| This paper extends the idea of communities as
organizational
junkyards that was introduced in an earlier piece. The motivating
question is : what kind of a thing is a community for the doing of
community
improvement programs? Urban communities have long been treated as
“test tubes” for new ideas about intervening to ameliorate the effects
of social problems. Even though this imagery has become less
popular
and experts believe they have learned from the successes and failures
of
past programs, the underlying logic of communities as objects of
intervention
remains common. This paper argues that urban communities are
littered
with the social organizational debris of decades of programs.
Several
forms of organizational debris are described and some implications for
understanding communities as arenas for intervention are discussed.
* Originally presented at ASA Annual Meetings, San Francisco, CA, August 1998 |