Reinventing Citizenship: The Practice of Public Work

Modes of Problem Solving

When we lost the notion of politics as our public work, we didn't lose politics. Politics is everywhere, in all of our mediating institutions and social settings. What we lost was the full creative potential of politics. Politics means, simply, the ways we make decisions.

The service society has shaped the political culture of the arenas in which we live and work: their practices, governing structure and policies, the way their values and goals are carried out, the way their resources are allocated.

Reclaiming these places as space for civic education and public work first requires an understanding of their current political culture and practice — what we call their "mode of problem solving." We use this modes chart (below) to help clarify the power structure and political culture operating within these arenas generally. Just as an organizer's map of the power structure, governing practice and norms of an association, community or institution helps guide its work, the chart helps us understand the culture in which we must work to reclaim the settings of our lives.

Four approaches to problem solving include the following:

These modes are not isolated from one another. Rather each is related to the others, either as a result of, or in response to, the inadequacy of any one political practice for governing and problem solving in our common life. For example, the failings of bureaucracies and their reliance on professionals supports protest-oriented responses. Often an institution or group combines two or more modes in its practices, though one will usually predominate. For instance, a hospital or charity organization can be both bureaucratic and therapeutic. A community organization can also have service dimensions. An advocacy group can also be institutional. For a better understanding of each of these problem solving approaches, please refer to the comparison chart.

Institutional/Bureaucratic Approach

The institutional/bureaucratic approach is practiced in settings like congress, universities, and other, usually large-scale institutions concerned with providing services or allocating other resources. This approach was developed to meet the needs of a large-scale society. It is useful in organizing large projects and populations, with widespread effect.

This approach, though, relies on hierarchical structures and narrow expertise. Consequently it often fragments complex problems and the institutions trying to deal with them. It sets up adversarial relations within an institution or system: parties, departments, even individuals within departments fight each other for resources and security. Problems or deficiencies (and other differences) are generally dealt with by tacking on another program or service, or passing it on to the boss, rather than through a holistic approach that uses people's talents and creates judgment around a problem through open debate, consideration of diverse perspectives, evaluation, and reflection on past practice.

Top-down management styles and expert-driven services leave little room for creativity, thoughtfulness, strategic action, or evaluation. Public work consists of activity or crisis management, rather than action, for most based in this approach. Solutions are often partial and ineffective. And the institutions and systems are often inflexible and stagnant, unable to adjust to changes in their field or the larger world.

Therapeutic/Helping Approach

Former president George Bush attempted to address social problems by calling for "a thousand points of light." And recently, activists like Michael Lerner have begun to call for a politics of meaning, aimed at creating a more caring and loving nation. These movements are built on a therapeutic/helping approach to problem solving.

This approach focuses on serving; it's about caring, volunteerism, meeting the deficiencies or needs of individuals, helping others. Settings which predominately use this approach range from one-on-one volunteer programs to large-scale service providers like hospitals. Service efforts reach many people in real need, easing the suffering of hunger, homelessness, sexual violence, and many other problems.

Service involvement offers individuals ways to participate in and engage the world beyond their immediate experience. They can provide contact with other cultures and backgrounds, and opportunities to make a visible difference on problems about which people are concerned.

However, this approach draws little attention to the public world stretching beyond personal lives and local communities or the ways diverse groups might work together to solve problems. Most service programs, for instance, include little learning about the policy dimensions of issues that volunteers address through one-on-one efforts. Volunteers, often upper or middle class members serving the poor or at-risk population, rarely have ways to reflect upon the complex dynamics of power, race, and class involved with the problem and their interventions. And their training often lacks attention to the rich, many-sided resources to be found within communities.

While many in the service world have questioned and challenged the expert-client model of problem solving, therapeutic/helping environments are still dominated by it. Expert intervention models structure professional education and service systems themselves. Thus service programs pay little attention to the capacities and agency of clients or volunteers, and they overlook serious education about community resources, cultures, and histories.

From the perspective of teaching a strong conception of ordinary people's capacity to act, the language and practice of this approach is limiting. The language is personalized and therapeutic. The focus is on developing self-esteem while caring for and helping the "other," and as a result the public or political nature of the work is often denied or ignored. This language can limit citizens' capacity to work effectively in public settings, where people may or may not care for you and where the point is not to bond but rather to accomplish public work.

