Aspen Institute, Voices from the Field: Learning from the Early Work on Comprehensive Community Initiatives (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 1997), 92 pp., $12.95 (paper).

Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 218 pp., $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood (Boston: South End, 1994), 342 pp., $40.00 (cloth), $28.00 (paper).

Dennis Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1997), 338 pp., $35.00 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).

Joan Walsh, Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1997), 40 pp.

Joan Walsh, The Eye of the Storm: Ten Years on the Front Lines of New Futures (Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation, n.d. [1998]), 42 pp.
 

Well before the last cannons in the War on Poverty went quiet, Marris and Rein (1973) identified significant barriers to social reform in the United States. They questioned how far an individualistic nation with a diffuse system of representation could go in altering the condition of the poor. More than three decades later, despite earlier frustrations, reform efforts continue. The publications reviewed here--three books and three reports--provide an opportunity to see how the urban social reform experience has evolved. Two areas of activity get explicit attention: school reform and comprehensive community initiatives. Because comprehensive initiatives often include school reform as a high priority and because school reform in many instances is tied to broader efforts to improve neighborhoods and build community, the categorization is somewhat artificial. Perhaps the important point is continuity. Urban schools were a major concern as far back as the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Project, and comprehensive improvement was an aim in the earlier period just as it is now. Moreover, despite the skepticism of some analysts (Halpern 1995), neighborhood-focused initiatives continue as the central channel of reform today, much as they were when Marris and Rein first took stock.

LEVERAGING CHANGE: THE ISSUE OF WHAT TO TARGET

Just as Marris and Rein (1973) found that the inaugural antipoverty warriors were highly concerned with theories of change, today there is ongoing discussion of the strategies of reform. Yet the scope of that discussion was limited earlier and remains so today. Antipoverty warriors of the initial period tended to concentrate on immediate problems rather than fundamental features of the nation's social and economic system, and in Marris and Rein's account, they assumed that "urban society is essentially a benevolent anarchy" (p. 52). Hence they did not pursue aggressively how deeply embedded inequality might be. In like manner, recent reform activity mainly takes social problems as given and expends little energy on issues of underlying causation.

Much of the earlier reform effort was directed toward trying to put together the Humpty Dumpty of social programs and urban service agencies into a coordinated whole, and the main strategy was to seek backing from the major stakeholders in urban society. Little has changed, either in the situation or the strategy. The system of social programs is still fragmented, schools (in particular) remain resistant to coordination, and comprehensive efforts continue to be a sought-after goal. Marris and Rein (1973) recounted that despite efforts to promote integrated approaches, centrifugal forces were strong--"institutions remained stubbornly self-interested" (pp. 156-57). Reports from the field three decades later repeat that familiar theme.

Because the federal government in the United States, unlike the central government in many European countries, has little authority to structure urban services, simple top-down reorganization is no answer. Hence much of the direct responsibility for services falls on local governments, but without benefit of any coherent national direction. In Marris and Rein's (1973) assessment, "No other nation organizes its government as incoherently as the United States" (p. 7), and they added that in the War on Poverty, "the dominant issue was the inability of government at every level to make a coherent or effective response to social problems" (p. 274). Over the years, little has changed, except that the federal role has diminished even further.

Local practice was and remains an obvious target for reform efforts. Moreover, Marris and Rein (1973) pointed out that local governments constitute a substantial store of resources in the United States. They noted that federal and foundation grants to cities were, in fact, quite small and easily overshadowed by what local governments themselves control. Of the era of the Great Society, they noted that any single big city spent as much on its schools as the entire federal budget for community action. Moreover, New York City spent three times the federal appropriation for community action on public welfare alone. The general picture is unchanged. Local government spending on urban service programs continues at a substantial level, and these services impinge importantly on the lives of the nonaffluent. In addition, in older industrial cities, public-sector jobs are enormously important. In many of these cities, the public school system is the largest single employer in the area. In terms of direct contact with the nonaffluent population, size of budget, number of employees, and scope of problems engaged, the public sector can hardly be ignored. Thus the Rockefeller report concludes, much as the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Project had earlier, that "the public system of service [is] a compelling force on the local landscape" (Walsh 1997, 5).

