BRUEGGEMANN, W.: The Practice of Macro Social Work. Thomason Learning, Stamford-London-Singapore-Torornto 2002
CHAPTER 1 Overview of the Pradice of Macro Social Work 3
Above all, however, macro social workers are active and creative agents in the construction of social reality. They try to see beyond the distortions that those in power sometimes use to justify their positions. They challenge illusions that lead nowhere and contest false answers that only prolong the status quo. They take a fresh look at social conditions and try new ways to resolve old problems.
This overview introduces you to the field of macro social work. You will see how different aspects of macro social work practice are covered in this book. You will begin to discover why the field of macro social work is important, and you will be challenged to consider your own role as a macro social worker. As you read this overview, think about how macro social work and its particular methods could have made a difference to the Triqui Indians and others like them in our world.
WHAT IS MACRO SOCIAL WORK?
Macro social work is the practice of helping people solve social problems and make social change at the community, organizational, societal, and global levels. Let's look at this definition in more detail.
Solving Social Problems
Many social work practitioners help individuals or couples who have been affected by and who bear the scars of personal problems. While healing and helping damaged individuals is important, it is its wider social concern that distinguishes social work from other helping professions. This wider concern involves social problems—those conditions of society that create personal troubles and are often embedded in the institutions and premises on which our society is based. Among these social problems are racism, sexism, violence, economic inequality, and the maldistribution of political power, to name just a few.
One of the premises that guides this book is that the most effective way of solving social problems is by people who are affected by social problems working togedier at the local level. Macro social workers believe that when people take charge of their own des-
tinies and become actively involved in the life of their communities, they become empowered to lead fulfilling, meaningful, and productive lives. In Chapter 2 you will look at several theories that have been used to explain why social problems exist. You will be invited to critique these theories and develop your own working definition of social problems. But you will also discover that macro social workers attempt to bring about a better society by means of an asset or strength-based approach.
Macro social workers apply a method called rational problem-solving to conditions that cause social problems. Rational problem-solving was conceived as a way of decision-making over 350 years ago and has been gradually applied to economic, political, and organizational problems in modem society. Rational-problem solving was used by macro social workers as early as the turn of the 20th century. Since then it has been adopted.by the field of social work as a whole and is now known as the generalist social work method.
In Chapter 3 you'll see how the rational problem-solving process works and learn how to apply it step by step. As important as the rational social work method has been, however, it has limitations, particularly for the helping professions. You'll examine some of those limitations and discover that rational problem-solving needs to be supplemented with thinking socially. Social thinking is a method that guides much of the processes in macro social work. It is the means by which social issues become resolved and the way communities generate ideas that are superior to those developed by experts. But mare importantly, social thinking is the way that people envision the future, access hope, and escape captivity to present reality. You will learn how to use social thinking to help people engage one another on the common journey of fulfilling meaning and completing the purpose of their lives together.
Making Social Change
People who make social change are change agents. Change agents come from a variety of disciplines and work at resolving different lands of social issues. Ministers engaged in issues of social justice, for example, or scientists involved in protesting against nuclear war are change agents. Envkosimeutalists are
The heart of social change is leadership. (©Kalhy 5loan/Jeroboam, Inc.}
change agents working to save the earth and its ecosystems from destruction. Sociologists who do research on social problems or political scientists who try to improve social policies are change agents, as are public adimnistrators working with or through complex organizations to improve social conditions. Change agents may be ordinary people worldng voluntarily for change in their own communities.
While change agents may come from many walks of life and any number of professions, there is one profession that claims change agent practice as its own. This is the profession of social work. Social workers need to understand how macro social systems work in order to design systems that are better, fix them when they become dysfunctional, challenge those models that are failing, and infuse with integrity and goodness those that are unethical. No other helping profession claims for itself so broad a social mandate as social work.
The heart of making social change is leadership. To some extent, every macro social worker needs be a social leader. In Chapter 4 you'll explore the mast important ideas about leadership and learn bow to apply them in macro social work practice. You will be invited to explore your own personal leadership style and how to use it in working with communities and cn^am7.atiQ"n&. H.ovj ev ex, on "vjiH find tijat wtiai is tra-
ditionally described as leadership today is often nothing but a disguised form of paternalism, particularly as leadership has become redefined as management. Macro social workers reject paternalistic leadership. Instead, you will learn how to help people themselves become leaders who take charge of the social, economic, and political conditions that affect their own lives, and which contributes to the process of social betterment.
The Spectrum of Macro Social Work
Solving social problems and engaging in social change by means of macro social work practice is the heritage, the present responsibility, and the future promise of the social work profession. It is social work's cornmitment to social betterment at all levels that insures its continued impact in our world today. Macro social workers see the spectrum of communities, organizations, society, and global cultures as arenas of their concern and involvement
Community Social Work Part Two of this book is devoted to the practice of community social work: helping communities strengtoettTelatianships between people
CHAPTER 1 Overview of the Practice of Macro Social Work 5
and mediate between individuals and the organizational megastructures of society.2 Next to our families, communities are ourmast basic and necessary social systems. We all find our sense of identity and connectedness to others in cammunity. When our communities begin to erode, people's social bonds become weak. People become alienated from one another and from society as a whole. When communities "become dysfunctional, people fail economically, emotionally, or socially.
For years, communities in both rich and poor nations have been neglected. Some are in disarray. As a result, many communities are rife with violence, poverty, and exploitation. Instead of oases of hope, enlightenment, and meaning they are deserts of despair, ignorance, and alienation. In Chapter 5 you will examine what community is, why it is so important, and why it may seem to be failing today. You will explore how macro social workers become involved with modern communities, communities of meaning or ontological communities, traditional communities, and communities of color.
Community planners are community social workers who assist local community groups develop plans for their own communities and act those plans. In Chapter 6 you will see how community planners work with locality and nonlocality based communities such as the communities of the aged, developmental^ disabled, and others develop and carry out plans for their welfare. You will learn how to do social work community planning and explore a number of planning tools and techniques that you can apply to community projects.
Macro social workers who help make communities better places for individuals and families are called community developers. Community developers work in inner city ghettos, slums, barrios, migrant work camps, reservations, and housing projects of America, bringing people together to build strong human relationships and communication between people, and to provide for individual well being and support for family life. You will discover in Chapter 7 how community developers take on economic development projects and create community development corporations that build housing, open banks, form co-ops, and sponsor many community projects bringing new possibilities and opportunity where despair and hopelessness exists. You will learn how to establish a community development corporation. You will also explore how community development and community organizations work
together in a double pronged approach to community empowerment and how community developers help ontological communities or communities of meaning become strong and healthy.
Some community social workers help overcome the estrangement imposed by large megastructures of corporate and public life. These social workers are called community organizers. Community organization is a process by which neighborhoods and coalitions of neighborhoods work over the long term for community betterment and political empowerment. Community organizers help community members learn bow to use their communities as social tools to invent their own futures and control their own destinies. You will see in Chapter 8 how community organizers assist people to overcome the politics of paternalism that keeps them left out, hold officials accountable to the community, create partnerships with government and business, and in the process reestablish democracy as a vital mode of civic life. You will learn how to do community organizing and discover four kinds of community organization practice models from which you can choose to strengthen neighborhoods.
Organizational Social Work Robert Presthus and others have observed that we live in an organizational society.3 Almost everyone in our society is intimately connected with and draws his or her sustenance from public sector governmental organizations or from private sector business organizations. You will find that while these organizational systems are by and large the reason for the enormous growth of the economy, at the same time they often allow little existential space for human communities. While community social work, therefore, continues to be a needed arena of macro social work practice, you will see in Part Three why organizational social work is rapidly becoming even more important. In Chapter 9 you will leam about the dynamics of modem complex organizations. While organizations and their defects are one reason many of our social problems exist, you will discover that macro social workers and others have been slowly developing a new and unprecedented hybrid form of organization and community by which social problems can be resolved. You will learn how these social organizations are structured, and how macro social workers and others have been forging these new social organizations into a third, relatively new social sector without which
6
government and the economy could not exist.
In Chapter 10 you will find that some macro social workers, called program developers, wort full time constructing these social organizations, and that you too can develop one of these new social organizations. You will discover, for example, how to form a community group, help the group become incorporated, form a board, develop funding, and hire staff. Social organizations require skilled social work administrators to implement change over the long haul. Social work administration, you'll see in Chapter 11, is a complex arena of macro social work practice including supervision, decision-making, budgeting, personnel, and planning. You will find, however, that social administration is not the management of people. You will explore how macro social workers are redefining administration and returning it to its original meaning of service, and you will learn how to carry out adnun-istrative decision-making and administer personnel and ■ finances in organizations.
Sometimes business and governmental organizations become dysfunctional when they fail to adapt to their rapidly changing social environments. When this occurs, corporate and governmental administrators may call upon macro social work consultants called organization developers to help bring their systems back to effective functioning. In Chapter 12 you will learn step by step how these management consultants use conventional organization development techniques to bring about organizational change. However, you will also find out how to use a second, partnership approach to organizational development that is more congruent for use with the new social organizations. You will discover how to assist employees and aomin-istrators work as partners to develop their agencies into patterns of fulfilling relationships and projects of social betterment that engage clients and community in the process of social change.
Societal Social Work la Part Four, which explores the practice of macro social work at the societal and global levels, you will see how macro social workers get involved in politics, policy, social movements, and international social change. In Chapter 13, for example, you learn about a number of theories from which political scientists claim social policy is derived. You will find that some macro social workers become professional politicians by running for
elected office. Ydu will read about some of the more prominent social work politicians. Other macro social workers become professional social policy advocates. You will explore how they write legislation, lobby, give testimony before state legislative bodies and Congress, and work as watchdogs over regulatory commissions to insure that laws, once enacted, are carried out. You will learn all of the necessary steps to help community members devise their own social policy to control their own communities and engage the political process at the local level, where it really belongs. You will discover how to gather facts, decide among various policy alternatives, choose the best policy, and help your community group implement it
Yet you will find that, as important as it is, political processes are sometimes ineffective in bringing about social change. When social problems remain unattended for long periods of time, you will see in Chapter 14 how people have organized themselves into mass social movements to bring social change. In fact, you will learn that social movements including the abolition, women's suffrage, the labor movement, the disabilities movement, lesbian and gay human rights, the environmental movement, and many others are almost endemic to American culture. Macro social workers who either lead or become involved in these societal movements are called social activists. You will examine how macro social work activists organize a modem social movement, and how to use a number of strategies, tactics, and techniques to influence the political process and bring about changes in social policy. You will also find, however, that social movements are not only about changing social policy. We are in the midst of a new social era, even though many are not at all aware of its current existence or its impending impact Socially aware macro social workers and others, you will discover, are keenly conscious of and are working to move society in a completely new direction. They are involved in what have been called "new postmodern social movements." You will learn about these new movements, how they come about, and how you and other macro social workers can work to bring about a new social order.
International Social Work Macro social workers not only want to make their own societies better, but they reach out to poverty-stricken, war-torn areas of third and fourth world countries in Central and South
CHAPTER 1 Overview of the Practice of Macro Social Work 7
One of the most Important roles of macro social workers is to help build communities of people. (Photo by and courtesy of Earl Dotterandthe Center for Community Change]
provides you with a list of resources written by and about many of these macro social work heroes.
One way that you can get involved in social change is to volunteer in a social organization. Look at the listings of domestic as well as international volunteer organisations in Appendix A. Then contact them for more information on how you can get valuable experience in macro social work. Another way to gain more understanding is to join a social organization or find out more about what they do. In Appendix B you will findlistings of many social organizations in each of the arenas of social work described in this book. Write to them for more information, visit, or invite a macro social worker to your class. As you review the wide variety of social organizations mat macro social workers have developed, administer, and serve, you might discover an area to explore for your internship.
A convenient way of accessing information worldwide is by means of your computer. In Appendix C you will learn how to use your computer tD access information about macro social work. You will see a listing of user and newsgroups as well as some resources about macro social work issues to contact
America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where hunger, disease, and poverty exist on a scale that is often unknown in the West In Chapter 15, you will explore how international macro social workers assist in community development projects in these often desperate parts of the world. You will discover how indigenous peoples are transforming their own social worlds by means of new international social movements, and how they are becoming involved in developing new social organizations—mcluding nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—to bring about a better, more humane global society. You will learn how to practice international community social work and find out how you too can be a part of this exciting world of global change.
RESOURCES
In Part Five you will find a number of resources that you can use to expand your understanding about macro social work. Many macro social workers have been heroes of social change who not only practiced change but wrote about it. The epilogue of this book
CHAPTER 2 Social Problems and Social Change
45
governmental leaders, not far permission or approval, but for assistance with action.
Government and business leaders, however, are not used to sharing power or leaving control to others. They are not familiar with agreeing to decisions others make, helping with plans that others create, or following the vision that others see. These "leaders" will need to be resocialized to their new role as partners. It is in this process of helping people redefine and restructure social reality and reformulate the relationship between community, government, and corporate America that macro social workers may make their most substantial contribution toward shaping a new society.
HOW TO SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS
There at least two approaches by which macro social workers can begin tD help people solve social problems. One is a contingency approach. A contingency approach is pragmatic and uses any number of ways to solve social problems. The social change approach takes an entirely different perspective on social problems.
Contingency Approach
Social problems manifest themselves in different ways, depending on the situation. No single solution will resolve all social problems, therefore, nor will the application of a solution at one level resolve how that problem affects people at other levels. Social problems have spillover effects. They spill over to different segments and levels of society. A problem at one level will affect other levels. To attribute all social problems exclusively to any one social assumption is to apply an overly simplistic or narrow view to issues that are complex and often interrelated.
A balanced view would require people to assess a social problem at the level in which the problem occurs, examine the particular context of the specific social problem, and choose a solution between alternative courses of action that meets the demands of the particular situation. Such a view is called a contingency approach. For example, macro social workers and neighborhood residents might adopt a posture of
working on several fronts simultaneously, applying different solutions that attack different aspects of a problem at different levels.
Individuals obviously can be malicious and aggressive for purely psychological reasons. Families sometimes become engaged in violent and abusive behaviors. Some people require individual or family therapy, remedial help, or special programs if they are to function normally in society.105 Child protective social workers, probation officers, and drug counselors would provide assistance to people whose behavior problems have reached the point where they are dangerous to themselves and to others. Counseling and behavioral assistance would be offered to people who have already been damaged by social problems to enable them to develop sufficient inner resources to reengage the struggle for selfhood. In addition, skilled clinicians would train and assist community volunteers to provide help to their friends and neighbors in the form of a therapeutic community.
At the same time, developing better communities, neighborhood social structures, and social peer groups may hold the answer to some social problems. Community social workers would help citizens establish neighborhood planning boards or councils. They would help set up community development corporations and community organizations. Community social workers would assist neighborhood civic associations and churches in partnership with corporate and governmental megastructures to empower local communities and engage local residents to become active in civic and community affairs.
Community social workers would enlist the assistance of social group workers to assist in the provision of neighborhood peer groups, or help neighbors develop an infrastructure of positive peer groups using scouts, YMCAs, Girls and Boys Clubs, church youth groups, and others. They would assist in establishing new community-based social organizations that would provide local social services and programs. A model for such a coordinated community-based system of social care might.be similar to that recommended by Specht and Courtney.105
Macro social workers would also assist coalitions of neighborhood and social organizations to confront megastructures of society that distort the public good for their own self interests, correct systemic social problems, and develop better social policies. Macro
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PART I Solving Social Problems and Making Social Change
social workers, finally, engage in social movements and social action to shift ideologies and practices that have become oppressive, and they work to bring about a healthier global society..
