Community" in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting attack, challenged by sociopolitical forces and intellectual currents that point toward more fragmented social orders. Locating community as a particular field of practice poses similar dilemmas. This article summarizes the broad outlines of the history of "community organization" in the United States, emphasizing both its multiple traditions and the enduring nature of its practical and strategic dilemmas. It provides an analysis of the key intellectual and social challenges facing the field and the different kinds of pressures they may be exerting on the different traditions of community action. Finally, it suggests four "boundarycrossing" areas of activity that cut across the inherited traditions and may represent emerging sources of innovation for community-based action."Community" in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Although this state of affairs is hardly unprecedented-community has been lost, found, and rediscovered over the years with disturbing regularity (e.g., Stein, 1960;Sampson, 1999)-the problem is especially pressing today. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. Long-neglected inner-city community areas have been rediscovered; new conceptions of communal ties (e.g., social capital) have emerged; new kinds of planned communities are being constructed. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting
The author evaluates urban regime theory as an approach to understanding development and housing policy in New York City since the 1970s. Strong elements of policy continuity are explained by the impact of economic restructuring, federal retrenchment, and interest-group pressures. The relatively modest shifts in policy that did take place are related to changes in the local real estate market and community mobilization as well as to the political factors highlighted by a regime framework. Regime theory's emphasis on political leadership, coalition building, and policy form, at the expense of other factors of urban analysis, underestimates the obstacles to genuinely progressive, community-oriented urban development.
This work has explored the ways in which post-1960s processes of neoliberalization set into motion a host of changes in North American and Western European cities, from revalorized labor, land, and housing markets to the new institutional mechanisms (entrepreneurial policies, service-delivery partnerships, policing strategies) that make possible expansion and governance of increasingly valued urban spaces. Such studies have not only provided a fuller understanding of historical mutations in interscalar structures of power, but have also repositioned cities and state policies at the center of new projects of economic accumulation and sociopolitical regulation.This literature has been less focused on the role of oppositional actors in shaping contemporary processes of urban neoliberalization. Recent decades have witnessed considerable (if fluctuating and disparate) levels of mobilization and conflict, and much of this contention has taken place within and acrossöif not always precisely overöcities
Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black-white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing-and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors-social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns-and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.
Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term "primitive globalization" in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital, this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neoliberal globalization by "separating" or disembedding social actors from conditions that otherwise impede short-term economic activity. This conception, which is considered primarily in relation to the United States, positions the state as both facilitator and victim of globalization, draws attention to state fragmentation and national politics, and places the role of the national state in the local state at the center of unstable linkages. It is suggested that under these conditions the national0local state may be caught between the roles of government and governance; for this reason, as well as others, contemporary globalization remains transitional.
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