Reinventing Citizenship: The Practice of Public Work

A Declining Public Life

The man on the television talk show was furious. "The savings and loan crisis is a terrible thing," he said. " Taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for that mess. Government should pay for it!"

The talk show participant expressed a widespread belief: Government is over there, somewhere, doing something for us, and not very well. Private citizens, as innocent outsiders, are not responsible for the mess. They are just clients or consumers of the state's services. At the same time, public officials have become specialized experts or professionals, based on their narrow expertise and responsibilities. Indeed, experts in every arena are responsible for solving our problems, and we have increasingly come to seek their services as the solution.

The narrow roles and outsider/consumer consciousness symbolized by the taxpayer's lament have crippled our capacity to govern and to solve public problems effectively. And they have undermined sources of meaning and empowerment in our lives. We have lost both our civic muscles — our political capacity — and our instruments and tools — our institutional and social environments — for acting as citizens who are co-creators and producers of society. This is the crisis we face in America today in many settings and institutions, not simply in government.

A fundamental problem underlies the failure of our institutions and less formal groups to effectively address critical issues and to engage and fully develop the leadership capacities of all people — experts and clients, voters, and protestors alike. This is the erosion of a democratic public life and the idea and practice of productive citizenship. Our public life has become fragmented, polarized, and dominated by expertise to such an extent that our public work is ineffective and often trivialized.

Reinventing government, the community service movement, total quality management, the politics of meaning: these and other approaches to this crisis have been touted. Yet these approaches address only parts of the problem or fail to address its underlying causes.

We argue that reinventing active, participatory notions of citizenship, work, and politics, altering our roles and practices as individuals and institutions accordingly, is an effective way to address this crisis. Our approach, called public work, builds on our democratic traditions and today's practices for effective civic organizing and citizenship education. Public work is a way to renew and reclaim an active, democratic public life, inside and outside of government.

Using terms like citizen, work, public, and politics can be problematic. People rarely ever consider themselves citizens; for some the term is even oppressive. For many, politics is not fulfilling, engaging, or productive. Finally, people often think of "public" as simply government. But we believe these words are important. Moreover, they can catalyze the renewal of public life in our everyday environments. In this and the following chapters we'll explore the traditions behind citizenship and public work, what we mean by them, and why we use them.

Democratic Traditions

Active, participatory understanding of citizenship and public work are not new. Throughout our history, Americans from all walks of life have used voluntary associations, movements, and other institutions to solve public problems and develop public leadership, from insurgent movements like temperance and populism to ongoing institutions like the YWCA and unions.

Such experiences should not be romanticized. They were often parochial and exclusive. But through them, many people learned civic skills and developed a civic identity. People encountered an intergenerational mix of ages, interests, and points of view. They learned to argue artfully, to think strategically about their public work, and to work together across lines of difference. Public work was understood as the way to deal with public problems and do public tasks, and took place in many settings, not simply government.

The Immigrant Experience

Vibrant histories like those of the immigrant area of the West Side of St. Paul tell how people became citizens, in their view, through street corner debates, activities at the settlement house, the formation of groups like the Workmen's Circle, and the work of building schools, parks, churches, and synagogues. These stories portray not only community involvement but also people's sense of public work on the larger civic stage. For instance, people from the West Side talk about helping to create the New Deal. When asked what they mean, they say they were involved in the union or the settlement house or the local school, and that work fed the New Deal and Minnesota politics.

Through such experiences people learned a number of public skills, building on the democratic heritages they brought with them and found here: how to deal with different kinds of people, the give-and-take, messy quality of public life, the art of argument, ways to map out power relationships and the politics of particular environments, and ways to be connected to the larger world. That process created a common fund of wealth and resources in the society. It was an experience of politics and citizenship as public work that taught skills and wider understanding of civic identities which included, but was not limited to, their role and stake in the nation.

The Civil Rights Movement

In another example, an understanding of freedom as public participation and citizenship was at the heart of the civil rights movement. Charles Gomillion described efforts to bring about political equality in Tuskegee, for instance, as "civic democracy . . . a way of life in which all citizens have the opportunity to participate in societal affairs."

Public participation and citizenship were central themes in the movement, generating Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools. These schools registered disenfranchised black voters, but also taught thousands of local leaders new approaches to citizen action. Teachers and students were peers. Lessons drew directly on participants' experiences. The formal political process was connected to problems in people's daily lives. This experience generated a transformative sense of politics. Unita Blackwell, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party who was elected mayor of Mayersville, described her experience: "We found ourselves involved in working in political work. We still ain't figured all of it out yet, but it's been just wonderful."