Social Change: Strength/Assets Approach
Looking at the social world from a "problem" orientation has been the conventional way social workers view the human condition. The roots of this problem-oriented focus are in the Enlightenment tradition on which our modern society is based. The Enlightenment tradition gave rise to science and the scientific method, to modem reason and rational problem-solving. Modern science looks at the world as an aggregation of problems to be solved. Once the laws that govern the physical universe are understood, then little by little the puzzles of how they work can be uncovered. When a problem is solved, it is solved once and for all. The new piece of information can be added to all the others, and gradually the entire universe can be predicted and controlled.
This model has been so powerful that it has brought about the marvels of our modem technological age. So it is no wonder that social workers adopted modem reason and modern rational problem-solving and applied them to trying to solve the problems of the human condition. However, perhaps you have already seen that there are a great many complications with looking at the social world from a problem-oriented perspective. Looking at the world as a problem to be solved often distorts our vision. We see personal problems at the individual level and mistake them for social problems. We see children growing up to become criminals and we believe criminality is lodged in parental upbringing or families. The concepts we adopt from mechanistic science, such as systems theory, presume social problems are due to entropy rather than intentional decisions of social leaders. The ideologies such as individualism and self-interest have been credited for solving many of our economic and political problems, but they may actually have caused many social problems at the same time.
We will probably always look at the human condition from the perspective of problem orientation, but there may be a better way to approach how to achieve a better social world. One way is by looking at society from the perspective of social change. Social change
is a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. Instead of looking to the past to discover what went wrong, the social change approach looks ahead to see what is possible. Rather than weaknesses, pathologies, and problems, people are seen as having strengths, possibilities, and solutions with which to build then-own futures. Instead of assuming communities are arenas of neglect, crime, and poverty, community is perceived as full of resources, assets, and strengths that can be used to make a better society. The social change model utilizes this assets-based strength approach.
Ann Weick and Dennis Saleeby assert that "to examine the strengths and resiliencies of people in their everyday lives signals... an important shift in dut thinking."107 When this happens, often with the help of a macro social worker, people begin to gain power. This power comes from a new way of thinking called "social thinldng" in contrast to "rational problem-solving." Thinking socially begins when people apply their common experiences to mutual reflection, thinldng through the issues that plague them, and then arrive at a strategy of action. People who felt helpless, separated, and defeated begin to think anew and act anew. They became new people and begin to conceive and construct the world out of those new perceptions of themselves and one another. What began as a problematic and even self-defeating situation becomes transformed into an opportunity for rebirth and renewal. Macro social workers help mobilize people to utilize their assets so they can construct their communities and build their social reality in the way they conceive best You will find out more about this new approach in the next chapter, and in other chapters that follow.
CONCLUSION
Macro social workers assert that the elimination of many of our social problems requires the active social engagement of people in the processes that contribute to the construction of social reality. Because social problems are part of fundamental principles embedded in the social order, people have a difficult time recognizing and extricating themselves from them. If social problems are to be solved, therefore, macro social workers must have an adequate understanding of society's role in creating social problems, and they must not be naive about the ways that decision-makers justify, rnimmize, evade, deny, and even perpetuate them.
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steps.27 Since then, rational problem-solving, or the generalist social work method, has became a conscious part of the core understanding of social work2E and has been described in many social work texts using various names. Because what is commonly accepted as rational problem-solving is identical to the generalist social work method, I have combined them into the term "rational social work problem-solving" in the description that follows. Today, rational social work problem-solving is systematically used in a number of macro social work contexts-9 such as social work planning, organizational social work, and social policy analysis, and it is synonymous with social work research.30
HOW TO USE RATIONAL SOCIAL WORK PROBLEM-SOLVOTG
Rational social work problem-solving can help you reach a goal efficiently, quickly, and cheaply. Rational social work problem-solving is logical and simple, straightforward and direct. It deals with facts, and as a result, easily lends itself to issues that are clearly defined and can be quantified. It is systematic and sequential. "When you use rational social work problem-solving, you are less likely to miss crucial issues or slap over things that need to be considered.(See Figure 3.1.)
Deciding on a Problem
Deciding on a social problem is the most important part of the problem-solving process. It is also the lengthiest There are two parts to deciding on a social problem: recognizing that a problem exists, and identifying it.
Recognizing the Problem or Issue A social issue, as troublesome as it may be, is not a "problem" until a person or group recognizes and labels it as such. Often social pain and dysfunction exist, but people ignore or deny their existence. Racial discrimination against African Americans, for example, existed since the first slaves were imported to this country. However, racism was accepted as a normal, even necessary, way of life among many members of society and was perpetuated even after the Civil War, until the community of African Americans decided to actively resist. In the same way, the problem of drunken dri-
vers was not a nationally recognized issue until the mother of a child killed by a drunk driver organized MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.
Identifying the Problem Once your cornmunity or arganizational^group recognizes that a problem exists, the members need to identify what specific problem or issues are important. Make a list of the problems or issues confronting your community or organizational group. Then compare your list with the following guides and narrow your choice to one.
Success/id Resolution. Choose an issue that your group has a good chance of resolving successfully. Consider the amount of energy, time, and money you have available. Do not choose a problem that is beyond the resources or the limitations of your group. Rather than a large issue, choose a smaller one that your group has a good chance of solving.
Legitimacy. Select a problem over which your group has some legitimacy. Often community problems are so broad that most community problems can be seen as legitimate ones that you can address. If you are dependent on an agency's financial support, however, make sure that your work falls under the agency's mandate. Otherwise your source of support may disappear or you may be in conflict with the agency. Sometimes the problem being addressed crosses the boundaries of several agencies. In this case it may be helpful to develop a coalition in which agencies and groups from a number of arenas join together in the change effort.
Control Choose a problem that is potentially under the control of your group or one in which control needs to be established. Consider, for example, a group of law-income residents concerned about the inadequate schooling their children are receiving. They may have little control over the school board or its policies. They may have no input into the amount of funding available for their children. This does not mean, however, that they cannot become empowered to gain control or change school policies. They can strategize to gain seats on the board or put pressure on local governments to make funding more equitable. They can gain control over the forces that affect the lives of their children.
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PART 1 Solving Social Problems and Making Social Change
Recognize and Identify the problem
Evaluate the results
GaÜiEr information about the problem
Implement the plan
Develop alternative solutions
Develop a plan of action
Rank the Alternatives
Choose the best alternative solution
FIGURE 3.1 Rational Problem-Solving Cycle
Meaning. Choose a problem that is pressing and current. It should have meaning to the group members, be deeply felt, and be one that can excite and energize them. Its solution should be important to the community as a whole, and the members should have a vested interest in having the situation resolved.
Beneficial Effects. Select a problem that, when resolved, will have far-reaching beneficial
effects. By changing one piece of a problem, your group may begin a process that can bring changes in an entire system. In this way, you can initiate a series of events that can cause an entire facade to crumble. At the very least, your group can prevent future problems from occurring. Make sure that what you are attempting will have a major impact The effort and energy you and your group expend should pay off in tangible benefits.
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CHAPTER3 TheMethDdofSolvlngSoclalProblems 59
A problem-solving group identifies issues by listing the specific problems confronting them. (©Mark Richards/Photo Edit)
If your group has misgivings about any of these issues, resolve them before you commit yourself to working on the problem Your group needs to be fully invested in the issue on which it will be working. After you have identified the problem on which you will work, write down a tentative statement of the problem as it appears to your group.
Gathering Information About the Problem
There are a number of ways of gathering data about a problem. The people of the community Dr organization are the best source of information about what is wrong, and you will spend lots of time talking to them On a more formal level, however, your group can administer surveys to community or organization members or interview key leaders. The group may also collect information about the problem from agency records, newspapers, or other sources. Macro social workers bring people together in focus groups to discuss the problem from various points of view. Regard-
less of the method you use, your group will need to ask the questions why, when, who, where, and how.
Asking Why: Observing Patterns Asking "why" gets at causation, helping you form a social diagnosis of the problem. Once you understand why a social condition exists, you have some control over it Look at your problem definition and then ask "why" until you can go no farther. Suppose, for example, you are working with a community about lack of police protection. Encourage the group members to ask, "Why is there lack of police involvement?" Because the city's priorities are elsewhere. "Why are they elsewhere?" Because neighborhood residents lack input to decision-malting. "Why do they lackinput?" Because they have no effective voice in the process. "Why do they have no voice?" Because the system does not provide for citizen input. "Why not?" Because those in power don't want input. They have excluded people from the process. Asking "why" helps your members focus on one possible cause and-allows them to see patterns that you can use to correct the problem.
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PART 1 Salving Social Problems and Making Social Change
Where: Locating the Pain While the problem-solving group might want to track down the ultimate cause of a social problem, practically speaking, this may be a waste of time. Like the ripples in a pond, one problem creates multiple effects, each of which spreads out from its source, touching more and more systems in its wake. Furthermore, the ultimate cause of a social problem, even if known, may be irrelevant to its effects. The series of events leading up to the Civil War in the United States, for example, began with the importation of the first slave into this country. Knowing this fact added nothing to resolving the eventual conflict and resultant racial discrimination that this act set in motion.
Causation cannot be undone, but the effects of causation can be understood and dealt with. For the most part, therefore, spend your, time understanding the effects of social problems and discovering where in the system the problem is most acute. The "where" may be a physical location. Where in a city or community do the homeless congregate, for example? Where are the slums developing? These should be the areas to which you are drawn.
The social pain may not be located in a geographical place, however, but with particular groups of people who experience the problem. In the past, for example, very few services nationwide were provided for persons with developmental disabilities. Parents, friends, and professionals joined together, identified themselves as a community, and pressed for changes in education, housing, and access to facilities. Bit by bit, attitudes changed and services improved.
Who: Discovering Victims and Perpetrators
By asking "who," your group pinpoints victims and perpetrators. Victims are those who are damaged by a social problem. For example, a bank may have an unwritten rule to not approve home loans within certain areas af the city that it assesses as risky—usually areas high in minorities or low-income residents. Such policies, called redlining, tend to discriminate against minority neighborhoods, making it next to impossible for people to obtain home loans or improve homes, which results in rundown neighborhoods. Redlining makes victims of almost everyone who lives in a targeted neighborhood.
Perpetrators are those who cause, condone, or provide conditions enabling the social problem to exist The individual acts of specific leaders of businesses or organizations formalize and instimtionalize problems
in our social systems. Target the individuals in charge, the leaders, administrators, policy-makers, executives, or others who have control over and can make changes in the system. For example, if redliriing policies exist, who are the particular bank owners, officers, and trustees who formulate and carry out those policies? The process of identifying those responsible for instigating, creating, perpetuating, or condoning social problems helps provide the victims of social problems with tangible, personal targets for change.
When: The Time Frame When did the problem arise and how did it develop over time? Has the problem been increasing over the last six months or year? Answers to these questions help your community or organizational group understand the history, severity, and patterns of the problem What specific events triggered the problem and when did they occur? Getting a chronology of the problem will also tell you about decisions that were made, who made them, and possibly why they were made.
Sow the Problem Occurred If you can understand how a problem developed, you have come a way toward changing it. For instance, you may find out that organizational decisions that once made sense are now outmoded. A system has failed to adjust to changing conditions. Or mistakes were made that have not been corrected and a defective system is being perpetuated. When decision-makers defend the current system by saying ,EWe've always done it this way," or "don't ask questions; these are the rules," there is a good chance that they are allowing system inertia to carry them along. Understanding how organizational or governmental policies and practices came about can help extricate people from dysfunctional patterns in the social system.
On the other hand, you may find that a consciously planned series of events were construed to deprive people of power, control, or resources, keeping them in a position of subservience for the benefit of others. Knowing this history can uncover patterns of systematic abuse and give your members evidence they can use in their struggle to restore justice.
Generating Alternative Solutions
After a problem is selected, defined, and the group members have gathered as much information about it
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as they can, they are ready to consider potential solutions. If the problem has been well researched, generating solutions should be relatively easy. They should flow naturally from the data. Generate as many alternatives as you can that would legitimately solve the problem.
There are some hazards in developing solutions that you should be aware of, however. For example, there is a tendency for individuals or groups to jump to solutions before they have explored the problem in depth. If your group does this, they may be fitting the problem to their own particular solutions. Sometimes people have pet solutions they use to fit any situation, or they may have a tendency to accept the first solution that occurs to them. Try to avoid these pitfalls, because you will be prematurely limiting your search for the solution that can best remediate the social problem.
One way of opening up the group to consider all possible alternatives is to list every possible aspect of the problem that can be changed, eliminating those that cannot be changed. Then, combine these change variables together into various solutions. Eliminate the ones that do not help accomplish at least some of your goals. Your group should now have several innovative solutions to consider.
Assessing and Comparing Alternatives
After the members have generated several potential alternative solutions, help your group decide which one is best Assess each alternative in terms of particular criteria that will give some indicator of success. Problem-solving consists "in the right ordering" or assigning weights to various alternative solutions. As Herbert Simon asserts, "rational decision-making always requires the comparison of alternative means in terms of the respective ends to which they will lead."31
One way of doing this is by means of a force field analysis. Force field analysis was developed by Kurt Lewin and is based on the idea that with every potential solution there are restraining forces, also called disadvantages or costs, and driving forces, also called advantages or benefits.32 Restraining and driving forces are constraints; they are conditions or boundaries that your group decides a solution must meet before it can ba accepted. For example, the members may decide that the mast important constraints are the amount of time, mouey, or manpower it will take to solve the problem.
Some solutions will be more time consuming, cost more money, or require more manpower than others. Driving forces are the benefits or advantages that an alternative will offer. Decide on a standard set of benefits and costs that your group can use to compare alternatives. You need to estimate the strength of these restraining forces and driving forces on a scale. I have used a scale of 0 to 5. Once you have calculated the strengths of both the restraining and the driving forces for a particular alternative solution, array them on table such as the one in Figure 3.2. Force field analysis is a way of deciding rationally on the best solution.
Choosing the Best Solution
By comparing alternative solutions you can see which will have more potential for success. Add up the benefits and subtract this number from the total costs. The alternative with the highest number will give you an indication of which solution has more power. Another way of calculating is to compute a benefit/cost ratio. The ratio will tell you what chances any one alternative will have of succeeding. A benefit/cost ratio that is equal to or above 1 (B/C=l) will provide your group with at least an even chance of succeeding. The higher the benefit/cost ratio the better.
When calculating benefit/cost ratios, ignore negative numbers. Compute the ratio by dividing total benefits by total costs. In the force field diagram in Figure 3.2, the benefit/cost ratio is B/C=l 1/12. Would the alternative be one to seriously consider? Why or Why not? What if the benefit/cost ratio were 12/24? What if it were 12/6?
Developing a Change Strategy
Deciding how to implement the solution that your group chooses is called a strategy for change. In many cases the change strategy will flow directly from the problem solution and almost be self-evident However, there is a more formal way of developing a strategic plan. Here are the various steps that your action group can take to develop your change strategy.
