Engaging in Social Partnerships

Democratic Practices for Campus-Community Partnerships

Novella Zett Keith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415996372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136647635
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Engaging in Social Partnerships helps practitioners advance democratic engagement by creating spaces where institutions of higher education, community groups, and other organizations can come together. This important book prepares higher education professionals to become reflective practitioners while working in collaborations that span not only the boundaries of organizations, but also borders created by the social divides of class, race, ethnicity, culture, professional expertise, and power. Through illustrative cases, Keith explores effective models of democratic engagement for university-community partnerships, as well as approaches to overcoming obstacles and assessing process and outcome. Current and future professionals in higher education will find this a valuable resource as they explore the power of engaging in collaborations that cross social divides, while enacting practices that are more equitable and democratic.

Part 1
Contexts

1
Social Partnerships Across Social Divides

In a period of relentless change, all students need the kind of education that leads them to ask not just “how do we get this done?” but also “what is most worth doing?”

(National Leadership Council for Liberal Education & America’s Promise [NLC-LEAP], 2007, p. 13)

The starting point of this book is that one thing “most worth doing” in our times is learning to collaborate with others to reach toward goals and purposes that really matter to all of us. These goals and purposes are thus in the public realm. Doing so is especially important now for two reasons: first, the fast-paced and complex nature of the world in which we live makes traditional experts and their technical solutions unsuited to handle the task on their own; second, increasing social diversity in the context of increasing intolerance makes it imperative to create democratic spaces and practices that bridge these social divisions. The book puts forth social partnerships as grounds that hold great potential for this kind of learning, particularly when they create spaces where people who live, figuratively, in different worlds can come together and practice democratic work.

Writers across different fields strongly agree that a new partnership paradigm has emerged over the last 25 years and that this organizational change is with us for the foreseeable future. Whether in private, public, or civil society settings, leaders are confronted with the need to replace steep command and control hierarchies with flat and nimble networks that are characteristic of the ways partnerships are organized (see Austin, 2000; Salamon, Sokolowski, & List, 2003). Advocates across the political spectrum have been calling on higher education to engage with the ‘real world’ and social partnerships and collaborations provide paths to such engagement. The purposes of these partnerships run the gamut from contributing to knowledge markets through academic research, applying academic knowledge to public and community problems, and using the knowledge and resources of the academy to support democratic public work. The last is most closely aligned to the purpose of this book.

Knowing that something should be done does not mean knowing how to do it well, and this is the problem the book addresses: ¹ how to cultivate a new kind of professional who can facilitate, lead, and learn through these partnerships, not as an expert but as a citizen—a civic professional who can work democratically across social divisions, creating and using both local and expert knowledge. An extensive literature on civic and democratic professionalism, reviewed in Chapter 4, has produced a good sense of the knowledge, skills, dispositions, values, and capabilities of this new professional; we also know that practices such as democratic classrooms, intergroup dialogues, and service-and community-based learning often result in changes in students that are in tune with these desired outcomes. But we know much less about what this professional practice entails and how to engage in it.

The preface has reviewed how the different chapters contribute to this objective. This chapter provides some background information. The first section presents major trends that contribute to the relevance of partnerships for higher education and the specific focus on partnerships across social divides. The second section introduces democratic civic professionalism and trains the spotlight on some of its tasks.

Higher Education and Social Partnerships in a Transitional Era

The authors of College Learning for a New Global Century, the report cited in the epigraph, remind us that we are in the midst of a ground shift. Widely known by now, the message is that we live in a world of “daunting complexity,” “relentless change,” ongoing economic innovation, and global engagement—all in the context of exponential technological change. Knowledge is central to this shift and thus educational institutions are deeply implicated in it; but what should these institutions hold as most worth learning?

The report calls for recasting and enhancing the relevance of the foundational values of liberal learning. Its data show that these themes are echoed in corporate and other settings that did not traditionally espouse such values but marched to the tune of command-and-control efficiency. According to the authors of the report, the knowledge we need is not only specialized and technical: it should enable us to “understand and navigate the dramatic forces—physical, cultural, economic, technological—that directly affect the quality, character, and perils of the world in which … [we] live” (NLC-LEAP, 2007, p. 13). These are the forces of turbulence that portend a world that is becoming ever more interconnected through communications and other technologies and ever more divided socially, economically, and ideologically. To navigate in these waters we must be prepared to ask what matters and not only what can be done. The challenge—a huge one—is to create responsible and informed citizens and civic professionals who can keep at the forefront a concern for the common good (multivocally and dialogically defined!) and a vision of diverse and globally engaged democracies.

