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Journal
of Drug Issues,
vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring 2006)
The rhetoric of "community" is common in talk of social programs. With
it comes imagery of common interests, overcoming turf battles, working
together, and getting along. When programs fail to achieve goals or
turn into outright fiascos, personal, organizational, and community
pathology, or simply "politics" are common explanations. Problems are
assumed to be endemic and intractable or remediable only by gifted
leadership or transcendence of business as usual. This(Full Text PDF ) DAN RYAN, Mills College danryan at mills dot edu article argues that such thinking is rooted in a false assumption. "Community" needs to be reconceptualized as a community of organizations, not people, and organizations as constrained actors not analogous to individuals. Organizations interact in peculiar, but analyzable ways, giving rise to unanticipated outcomes that could be labeled pathology or mere politics. Community alcohol and other drug AOD programs might be more successful if their logic models were based on realistic concepts of community that can distinguish the actually political from the organizationally normal. |