reaching a million people a year and reducing the illiteracy rate to 20% by 2016. The program operates through primarily public and nonprofit providers, though the king has recently supported courses in mosques,⁸ and it aims to improve training of instructors, use of appropriate methods for the location, and project evaluations as a means to achieve its goals.⁹ The program itself has figured into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or the eight goals set by international leaders and agencies in 2000, and thus the agendas of a number of international development agencies like the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Like the United Way program, illiteracy projects in Morocco operate within a larger rubric established through a network of international and national actors that influence the actions of local projects through their own requirements.

The same pressures that underpin similar approaches to the management of social intervention across fields also encourage shared methods of intervention within fields. Factors like government policy or resource availability influence the design and sustainability of particular kinds of activities. For instance, night shelters during the winter in England are traditionally housed in churches.¹⁰ They receive referrals from government or charitable agencies for what is primarily a generic activity, or one-night accommodation for transient or vulnerable populations, dependent largely on church-based volunteers and space. Other services for ‘rough sleepers,’ or people sleeping on the street, include day centers that provide benefits, job-seeking assistance, and other advice;¹¹ and some activities and showers or help lines, like that offered by Shelter, a leading homeless and housing advocacy charity in the United Kingdom.¹²

Analyzing a field entails examining diversity and commonality in intervention across projects and exploring reasons for the range of activities. As will be discussed in relation to interfaith forums, the range of projects has consequences for impact, for instance winter shelters only providing immediate relief during the cold season or advice services only providing information rather than more intensive, sustained intervention. They also reflect external constraints on innovation and thus evoke questions as to why certain interventions are not replicated or do not survive. For example, Quaker Social Action runs a support service in London that advises on how to reduce funeral costs. Its advice service differs from the few charities, like the Child Funeral Charity, which provide funds directly. Based in East London, the organization Down to Earth¹³ acts as an intermediary between funeral directors, the Department of Work and Pensions—which has support funds for low-income families for bereavement and burial¹⁴—and the National Health Service, and families. The origin of the service itself reflects pervasive financial precariousness, the declining stigma of poverty, the expense of burial in London, and pricing by funeral chains, which tends to be too high for low-income families. Its uniqueness as a project could be attributed to lack of political interest, and thus policy initiatives, in addressing the issue, evidenced in a lack of industry regulation¹⁵ and failure of the DWP Funeral Payments fund to match rising funeral costs.¹⁶ Beyond political interest in the specific issue, the isolation of the project indicates a broader absence of comprehensive policy and program strategies that address economic insecurity among low-income groups, namely that link phenomena like zero-hour contracts to food poverty and inability to pay for events like funerals.

The third argument is that similarity in the management and designs of social interventions, regardless of area of work or location, allows for comparing responses among practitioners. The responses can include resourcefulness to ensure services exist to address local needs, especially if these needs are not recognized by policy, and to contribute to social solidarity; and opportunism to secure organizational sustainability. Depending on the context, the responses may be analogous across locations or differ because of particular political, institutional, and social factors. Importantly, frontline responses to flaws or gaps in project design influence both the organization and service delivery and use, making the social dimension between policy and practice critical for comprehending how to improve social intervention. The impact can be negative when frontline staff members feel alienated from the methods of intervention.

For instance, investigating pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Bridging Policy and Practice
• 2 Assessing the Context of Social Action
• 3 Analyzing Fields of Social Action
• Conclusion
• References
• Index