Goals Planning for action begins with setting goals. Begin with ultimate or long-range goals. More than likely there will be only one or two ultimate goals. On a chalkboard or newsprint, place a long-range goal on the far right. Now work backward, identifying intermediate goals and immediate, short-term goals. List
62
PART 1 Solving 5octal Problems and Making Social Change
Restraining forces -5
money
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t +1 +2 +3 +4 qu		quality maty			+11
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effectiveness
FIGURE 3.2 Force-Field Analysis Alternative I
all of the events that should occur that might precede accompbshing each long-range goal.
Objectives What specific things need to be accomplished in order to reach the mid-range goals? These become objectives. Each objective should meet three criteria. It should be: (1) time limited, (2) specific, and (3) measurable. For example, "The police department will provide one additional patrol officer on Elm Street by June 1, 2003." Branch these objectives off from the mid-range goals. You may have several objectives preceding each goal.
Tasks Break down each objective into tasks required. Tasks are specific duties or steps members must take to reach objectives. Tasks may be printing information, calling meetings, contacting the media, meeting with perpetrators, or other actions.
Tactics Tactics tell you how to carry out tasks, especially activities that are politically sensitive, or that are complex and require coordination of members. Community organization tactics may include holding public hearings, meeting with government or
political officials, or lobbying, among others. When deciding on specific tactics, be sure that the group members, give thought to the lands of resistance they might encounter from power figures and how they might overcome resistance.
Targets Often your tactics will include identifying specific targets. Targets are the key power figures in business, government, or the community that your group wants to influence, change, co-opt, or whose support is crucial to the project
Reviewing Your Strategy Review your strategy. There may be duplication. Some issues may be irrelevant or subsidiary. New ideas may have occurred to your group. Revise the plan. Develop a backup or contingency plan. Try to anticipate what could go wrong with your strategy. For example, what if you do not meet your objectives? What alternative objectives are there? What if your tactics backfire? What other tactics or targets should be considered? Be prepared to think through these issues so that you will not be caught off guard if (Mugs do not go the way you expect.
CHAPTER 3 The Method of Solving Social Problems
63
Finalizing the Plan After reviewing the strategy, your group is ready to firialize the plan. Decide on the sequence of events that need to be orchestrated in order to accomplish your group's goals. Do certain events, tasks, or activities need to precede others? Which things do the members need to do first, second, or third? Create time-lines. Then assign individuals to those tasks and get commitment from the members to carry them out. Make a list of those assignments and deadlines.
Implementing the Solution
Implementation means carrying out the strategy you have decided on. Members of your group become the nucleus around which the community becomes organized, a program is developed, or a social plan is implemented. Community meetings, for example, inform people about the problem and the proposed solutions. Members also promote community involvement, soliciting help from other community members, and begin organizing the change effort. Your group members may chair committees or lead task forces committed to carrying out the goals of the project They may even join the board of a social service organization.
Evaluating the Results
Throughout the change process, you need to evaluate its progress. Perhaps the easiest, most useful, and most immediate evaluation is feedback. After meetings, or at least periodically, your group should spend time "debriefing." Debriefing gives members a chance to share stories, let off steam, get recognition, enjoy triumphs, and obtain support when things have not gone well.
Debriefing empowers your group and provides a learning tool for the members. The group has acquired valuable information about resistance, system dynamics, and power structures. Members learn about change and the change process by sharing and involving themselves with one another. Learning takes place as people talk about problems, share perceptions, and wrestie with what to do next. Debriefing helps group members determine whether their predictions about what would happen were correct. Armed with this new information, your group can reassess the situation, mpdify your strategy, plan, and move ahead.
In addition to debriefing, more formal evaluation processes may be used. For example, keep records of meetings and activities and refer back to them, particularly reviewing progress toward objectives. This will help members shift strategy, keep track of events, and make sense of what has occurred. Writing often helps develop ideas and gain insights. This information also can be helpful in developing a history of the change effort.
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A CRITIQUE OF RATIONAL SOCIAL WORE PROBLEM-SOLVING
The rational social work problem-solving approach eliminates nonquantifiable values, feelings, or intuition that are not capable of calculation.33 It is helpless in understanding or developing social goods and fails to assist in overcoming social problems or social "bads."
Values
Social work in general (and macro social work in particular) is a highly value-laden field. Because values are nonquantifiable, tiiey are beyond the realm of rational problem-solving. Rational social work problem-solving cannot evaluate whether the values
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PART 1 Solving Social Problems and Making Social Change
inherent in decisions are worthwhile or even what constitutes a good or correct decision.34 Decisions themselves are not judged according to their intrin-sic worth, truth, or goodness, but rather in terms of their utility. If we accept the ends of those in power as they are given, we are precluded from evaluating the goodness or badness of those goals or ends. Alberto Ramos asserts, for example, that "rational man is unconcerned with the ethical nature of ends per se. He is a calculatrve being intent only on accurately finding adequate means to accomplish goals." This is why rational problem-solving is "instrumental...it functions to map out terrain and achieve goals."35 It is a purely "technical calculation of means; it contributes nothing substantive to the grasp Df ends or values themselves."36 As a result, you will encounter difficulties where rival ends are in question, where multiple values are involved, or where corifhcting values are at stake, such as often occurs in working with communities.
Rational problem-solving is value-skewed. It considers quantification, utilitarian application, facts, and profit as values of the highest order. Other values that escape calculation are simply not recognized. According to Zey, "the values at the basis of preferences do not concern rational choice theorists. What is assumed is that actions are undertaken to achieve objectives that are consistent with the actors preference hierarchy. The substance of these values and their source are irrelevant to RTC."37 Value or ethically laden issues such as social goods, asserts Ramos, "have no place in the area of rational debate."38
The only values that are recognized in rational problem-solving are the pre-given ends, which are inherent in the problem itself. If, for example, the end is to increase the tax base of a deteriorating urban inner city, rational problem-solving can assist in deciding which among such alternatives as building a parking lot, a high-rise office building, a park, or a shopping mall is the most cost beneficial. The issue of whether destroying the neighborhood itself is worthwhile is not open for consideration, nor are the opinions of the residents, the value of the neighborhood that is to be destroyed, or the lives of the people to be removed. It is impossible to use modem reason to decide between the value of a community of people, even those living in a deteriorating slum, and that of a parking lot or shopping mall.
As a result of using modem rational problem-solving for the majority of our decisions, we have emptied decisions of moral content to such an extent that there are no "evil decisions or actions. There are only mistakes."39 The world is reducible to errors only. Those errors can be discovered, corrected, and eradicated. Morality has become reduced to calculation, and to error reduction.
If social work were to attempt to exempt itself from immersion in the world of human values, it would become wholly inhuman, impersonal, and antithetical to itself. This sometimes happens as social workers, in an attempt to appear objective and impartial, adopt a value-neutral stance in relation to social decisions. Furthermore, a calculative logic can pervade organizations where strict adherence to rules and procedures captures the way people engage one another. When this occurs, we deprive ourselves of the ability to think in valuational terms at all. Values themselves become suspect, and we are persuaded to distance ourselves from them as if they were dangerous. Scnimmel, for example, asserts that
Amoral psychology is uncomfortable with "oughts"—it prefers tD think that it can deal with facts about human nature, shunning values. This is neither possible nor desirable for real, living humans, whose lives are an inseparable interweaving of fact and value. As long as secular psychology continues to avoid confronting the role that values play in everyday life—what is right and wrong for us to do to ourselves and. others...it will fail to ameliorate our anxieties. We need to reclaim the rich insights into human nature of earlier moral reflection if we want to lead more satisfying lives.40
The values implicit in rational problem-solving promote self-interested maximizing behavior. When you selfjessly give to overcome misery, poverty, or injustice, you are acting irrationally by standards of modern reason. Modern reason, in fact, is opposed to altruistic, compassionate action, one of the core components of social work.41
In addition, if you rely on modern reason you may often tend to abandon thinking critically about social policy and social decisions. Instead, you may uncritically accept the ends and goals of those in authority, the theories of respected academics, and the ideologies of popular politicians, and apply yourself
I-
I-
I
I V-,
only to the task of how to implement those ideas. To the extent that you adopt the premises of modern reason and embed them in the generalist social work method, therefore, you deprive yourself of the ability to think valuationally, may harden yourself against compassion, and may- uncritically adopt morally obtuse solutions to social problems. If you use value-neutral, impersonal reason, you may attach yourself to the application of technical expertise, rather than infuse yourself with altruism and shared meaning. You sit at the conference table of top-down, expert scientific logic rather than in the company of bottom-up social thinking where values are a core component.
Emotions
Emotions suffuse one's existence and are an ineradicable component of the human condition. Feelings of love and compassion when combined with ethical values can call forth acts of the greatest humanity and altruism. Emotions, however, are not compatible with impersonal, objective calculation. Feelings are seen as unreliable and values antithetic to objective fact gathering. As a result, in order to achieve a reliable model that is unbiased and strictly neutral, modem reason was intended to eliminate from decisionmaking all emotions that "escape calculation."42 The key to modem problem-solving is its impersonality and strict adherence to calculable rules in which every situation is treated alike. For this reason, modern problem-solving promotes standardization, uniformity, and attention to facts, regardless of one's feelings.
Social workers who are trained as psychotherapists to be sensitive to emotions and understand "unconscious" irrational components of human behavior will face difficulties when the primary social work problem-solving method is completely blind to feelings and denies their utility in decision-making. It also complicates decision-making for macro social workers, whose main role is to develop more human, personal, and fulfilling social relationships.
Private, Public, and Social Goods
Modem reason is overwhelmingly successful and effective for making economic decisions in the private sector based on maximizing the self-interest of an individual or of a firm, the arena for which it was
CHAPTER 3 The Method of Solving Social Problems
65
designed. Rational problem-solving is used with somewhat less success in public-sector decisionmaking, the domain of public goods.43 On the other hand, rational social work problem-solving is applied with nearly complete failure in the social sector, the arena of social welfare, where social goods are produced.
Private Goods Private goods are tangible goods and services that are produced by the private sector of the economy, which is the one sector of society where modem reason can be applied most effectively. Modern reason is meant to calculate how to maximize the private interests of individuals, interest groups, and business corporations in attaining their goals in the most efficient way. Modern reason is exactly compatible in the economy because private goods are easily quantifiable, priceable, and consumable. They can be bought and sold. Rational calculation is the means by which decision-makers in the economic sector produce private goods.
Public Goods When issues involving public goods are encountered, rational problem-solving begins to suffer failure. This becomes a serious consideration in the political arena, where questions of value and what is the best use of public goods comes into question. Public goods are things of common value such as the environment, public health, or the people's welfare—goods that cannot be privately produced in the economic sector. Unlike private goods, public goods cannot be possessed by anyone but are "owned" in common. They can only be produced, protected, or regulated by a governance system that is accountable to all. Public goods such as highways, for example, cannot be privately bought or sold. Once they are produced, they become available to all. No one can be excluded from their benefits. They "spill over" to everyone. Neither can public goods be privately consumed. A person cannot own or privately consume his or her share of national defense, for example. Nor can someone purchase more national defense than is commonly available or sell his portion to others.
In the same way, when public "bads" occur, they affect everyone. If a company pollutes the air, everyone who breathes that air is affected. If people plunder a public good such as the ocean for their own benefit, everyone is affected when the ocean becomes depleted of fish.
CHAPTER 3 The Method of 5olving Social Problems 71
The social worker must, in some ways, help people think like artists, using intuition-r-people's dreams and visions, hope and faith. While visions and dreams are nonrational and nonquantifiable, they are often the substance on which community is built. The wisdom literature of the Hebrews recognized this truth: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." When people interact together and envision things as they might be, they use their common intuition. Intuition and imagination are the foundation of hope. "It is a common experience that before action, a human being visualizes a desired result. He visualizes the future and undertakes to bring it about"51
Cognitive Thinking
Thinking is one way of malting decisions using information gathered by your senses or your intuition. Your thinking function helps you decide by looking logically and analytically at things, and using cognition to understand situations. When you use your thinking function, you will be interested in what is objectively right or wrong. You will be critically minded, seeing the consequences of decisions, even when they are unpleasant. Your thinking function helps you to not falter when the facts point to difficult realities, and to stand against opposition. By using logic and analytical skills, you hold to a position that is right particularly if supported by facts. When you use your drinking function, you are deciding with your head and not your heart Your thinking function helps develop theories and use ideas to solve problems. If you have a highly developed flunking function, you may tend to be tough minded and firm. You will want to be treated with fairness and honesty and may get particularly concerned when others are dishonest or treat people unfairly.
Sensing/Acting
Your sensing function honors irnmediate experience as a valid form of knowledge. Your sensing function enables you to see the world realistically and pragmatically. It helps you conceive of solutions to problems and put a plan into action. Your sensing function helps you get beyond concepts or theories. It helps you deal with details of everyday reality, and with how to put together a project or construct a program.
If you have a highly developed sensing function, you tinker with the machinery of life, get immersed in fixing things and working on details, and face present issues realistically. When you perceive with your sensing function, you see the real world as it is with your eyes, not imagine it as it could be with your intuition, or as it should be with your feelmg/valuing.
Sensing, however, is more than merely grasping experience in its raw state. Your sensing function helps you move to action to accomplish something, and to see the results of that action in tangible programs and services. Of all the ways of understanding, thinking by doing is among the most important You learn by doing, by putting your feelings, intuition, and ideas into practice. The more you practice, the more experience you acquire, the more your feelings become useful, the more insights you develop, the more ideas you have, and the more skills you have. The crux of social tiiinking is putting all of your functions into action.
SOCIAL THINKING
AND MACRO SOCIAL WORK
Each of us has the four functions—feeling, intuiting, sensing, and thinking—at our disposal. However, each of us gradually adopts one dominant way of perceiving the world and one way of making decisions with which we are more comfortable. For example, you may grasp information primarily by means of your senses and transform that information into decisions or ideas by means of your value/feelings. Your intuition and thinking are subsidiary functions. You may grasp information by your intuition and make decisions by means of your thinking function supported by sensing and feeling/valuing. The particular functions you choose depend on any number of factors, such as your genetic predisposition, your family upbringing, conditions in your environment, or circumstances that you encounter in your life.
The strength of one or another of these functions determines your own social thinking style. There is no one right or wrong style. All combinations are useful under different circumstances. The more conscious you are of your own social thinking style, the more in control and aware you become in using yourself productively. You can choose to develop your subsidiary
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PART 1 Solving Social Problems and Making Social Change
functions more fully in order to become a more whole and stronger problem-solver. You can also become more conscious of how you use your functions when you work on solving social problems. In addition, as you grow older, your more dominant functions will tend to give way to those that are only used in a subsidiär}' way now. The more you are aware of these changes, the more you can guide yourself in gaining strength in the use of all your functions.
Moreover, the more variety of functions that are available, the wider the range of experiences, and the more perspectives you can apply to a social problem, the better chances are that the social problem can reach a satisfactory conclusion. As a macro social worker, you understand that your own perceptions and perspectives are inevitably limited. You understand that the broad combination of functions and perspectives which community members possess will guarantee that the ultimate strategies and processes they adopt will have a greater chance of success. The more you exercise your social thinking functions, the more skill and ability you will acquire. The full range of social flunking functions must be included and engaged by people at the local level. As you engage issues together, the dominant functions of some will complement the dominant functions of others. Even though any one or two people may not be able to completely access the full range of trtinking, as more people are engaged, the entire community develops "whole mind" social thinking. Ofou and your classmates may be interested in exploring your own social thinking functions more in depth. Checklist 3.2 at the end of this chapter will assist you in learning more about our own thinking functions.)