Advocacy/Protest Approach

America has a rich history of advocacy or issue-based politics often expressed in movements from temperance to environmental activism. This approach makes problems dramatically visible and provides an outlet for moral passion. Advocates in some instances help individuals work more effectively with bureaucratic institutions, and in others challenge bureaucracies and other institutions around issues of justice. They educate the general public about important public issues.

While protest politics raises important concerns, it also tends to strip people of their problem-solving roles. Activists of all persuasions adopt a zero-sum view of power, presenting themselves as representing the powerless people against an all-powerful establishment or corrupting force. Beginning with a view of what people should believe or care about, this approach is ideological, moralized, and polarizing. Most issue organizing efforts, from affirmative action to prayer in schools, animal rights to pro-life campaigns, pose their aims in this way. Public roles are limited to the innocent victims or righteous protestors on the one hand, and the corrupt or evil power-holders, experts, professionals, or government officials on the other, leaving no room to work with people pragmatically. This approach tends to treat public problems idealistically, with uncompromising, non-negotiable demands that deny the problem's complexities.

Community Approach

The last two decades of organizing and local activism have produced a large array of community-based initiatives. The most successful community organizations have literally refashioned patterns of economic development for cities and even regions, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars into low income and poor communities.

In large part the community movement — expressed in the slogan "small is beautiful," or in the communitarian movement — can be seen as the effort to reclaim local authority for problem solving in the face of large-scale institutional and service systems. Indeed, communal and cultural authority has been its main power source.

Community groups address multiple issues, from struggles for justice and gaining voice in decision making to development projects and drugs. This range makes for a broad role for citizens, shifting from simple partisanship around issues or elections to a far more multidimensional experience of political problem solving. Reflecting this range, the most successful community groups self-consciously enlist a wide variety of political viewpoints. They see the people themselves as the main source of influence and thus consciously develop people's capacity.

Yet community politics has its limits, too. It can be parochial and very small scale. Leadership is often dependent on charisma. Community action is difficult in a time when communal settings (like the church or synagogue, family, school, or local business) have weakened and many people's lives are fragmented among a number of different arenas. Further, except in the largest groups, community politics tends to leave unaddressed larger power dynamics and issues such as trends in the larger economy, toxic wastes, the power of the media. External threats instead breed a "not in my backyard" mentality.

Finally, even at its best, community politics is defined by the cultural, geographic and organizational boundaries of community. Community politics alone cannot be translated into a different view of citizen agency, adaptable to many environments, making visible the linkages between locales and the larger world. Community is often based on sameness and belonging, making it difficult to work with diverse people and issues. Community politics itself does not expand the role of community member to an enlarged understanding of citizen.

Public Work

The challenge in reinventing a politics for more active citizenship involves learning how to integrate our passionate ideals and interests with practical strategies for working with others with whom we may disagree. This involves looking at the public world as a space of different ideologies and approaches. It requires finding a larger common goal that most can agree on; and recognizing that for significant public work on most issues today, the insights and participation of many different people are often essential. In this way, citizens can become actors, definers, and solvers, rather than limiting themselves to a life of specializing, serving, litigating, or protesting.

We've looked at four modes of politics — four general ways our institutions get public work done. Public work builds on insights from each of these modes. Based on a more expansive understanding of citizenship, it opens up or democratizes these approaches and the settings in which it is used. Public work also emphasizes the need to create productive relationships across different modes.

The next chapters introduce the concepts and practice of public work. Public work is conceptually based, and draws on lessons from history and our own work. At its core is civic education, the development of ordinary people's capacities for public leadership. This requires paying attention to our roles, capacities, and identities so that we can become agents for problem solving in the multiple arenas of our public work. These capacities are developed best, we believe, through practice coupled with tough, self-conscious reflection on practice.

While strong democracy requires active citizens, active citizens require public spaces in which to work with others from a mix of backgrounds. The practice of public work — civic organizing — while often messy and time-consuming, is also effective in reviving the public missions and practices of the places where we live and work.

1. Think about the places and spaces in which you do your public work. How do the institutions operate? What are their politics?
   
   
2. What do you learn about your public role and the role of others — about citizenship — from those practices?
   
   
3. What are the strengths and limitations of these practices for effective problem solving and the development of people's public capacities (staff, clients, or others)?
   

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Chapter Four: Citizen Politics

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