In the early days of the War on Poverty, bureaucracy was the primary target of reform. Many antipoverty warriors saw the problem as one of "bureaucratic introversion": school systems, job training programs, welfare agencies, and others on the front line of working with the poor were so preoccupied with their own internal procedures and what these procedures protected, they were insensitive to an evolving world around them and the changing needs of those they served (Marris and Rein 1973, 52-54, 146-47). Reorienting urban service agencies thus seemed to many to be the essential move. Even so, there were critics of this view. Early on in the Great Society era, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that trying to "cure poverty" without attending to broader national issues of social policy "is treating symptoms" (quoted in Marris and Rein 1973, n.187). Marris and Rein themselves voiced skepticism about the tendency of reformers to find fault within particular institutions "rather than the structure as a whole" (p. 278).

Among the works reviewed here, Jean Anyon's (1997) analysis stands out for its historical perspective and for its insistence that the performance of urban agencies (schools specifically) largely reflects the experience of cities. As she points out, even before the advent of World War II, middle-class flight and a changing industrial economy presented schools in Newark and other cities with rising problems and declining resources (see also Mirel 1993). After decades of neglect, as Anyon shows, locally targeted reforms often leave underlying issues of race and class unengaged and schools still weighed under by the press of unsolved problems. From this perspective, bureaucracy is a symptom, not the cause, of the condition. Moreover, in such circumstances, even with the backing of business and other elite stakeholders, new programs and reform measures work no magic. Thus Anyon's study raises a second question: can established centers of power provide effective reform leverage, given the nature of the problems at work? Much as Marris and Rein (1973) did, Anyon sees the issue as one of the structure of representation in the United States, and she sees local initiatives as having little impact on that structure.

The fundamental dilemma, then, seems to be that immediate problems of urban service provision are the most readily addressed issue, but little lasting headway appears likely if broader issues are off the reform agenda. In the continuing campaign for urban social reform, established local leaders play a two-edged part. On one hand, they are helpful in bestowing legitimacy on proposed changes. On the other hand, they have little inclination to encourage challenges to the order in which they are "movers and shakers." Seeking their support may thus narrow the reform agenda.

The War on Poverty was an attempt to support change from the national level, but as Marris and Rein (1973) discovered, authority at the top is too fragmented to support a sustained effort. Furthermore, because authority is so thoroughly fragmented in the United States, a top-down approach to reform appears largely infeasible anyway. A dilemma for urban social reform is that fundamentally different national policies may hold the most promise of lasting results, but piecemeal change from the bottom may be the most feasible path to follow.

CIVIC REGENERATION

Is there a way out? Are local initiatives to be dismissed, or does community-based reform have a potential that should be recognized and encouraged? The current wave of reform activity suggests that a grassroots approach, though not beyond question, nevertheless offers promise that should not be ignored.

With Anyon (1997) as a partial exception (she advocates a combination of national and local measures), the other works reviewed here support what is variously termed a community-building or civic engagement approach. The underlying idea is that if local communities are given the resources to "reweave the fabric" of social connections internally and establish partnership links with local government (especially with urban service agencies) and the local business and philanthropic sectors, then it is possible to generate a substantial level of civic energy that can be directed into problem solving (see also Cortes 1993). There is, one might say, a Putnamesque view that civil society represents a greatly underused potential for doing social good and that it has sufficient autonomy to be cultivated on its own. In this view, civil society is no mere reflection of the economy but has a substantial degree of self-determination, which can be further augmented by supportive governmental actions.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) is one model for civic engagement, that is, for tapping the potential in civil society. By targeting the Dudley Street area, the Riley Foundation of Boston provided a catalyst for community organization (Medoff and Sklar 1994). With a strong and inclusive representation of neighborhood residents, the DSNI brought various elements of the community together in a combined effort and moved through a series of issues, progressing from smaller and more manageable ones to larger and more ambitious measures. In the process, two important things happened. One is that neighborhood expectations turned around so that feelings of hopelessness no longer predominated, and the other is that the DSNI garnered key forms of support from the city and other public officials as well as a crucial loan from the Ford Foundation and useful pro bono services from academicians and other professionals in the area. Leaving aside for now the issue of the replicability of this kind of external support, readers can find much in the DSNI experience to bolster confidence that broad community improvement through civic engagement is possible.