HOW TO ENGAGE THE SOCIAL THINKING PROCESS
Social thinlcing often occurs as people experience a social situation that may cause dissonance. As people gather together, however, they share their mutual feelings about that experience and filter it through their values to make sense of it. They engage in mutual reflection by means of their intuition and begin to generate common understanding about what that dissonance means. They use cognition to examine the
facts and develop a strategy of action. Once a strategy is in place, people test themselves in the fires of experience, putting their new understandings into action. However, these different steps are not sequential. They are reciprocal and build on Dne another.
Sensing/Experiencing: Cognitive Dissonance
In many situations of everyday life "action proceeds automatically, without any consciousness of meaning." Only when some difficulty arises in the course of an action or experience will a person be prompted to be "conscious of meaning, thought, and a disruption of mechanical repetition."52 The disruption of our normal thoughts when an incident in our social environment becomes incongruent with our ordinary life experiences is called cognitive dissonance. Many people, for example, experience something as tragic, wrong, or unjust A gap exists between what is and what ought to be. People are jolted out of their ordinary activities and are confronted with trying to understand the meaning that the Discontinuity creates. They try to cope with their feelings and wrestle with their values, while at the same time they struggle to make sense of what has happened. The result is often a reorientation of consciousness and an attempt to establish a new meaning for the self.
Social workers are very familiar with these experiences. They occur during times of crisis, such as when a loved one dies, aperson loses his or her job, or atragedy suddenly occurs. Social workers apply social thinking to help people cope with these personal crises and wrestle with the inevitable process of working through grieving and putting their lives back together.
On the other hand, some people are burdened with an ongoing, chronic sense of dissonance. Their entire existence becomes problematic because of the life situation in which they find themselves. For people who experience social problems such as efbrtic intolerance, gender discrimination, prejudice because of sexual orientation, or economic injustice, dissonance is an ongoing, chronic, daily experience that saps their energy, destroys their identity, and injures their spirit. Unlike grieving over a death or a particular injustice, the experience of social difficulties is so generalized that their entire life is experienced as problematical, as tragic,
CHAPTER 3 The Method of Solving Social Problems
73
and there is often no one specific incident or experience onto which grieving can be attached.
Such social dissonance throws the meaning of one's entire existence into question. Unlike personal tragedies, the common dissonance that people feel who share injustice and oppression cannot be dealt with individually, but only commonly. Sharing feelings in common becomes the way in which new meaning and new solutions can occur. It is also the way community often comes about The very experience of common troubles brings people together in community, and community often becomes the means by which those troubles can be overcome.
Shared Interaction: Feelings and Values
The experience of oppression and injustice that megastructures impose on the human condition is inevitably ahenating. It creates a sense of isolation, disengagement, and guilt. It drives out the social, destroys the basis of communality, and undermines people's resolve to transcend their distress. However, most macro social workers understand that the way people can begin to Teclaim their lives is by rejecting alienation and its effects. When people begin talking together about their mutual experiences, they become connected with one another. The common memories of injustice and oppression become a cohesive force that cements them together. Their mutual history binds them together into a community.
Sharing feelings is therapeutic in another way. As . people begin to face their feelings, the depression and hopelessness and guilt that once enveloped them begin to give way to anger. Anger helps people translate their apathy into action.
Intuitive Reflection
Herbert Blumer asserts that a community of persons who are experiencing dissonance must confront a world that they must interpret in order to act Communities of people use intuition as a means of active reflection to understand the events that confront them. Active reflection means to set yourself aside momentarily to allow new perceptions of reality to enter your consciousness. When this happens, you transcend ordinary reality and open yourself to alternative per-
ceptions of the world. When people in community generate these new ways of looking at things, often assisted by a macro social worker, they provide new perspectives, new alternatives, new ideas, and new ways of becoming and being.
Active intuitive reflection is very different from scientific thinking or rational problem-solving, in which a narrow, highly disciplined method is used to apprehend reality and to see things in a narrow sense. This is one reason social problems cannot be solved by top-down solutions or by experts who provide ready-made solutions to people. Instead, people refuse to accept the conventional or presumed definition of things or to take at face value what those in power assert is true. As your community sees what a situation means for themselves, they begin to understand what may only be implicit in a situation. Their intuitive social consciousness helps them understand the meaning behind the reality that presents itself. When this occurs, your members understand their situation not as tragic, but often as having transcendent importance, and in some cases they are compelled to rise above their own solitary interests and alienation which separates them. As Lauer and Handel point out, meaning is not an external phenomenon imposed on an individual; instead, "meaning emerges from the interaction process."53 According to Kaufman,
The values of human Me never come about automatically..The human being can lose his own being hy his own choices; a tree or stone cannot Affirming one's own heuig creates the values of life.... Individuality, worth, and dignity are not gegeben; given to us as data by nature, but aufgegeben—given or assigned to us as a task which we ourselves must solve.54
There is no meaning in merely calculating alternative preferences and choosing the best one among them by rational problem-solving. The process of infusing meaningfumess into one's life can occur only in cormnurnty as people reflect on their common experiences.
Cognitive Thinking: Developing a Strategy-After your cDmmunity develops a vision of what is possible, along with a shared identity and mutual
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PART 1 Solving 5ocial Problems and Malting Social Change
sense of their own common destiny, they begin to look clearly at the facts that have placed them in the particular situation in which they find themselves. They begin to gather information. Members put facts together to form a pattern. This helps them understand cognitively and empirically what their feelings and intuition have already told them. Unlike emotion and intuition, however, the facts help people deal with the concrete reality. Facts help them identify perpetrators, patterns, and opportunities and make decisions about what kind of action to take.
Cognition in combination with intuition helps communities of the oppressed imagine alternative strategies that they can put into action. Consider, for example, a problematic situation in which several alternatives are suggested for a situation, Duly one of which can be implemented As members intuit the various meanings that are implicit in the situation, they can review their joint past experiences with each different type of response and imagine the consequences of miplementing them, and "new real possibilities emerge in the process of interaction between individuals as they cooperate in a common environment"55
Moving to Action: Thinking as Doing
Action is not simply a mechanism of carrying out a strategy, a mechanism of operating that has no other meaning than the final step, like pushing a button to turn on a machine. Instead, meaning is a personal investment of yourself along with others who likewise commit themselves to a cause, a goal, an idea. Blumer states that a community uses meaning as the basis for directing its action.56 George Herbert Mead asserts that "when we respond to an act, we generate meaning. Meaning is not in the objects or in the event that impinges on us, but in the response that we make to the event....We generate meaning when we take action about an event in our lives. The meaning that the event has for us becomes part of our repertoire of behaviors which we have generated."57
Community members use cognition to think through the issues that confront them, but cognition related to the meaning of the situation, not merely to accounting for the least cost or most efficient solution. Community members ascertain the meaning of the actions of others and map out their own line of action
in the light of such interpretation.58 In social thinking, action itself is just as important as the motives behind it. It is the experience of putting yourself into the arena of action that is crucial.59
The power of social tMnlting does not stand or fall on the selection of the best alternative; nor does it depend on the success of a particular strategy, as it does in rational problem-solving. With social thinking, any number of strategies can be used. If one strategy does not work, community members can try another. In social thinlting, the failure of a strategy is just as important as its success. If one "response is unsuccessful, we become consciously concerned with meaning until we arrive at a solution and satisfactory meaning is achieved."60 It is the meaning of events that is important, not only whether you win the struggle. Learning does not take place in a world where everything goes according to plan. It is in learning how to cope with failure, imperfection, and incompleteness in yourself and in others that you become mature and refine your plan's direction.
The very act of doing is the means by which thought is engaged. Putting values, feelings, intuition, and cognition into action is a rehearsal for testing out new ways of action, which generate new experiences and pave the way for more value generation, intuitive reflection, meaning generation, and more action.
This process of thinking socially is congruent with a "strength perspective" and aproactive model of social change, Ann Weick and Dennis Saleeby assert that, in fundamental ways, "the strength perspective changes the modernist heritage of psychopathology and problem-solving which has permeated social work practice for a significant part of this century."51 Social thinlting focuses on the hopes, meaning, and power of people who want to build a life for themselves and their children. While your community members may begin with few physical resources, when they work together they use their aspirations and strengths to add to the resources they have.
THE SOCIAL
EMANCIPATION
OF SOCIAL WORKERS
Modernity is dominated by the economy, in which the social is relegated to a restricted and often msignif -
CHAPTER H Leadership: The Hallmark of Macro 5odal Work 87
trusive controls by shaping what gets coramnnicated to whom, developing the organization's own internal language, and by channels of decision-making.
The way we structure organizations reinforces the view that leadership resides in only a few who dispense opportunity for advancement, benefits, and status. Because command-oriented hierarchical management has become the means by which superior/subordinate relationships are devised, many of us accept as normal the surrender of our autonomy and the prerogative of those in charge to decide for us. Given its premises and its perspective on human character, business management of necessity is paternalistic or patriarchal. Fully functioning adult humans are assumed to be incapable of managing themselves and therefore need to be managed by a boss. We come to depend on those in charge because we are forced to obtain their approval before we can take action.
We expect the manager to tell us what to do, and because power along with the capacity to dispense favors resides at the top, we look for strong leaders to provide what we cannot give ourselves—the capacity to decide our own futures.21 "The wish for leadership is, in part, our wish to rediscover hope and...have someone else provide it for us... .We hold to the belief that hope resides in those with power."22 Eventually we begin to live the myth that if we do not have sponsorship from the top, we cannot realize our intentions.
Paternalistic management is self-reinforcing. It keeps us in helpless, dependent positions and usurps our capacity to decide for ourselves. Eventually we become convinced of our own inability to take responsibility. Herbert Simon asserts that we accept decisions made by others because of our "simple unwillingness or disinclination to accept responsibility.... If the assigned task is not unduly unpleasant, many individuals would prefer being told what to do to being forced to make the decisions themselves."23
Strong leadership is something we desire because we have been socialized to beUeve we need leaders who are powerful and in control, leaders of vision who can take us to places we have never been before. Paternalistic leadership does not question its own desire for dominance. All that business and political leaders ask is that we trust them and allow them to lead. In return we ask only that dominance be implemented humanely. The handcuffs of control become golden when they are fitted with the promise of protection and satisfaction.24
Managerial Leadership
Managers are desperate to win the competitive race by having their companies succeed. They are burdened with the continual task of squeezing more productivity out of their employees. For nearly 100 years begirining with Frederick Winslow Taylor's book Scientific Management,25 managers have struggled with how to motivate workers to accept decisions made by others, assume responsibilities imposed on them, and perform tasks which are boring, physically demanding, distasteful, or even dangerous. One of the more recent variations in this effort has been to redefine management as leadership, as if imputing substantive content onto the managerial role will make a difference. Browsing through the business management section of your local bookstore will reveal how many popular management "gurus" redefine management into "visionary," "enlightened," "empowering" leadership. Yet for all the efforts of managerial theorists to paint paternalism with the glitter of egalitarian, employee-centered, and visionary leadership, instrumental management remains handicapped by its top-down hierarchical premises and a self-interested, privatized, control orientation.
There is a fundamental difference between corporate management by which private firms operate and authentic leadership by which people in community and society find direction. Management is appropriate in command structures of privately owned firms, threat systems such as the rnilitary and police, and systems requiring speed and effectiveness such as emergency medical services. Management can be an acceptable means of inducing people to become machinery of productivity, defense, or saving lives so long as we consciously, ethically, and with full information decide to accept a functional role in return for rewards that a job offers. But when management is presumed to be leadership at large, or a means by which we achieve access to authentic direction in life, then management exceeds its boundaries, leads us astray, and becomes deceitful. Moreover, when social workers use instrumental management because we have not conceived of Dther ways of leading, we deceive ourselves. When social workers adopt hierarchical structures in which people are assumed to be docile, dependent, and irresponsible, we lead ourselves and our clients astray. Today, however, macro social workers are helping us understand the necessity of deciding for ourselves, following our own
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You observe but also engage members, make connections, and see relationships and patterns. You reflect back to members the issues they have been describing, picking up themes and messages, ideas and insights.
You use your thinldng function to help your members confront the past You use your intuition to inspire a shared vision. You use your feeling/valuing function to help create community. You use your sensing function to help the community move to action.
SOCIAL LEADERSHIP AND THE FOUR FUNCTIONS
Although the social leadership model is presented as a cycle (see Figure 4.2), you may begin anywhere along this continuum and move either backwards or forwards, depending on the issues that confront you in building community and solving social problems.
Using Your Thinking Skills to Confront the Past
When you use your thinking function, you help your members gain a sense of the injustices that have been perpetrated against them. You confront the way things have been done in the past that create troubles in the present. You challenge the way tilings are done today, so as to bring about a better tomorrow. You help people develop a sense of mission that can shape and improve their lives. Community members who have a clear sense of direction are best able to lead themselves and help others develop an idea of where they want to go. As Burton Gummer asserts, "People who present clear and convincing arguments for taking action in situations where knowledge is limited or absent will be influential in shaping the thinking and behavior of others."29
Your ihinking function gives you stability and consistency. "It is consistency between words and actions that build your credibility."30 Management consultant Edgar Shein says, "I learned that my own consistency sends clear signals to audience about my priorities, values, and beliefs. It is the consistency that is important, not the intensity of attention."31 You use your thinking to help your members develop a set of
intentions, outcomes, goals, and directions for themselves. Your thinking function helps you and your members become confident in your ability to make things happen,33 and helps you access members' confidence as well. You know what results you and your members are trying to accomplish.
If you are firm in your thinldng function, you stand up for your beliefs and assist members to firm up their beliefs. You practice what you preach and show others by your own example; you live by the values that you profess. You are not simply committed to truth and justice in the abstract; you exemplify the truth in your own life and actions. Your thinldng function helps you focus yourself, and your members gather strength and confidence in using their thinldng function as well.
Using Intuition to Inspire a Shared Vision
The members of your community must have a vision to effect social change. You help your members generate a shared vision of where they want to go. According to Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, "Vision is the key to leadership." Unless your members have a vision of where they are going, they are not going to get there.33
Your community members "begin with imagination and with the belief that what is merely an image can one day be made real."34 You accept your members as they are, damaged and hard pressed on every side, and help them envision themselves as they might be. As you talk with the members and affirm their perceptions, you help members gather their hopes and dreams about what is possible. You help articulate those dreams and assist your members to rekindle inside themselves what is theirs—a future possibility, even though few may see it clearly. You assist your members to envision the outcome and help them head toward it.
"Every organization, ever}' social movement begins with a dream. The dream or vision is the force that invents the future."35 This dream gives shape and meaning to people's lives. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. combined his thinking function, challenging injustice with an intuited vision. He "envisioned the future 'gazing across the horizon of time' and imagining that greater tilings were ahead. [He] foresaw something
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; t-
ŕ
Thinking to confront the past
Sensing to change the present
Intuiting to envision the future
Feeling to build organization or community
s
| ■ '    FIGURE 4.2 Social LeadErship and the Four Functions
out there, vague as it might appear from the distance, that others did not. [He] imagined that extraordinary feats were possible,...that the ordinary could be transformed into something noble."36
You reflect their vision back to your members so that they see themselves and their purposes anew; they see their common future and the possibilities of what they can do and be. The community becomes the vehicle by which the shared vision is transmitted.
