| In recent years government and philanthropic funders have frequently required the formation of community-wide coalitions that bring all “stakeholders” to the table as a condition of funding. The reasons given for these requirements include the complexity of problems, turf wars, and economies of scale. Despite evidence that coalitions may be more trouble than they are worth, support for these approaches continues to grow. This dissertation is a case study of one such effort, the Fighting Back initiative in New Haven, Connecticut. Fighting Back was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in thirteen cities from 1989 to the present with the mandate to form community wide coalitions to build “comprehensive systems of prevention and treatment” to reduce the demand for drugs and alcohol. The data for this study include several years of participant observation, interviews with participants, and examination of organizational archives. Rather than asking “does Fighting Back work?” I use the case to ask: what kind of a thing is a community for carrying out an intervention like Fighting Back? Beginning from the assumption that a community is a community of organizations, and that Fighting Back was an organizational intervention, I show how many of the routine problems encountered by Fighting Back emerge from “ordinary” interactions between “ordinary” organizations rather than from individual or community pathology. Borrowing from theories of social networks, organizational garbage cans, and social capital, I identify three points of origin of “community of organization effects.” First, organizations have organizational properties that interact to produce unanticipated system level effects. Second, attempts at community-wide collaboration link together “garbage can” processes that are a normal part of organizations to produce super community wide garbage cans. The negative outcomes associated with increased linkages suggests a “dark side” of the social capital that coalitions supposedly foster. Finally, I develop a new way of thinking about how programs are embedded in history. Rather than seeing history in terms of lessons learned, I argue that in communities of organizations history is present as the “ghosts of organizations past” – scraps of social organization shed by organizations as they grow and die. As playing fields, communities are not merely unlevel, they are bumpy, full of gullies, hillocks, and ruts in which organizational junk both guides and hobbles contemporary efforts. Together, these effects help to explain why implementing programs like Fighting Back is so difficult, despite good intentions and plentiful resources. |