But what exactly is civic engagement? Shirley (1997) takes on this question, using a problem-solving frame of reference. As Shirley sees it, many older, nonaffluent neighborhoods have fragile families and numerous social problems, indicating a special need for increased attention to children and youth. Yet, without some conscious effort to build civic capacity, these neighborhoods are caught up in a vicious circle of civic disengagement. Reinforced by past frustrations and disappointments, they have little inclination to work with public officials (including school staff) or perhaps even with representatives of the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds. Political alienation is high and manifests itself in suspicion toward most outsiders. Within the neighborhood, forms of social capital are weak (cf. Furstenburg 1993). With resources and opportunities scarce, many residents display "survival-oriented patterns of coping and relating" (Halpern 1995, 138) and are concerned with short-term advantage and self-protection (hence the wariness about "outsiders"). Following Putnam (1993), Shirley calls this "the vicious circle of civic disengagement" (p. 158).

Unlike Putnam (1993), however, Shirley sees civic engagement as a process that is subject to relatively quick and thorough reversal. The three reports on foundation initiatives, along with the study of the DSNI, also see a potential for reversal; hence they employ the term capacity building to identify the weaving of cooperative relationships within poorer communities, the heightening of their organizational and self-help skills, and the strengthening of their ability to negotiate with external actors (Aspen Institute 1997; Walsh 1997; Walsh n.d.). Of course, no one argues that civic engagement can be created instantly. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliates in Texas examined by Shirley make use of a strategy of organizing that proceeds with an elaborate series of steps (the DSNI in Boston followed much the same strategy). For the IAF, this approach often starts with personal contact, that is, one-on-one meetings between organizers and residents in the community. It moves on to house meetings that bring small groups together. This process surfaces concrete, "winnable" issues. (In many of the communities studied by Shirley, the major concern proved to be "the poor performance of the public schools.") Once a community has organizing momentum and an issue agenda, several steps follow. One is to contact various external actors--for example, the school board, business leaders, and local foundations. This is a step in changing expectations, both within the neighborhood and about the neighborhood within the larger community. To further school reform, IAF affiliates inaugurated "neighborhood walks" that included parents, teachers, students, and various community leaders. They also sponsored special events such as "recognition days" to highlight academic achievements by students. Public assemblies served to bring major players together with neighborhood residents. "Action teams" undertook sundry tasks such as household-to-household surveys. These were followed by campaigns to launch after-school programs, alter traffic patterns around schools, or meet public safety needs.

These various issue campaigns were not ad hoc efforts, unconnected to one another. Shirley (1997, 185) talks about a "chain of change." And that is precisely the kind of process sought (with mixed success) in various foundation efforts, such as the New Futures Initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. An effective response to one problem engenders expectations about meeting other needs. Thus, in Boston, "as DSNI's organizational capacity grew, so did the demands on that capacity" (Medoff and Sklar 1994, 268).