This sense was echoed in the movement's freedom language. Freedom meant the capacity to participate and contribute as full, independent, and powerful citizens in public affairs. Public participation — made real in the movement's rallies, sit-ins, demonstrations, voter registration drives, Freedom Schools, and other activities — generated the movement spirit, despite violent opposition and situations of great danger. Freedom involved self-naming, taking the definition of one's self back from others. The theme of freedom lent a new sense of collective power, the ability to act with others around expansive ends, to shape the larger public world.

It is to fulfill this democratic promise of creative, serious roles in the shaping of our common world that we argue the need to reinvent citizenship and public work.

Why Citizenship?

Citizenship is a powerful but contested theme. In this nation comprised largely of immigrants, citizenship has many layers of meaning for various communities. To some, a good citizen votes and obeys the law. Others think citizens also have the right or duty to monitor government for corruption or fairness. Some see citizenship as participation in a shared community of values. We all share certain values because we're Americans. In these terms, citizenship can be sentimentalized, or turned into a "right" way of thinking, as in the slogan, "America: love it or leave it." Today, while more people may be defined as citizens, few would claim the term in a strong way. The substance and meaning of citizenship has become thin and weak. And as the term private citizen reflects, it has lost its connection to public life for many.

Yet as people learn the leadership skills of effective action to solve public problems and as they learn to relate their efforts to the larger well-being of communities and the nation, citizenship takes on new life and resonance. Historically, citizenship has vividly come to life in the democratic movements that fought to expand the definition of citizen — to recognize African-Americans, women, the poor, and working people as citizens with full rights. Or in the settlement houses where immigrants, working class people, and the settlement house workers learned and practiced active citizenship as they built and maintained strong communities.

Citizenship raises particular questions and conflicts born of the historical, political, and legal experience of people of color in America. For the Native American, it may symbolize a status imposed on them by force. For Latino and Asian-Americans, it brings up questions of legality and documentation. For African-Americans, full citizenship became imaginable only after slavery was abolished but seemed possible only after their own self-determination and resolve turned aspirations into action through the sweeping movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As Dr. Martin Luther King stated, "This growing self-respect has inspired the [African-American] with new determination to struggle and sacrifice until first class citizenship becomes a reality."

For communities of color, citizenship offers either a conceptual stumbling block or entry into the American dream of promise for full participation in democratic governance. Stripped of its legal denotations, though, citizenship connotes the greatest common denominator for diverse people to claim a common identity and basis for the collaborative public work at the heart of a vibrant, democratic public life.

Active Citizenship

Active, public citizenship begins and is grounded in our everyday institutional environments — the places we live and work, go to school, volunteer, participate in communities of faith. It is public-spirited and practical; not utopian or immaculate but part of the messy, difficult, give-and-take process of problem solving. Citizenship links our daily life and interests to larger public values and arenas. Through citizenship we build and exercise our power.

Active citizenship is tied to an understanding of public life as diverse, contentious, and linked to, but distinct from, private and communal life. Thus the role of citizen can connect people across lines of difference for the purpose of governing and problem solving, drawing on cultural identities and other communities while remaining distinct.

Reinventing this active understanding of citizenship is important today, in our view, for at least three reasons:

• A birthright. Human beings have both the birthright and the capacity to help create the world, not only in their immediate environments, but also on the larger public stage. Claiming and developing that capacity has a dramatic, often transformative effect.
  
  
• Effective problem solving. It is increasingly obvious that Americans cannot successfully address the problems we face without the reinvention of citizenship, inside and outside government. Crime, drugs, teen pregnancy, school reform, and a host of other issues will not be dealt with in sustained, full, or effective terms without widespread civic participation or without enlisting the insights, energies, and talents of the diverse citizenry.
  
  
• A vision. Citizenship, understood as the challenging, difficult, ongoing work of creating our society together, of rebuilding the nation from the bottom up, is the avenue through which we can develop a larger vision of America and address the crisis in meaning widely discussed today. What we need is a concept of our nation as our common creation, our common work, our commonwealth. Through wide participation in common tasks we will be able to realize a more just and free society, as well as to clean up the mess of social problems that we threaten to leave to later generations.

Why Politics?

That is the challenge and the rationale for citizenship. But in order to reinvent citizenship as part of our everyday life and the way we effectively participate in shaping the public world, we also need to reinvent politics.