Using Your Feeling Function to Create Community
As you hold to your sense of justice and engage in a shared vision with your members, use your feeling function to help members form themselves into community partners in block clubs, neighborhood associations, community organizations, community planning boards, community development corporations, and social organizations. Using your feeling function, you reach out to those who may be alone,
alienated, separated, distrustful, and disengaged from one another. You engage others, connect people, and help bind your members together. If you do nothing else, you do this. Going out into the neighborhood, you bring people in. You invite them to share their difficulties and disappointments, successes and failures; you listen as they recount their stories, and you affirm their feelings. You listen to their values and help unite them into a community.
Leaders find that common thread that weaves together the fabric of human needs into a colorful tapestry. They seek out the brewing consensus among those they would lead. In order to do this, they develop a deep understanding of the collective yearnings. They listen carefully for quiet whisperings in dark corners. They attend to subtle cues. They sniff the air to get the scent They watch, faces. They get a sense of what people want, what they value, what they dream about37
By being fully human, having passion for the cause, and being genuine and real to others, you bring
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your feeling/valuing function to leadership. You often may feel strongly about the issues that engage your community, and you let your passion show. As you do this, you set a tone of engagement and accessibility, an atmosphere in which your members depend on and reach out to one another.
You enable and encourage members to respond to one another with caring and compassion, with commitment and cohesion. The real flesh and blood encounters with one another and the feelings that are elicited add substance to the dream so that it is not a vision only, but a reality that occurs as people engage one another in mutuality and trust. In doing this you foster collaboration, strengthening, and enlisting others in capturing the future that your members were meant to have.
In forming community you help discover meaning. You "act as a channel of expression between the down-to-earth followers and their other worldly dreams,"35 not only communicating but creating meaning as well. Social work leaders attempt to become the embodiment of the truth of the community, a truth that makes this people unique. This uniqueness gives your people their sense of identity, their own particularity, which sets them apart from all others. This "differentness," cherished and prized among people, fosters pride and self-respect As you prize your own thinking, mtmting, and feelings/values, you model your differentness and lead others to take pride in theirs.
Using Your Sensing Function to Move to Action
Armed with facts, a vision, and having formed a community of the oppressed, you use your sensing function as one who "commits people to action, who converts followers to leaders, and who converts leaders into agents of change."39 Delving into the practical everyday life of your members, you assist them to grasp the hands-on realities of shaping and forming abetter world for themselves. You work with them as they develop programs, engage in political activities, or work in wider social movements. Your members may have to acquire particular skills such as doing research, leading meetings, speaking at public hearings, organizing committees, writing proposals, seeking funding, hiring staff, training a board, proposing policy, carrying out services. Members may discover talents they did notrealize they had, and they put those talents to use in meaningful work that contributes to the common good.
By developing tangible services and programs, community members discover strength in action. Relationships take shape as people become servants to one another and as they meet the real needs of those who are in trouble and in pain. You keep your eye on the larger picture, as your community moves ahead one step at a time. You help break larger problems into small units, and the community gains with small wins. "The magic in small wins is the experimentation process, or setting up little tests that continually help you learn something."40
The social leadership process now comes full circle. You help members challenge injustice with their thinking function, apply their intuition to hold onto their dream in the face of challenges, draw on their feeling/valuing function to strengthen the community in times of stress, and use their sensing functions to immerse themselves in strategizing and planning.
GROUP-CENTERED LEADERSHIP
In 1969 Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard, two organizational psychologists, developed a leadership model that they called "3-D Leader Effectiveness Theory,"41 later termed "situational leadership." Hersey and Blanchard assumed that individuals in groups go through various phases of development As people develop their abilities, their needs change. As a macro social worker, you adapt your style to these changing situations. Hersey and Blanchard conclude that you modify your guidance and direction and the amount of socio-emotional support you offer, depending on the readiness level of members.
Levels of Member Readiness
Hersey and Blanchard defined four levels of member readiness. Members who are unwilling (lack motivation) and are unable (lack skills) will display low readiness to successfully complete a task, engage in group problem-solving, or work on a community project. For example, if you are working with people with low readiness, you should adopt a high-taslc/low-relationship (HT/LR) "telling" stance characteristic of a directive leader. As your members become more motivated and skilled, you shift to a high-task/high-relationship style (HT/HR) "selling" stance of a democratic leader. Your members will
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explore a short history of planning in housing, mental health, and poverty. You will explore approaches to community social work planning. You will learn how to do community planning and specific techniques that social work planners use.
WHY PLAN?
When you think about what you want to do in any one day, you are planning. If you have a goal that you are trying to reach or something that you want to accomplish, you begin to plan for it. Things happen when you plan.
All modern social systems exist by planning. Large and small business organizations expend a great deal of energy developing marketing plans, engaging in strategic planning, and planning new products. City planning departments develop land use plans and plans for municipal services. Regional and state governments develop comprehensive health plans, water resources plans, environmental plans, and mass transportation plans. The federal government plans for national defense and space exploration. Planning also occurs at the international level. The Marshall Plan was a means by which those nations who experienced massive destruction after WW II rebuilt themselves. Today, the European Union develops cooperative economic plans providing fiscal arrangements for its member countries. The members of the world's eight wealthiest nations hold a yearly sununit to ratify plans for international economic stability. Planning even occurs at the global level. Through the World Health Organization (WHO) the United Nations develops plans to eradicate disease. The World Bank finances community development plans and projects worldwide.
WHAT IS SOCIAL WORK PLANNING?
Macro social workers engage in the process of social planning to insure that services are provided on behalf of those who are in most need. Social planning is a "process of selecting and designing a rational course of collective action to achieve a future state of affairs"3 for the social good, including "development,
expansion, and coordination of social services and social policies" at both the local and societal levels.4
Social work planners insist that communities of people who have fewer resources, less power, and little influence be given opportunity to develop plans for their welfare which compete on an equal footing, recognition, funding, and entitlement with plans developed by powerful business corporations and governmental bureaucracies. Until recently, however, communities have been completely ignored in planning for their own welfare. Community members were invited to only token membership in the planning process. As a result, entire neighborhoods have been decimated to build highways, corporate office buildings, Dr housing projects in the name of "rede--velopment." Funding has flowed into middle-class and upper-middle-class suburbs, ignoring neighborhoods most in need of support.
The planning process is one of the key means of citizen access to power, where community needs can be met, and plans that destroy the community can be stopped before they are implemented. Community social planning is one way by which macro social workers assist communities of people take charge of their future.
SOCIAL WORK PLANNERS
There are three lands of social work planners. Some social work planners are staff specialists working in large public and quasi-public direct-service case management and clinical services organizations. Social work planners work closely with the agency executive. They analyze needs, assess services, write grant proposals, conduct research, and make recommendations to help the agency meet the needs of its clientele, adjust agency resources, and adapt services to c changing population.
Social work planners working in direct-service agencies often begin their careers as clinicians or counselors, and they develop an interest in social planning as they become involved in wider social work issues. They may have a variety of titles, such as planning consultant, staff analyst, planning analyst, mental health or developmental disabilities specialist, or resource developer. Some analyst or planner positions require a bachelor's degree. Others require an
ans eds lity im-.cro alte
CHAPTER 6 Becoming a Social Work Planner 139
Social planners provide expert advice, make assessments, coordinate, and plan new services where existing services are poorly, Inequitably or ineffectively provided. (Courtesy of Goodwill Industries)
MSW degree and some experience, particularly in the field in which the agency works.
A second type of social work planner works for an organization that is exclusively dedicated to social welfare plaiuiing for a specific population on a regional basis. Social welfare plarining agencies assess needs, regulate the amount and kinds of services in their service jurisdiction, review and make . recommendations for awarding governmental grants, assist in developing new services, and in some cases maintain quality control over services in their mandated arena. "Welfare planning organizations interact with a variety of service providers, agencies, and parent organizations, as well as ancillary service systems such as universities, governmental agencies, businesses, and community groups to develop comprehensive plans for their service area
Area Developmental Disabilities Boards, for example, gather information and develop comprehensive welfare plans that become the basis for the provision Df new services and the awarding of governmental grants. They oversee the provision of services and
make funding recommendations. Area Agencies on Aging assess needs, make recommendations, formulate plans, and oversee grants for services to maintain and enhance the welfare of persons who are elderly. Social work planners in these agencies most often have a planning background or degree in planning, policy, or public administration in addition to an MSW degree.
In the last few decades, a new and potentially revolutionary role for social work planners is developing that goes beyond agency or regional planning for specific populations. We are working more and more frequently with local neighborhoods through city planning commissions, mayors offices, or local community organizations. Community social work planners can play one of the most potentially important roles in the field of social work today.
Commrmity social work planners assist neighborhood residents to organize themselves into effective community planning councils. We help form neighborhood planning groups, identify local leaders, and provide assistance to newly formed groups. We assist community members to organize neighborhood
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leadership training workshops. We help new organizations write bylaws, rules of procedure, and constitutions. Community social work planners train groups in membership recruitment, record keeping, accounting, and fundraising. We assist local planning leaders to develop cornmittees, assist board members to conduct meetings, and aid community planning groups in maintaining their organizations. We help neighborhood groups conduct evaluations of their own organizations or the programs that they initiate, or provide evaluations ourselves to help community groups function more effectively.
Community social work planners consult, train, and give information and technical assistance to neighborhood planning councils as citizens construct their own local plans, budgets, and projects. We assist citizen groups to develop action plans and grant proposals for addressing local problems. When community planning councils are asked to comment on city-initiated plans and public services, we help citizens to develop criteria for evaluation, analyze city plans, write reports to city government, and provide input for comprehensive neighborhood plans.5
Community social work planners act as liaisons between city politicians, staff and neighborhood organizations. On the one hand we help community planning councils obtain information about publicly and privately initiated plans that may affect their areas. We teach members about the operation of city government, explain city budgeting procedures and local, state, and federal program requirements, and agency operating procedures. We train citizens to be influential in civic affairs. We assist citizens in obtaining data, maps, regulations, and statistics to develop responsible plans for their neighborhoods. We provide neighborhood planning groups with the contacts to work effectively through governmental administration and city and state bureaucracy.6
On the other hand, community social work planners help city planning commissions, city councils, mayors' offices, and other public officials to understand the concerns and desires of neighborhood groups. We provide communication linkages and use □ur contacts with neighborhoods to keep local government in touch with neighborhood needs. We use our understanding of the neighborhood and its members to act as their advocates and mediators. As advocates, we explain the position of a neighborhood to the mayor or city manager, present a proposal to the city council, or provide input on neighborhood con-
ditions to other public officials. If there is misunderstanding or conflicts, we often bring conflicting parties together to discuss issues and promote compromise and reconciliation.7
Community social work planners use a consensual approach to community social work We not only help community members develop neighborhood planning organizations and assist local residents become effective planners, but when planning points to the need for other ways of empowering the community, we work with citizens to develop social programs, help initiate community development projects, or work with local leaders to develop community organizations. In the Pendleton area of Cincinnati, for example, community planners helped the existing Thirteenth Street Tenant Organization and a newly formed group unite into a more broadly based community organization council.8
SOCIAL WORK PLAMOTG IN AMERICA
American society is a combination of planning and freedom from planning. The founders were the first people in history to plan a new nation from scratch. They were acutely aware that although plans provide a direction, once they are made and become binding, they tend to prescribe a path that eliminates other options. The social plan we call our Constitution was a way of insuring that choice would not be limited to only a few people who could impose their own plans or ideas onto the populace. It was a social plan that prevented the few who hold power from planning for everyone else. We call this the "balance of power."
In the minds of the planners of our nation, there were three areas where people should be particularly free from oppression. First, people should be free from political oppression. Instead of politicians holding a monopoly on power, individual citizens were to hold power, and government was to be subject to the will of the populace. Second, people should have opportunity' to pursue their Dwn private economic interests rather than have a centralized authority detennine What their interests ought to be. Government was not to regulate or interfere with the free operation of the economy. Instead government was to be a sort of referee ensuring that individuals could carry out their own legitimate economic interests. Third, people should not have a system of belief
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CHAPTER 7 Becoming a Community Developer 169
munity development efforts. Neither corporate nor governmental assistance alone will provide the answer to America's depressed communities. Neither business leaders nor politicians have the will or the ability to solve the problems of inner-city and rural poor. Only the people of a community, in partnership with government and the economy, can solve their common problems. Along with community organization, community development has potential to revitalize community and to remediate social problems that have gone unsolved for generations. Community development is one of the most important arenas of macro social work today.
In this chapter, you will learn what community development is. You will explore a short history of community development. You will learn bow macro social workers approach community development in modern communities, how to begin a community development corporation, and how to assist in restoring ontolDgical communities.
WHAT IS COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT?
The term community development came into popular use after World War II. Community development is derived from economic development, from which it takes its surname, and community organization, from which it takes its first name. Economic development has been chiefly concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency by developing businesses that multiply and distribute economic resources to improve the financial situation of a locality. Community organization engages local residents seeking empowerment and self-determination in issues that affect their communities.4
Community development is much like grassroots democracy, in which power is shared in an equal and open forum. It encourages values of citizenship and citizen participation in the life of the community, promotes education in civic pride and civic consciousness, and sees in community itself an arena where the public interest can become a living force. Community development is a method by which macro social workers assist community members to develop resources and promote networks that enable a community to become a source of social, economic,
political, and cultural support to its people. Antonia PantDJa and Wilhelrnina Perry define community development as a means by which members of an economically dependent and politically disenfranchised community work together to:
1. Understand the forces and processes that have made them and keep them in their state of poverty and dependency.
2. Mobilize and organize their internal strength, as represented in political awareness, a plan of action based on information, knowledge, skills, and financial resources.
3. Eradicate from individuals and from group culture the mythology that makes them participants in their own dependency and powerlessness.
4. Act in restoring or developing new functions that a community performs for the well-being of its members—starting with the economizing function.5
Community development aims at the creation "of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation and the fullest possible reliance on the community's initiative."6 Community developers with oppressed, alienated, and depressed modern communities use "democratic procedures, voluntary cooperation, self-help, development of indigenous leadership, and educational opportunities" to cooperatively solve common problems.7 We assist communities of meaning that experience declining membership, and boundary and leadership problems. We become strengthened with a renewed sense of purpose and mission. We work with traditional communities to
inculcate among the members of rural communities a sense of citizenship and among the residents of urban areas a spirit of civic consciousness; to introduce and strengthen democracy at the grassroots level through the creation and/or revitalization of institutions designed to serve as instruments of local participation; to initiate a self-generative, self-sustaining, and enduring process of growth; to enable people to establish and maintain cooperative and harmonious relationships; and to bring about gradual and self-chosen changes in the community's life with a minimum of stress and disruption.8
CHAPTERS Becoming a Community Organizer 199
Eisenberg described COPS as the most effective community group in this country. A federal study of American Communities coinmissioned by the National Commission on Neighborhoods detailed the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of improvements in streets, drainage, public facilities, and cleanup that COPS won for poorer neighborhoods in San Antonio. It described the five, six, or seven thousand delegates who come each year to the COPS annual convention, and it concluded: "There has been a major shift in power from the wealthy blueblooded Anglos to the poor and working Mexican American families of San Antnnio. COPS has been at the center of this shift"
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
There is a quiet revolution sweeping the country. Born in the ferment of the Depression, it waxed and waned though the 1940s and 1950s, and the turbulent 1960s gave it a new push. Since the 1960s it has refined its methods and become a grDundswell of positive action in small and large communities from Orlando, Florida, to Anchorage, Alaska, from Bangor, Maine, io Honolulu. Less flamboyant, less confrontive, and more permanent, community organizing today most often works through existing faith-based social net-Works by which people become involved in political and economic action to create a better life for their children, their neighbors, and themselves.