Four important trends intersect with social partnerships and help explain their relevance for higher education: the emerging global network society, the increasing presence of social diversity in the context of social injustice, pressing social problems, and pressures on higher education to use its resources to make ‘real world’ contributions. I will address each in turn and later return to them selectively in the discussion of the new professional.

Network Society

Some 50 years ago, in an almost prescient way, Marshall McLuhan (1960, 1962) wrote and talked about the upcoming electronic age that was giving rise to a global village. More recently, we refer to our era as the Internet Age, the network society, or the global information economy. McLuhan used the global village metaphor to refer to changes emerging in the 1960s that would allow people to communicate, learn about, and become connected to one another through the postmodern equivalent of the beating of the drum—the electronic media. Just like the print age before it, the media of the electronic and Internet age favor certain tendencies that find their way into social arrangements. The speed of information flows, for instance, erases time and space and favors organizational forms that can respond quickly to rapid change.

In the network society, our world is interconnected through social systems that are based on the logic of networks. Manuel Castells’s monumental three-volume work, The Rise of the Network Society (2010) has added information nodes (and much more) to McLuhan’s now almost quaint idea of the electronic age. Instead of the vertical charts of bureaucratic organizational forms that characterize the print age, visualize crisscrossing lines and smaller or larger nodes indicating where few or many lines in the network intersect. In networks, power is distributed differently from the way it operates in bureaucratic organizations, where command and control flow downward to divisions and offices with specialized functions: network nodes can rise and fall based on their connectivity, on the information that passes through them, and on the degree of their interconnectedness or flow.

Thus, network society and the network economy seem to favor organizational forms that are horizontal and decentralized (which should not be equated with democratic forms), can link complementary resources, and shift at a moment’s notice, according to rapidly emerging trends. Keeping up with these ever-changing and speeding flows of information is accomplished through flatness rather than hierarchical control and new forms of management or managerialism. Terms such as smart and nimble have gained currency, applying to organizational entities that are best able to collect and use information (and are thus information rich or smart) and can adapt quickly to changing environments (nimble), which best positions them to seize new opportunities. This is also the likely organizational form of social partnerships.

New organizational forms, in turn, require new forms of management and leadership. ² A special issue of Business Week dedicated to smart management describes companies that are “testing fresh methods to develop global leaders while tapping innovative collaboration tools and social networks to speed up productivity and decision-making” (McGregor, 2009). In the same article, the CEO of Cisco Systems, one of the featured companies, explains the advantages of what he describes as democratizing management, which allows teams at various levels to make decisions: “When you have command and control by the top 10 people, you can only do one or two things at a time. The future is about collaboration and teamwork and making decisions with a replicable process that offers scale, speed, and flexibility.” The role of the manager thus shifts from exercising command and control to being the enabler who coordinates through dynamic linking and communicates through conversation (Denning, 2011).

In this new global economy, people need to ‘learn to learn,’ as they are expected to take on changing rather than stable occupations: working in organizations that are not only smart and nimble, but also lean (that is, they adjust their workforce, inventories, and resource use according to changing needs), people are expected to be smart and nimble in turn. A survey of employers and college graduates conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates (2006) for the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) found that employers looking for new hires highly valued skills in teamwork and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group settings. More than two-thirds of employers think higher education should place more emphasis on these skills as well as on communication, applying knowledge to real-world settings, critical thinking and analysis, global issues, and solving complex problems. Generally, the preference is for well-rounded people with a balance of skills rather than a narrow, overly specialist focus. Some three-fourths of employers also think that the ability of firms to innovate is central to success in the global economy and that higher education must play an important role in this regard. Innovation requires the collection and smart management of information.