Today, most people want to avoid politics, especially in everyday environments (i.e., office politics or school politics). They see politics as sleazy, corrupt, and cynical, and they imagine themselves as innocent outsiders. As a result, most people also lose the middle ground of public action where the point is neither to win nor just to talk, but rather to engage in the complex work of creating the public world.

A strong sense of citizenship requires a broader understanding of politics: Politics is an aspect of the public work of problem solving and governance, full of ambiguity and practical tasks and taking place in everyday environments. This understanding allows people to recognize and develop their varied public roles and capacities. It highlights the fact that politics is everywhere: every individual, institution, community, or arena practices some kind of politics. Politics here is understood as cultural practices of power and governance, how decisions get made. It includes the customs, habits, structures of power and governance, and formal and informal rules in the environments in which we live and work.

Citizen politics starts from this understanding of politics and adds democratic goals and practices. With citizen politics, politics becomes a deeply responsible form of activity, through which people come to see themselves as accountable public actors who are able to combine their ideals with effective strategies for dealing honestly with the world as it is, full of messiness and compromise.

In Chapter 4 we further explain the conceptual foundation of public work: public, diversity, self-interest, and power. The next two chapters will explore in more depth how we currently do politics.

Why Public Work?

Public work is cooperative civic work that is visible and widely acknowledged as significant. Public work helps build our larger common pool of wealth and resources — our commonwealth.

Public work can be paid or voluntary. It can be done in communities. Or it can be done in institutions and across institutions as part of one's regular job. In fact, adding public dimensions to one's occupation — recognizing the larger potential significance and impact of what one does as a teacher or nurse, as a county extension educator or a computer programmer or a machinist or a college professor or anything else — often can turn an unsatisfying job into much more significant work.

American citizenship in its most expansive sense is understood as public work — visible effort on common tasks of importance to the community or nation, involving many different people. This older view of citizenship is grounded in people's everyday workplace and living environments. Public work is work that the public believes important. Thus, it is always subject to argument and interpretation. Public work makes things. It builds things. It creates social as well as material culture.

Our most common associations with the idea of public work are "public works," in which the focus is on the products themselves. Public works include water mains and roads, sewer systems and bridges, and other parts of the infrastructure. Cities have departments of public works. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal organized a Public Works Administration.

Public works also extend beyond function and usefulness. Public works can express the grandeur, the beauty, even the highest aspirations of a civilization. In the United States, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is a public work, as are the majestic figures carved from Mount Rushmore. The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials grace the capital, conveying our democratic traditions. Though public works of a cultural and social nature may seem more difficult to identify than roads and public buildings, they are nonetheless a vital part of our environment. Music, dance, and art, like other cultural practices, can be public.

When the emphasis is simply on the product, however grand the creation or however noble the aspiration, democracy is not part of the equation. The work activity itself — those who do the work and how — remain hidden and in the background.

In fact, public work understood simply as products may convey the opposite of democracy. Public works can conjure up the image of oppressed and brutalized masses, like the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, or "coolie labor" — the abused Chinese workers who built the American railroads. The invisibility of work in those things that are grand public creations highlights a painful contrast: while the importance of the thing itself may be recognized on the largest public stage, those who create the thing may be rendered insignificant in comparison.

When "public work" as a term first appeared in America, it a had a broader range of associations than it does today. Public work was understood to create public goods, even if by private businesses and corporations, that were thus subject to public deliberation and regulation. Farmers, artisans, teachers, merchants and others often saw their work in more public terms than is now common.

In the fullest sense of the term, public work takes place not solely with an eye to public consequences. It also is work of a public, a mix of people whose interests, backgrounds, and resources can be quite different. This requires political skills such as listening, bargaining, understanding diverse self-interests, and being able to map power relations. Everyday politics (or citizen politics) is an important aspect of public work, but it is not the same thing.

Public work focuses attention on something that we have largely lost sight of in our age of high technology, a point larger than politics: we help to build the world through our common effort. Public work develops our core identities as citizens who are broad producers, rather than simply consumers or clients or experts or any narrower role. It liberates our talents and capacities. What we build and create we can also recreate. Thus, public work also makes clear that the world is open and fluid, not static and fixed. It helps to regenerate hope in our time.

At the end of each chapter we will pose a few questions, mainly aimed at applying the chapter's theory to your situation. They can be used by you personally, or with a group for discussion. Add questions you find helpful. Investigate the reference materials at the back if something interests you, or if you disagree with something. Evaluate the theory presented here against your own experience.

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