In this chapter you will explore why community organizing is important and learn what community organizers do. You will review a short history of community organizing and learn about four contemporary models of community organizing. You will explore the partnership model of community organizing. You will discover that community organizing is a fundamental part of a new wave of societal change that is . gradually reordering the postmodern era. Community is being reborn, the social is being regenerated, and politics is being reshaped. Locality based community organizing is at the forefront of those changes.
WHAT IS COMMUNITY ORGANIZING?
Ordinary people in communities have always sus-. pected something that government officials and
politicians are only now beginning to realize— "Those macro, top-down solutions don't work."5 Powerful government redevelopment agencies that tear down the slums and build high-rise corporate offices will not solve our social problems. The solution to ufban social problems does not lie in destroying neighborhoods but in empowering them. Politicians passing laws will not solve them If politics is expected to work, democracy can no longer be the privilege of a few wealthy politicians at the top but must be the concern of ordinary people at the bottom. Trickle-down economics will not solve social problems. We will wait forever before wealthy corporations trickle good jobs, good pay, or employment benefits down to us.
It is becorning increasingly clear that politics in the White House or Congress, in governor's mansions or state legislatures across the country are often helpless in dealing with issues that matter most to us. "The only thing that really works," says Harry Boyte, "is local initiative."6 Social change happens only when ordinary people working with others make it happen.
Community organizing is a process by which people in neighborhood organizations, associations and churches join together to form strong local organizations to address social problems in their communities, develop their own solutions, and in partnership with government and corporations implement those solutions over the long term.7
Community organizing breaks the bonds of depression, helplessness, and hopelessness by bringing community members together to gain empowerment and justice. People who were formerly alienated, apathetic, and uninvolved take responsibility for themselves to ensure that government or the private sector delivers something in deprived neighborhoods.8 These neighborhood action organizations begin with community issues: municipal services, jobs, health care, housing finance, parent-school problems, consumer action, insurance rates, police protection—all the things that touch us where we live. Each victory strengthens our hope, and hope builds up organizational membership. Gradually we develop the power and skills needed to deal collectively with a variety of local needs and problems.9 Community organizing transforms powerlessness into empowerment, dependency into interdependence, debumanization into human dignity.
CHAPTER 10 Becoming a Program Developer
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During her presidency, B arton and the Red Cross engaged every major calamity that occurred in the country, assisting victims of forest fires in Michigan in 1881, floods of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in 1882, the Louisiana cyclone of 1883, the Ohio river flood in 1884, the Charleston earthquake and the Texas Famine Df 1886. When most people were enjoying retirement, at age 66, Clara Barton supervised relief work during the Florida yellow fever epidemic of 1887, the great Johnstown flood of 1889, the Galveston hurricane and tidal wave of 1900, and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
Twice she carried relief to Russia during the Russia Famine of 1891, and she was present during the Armenian massacres in Turkey in 1896, assisting homeless and wounded. Barton was again on the battlefield in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1889. During the Boer War in SouthAfrica (1899-1902), she commanded the relief ship Clinton, for which the whole American navy made way. To insure immediate action in any emergency, Barton placed $3,000 of her own money at the disposal of the American Corrimittee of the Red Cross.
Throughout her long career of developing and providing relief services throughout the United States and the world, Barton's moral courage, energy, diplomacy, and unwavering integrity were her chief characteristics. She had two rules of action: unconcern for what cannot be helped, and control under pressure. Her career teaches that the meaning of human life lies not in what we get, but what we give. American-history has no more eloquent record of self-sacrifice, courage, and devoted service to humanity than that of Clara Barton, one of America's social heroes and great program developers. She died on April 12,1912, at age 91.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IE THIS CHAPTER
Every facility for elder persons, day care program for children, sheltered workshop for adults with intellectual disabilities, treatment program for people with emotional disabilities, socialization program for youth, or shelter for battered women has been developed by a group of people who had a vision about helping their neighbors in a new way or saw an
unmet need and worked to meet that need. Social workers who help build such social organizations are program developers.
In this chapter you will learn how you too can assist people develop a social organization. You will explore how to form an organization action group, assess social needs, setup a formal corporation, establish a board, recruit and hire staff, and obtain funding. You will discover that social work program developers are more than mere social entrepreneurs who put together social agencies in the same way that business people develop businesses. Social work program developers are engaged in the task of helping people construct their own social reality and meet their own social needs.
WHO ARE SOCIAL WORK PROGRAM DEVELOPERS?
Program developers are often employed by social agencies serving a particular population, such as persons with intellectual, emotional, physical, or behavioral disabilities. We help insure that social welfare services are in place to meet a range of needs for that population.3 We meet with various public and private agency staff to assess where gaps in services are occurring and assist parent groups, agency staff, and interested community leaders who want to establish a new social organization from scratch. We assess the changing needs of a community and work with social organizations to improve or expand services that already exist
Social work program developers are often creative and insightful social workers who can observe needs and quickly conceive programmatic solutions to them. There is a danger if you are an agency program developer, however, and attempt to develop a program or construct a social organization single-handedly. Robert Linthicum observes, "a problem with professionals is that they are the perceived experts because of their degrees and body of knowledge." They "know what is best" for the individual or for the community. This is the great weakness of outsiders such as legislators or city council persons who want to start programs for others. They look at social problems and came up with ideas that are intended to fix them as if they are social mechanics fixing a broken engine. One group may see the problem of drugs,
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for example, and say "Let's hire more police officers." Others may read about teenage delinquency in a poor, rundown neighborhood and advise, "Those people need a youth program to get the teenagers off the streets." Some people see homeless mentally ill and alcoholics wandering the streets and they ask, " Why don't they develop a soup kitchen or a shelter?" People become concerned about children running around the vacant lots. "That neighborhood needs a playground," they offer.
While these well-intentioned and concerned people may have many worthwhile ideas, the common element with these solutions is that someone else, often a person from outside the community, sees the community or its people as a problem that needs to be fixed. The assumption is that the people who have the problem are not as capable as others of seeing what needs to be done, do not have the imagination to conceive of solutions that are obvious to others, and furthermore, do not have the capacity to do it themselves. They assert, for example, that if the alcoholics, the homeless, the poor had the ability, wouldn't they have solved their problems long ago? Experts, on the other hand, who have the knowledge, skills, resources, and political connections ought to be the ones who can solve these problems. So social workers and a host of public health, mental health, recreation, and other professionals are called in to make recommendations. Politicians pass legislation and appropriate money, new programs are initiated, and well-intentioned criminal justice or social welfare professionals are hired. All of this ignores one of the primary assumptions of social work. According to Linthicum, "the people best able to deal with a problem are the people most affected by the problem. The people best able to deal with teenagers who are running amok in their neighborhood are the people who live in that neighborhood."
The concept of client self-determination "is one of the most difficult insights" for social workers to apply in their own professional lives. We want to get results, and because of our expertise we may think we know what is best for the community. We unwittingly teach people to be passive recipients and beneficiaries of charity. We train community members to be ancillary spectators and nonparticipants in the vital and necessary forces that shape their social worlds. We expect them to remain socially unresponsive and disengaged
from the problems that affect their lives. As a result, members may often feel victimized and demeaned by our benevolence. They may resent social agencies deeply for making them feel so helpless.
Sometimes social work agencies try to set up processes to encourage a sense of ownership of the community's social services. They invite two or three community residents to sit on the agency's board, set. up a women's auxiliary, or develop a community advisory corninittee. But community members normally won't accept that offer of participation because it is not their project or even their idea. They may refuse to get involved, and the burden of leadership. continues with the social agency.
The agency becomes cynical about the lack of community involvement, and community members continue to feel no ownership in the project. Eventually social workers and community members burn out on the project. The fate of any program developed, under such conditions is inevitable. It will function successfully only as long as others commit people, money, and materials to the program. When the well-intentioned executive can no longer raise sufficient resources, it will die. It will die because it has never been a project of the people.
HOW TO DEVELOP
A SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Community social planning councils may often rec-< ommend development of a social program that meets: people's needs in some way. Sometimes ideas foi ■ social programs come out of the involvement of ordi-'. nary citizens who are concerned about social problems in their communities. They meet with their; neighbors informally and begin to envision a social program. Many social agencies have been formed in ■ this way. George Williams, for example, was con-, cerned about the spiritual and social needs of young ■ men who recently arrived in London in 1859. He-began to form Bible study and socialization groups: whose members eventually formed the YMCA. In! 1853, citizens concerned with homeless children wandering the streets of New York City organized the Children's Aid Society, the beginning of the foster home and adoption movement in America. Many women's shelters have become established because
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sonnel adnriiiistratiDn.You will learn about the role of the chief social work administrator in planning, working with the board, and program evaluation. Just as social workers and others are inventing social organizations as a new form of human association, you will discover that social work administration is breaking free of top-down, hierarchical, market-centered management, which has overwhelmed the field of public and social administration for well over 100 years. A new form of social administration is being constructed that is more congruent with social work values of partnership and service. Most social workers will have an opportunity to work in social organizations and experience the importance of administration in carrying out social work. Someday, you may decide to become a social aoiTiinistrator.
WHAT DO SOCIAL WORK ADMINISTRATORS DO?
Social work administrators help social workers and members of the community facilitate the work of social betterment by means of a social organization. In many hierarchically structured social agencies, depending on their size, there are three levels of administration. line supervisors are at the first level. Social work supervisors usually are in charge of a unit of six or seven social workers. The supervisor helps social workers individually and the unit as a whole perform their jobs. Division or departmental administrators engage departments in joint decision-malting, develop smooth working relationships between units, coordinate work of the units, and make sure that each unit is functioning properly. The chief social work adrninistrator is responsible for much of the planning for the agency, manages the budget and personnel issues, sees to it that the agency is periodically evaluated, and relates to the social organization's board of directors, who make overall personnel, financial, and program policy decisions for the agency. Much of the success of any social work program depends on the quality of administrative leadership.
Supervision
A social work supervisor is at different times an information giver, instructor, problem-solver, coach, consul-
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tant, mentor, and evaluator. The social model of administration expects social work supervisors in a joint venture to assist you to develop skill and collaborate in the provision of service to your clients. In a 1974 study by Al Kadushin, social workers asserted that "being able to share responsibility with supervisors and being able to obtain support for difficult cases was the greatest source of satisfaction." Both supervisors and workers believe that as you gain experience, the best relationship becomes one of consultant-consultee, a form of supervision preferred by many social workers.
Shulman reports that social workers often want supervisors to devote time to teach practice skills, discus research information, and provide feedback on performance. When a supervisor models rapport and caring as well as offering empathy, respect, mutuality, and trust, these qualities carry over in the way social workers assist your clients. Shulman found that "supervisees learn what a supervisor really feels about helping by observing the supervisor in action. More is often 'caught' by you than is 'taught* by the supervisor."4
Sometimes as a social worker you will need explicit, firm direction or direct answers to a policy or procedural question. Your supervisor should provide answers clearly and forthrightly. As you increasingly think about and make your own decisions, the trust and the support of your supervisor is important Ongoing positive reinforcement, good communication, including active listening and giving feedback, and your supervisor's attempts to create a positive work environment are often essential in helping you become independent and self-directing.
In addition to working with you individually, your supervisor assists your entire work unit to set work priorities and goals and decide on work assignments. Your supervisor acts as a buffer between your unit and administration, providing you with information and training about the agency's plans and priorities. Your supervisor informs the department adininistrator about your unit's needs and performance. The ultimate objective of good supervision is to help your unit become a cohesive group of highly capable social workers who deliver the highest amount and quality of service to your clients.
Perfoimance Appraisal In most social agencies, social work supervisors monitor and evaluate your performance as an ongoing process. Performance
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appraisal often comes out of your discussions with your supervisor, may be based on your professional objectives as well as the agency's standards, and is performed collaboratively with you confinning what has been occurring during the year's period.
In larger, more hierarchically structured organizations, social workers are often evaluated by means of conventional performance evaluation processes developed by human resource specialists. Such evaluation is designed to measure the extent to which you achieve the requirements of your position by means of specific, realistic, and achievable criteria in relation to standards of agency performance. These organizations evaluate staff on at least an annual basis and use these evaluations to determine pay raises, promotions, future assignments, or the need for disciptine.
Human resource specialists decide on performance standards. The kinds of measurement criteria they consider include output quality, output quantity, work habits and attitudes, learning ability, and judgment or problem-solving ability. They recommend that your supervisor objectively examine how you perform certain key skills such as devising a questionnaire or keeping records, your ability to perform essential practice functions such as community planning or performing casework, and concrete outputs such as the number of policies or programs developed, or children reunified with parents.
Human resource professionals also recommend your supervisor evaluate you subjectively by comparing your individual performance to others using group norms, assessing your performance on the basis of relatively fixed, independently determined standards, and judging performance by carefully observing what you do.5
This land of conventional performance evaluation requires the imposition of externally applied measurable evaluation criteria, a form of consciously applied control that often bears little resemblance to actual social work practice. Management justifies such quantifiable evaluation as part of agency "quality control," as if you are a component of a machine. Implicit in such monitoring is basic distrust of social workers and an assumption that unless regularly scrutinized, you will fail to perform properly. Setting goals for you, defining your progress toward those goals, and then rewarding or punishing you in relation to them does not honor your capabilities. Not only does such con-
trol fail to respect you as a competent adult, a professional capable of self-direction, but it misuses supervisors as well. Some critics find such impersonal ■ formal procedures "no more than a vehicle for tie bureaucratic surveillance of social workers."6
An approach that is more consistent with social work values of self-extermination and respect for the ability of social workers will reverse typical patriarchal management Instead of measurement serving the interests of control, consistency, and predictability, social adminis-' Orators will "let measurement and control serve core social workers," asserts Peter Block ,rFor example, measures should come out of conversation with clients, between workers themselves as well as supervisors," says Block. You and your social work team mamtain control by your cornmittnents to your jobs and to one another. These commitments become mutual agreements, not only between workers but also between workers and supervisors. Because contracts are between partners, expectations go both ways, with equal demands, between workers and supervisors, and between supervisors and department heads. The intent is to elirninate coercion as the basis for getting results. Performance contracts would not be tied to pay or punishment but to mutual accountability, teamwork, and accomplishing the goals of serving the community and clients, and increasing your skills and capacities for growth. "No one," asserts Block, "should be able to make a living simply planning, watching, and controlling or evaluating the actions of others." Social work administrators should "exist primarily to contribute to social workers who do the core work Core social workers should have strong voices in determining what administrators can do to help them accomplish the'-common purposes of the social organization."7
Social work supervisors are valuable people. They have special knowledge and experience, and we choose them because we believe they are the beel social workers we have. "We need these talented individuals who are skilled in providing caring, concerned relationships and capable of passing their experience to others. We need to reorient our thinking about supervision. Instead of monitoring and controlling, we should allow our experienced social workers to coach, teach, support, and provide modeling and consultation in service of those who do social work with clients. The role that we call "supervision" should not bE ode of authority, but rather should assist and support you in becorning the best social worker you can be.
