Investigation Of Public Housing Activities In Los Angeles

Author : Paul Lichterman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691212333
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Download or read book How Civic Action Works written by Paul Lichterman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book develops a new way to think about how social advocacy works in everyday life. Varied scholarly approaches to social advocacy over the past four decades have tended to highlight skilled actors who craft rhetorical appeals and pursue resources and opportunities strategically to win their ends. Lichterman argues that this approach presents a thin view of culture and oversimplifies action as a product of collective actors whose speech and action do not vary by setting. In this study of housing advocacy, he turns the analytic lens away from the actors to the social settings and the cultural contexts of unfolding action, which allows him to develop a more precise explanation of success and failure. Lichterman draws on four years of ethnographic research on four campaigns, three coalitions, and twelve organizations that took up affordable housing, homelessness, and related problems in Los Angeles. The author follows how the actors' identities, claims and strategies unfold in specific settings as they promote new legislation, oppose gentrification, build affordable housing, and pursue health and environmental issues alongside housing problems. He finds that the discursive fields are crucial contexts that influence the work and that organization style powerfully shapes civic action. How Civic Action Works offers a new conceptual framework and research agenda for studies of social advocacy"--