Participatory Governance and Professional Radicalism – Two Historical Variations of Community Organising

This paper explores the limits and possibilities of participatory politics with genealogical and historicist research. It presents two variations of “community organising” in which involvement of local communities is a central means of handling juvenile delinquency, poverty and other social problems. These interrelated but differing conceptions are Clifford Shaw’s sociological thought with its governmental application, the Chicago Area Project, started in the 1930s, and Saul Alinsky’s work in the 1940s and 1970s. The first case tells how community involvement was based on sociological knowledge on communities deployed as a means of social change. The second illustrates how community organising may be understood as a tool for emancipation and widening of democratic politics. This examination helps to understand how participation and citizen involvement in governance can be understood both as a consensual effort to solve social problems and as inherently conflictual and political action, a fight for a more equal society.