If an organizing process gains momentum, Shirley argues, it can address major social needs; organizing can provide protection against dysfunctional tendencies in modern society--it can, for example, bring "increased adult attention" to children and youth. In this way, not only is a social need met, but organizing to respond to the problem gives neighborhood residents experience with and confidence in dealing with officials (including public school staff) and other community leaders. It also has the potential of moving nonaffluent residents to a different way of seeing themselves in relation to the people around them. As one Dudley Street resident expressed, "Hey, if we stick together we might be able to get things done here" (Medoff and Sklar 1994, 86). Another talked about the need to realize that "we all had to become invested in some general community concerns, and that we didn't live in isolation" (Medoff and Sklar 1994, 171). In this way, a narrow view of self-interest can give way to concerns seen in relation to others on a community level. Shirley does not confine the process to neighborhood residents. For example, he sees shared interests between parents and school staff and argues that their mutual concerns are greater than their points of conflict, and he provides examples in eight schools across five Texas cities. From the case examples in these Texas cities, the Dudley Street area, and the various instances covered in the Casey and Rockefeller reports, it is clear that a replicable form of civic engagement can occur. But what are its foundation, its potential, and its limitations? Responding to these questions brings us, as it did Marris and Rein (1973) in their inquiry, to the issue of power. Thoughts about this issue, however, have evolved significantly since the earlier era of community organizing.

RELATIONAL POWER

In the formative years of the IAF, Saul Alinsky often sought to confront defenders of the status quo and harass established power holders into significant concessions. After the death of Alinsky, under such leaders as Edward Chambers and Ernesto Cortes, the IAF turned more to a strategy of "patient building of power through collaborations based on mutual interests" (Shirley 1997, 38). Other community-based groups gravitated in a similar direction. The Rockefeller report gives the example of Angela Glover Blackwell's "epiphany." A public interest lawyer who frequently took public agencies to court on behalf of poor clients, Blackwell recounts that one day, "I saw that most of these agency people were basically good people who wanted to do the right thing for their clients, but they truly didn't know how" (Walsh 1997, 20). In shifting the approach with the establishment of the Oakland Urban Strategies Council, Blackwell embraced an alternative to litigation:

What if a local organization devoted the formidable research and advocacy skills that typically go into lawsuits into helping public agencies better serve low-income communities? What if isolated bureaucrats found themselves sitting at a table with service providers, business people, advocates and neighborhood residents, trying to craft new solutions to the problems of urban poverty that they couldn't solve alone? (Walsh 1997, 20)

The reasoning embedded in this view is that lower-income people and their advocates, combined with service-providing agencies, represent a considerable body of resources and civic energy if mobilized constructively instead of being dissipated in actions of contention and withdrawal. The study of the DSM makes a similar point with its emphasis on the adage, "Together, we'll find the way" (Medoff and Sklar 1994, 249).

Part of the shift toward a partnership approach rests on an appreciation that lower-income neighborhoods, even with their many problems, nevertheless possess significant assets that can be directed into constructive actions (Medoff and Sklar 1994, 254-55; Ward n.d., 8-9). Much the same could be said about public agencies themselves. They represent substantial resources, important skills, and a potentially valuable partnership to neighborhood residents, but it is a potential that can be undercut by withdrawal into a defensive posture.

The notion that mutual interests, if given appropriate expression, can override conflicting interests could be challenged on two grounds. First, one might argue that particular and immediate interests always outweigh more general and long-term concerns, and friction between clients and agencies as well as among agencies is simply a pervasive reality. Second, one might question that "chaos" or disorganization is the fundamental problem instead of deeply embedded social conflict. In Marris and Rein's (1973) view, American democracy represents middle-class interests at the expense of the lower class, and public agencies inevitably reflect that bias.

Neither of these arguments is readily dismissed, but the Texas school reform experience and the DSNI and other stories nevertheless point to community mindedness and constructive partnership as actualities. In short, there is some evidence to support Putnam's (1993) notion that alternative equilibria are possible--one organized around distrust and civic disengagement, the other around civic engagement.

A potential for civic engagement runs through much of the discussion in the works reviewed here. Hence considerable attention is given to identifying or fashioning the elements for such engagement. In the current foundation approach, community building is a major theme, and it refers to a process that starts with strengths in lower-income neighborhoods and gives special attention to the role of technical assistance in the development of these indigenous strengths. The role of service agencies is not that of delivering a professionally designed service but of engaging the people in the neighborhood to combine their resources and capacities (see also Handler 1996). A problemsolving potential thus lies in an alliance between the public sector and civil society. As exemplified in the Texas schools studied by Shirley, a special responsibility falls on the public sector to reach out and be open to community participation, but there is also a strong need for the community to be organized so that the citizen's role is one of active engagement.

