Jim Brown reviewed Occupation : Organizer by Clément Petitjean
How organizing became a profession
This is a great critical review/history of community organizing, with a particular view about how organizing became "professional." A useful critical take on Alinsky, but also a discussion of how organizing's "spadework" (a term coined by Ella Baker to describe the difficult work of cultivating personal relationships and preparing the ground for longer-term organizing) might be the better place to focus energies rather than on what Petitjean calls the "crème brûlée" of militant liberalism with its "crisp layer of conflict tactics and antiestablishment rhetoric on top o fa mellow cream of commitment to class harmony, compromise, and liberal pluralism. Significantly, the professional dimension of [organizing] work was baked into the créme from the beginning." (21)
This book also introduced me (I'm sure this is mostly because I'm just uninformed) that the distinction between organizing and mobilizing written about in Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts actually originates in the SNCC critique of …
This is a great critical review/history of community organizing, with a particular view about how organizing became "professional." A useful critical take on Alinsky, but also a discussion of how organizing's "spadework" (a term coined by Ella Baker to describe the difficult work of cultivating personal relationships and preparing the ground for longer-term organizing) might be the better place to focus energies rather than on what Petitjean calls the "crème brûlée" of militant liberalism with its "crisp layer of conflict tactics and antiestablishment rhetoric on top o fa mellow cream of commitment to class harmony, compromise, and liberal pluralism. Significantly, the professional dimension of [organizing] work was baked into the créme from the beginning." (21)
This book also introduced me (I'm sure this is mostly because I'm just uninformed) that the distinction between organizing and mobilizing written about in Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts actually originates in the SNCC critique of MLK's SCLC. SNCC's was interesting in organizing (the slow work of spadework) while it saw MLK primarily doing "mobilizing" (focusing on gathering large groups of people for protest rather than on involving the bulk of those people in the organizing work).