The logic of networks is also influencing the reform of public entities such as government agencies, educational institutions, and school systems. Writing about new approaches to public administration, Goldsmith and Eggers (2004) remark that connectors are needed, leaders who listen well, cultivate relationships, and appreciate others’ assets and thus can bring together people from different backgrounds. Rather than running an entire operation, the role of the new type of leader is to activate and coordinate a network of resources involving any number of public and private partners or contractors. Public-private partnerships grew significantly as the government shed and outsourced functions that were previously the exclusive domain of public employees. This has been happening not only in the provision of public services but also in the prison system and the military: for instance, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been described as network centric, as private contractors played an increasingly larger role in all aspects of military operations. The ratio of military personnel to private contractors grew from 55:1 in the Vietnam War to 1:1 in the Iraq Wars and 1:1.49 in Afghanistan (Hammes, 2010). Of course, there are issues and criticisms in these and other privatization ventures, but the main point for us is that Goldsmith and Eggers and others were on target with their claim that new organizational forms are evolving and replacing the bureaucratic model.

Social change and global justice movements are adding new twists to this network logic (Fung, 2006). Political movements—including the 1990s indigenous people’s movement in Chiapas, Mexico, the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle,’ the World Social Forum, and the Occupy movements in Europe, the US, and elsewhere—have developed new participatory democratic practices that involve horizontal ways of coordinating the social actions of various autonomous groups, as well as information exchange and consensus decision making. Jeffrey Juris (2007) explains the new approach:

While the command-oriented logic of traditional parties and unions involves recruiting new members, developing unified strategies, pursuing political hegemony, and organizing through representative structures, network politics revolve around the creation of “convergence spaces” …, where diverse collectives, organizations, and networks converge around a few common hallmarks, while preserving their autonomy and specificity. The objective becomes enhanced “connectivity” and horizontal expansion by articulating diverse movements within flexible, decentralized structures which facilitate transnational coordination and communication. Key “activist-hackers” … operate as relayers and exchangers, receiving, interpreting, and routing information out to diverse network nodes. Like computer hackers, activist-hackers combine and recombine cultural codes (in this case political signifiers), sharing information about projects, mobilizations, strategies, and tactics within global networks.

(para. 18)

The logic of networks seems to be applying to all kinds of settings and activities. The importance of the role of the connector or, in the language of this book, the democratic civic professional, is thus assured for the foreseeable future. One of the questions will be how to engage in this role given the complexities of this historical moment. One factor that adds to complexity pertains to what is generally known as diversity.

Social Diversity

Globalization involves increasing world population movements, through migration, flows of refugees, student and professional exchanges, tourism, volunteer-service vacations, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and the like. The result is that globalization is happening ‘right here’ as well as ‘out there.’ Along with other ‘advanced’ countries of the global North, the United States is becoming an increasingly diverse nation. Haub (2009) reports that in the US “immigrants arriving after 2005, and their children and grandchildren, will account for 82% of the population growth between 2005 and 2050” (p. 10). As Robert Putnam (2007) remarks, this trend is “one of the most important challenges facing modern societies, and at the same time one of our most significant opportunities” (p. 137). What does it portend?

On the challenge side, social heterogeneity often erodes social trust, a sense of community, and participation in civic life (see Pettigrew, 2008). This is particularly true where there are growing economic divides, which in turn spawn not only social insecurity but also public incivility, hate groups, and intergroup violence. The problem, thus, lies not in heterogeneity or diversity itself but in essentially ideological and political processes (where political refers to the use of power, not necessarily to government and related institutions) that transform diversity into binary categories involving dominance (Self) and subordination (Other), with attendant inequalities in the distribution of resources, including psychic ones: Self is an active subject and agent, a doer, while Other is a passive recipient, an object and nonagent. The issue, then, is not diversity but difference.

Diversity or Difference?

This question highlights the fact that power and privilege are implicated in creating social categories or identities. If mere diversity were at play, we could imagine a spectrum from which members of different groups would create their identity by selecting the qualities by which they want to define themselves. Instead, we find a play of opposites, where dominant groups construct their social identities by appropriating qualities they value while assigning their absence or their opposite to members of subordinate groups, through a collective projection of the shadow side, or those parts of the self that are rejected and feared. For instance, according to a binary classification, the traditional dominant group composed of upper-class heterosexual white males will ascribe to itself socially valued qualities such rationality, intelligence, willpower, and drive, while Others (e.g., women, nonwhites, lower classes, gays, despised ethnicities) may be described as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Contexts
• Part 2 Thinking About Professional Practice
• Part 3 Learning About Professional Practice Through Cases
• Part 4 Going Forward
• References
• Index