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Brainstorming is useful when (he solution to a problem requires the group's cumulative wisdom. (©Jane Scherr/Jeroboam, Inc.)
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Administrative Decision-Making
All administrators engage in decision-making. Often, administrators make decisions alone, after gathering information and reviewing the strengths and limits of each alternative. The administrator often chooses the alternative that is cheapest, most efficient, or most effective in accomplishing a specific goal. At other times administrators play a facilitative role, collaboratively engaging a department's supervisors to solve a problem by arriving at several alternative decisions and selecting the best alternative solution.
Administrators are often preoccupied with instrumental questions such as: How can we improve service delivery to our clients? How can we increase our efficiency? How can we save money and eliminate waste? What can we do to expand our services? Instrumental questions, however, ask only about means. They rarely examine premises on which those questions are based. Social work administrators who see beyond instrumen-tal questions and encourage social workers to ask more fundamental questions of value assist social workers to engage in broader questions that can improve the direction of the social organization. For example, the most efficient or cost-effective solution, if not in the interests
of members of the community or if imposed from the top, may only alienate people. Instead of asking about efficiency, it may be more important to ask 'Is the department or unit going in the right direction?"
Arriving at Alternatives Once the real problem and the values implicit in the problem are clear, it is time to look at alternative solutions or decisions. Administrators may use a variety of techniques to make decisions in organizations: decision-analysis, linear prograrruning, queuing, decision trees, benefit/cost analysis, and force-field analysis. These are common tools that administrators as well as staff can use and with which they should be familiar. These techniques were described in Chapter 6.
Aajninistrators often use decision techniques with groups of staff members to develop solutions to social and administrative problems. Three lands of decision techniques are common in meetings: (1) bramstorming, (2) reverse brainstorming, and (3) nominal group technique (NGT).
Brainstorming and Reverse Brainstorming Brainstorming allows a group to obtain the maximum amount of input in an orderly manner. Brainstorming
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of differing ideas are not commented upon, discussed, or debated.
4. Voting. Because a large number of items may be on the board, it is often best to decide by multiple voting. A first choice will receive 3 points, a
- second choice 2 points, and a third choice 1 point. Each person writes his or her top three preferences on a card and passes it to the leader. The total points are added up and divided by the number of group members to obtain an average. The results are compared.
5. Discussion (optional). Because several rankings may receive close scores, discussion may help the group understand why they voted the way they did.
6. Revoting, The voting process can be repeated among the top scoring items until a clear winner emerges.
NGT protects individuals from group pressure, because anonymity is assured and discussion is not allowed. In the idea generation phase, each person is given the assurance that he or she will have opportunity tD generate as many ideas as possible. This stimulates creativity, but in a quiet atmosphere in which everyone can give the problem the full concentration and attention.
The Round Robin phase provides for face-to-face contact and interaction at an appropriate time and in a controlled atmosphere. Each person knows that his or her ideas will receive equal and legitimate attention. The voting process provides for an explicit mathematical solution that fairly weighs all members' inputs.
Finally, in the discussion phase, member's subjective feelings, perceptions, and input can be factored into the final vote, while individuals understand that there will be joint group commitment to the final decision.
Administering Finances
Administering an organization's finances includes developing the budget, presenting the budget to the board of directors, overseeing how money is generated and spent, and insuring that there is good fiscal accountability. In a small agency, the chief social work administrator often takes the lead in overseeing the financial health of the agency, preparing the bud-
get, raising funds, and assisting staff in managing the agency's finances. In a middle-size agency that has two or three social work departments, a finance manager is often responsible for managing agency funds. In a larger agency, administering the finances is usually delegated to a finance or accounting department.
The budget is your agency's most basic and important organizational plan. The budget sets out the financial outcomes that you intend to accomplish during a specific period, usually a year. According to Malvern Gross, a budget is a "plan of action that represents the organization's blueprint expressed in monetary terms, a tool to monitor the financial activities [of an agency] throughout the year."5 Budgeting is intended to be a rational process. According to Wildavsky, "Making budgetary decisions depends on calculating which alternatives to consider and to chose. Calculation involves determining how problems are identified, get broken down into manageable decisions, how choices are made, and who shall be taken into account."10
However, arriving at a budget is far from perfectly rational. For one thing, according to Wildavsky, people are limited in their ability to calculate, time is severely limited, and "the number of matters that can be encompassed in one mind at the same time is quite small." As a result, people tend to make budgeting decisions incrementally. We "simplify in order to get by. We tend to make small moves, let experience accumulate, and use feedback from our decisions to gauge consequences." Social work agencies, in addition, often lack a well-understood financial base. "Spending agencies do not know how much they will need; reviewing bodies do not know how much they should allocate. Requests for spending and actual appropriations fluctuate wildly."11 As a result budgeting, especially in small agencies, may often involve making educated guesses about a future state of affairs and what the needs of the agency will be.
Some budgets are "wish lists" in which administrators ask for what they want, but they must work within whatever amount is allocated to them. If the agency or program is new, the problem is compounded. Often a negotiated struggle takes place. Central funding sources, such as United Way, government agencies, or county or state budget departments will exert control, knowing that agencies will push for increases as hard as they can. The result is a game in which each attempts to maximize its position without regard for the other. Added to this mix is the
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self-interested pursuit of power by executives who see success in the budgeting arena as their "road to fortune." Budgeting in pubic social work agencies and to a certain extent in private ones is a mixture of rationality and politics.12
Three budgeting models used by social agencies are line item budgeting, functional budgeting, and program budgeting.
Line Item Budgeting The line item budget, the most common form of budgeting in social agencies, is a description of revenue and expenditures on functional items such as salaries, rent, utilities, postage, office supplies, training, consultation, and others. A line item budget for an entire agency may include the following:
Personnel costs: salaries, health and life insurance, staff development
Space: rent, utilities, telephone, insurance
Equipment: purchased equipment, leased equipment, equipment maintenance
Consumable items: supplies, postage, books, subscriptions, printing, advertising
Petty Cash
.Other: Conferences, travel, services purchased
The line item budgeting process is relatively easy to calculate and understand. Since line items may cut across departments or divisions, each department calculates how much it spent on these various items in a given year. Budget planners add up these tine items, compare actual expenditures with last year's budget, and project costs on those items into the next year.
An advantage of line-item budgeting is "simplicity and expenditure control. The categories are limited and fixed over time, and increases and decreases projected in any given line are usually determined as a small increment"13 over the previous year. Assume, for example, that last year your agency spent $100 on paper products. Allowing for inflation, this year the board approves a budget allocation of $105 for paper expenditure. Because of increased demand for paperwork, the agency actually spends $115 dollars. Based on those figures, it would probably make sense for the board to budget $130 next year, given increased usage and increased costs.
Sometimes line item budgets are developed by financial or accounting staff who often guess how costs might increase or decrease in the coming year.
They ask social work professionals what increases they expect to make. Based on those figures, the budget is submitted to the board, who, without further information or understanding, is asked to approve it14 Line item budgeting may suffer because it is based on previous expenditures that may or may not be accurate predictors of future needs. It tells us nothing about the relative importance of budget items, or whether various departments or units needed them. Line item budgeting "does not depict efficiency, effectiveness, priorities, or programs of the agency,"13 neither does it help you plan for new programs or for agency innovation.
Functional Budgeting A functional budget places various'organizational functions into categories that can be examined and monitored. As an administrator of a smaller social organization, you may divide finances into social work services and supporting or adimnistrative services.16 If you administer a larger organization, you may want to know if expenditures for social service programs, system maintenance (personnel, accounting), and support (clerical, facilities maintenance) are growing more quickly than others and whether the amounts allocated to these various functions are appropriate.
Program Budgeting Administrators who use program budgeting "make budgetary decisions by focusing on end products of output" You may ask yourself, for example, "What do we do (program)?" irWhy do we do it (objective)?" and "How are we doing (output in relation to objectives or results)?" You define program objectives in terms that are capable of being analyzed, have specific time horizons for accomplishing objectives, measure program effectiveness, and develop and compare alternative ways of attaining objectives.17 For example, if the goal of a program is to rehabilitate 100 persons addicted to alcohol in the coming year, the administrator and staff calculate the resources needed to accomplish this goal. The meaning of "rehabilitation"- may become an issue. Is an alcoholic considered rehabilitated when he or she has been sober for three months, six months, or one year? Is a person addicted to alcohol considered rehabilitated if he or she is capable of holding a job and attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings regularly? Once a defrnition is decided upon, social workers can arrive at some goals. It is best to make goals
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CHAPTER IX Becoming A 5oclal Work Administrator
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specific, measurable, and time limited. You assess particular treatment methods. For example, if your definition of rehabilitation includes holding a job or enrolling in AA, you will probably add a job training program to your services, as well as referrals to and monitoring AA attendance. You and your staff calculate how much it will cost to rehabilitate 100 persons addicted to alcohol.
At various points during and at the end of the year, yau can review the budget to assess the degree to which the program was successful in accomplishing its goals and if it is staying mthin its cost projections. You and the other social workers can also assess the effectiveness of various treatment modalities, arrive at more realistic operational definitions, and attempt to improve treatment effectiveness. Then you adjust your treatment goals and budgets.
Program budgeting has an advantage over line item budgeting and functional budgeting because it allows you to examine how effective services have been in the past year, and it provides a mechanism to plan a better program for the future. In addition, program budgeting involves everyone in the budgeting process who is responsible for program outcomes, particularly line social work staff. This makes budgeting an integral part of the treatment process, gives social workers increased control over their own work, and provides incentives in goal accomplishment Program budgeting can also help evaluate treatment and program effectiveness.
Human Resources Management
Because social organizations are composed of people, and their purpose is to enhance people's lives, the human side of organizational life ought to be one of the most, if not the most important aspects of social work administration. The human side of organizational life, especially in larger hierarchically structured social work organizations, is often delegated to human resource managers whose role is to influence "the effectiveness of employees in the organization."18 Human resources (HR) management is "the use, development, assessment, reward, and management of individual organizational members or worker groups." Human resources management includes the design and implementation of systems for staffing an organization and "developing employees, managing careers, evaluating per-
formance, compensating workers, and smoothing labor relations."1B
MASS PARKER FOLLETT: ADMINISTRATION THEORIST
Bom in Quincy, Massachusetts, an 1B9S graduate of Radcliffe College, Mary Parker Follett was active in vocational guidance, industrial relations, civic education, settlement work, and social adrninistration theory and practice. As a vocational counselor for Boston's Roxbury Neighborhood House, Follett became aware of poor working families in need of social, recreational, and educational facilities. In 1909 her lobbying efforts resulted in legislation that madE her the initiator of the first public school community centers,20 the Boston School Centers for after-school recreation and education programs.
A member of the Vocational Guidance Board of the Boston School Board and the Minimum Wage Board of the Women's Municipal League, Follett was active in the business community and addressed groups of business people. In 1924, Follett moved to England, where she was vice president of the National Community Center Association and a member of the Taylor Society, an organization concerned with scientific management administration, and efficiency in industry.
Her theory of "Psychological Interpenetrating" pioneered the concept that was later described by Alfred Schutz as "intersubjectivity" and we-relations. In her 1924 book Creative Experience,21 Follett advocated administration practice in which people of different socio-economic and occupational backgrounds understand one another's viewpoints. Her various writings on administration are contained in Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett- and describe her perspectives on social adrrunistration
In an era when management was the exclusive bastion of wealthy male business leaders, Mary Parker Follett brought a new perspective to social adrninistration, concentrating on social work values. Of all the important organizational theorists and writers, she was the only social worker, and the only theorist to challenge the scientific management model dí business. Over 10D years ahead of her time, her voice is now beginning to be recognized for its uniqueness, creativity, and advocacy of authentic social work administration.
Recruitment and Selection According to Sturgeon, since everything the organization does depends on the quality of its employees, recruiting and selecting people is the organization's most important
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berated her for being ineffective. In spite of what she considered to be heroic measures to advocate for her workers, even they had turned on her. Jean felt helpless, alone, and stressed.
The county had recently hired ICathy Herbert, a social work organization developer, who had visited the probation department and explained her services. With no one else to turn to, Jean called Kathy, Meeting over coffee, Jean for the first time poured out her frustrations built up over years of being a buffer between her unit and the rest of the agency. Her feelings were deep and painful, and it was embarrassing for her to express her grief. She felt that her battles to help her unit, her concern for their good, and her compassion were being thrown back at her in the form of resentment and anger. She felt blamed for the very situations she had fought against
Kathy provided a listening ear and over the course of several weeks helped Jean work through her anger, loss, and hurt. Together they began to problem-solve and worked on different approaches to the unit. Kathy met with Jean and her unit together, engaging in mutual problem-solving. Gradually, the unit began to see that they were in a self-defeating cycle, and while they were under stress and blaming Jean, their own attitudes and work habits were contributing to their low morale and lack of self-esteem. Jean also realized that she needed to be much more directive and began to make some changes in how she related to her unit. Her self-confidence began to return and she began to feel in control once again, developing a proposal for redistributing workloads on a more equitable basis.
As the East Side members began to take responsibility for themselves, not blaming the supervisor for issues beyond her control, Jean and her unit began to work together as a team once again. Jointly, they began to strategize for solutions. While the external pressures of work did not ease up, Jean and her unit were communicating an a regular basis and reworking their relationships.
what you will learn" in this chapter
It is probably safe to say that no organizational system is without defects. Everyone who works in organizational systems will, at times, find themselves under
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stress, experience burnout, or have their lives thrown into turmoil. They may become demoralized, in con- i flict with those with whom they work, or experience job dissatisfaction. In addition, if the organization experiences financial problems, people may find i themselves out of work and their lives in disarray.
These problems can affect the provision of qual- -g ity services to clients. Clients of social agencies may experience inefficient or ineffective services, rigid or ■;■ inflexible responses to their needs, or an organizational system fraught with red tape. Because organ!- '| zations affect people's lives in so many ways, therefore, macro social workers are increasingly turning their attention to these important social systems, '4 fmding that the methods, skills, and processes we use in healing families, groups, or communities also work with helping dysfunctional organizations.
In this chapter you will become acquainted with the emerging field of organization development You will learn who organization developers are. You will also discover that there are two different lands of organization development. You will learn about the most popular and well-known method of organizational intervention: conventional organization devel- | jp opment. You will explore how to do conventional h organization development step by step, includiag fjl diagnosing and applying a variety of treatment tools and techniques at the individual, group, intergroup, and organizational level.
You will also learn about a much less well-known and rarely utilized method of assisting mem- '{ bers of social organizations called the partnership model. You will discover that this model is more con-gruent with social organizations in social work. You % will explore how a social organization developer uses the partnership model to help social organizations improve their effectiveness.
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who are organization developers?
Organization developers help organizational members plan for and carry out change. There are two lands of x organization developers. An internal organization developer is an employee of a direct service social ;| agency such as a county social services department, regional center for developmental!)1 disabled, hospi-
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CHAPTER 12 Becoming an Organization Developer 319
tal, or mental health facility, who works exclusively with the employees, supervisors, and administrators inside that agency. Internal consultants may tend to be cautious and more thoughtful in their recommendations because they must live with the changes that ihey recommend.2
An external organization developer works either as a private management consultant or as a member of an organization development firm and provides management consultation, training, and problem-solving to many different organizations and agencies. Robbins says that while conventional external consultants can offer objective perspectives because they are from the outside, they often do not have an intimate understanding of the history, culture, goals, and procedures of the organization. As a result, external consultants may have a tendency to institute drastic changes'because they do not have to live with the results.3
Organization development can be a very rewarding endeavor. Many social work organization developers have an MSW specializing in clinical social work. They often have acquired additional education at the master's or doctoral level in administration, applied organization behavior, or organization development, as well as experience working in complex organizations.