IAF thinkers such as Ernesto Cortes believe that civic engagement is sustainable and that the experience of constructively taking on neighborhood problems and improving the community is personally rewarding to participants. Teachers, administrators, and other public-sector staff can find fulfillment in professional achievement, and they are capable of openly acknowledging, as one principal said to a community gathering, "I need help!" (Shirley 1997, 104). The IAF places special emphasis on leadership development, and heightening neighborhood skills in working with actors from the larger community is part of the capacity-building goal. For his part, Cortes ( 1993, 301) called for expanding "the capability, vision, and political acumen of the community's residents."

In short, civil society in poorer neighborhoods and the public sector are interdependent so that what can be accomplished in alliance with one another is different from what each can accomplish separately. This is partly a matter of what each can contribute to an aligned effort and how each can strengthen the other, but the process of contributing itself rests on an ability to see that the possibilities stemming from alignment are greater and more attractive than those from pursuing separate paths. The report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation makes the point that "systems reform is about changing relationships" (Walsh n.d., 8). In short, constructive engagement rests on an appreciation that power can derive from relationships. By differentiating between unilateral power and relational power, present-day IAF leaders make a distinction akin to the one between social control and social production (Stone 1989, 219-33). According to this line of argument, no one is locked into a fixed understanding of their interests. When citizens participate in organizing their neighborhoods and engage others in discussion, as Shirley explains, they see their interests in a fresh way, and earlier views give way to new ones. In other words, preferences form and reform through the experience of working with others, and the ability to solve problems depends on being able first to see the possibility of enlarged alliances and then being able to act through such alliances.

The relational power ideas of the IAF mark a sharp departure from the discussion of power by Marris and Rein (1973). In their examination of the War on Poverty, Marris and Rein gave particular attention to the power of the poor to press their rights--that is, to make a unilateral claim. In the understanding of that time, power is a matter of being able--through invoking legal sanctions, threatening protests, or waging a political campaign--to register an effective demand in a world of contested possibilities. The concept of relational power is, by contrast, a distinct move away from an adversarial model of politics. It highlights the possibility of creating a new capacity for problem solving that does not, in and of itself, require entry into a competitive fray with other claim makers and others who are defending existing prerogatives.

IAF thinkers do not argue that relational power is the only form at work, but rather that it is a significant part of the mix. Similarly, top staff in community-building projects, although emphasizing the importance of building cooperative relationships, also argue that advocacy is a necessary part of the overall process of social change (Ward n.d.).

STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS

As champions of community organization, IAF leaders emphasize the potential in political agency. To them, the world is not as it must be of structural necessity. Instead, they believe that intentional activity can alter the situation, bringing together elements of a problem-solving and personally gratifying activity. Organizing thus can be a positive-sum game that is satisfying at the personal level as well as a source of social improvement. In Putnam's (1993) terms, a civic engagement equilibrium is possible because bringing people into a cooperative relationship generates experiences that perpetuate the process. Putnam saw civic engagement as both a product of and a producer of social capital. Once it is in operation, it does not deplete itself but actually gains strength through continued use.

But what about sources of friction? Are there countervailing forces at work that make neighborhood social capital something less than the perpetual-motion machine Putnam (1993) suggests? Perhaps the crucial question is the extent to which civil society is in fact autonomous and the extent to which the actions or inactions of the business sector impose themselves. For example, Otis Johnson of the Savannah New Futures Initiative reported that one of his biggest disappointments was "the failure of the business community to help us much in the way of jobs": "there was a belief that if we tackled the problems of kids, families, and neighborhoods, we would find employers ready to hire our residents. And that hasn't proved to be true" (Walsh n.d., 33). A summer jobs program with the chamber of commerce yielded only 11 placements, despite a major effort through the New Futures Initiative of working with young people.

