Article

Social Learning Theory and Community Organizing

The past two decades of community organizing around issues of racial, political, and economic justice confirm that grassroots practice for social change, notwithstanding local and national successes, has not harnessed citizen action into a movement that can substantively redistribute power in American society. There are at least three chronic problems: (1) funding arrangements, particularly the vagaries of top-down sponsorship; (2) formal organizational structuring, the legal rubric to institutionalize direct citizen action in corporate and government decision-making; and (3) systematic technology for organizers, based on scientific knowledge of human behavior. It is the formulation of suitable technology for influencing behavior and com-munity organizations that is the present focus. It is sometimes difficult, especially for organizers, to appreciate the inadequacies of the existing knowledge base for training new community practitioners. The wonder is that so much has been achieved with so little. It is a testimonial to the inordinate dedication of the members of the profession. The curriculum consists of anecdotal accounts passed on by colleagues, ideological rhetoric mixed with disjointed rules of practice, less than compelling attempts to apply social science research and casework or groupwork principles, useless conceptual overviews of practice, and all too rarely, a fragment of well-developed technology, such as those for mass mobilization and grant acquisition. These are at best shaky underpinnings for a profession that aspires to sustain if not shape and direct basic changes in the policies and institutions of the state. Medical practitioners have more sophisticated technology for transplanting a single heart. Then, of course, their profession is more than 2,000 years old and organizing is not yet 100. There is an uncomplicated link between systematic technology for organizers and more effective organizing. Contemporary organizing is without an empirically based paradigm for understanding and predicting social behavior. For understanding behavior, the best available guide to practice is the Alinsky dictum to pay attention to self-interest. My goal here is to lay the groundwork for organizing technology based on social learning theory. Social learning provides a scientific framework for analyzing human behavior, but more importantly, it serves as the foundation of concepts and procedures for changing social behavior in organizational life.

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