WHAT IS ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT?
Organization development is an "emerging behavioral science discipline that provides a set of methodologies for systematically bringing about organizational change, improving the effectiveness of the organization and its members."4 Richard Beckhard says that organization development is a process of engaging in change that is "(1) planned, (2) organization wide, (3) managed from the top, (4) to increase organization effectiveness and health, (5) through planned interventions in the organization's processes (6) using behavioral science knowledge."5
Most organizations that require organization development services are more or less hierarchically oriented business or public organizations that have taken a reactive approach to solving problems. If you consult with them, it is probably most appropriate to
use conventional organization development because it fits best with the managerial style and culture of these systems. The conventional approach is supported by major organization development professional organizations, universities, and writers.
The partnership model of social organization development is relatively new and fits most congru-ently with social organizations. The partnership model tends to be proactive and membership oriented, encouraging organizational members and the community to engage in a process of ongoing, mutual problem-solving rather than the conventional model of imposing change from the top down. A capable organization developer will be able to use both models as long as he or she is clear about his or her own value stance toward organizational change.
The environment of the organization developer is change. There are a number of factors that impel organizations toward change and factors that cause organizations to resist change. You must understand both of these forces in order to assist organizational members respond positively to the need for change. Rob-bins tells us that there are at least six forces that are "increasingly creating the need for change—the changing nature of the work force, technology, economic shocks, changing social trends, the 'new' world politics and the changing nature of competition."6 According to Harvey and Brown, because of this "increasingly complex environment, it becomes even more critical for management to identify and respond to forces of social and technical change." Those organizations that adapt to changing circumstances will survive; those that fail to adapt will not7
In spite of the need for change, however, there are a number of factors that create complications for administrators in trying to effect change in their own organizations. "Organizations," as Robbins says, "by their very nature are conservative. They actively resist change."8 It is a paradox that while change and innovation is the heart of organizational survival, "organizations are not necessarily intended to change."9 For example, the system's state, size, structure, chain of command, subordinate position of workers, organizational culture, and administrator may all contribute to an organization's resistance to change. According to systems theory, there is a tendency for an organization to exhibit inertia. An organizational system will tend to maintain a stable state that works against
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change. AIL organizations have inherent mechanisms to maintain homeostasis or stability.10
Smaller systems are more malleable and adaptable to change. The larger the system, the more difficult it is to shift direction. More people are involved in change, any one of whom can cause resistance. More subsystems must be integrated, coordinated, and linked together.
More important than size, however, are the organization's structural aspects. Modern complex organization, almost without exception, is based on hierarchical structure, unitary command, and one-way communication in which subordinates do what they are told. Each of these organizational components becomes entrenched in a self-reinforcing organization culture that resists change at every level. Top-down hierarchy, for example,
promotes delays and sluggishness; everything must be lacked upstairs for a decision either because the boss insists or because the subordinate does not want to take the risk of making a poor decision. All this indecision exists at the same time that superiors are being authoritarian, dictatorial, rigid, making snap judgments which they refuse to reconsider, implementing on-the-spot decisions without consulting with their subordinates, and generally stifling any independence or creativity at the subordinate levels.... Hierarchy promotes rigidity and timidity.11
In modern hierarchical governance systems, change must proceed up and down the chain of command. In general, it will be resisted at each level, particularly when organizations are composed of highly trained professionals.12
Subordinates are under constant surveillance from superiors; thus they often give up trying to exercise initiative or imagination and instead suppress or distort information. Finally, since everything must go through channels, and these are vertical, two people at the same level in two different departments cannot work things themselves, but must involve long lines of superiors.13
When managers see their roles as making decisions from the top, a model of obedience and dependency is established. Organizational problems that may be obvious to line workers go unrecognized by adininistration for long periods of time. Because workers are functionaries who do what they are told,
they may think it inappropriate to suggest changes and even self-defeating for them to do so. Individuals at lower levels of organizations may be reluctant Id complain to their supervisors out of fear of causing trouble. They may not want to appear disgruntled, because this could reflect badly on their performance evaluations. Those who call attention to problems may even be subject to reprisal. "Subordinates are afraid of passing up had news, or of making suggestions to change. (Such an action would imply that their superiors should have thought of the changes and did not.) They are also more afraid of new situations than of familiar ones, since with the new situations, those above them might introduce new evils, while the old ones are sufficient''14
People are very malleable. If the organization culture is patriarchal, people will adapt to those organization patterns. Patriarchy and resistance to change becomes self-reinforcing. According to Herbert Simon, "organizational environment provides much of the force that molds and develops personal qualities and habits."15 Organization culture naturally shapes human character to conform to the premises of organization decisions. These premises, says Simon, "inject into the very nervous systems of organization members the criteria of decisions that the organization wishes to employ." Organization members are therefore able to make decisions by themselves as the organization would like them to decide.16
Organizational change becomes very difficult because "in changing these old patterns, people must alter not only their behavior, but also their values and their view of themselves [while at the same timel the organization structure, procedures and relationships continues to reinforce prior patterns of behavior and to resist the new ones."17 As a result, "almost any change will be psychologically painful,"18 bringing with it "upheaval and dissatisfaction."19
Organization leaders are, therefore, faced with a dilemma. "In a monocratic administrative system—a bureaucracy—the external owner has all the rights. He alone can innovate " asserts Victor Thompson. While "innovation will depend upon the psychology of the owner—his mood, confidence, faith and so forth,"20 administrators may not want to hear about problems or may themselves have contributed to them. Even though the administrator may realize that change is needed, he or she may be reluctant or even
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CHAPTER 12 Becoming an Organization Developer 321
he unable to change the hierarchical, patriarchal organization culture that he or she has created.
APPROACHES
TO CONVENTIONAL
ORGANIZATION
DEVELOPMENT
Most conventional organization development "seeks to improve the ability of the organization to adapt to changes in its environment It seeks to change employee behavior."21 There are several conventional approaches that organization developers can take in planning for change. In the systems approach, the organization developer sees the system as a process of inputs, system maintenance, outputs, and feedback. A change strategy could occur at any point on this continuum. A change in one part of the system process could create changes in other parts of the system.
In the social ecology approach, the organization developer views an organization as an open system that is continually interacting with and adapting to its environment. A dysfunctional organization system is one that has failed to adapt. A system design that may at one time have been appropriate or workable has become outmoded or incongruent with new conditions. The organization becomes rigid, unable to scan its environment or cope with tensions or stresses that its environment presents. You try to help the admrn-ishation and staff anticipate changes and initiate strategies to adapt to them.
In the levels of analysis approach, the organization developer might focus on the level of individual effectiveness, examining morale, absenteeism, or productivity. You focus at the level of the group or unit, helping units work more effectively together. You help resolve conflicts, communication problems, or coordination difficulties at the intergroup level. You could concentrate on the effectiveness of the organization as a whole, making sure its overall goals are being met and that the organization's culture is healthy.22
In the subsystems approach, the organization developer focuses on one or more subsystems in the organization. For example, you could begin by improving the reward system in hopes that improving compensation or benefits will increase organization
effectiveness. You might examine the communication system, improving information flow between units. You might work with the decision-making system to improve the decision quality and quantity. You could focus on the fiscal budgeting system, improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and reducing waste.23
In the contingency approach, the organization developer may view the organization as a system composed of a variety of components, each of which must fit together harmoniously in order for the system to function effectively. You look at the relationship of all of the parts of the organization and attempt to discover which of the parts do not fit well with the others. Once the dysfunctional components are located, you adjust them so that the parts of the organization work smoothly together.
In the therapeutic approach, you assume a role of a therapist whose client is a dysfunctional organization. Just as a social work clinician uses personality theory to diagnose psychopathology, you use organization theory and a variety of theories of human behavior, group dynamics, and organization behavior to diagnose organizational problems. You look at different components of the system to determine where pain is located, and which level of analysis dysfunctions are occurring. You develop a treatment plan and provide an intervention to restore the system to better functioning, and you evaluate the treatment to insure its success.
The conventional approach taken here is one that combines all these various aspects of organization development
HOW TO DO CONVENTIONAL ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT
Individuals in organizations may lack motivation, display decreased morale, or be prone to stress and burnout. Dysfunctions may show up in internnit rivalry, miscommunication, or conflict. The symptoms may manifest themselves in lessened organizational effectiveness, inefficiency, or poor adaptability to the organization's environment. If these problems persist or if an administrator becomes unable to
CHAPTER 15 Social Work a! the Global Level
419
Health Organization (WHO). WHO coordinates research, provides a system for notification of infectious diseases, and assists developing countries to organize their own public health services and control health-related problems such as poor sanitation.75
Becoming Involved in International Social Work
The easiest and most accessible way to become involved in international social work is to become a social work intern or volunteer, or obtain a paid position in an international social welfare organization such as Oxfam, CARE, World Vision, or ITNICEF that provides relief or promotes community development76
When you perform international social work, you will need to learn the language and understand the culture, customs, and history of the people with whom you are woridng. Only with a mind freed from the presumption that Western ideas are superior can you prevent yourself from unintentionally reinforcing the conditions you intend to change. You may, for example, come with a sincere intention to help develop people in an impoverished nation. Social workers who come from Canada or the United States, however, cannot develop the poor or anyone else. The only person you can develop is yourself, and the only people who can develop the poor are poor people themselves. Modern developmental models represent top-down, rational, market-orientation ideas of "progress." You cannot be a representative of these ideas. Instead, you honor the ideals of human potential, setf-detennina-tion, self-development, and the necessity for people to construct their own social reality and community culture. You disassociate yourself from enlightenment reason. You assert that self-reliant action by the people will not be determined by others' knowledge but by the people's own knowledge and action.
You cannot assist in the process of liberation if you are not first liberated yourself. Tarun Mandals (poor people's village organizations) give you this advice.
We need outside help for analysis and understanding our situation and experience, but not for telling us what we should do. Initially we had genuinely thought that outsiders had our good at heart and Icnew better. We did not tfunk much of ourselves and did not have ideas of our own.
An outsider who comes with ready-made solutions and advice is worse than useless. He must first understand from us what our questions are, help articulate the questions better, and then help us to find solutions.
An outsider also has to change. He alone is a friend who helps us to think about our problems an our own. The principle should be rninimum intervention.
Once you have become clear about the difference between the values, methods, and processes of modernization and the principles of helping people generate their own ideas and decisions, you may be ready to begin. Your primary task is to assist local people to attain a liberated inind in which they not only affirm that their ideas are of value, but they trust their belief s and culture and respect their own judgment. Only with a liberated mind can poor people release their creative potential to conceive the new world that lies ahead of them and then act on that vision.
While you may raise questions and sharpen thinking, your goal is to assist members of communities to make their own decisions, not judge whether the direction is the right one. The strength of your method is your conviction that ordinary working people are capable of social inquiry and analysis, and this capability can be enhanced by practice. Liberating education is more than the transfer of information; it is the practice of freedom. You affirm that poor villagers have the capacity to direct their own development and discover a "truth" of their community that becomes as valid for them as scientific truth is to technologically minded members of the West
You engage community members on their own territory and on their own terms. You must be willing to give up your own lifestyle and economic attainments to gain the trust, respect, and confidence of the community members. By living in impoverished communities, you demonstrate that you are willing to live the same life that they live, breath its air, eat the same food, and as much as possible become attuned to its culture.
One of the hallmarks of an international social worker is your ability to engage people. In the early stages of community work, your main job is simply to get to know the community and make friends with the people there. Talk to them about their lives, about the life of this community, and their feelings about living
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PART 4 Macro Soda! Work at the Societal and Global Levels
entrepreneursbip skills. Eventually, he asked whether his friends and family members could join him in these sessions. Before we could proceed to accept bis suggestion, John Luis explained that we had to talk with bis family and the parents of other youths who would be coming. We visited homes to introduce ourselves and explain the purpose of the youth sessions. Before long, the sessions expanded to formal Saturday morning meetings with eight of his relatives and friends.
Word spread around the small village that two "American" teachers from California had come to live in the area and that they were teaching the children. Within a week, John Luis brought a verbal invitation for us to present ourselves at a meeting of the local association. Not knowing what to expect, we arrived at the meeting fully equipped, carrying documentation as to who we were. We were seated in a small room opposite eight older gendemen and one woman who never spoke throughout the meeting. The men were dressed in the true "jibara" style. They wore sparkling clear and ironed "guayaberas." We introduced ourselves and they asked why we had come to their village. We spoke for several hours.
At the end, fully satisfied, the association asked us to work with the entire coinmunity in solving its serious unemployment problem. We told the association that we needed a planning and action committee. They named a committee, immediately including some of those present and others whom they could notify. Our work began that night. Every Thursday evening we met to plan and create a mode! of action. As a result of our work, Producir Inc., an economic and community development corporation, was legally incorporated in June 1986.77
in this community. Share with them who you are and be as real and genuine as you can. Express real interest in people, their surrotmdings, hopes, fears, and personal situations. Try to relate their lives with something in your own life. When you develop common ground or rapport, real understanding and communication can begin. The more you talk with people and get to know them, the more closer to them you will become, and the mare you become one of them.
Relationships and communication develop trust. Trust is essential in all community social work. Your influence in a community will depend to the extent to which its members trust you. The fastest way to develop trust is visibility. Go to places where people congregate. Any place people in the community gather is a good place for you to spend time. Go to religious celebrations and traditional festivals. Try to become close to several key people, if you can gain acceptance by one or more members of a particular subgroup, you have-established a toehold in that community. Once you have done this, you will more than likely be able to expand to other subgroups, because most communities have overlapping networks of relationships.
When you meet with a group of community members, listen to the issues, gather information, take time to talk to key community leaders, or simply act as a participant-observer in the community itself. Stimulate an attitude of self-reliance in the people from the very beginning. Help them ask questions such as, What can we do ourselves to solve this problem? Do we need the NGO worker to solve this problem? If we absolutely need outside help, how fast can we make ourselves independent? What can we do to facilitate this purpose?
In early January, 1985, we arrived at our farm in Cubuy. Living in the hills and on a farm was entirely foreign to both Df us. We quickly learned that two women living alone would need some help with the heavy work. John Luis, a young man in the area, was a member of a crew of handymen that helped-us out As custom requires, he became like a family member rather than simply a "stateside" handyman. He was unemployed and bis prospects for a job were dismal. We began to informally involve Mm in sessions on
One of your first tasks is to help members break the bonds of oppression that bold them in chains. Overt oppression itself, however, is not the main problem confronting the people of poor nations. The oppressed people's perception of their situation and their internalization of that oppression is their most persistent and insidious enemy. After centuries of conditioned helplessness, many people are trapped in "self-coloniza-tion." Freire calls this "playing host to the oppressor." Poor people participate in their own self-oppression. They accept their role as an oppressed people and often act in helpless and dependent ways rather than reject those roles. They internalize the opinions that the oppressor holds of them as if they are true. They believe