If the domain of opportunity cannot be enlarged to include significant entree to jobs, then it is not clear that the "virtuous circle" of civic engagement can be sustained. For example, for academic achievement to hold up as a shared aim for educators and community residents, students must be able to see that effort in school widens access to mainstream employment. How far, then, can the civil society/public-sector alliance go without the involvement of the business sector? A potentially crucial question is the extent to which private businesses open up jobs to unconventional channels of recruitment. The Savannah experience, especially, is not reassuring on this point. Moreover, there is the sobering point that, impressive as the Texas school reform is in Shirley's account, he acknowledges that performances on measures of academic achievement have turned out to be much harder to alter for high schools than for elementary schools. It may simply be that the credibility of expanded opportunity is harder to maintain as students get closer to the stage of full-time employment.

Business leaders are not necessarily disengaged from social reform. Employers have a stake in a solidly performing school system, and the attractiveness of the local community for investment is enhanced by such a school system. So at some level, there is congruence of interest among parents, educators, and the business sector. But in a competitive, profit-driven economy, individual employers may be reluctant to act on this congruence.

All things considered, equilibrium may be too strong a term to describe civic engagement. As Marris and Rein (1973) noted years earlier, the centrifugal forces of politics in the United States are very powerful. The Rockefeller report observes that

very few endeavors in American society engage both elites and grassroots, not to mention government bureaucrats and service clients, non-profit groups and their funders, with a belief that the participation of everyone is important. Thus each comprehensive community initiative has had to struggle to develop the structure to sustain the complex, cross-sector work community building requires. (Walsh 1997, 34; see also Aspen Institute 1997)

Despite successes, any initiative is under constant threat to unravel or lose energy. The Rockefeller report cautions that "at its heart community building is a delicate political undertaking, an attempt to orchestrate a powerful constituency for social change in neighborhoods that political and economic forces have marginalized" (Walsh 1997, 32). Anyon (1997) reminds us that local initiatives run a risk of being overwhelmed unless accompanying measures address the national causes of marginality.

ON BALANCE

In the three decades plus since Marris and Rein (1973) first examined the dilemmas of social reform, local initiatives and community organizing efforts have continued as part of the political landscape of the nation's cities. They show that deteriorated areas and badly performing public agencies can be turned around through a process of grassroots participation and civic engagement. By relating to one another in constructive ways, residents in nonaffluent neighborhoods and the agencies for which they are clients can align their resources and efforts in ways that are productive. And, as the example of Dudley Street shows, poorer neighborhoods can enlist crucial external allies. On the other hand, not all reform efforts take hold, and some lose energy after a time. Moreover, because even after decades of activity local initiatives cover only a limited amount of the urban terrain, many neighborhoods continue on a path of neglect and decline.

What, then, do we make of this mixed picture? One response might be to abandon local initiatives and concentrate on national issues of social justice. Yet dismissing bottom-up efforts to strengthen civic capacity in poorer neighborhoods, paying little attention to the engagement of lower socioeconomic status citizens in developing an agenda of their fashioning, and writing off activities that might enhance their skills in pursuing that agenda relegate economically marginal people to the nonpolitical condition of forever being acted upon without a prospect of being able to have a voice in their own fates.

Much of the work reviewed here not only sees normative value in pursuing bottom-up efforts but also regards such efforts as potentially effective. As one participant put it,

Ultimately if you can't deliver at the local level in the neighborhoods to individuals, all the rest is worthless. And so the emphasis to me, the focus has to be on building capacity at the neighborhood level, if it isn't there, and nurturing it, if it is there. And then the other levels will take care of themselves as that bubbles up. Systems and programs [will] change. . . incrementally over time in response to real issues and real programs and real people that are taking place at the local level. I think the efforts to come in from above in an abstract way and say we need to change the system simply leads to papers and not much real change at the local level. (Quoted in Aspen Institute 1997, 56)

Similarly, Shirley (1997, 49) argues that the "IAF is founded on the premise that people in a community can solve their own problems given the requisite training and leadership development." Yet, though the robustness of local effort is a strong article of faith in most of these publications, Anyon (1997) nevertheless provides a needed reminder about the "pauperization" of the public sector in older cities. Inspirational as the DSNI story is, the Dudley Street area had a vital catalyst in the form of start-up money from the Riley Foundation. In her work, Schorr (1997, 373) found that for comprehensive community initiatives, "neither current levels nor current sources would come close to meeting the need."

Some successful program initiatives have lapsed or have been kept at the pilot stage because they required resources beyond the routine amount already available. Thus, even though substantial resources in the government sector can often be deployed more effectively when aligned with community residents, initiative success is often tied to extraordinary funding.

Some critics of community organization might see focusing on concrete, local issues as too confining and might even fear that after the death of Saul Alinsky, the IAF lost its radical edge and that its approach to organizing perhaps even fosters a form of false consciousness. Shirley has a different view. He sees organizing around concrete, local issues as a necessary step in raising political awareness. Specifically, Shirley sees a process by which concrete discussion of local issues "enables citizens to see their problems less as a reflection of their own personal fallibility and more as an expression of economic and political forces" (p. 63).

Alternative scenarios of urban social reform can be sketched. Each deals with a relationship between action and ideas. In one version, action is the beginning point. There are sufficient resources and latitude for successful action focused on local issues, and following this path can expand awareness of systemic forces through the experience of concrete problem solving. Because local initiatives are sustainable, a broad base for reform can be built cumulatively from the bottom up.

An alternative scenario emphasizes larger structural influences and posits community-level initiatives as inevitably being overwhelmed by larger systemic forces. Local efforts eventually produce disappointment and frustration, thereby reinforcing feelings of futility and undermining the long-term prospects for civic engagement. In this version, organization is best targeted to system opposition from the start.

In the first scenario, action and ideas strengthen political agency and enable people to develop a grounded understanding of the challenges they face. In the other scenario, the inability of local action to make a lasting impact on structurally induced problems ultimately produces disenchantment and makes the advent of social reform even less credible than it would have been without local initiatives. In the second scenario, the system context is the overriding factor. Only reform directed toward larger structural forces can make an impact. To guide effective action, ideas must be commensurate with the structures to be altered. In the first scenario, structural constraints are less confining, and there is room for local action. Ideas are based in everyday experience, but understanding expands through an ongoing effort to solve everyday problems in neighborhood improvement.

Are local issues a potential springboard for genuine political agency at the grassroots level, or are systemic forces overriding? Perhaps instead of placing bets exclusively on one scenario or the other--because the evidence in support of either is far from overwhelming--reformers of the future should pursue a dual strategy: promoting local organizing activity around concrete issues while working to see that structural constraints are not so suffocating as to preclude local robustness. Thus, although urban social reform continues to pose dilemmas, it also provides opportunities to pursue a mix of strategies.
 

REFERENCES

Cortes, E., Jr.1993. Reweaving the fabric. In Interwoven destinies, edited by H. G. Cisneros, 294-319. New York: Norton.

Furstenburg, F. F., Jr. 1993. How families manage risk and opportunity in dangerous neighborhoods. In Sociology and the public agenda, edited by W. J. Wilson, 231-58. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Halpern, R. 1995. Rebuilding the inner city. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Handler, J. F. 1996. Down from bureaucracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Marris, P., and M. Rein.1973. Dilemmas of social reform: Poverty and community action in the United States. 2d ed. Chicago: Aldine.

Mirel, J.1993. The rise and fall of an urban school system: Detroit, 1907-81. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Putnam, R. D. 1993. Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Schorr, L. B. 1997. Common purpose: Strengthening families and neighborhoods to rebuild America. New York: Doubleday.

Stone, C. N. 1989. Regime politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.