ABSTRACT
This theoretical chapter describes ways that community context can matter for community organizing and its outcomes. In doing so it seeks to reframe a particularly contentious debate in organizing and development practice-the relative efficacy of conflict vs. consensus modes of organizing. Proponents of consensus organizing hold that “traditional” models of organizing, those which emphasize protest and divergent interests, are not likely to succeed. Proponents of other organizing modes, sometimes implicating community development practices, see consensus organizing as the manipulation of existing networks without changing terms of power. Instead of viewing conflict or consensus-based strategies in a vacuum, I view these strategies as emerging in local political cultures where patterns of conflict or consensus are themselves key dimensions of political institutions. This is an argument that community “matters” in community organizing, in that organizing promotes a vision or frame of community itself. This vision finds confluence or resistance from existing political structures and inter-organizational patterns of interaction. While institutional resistance to a campaign’s frames about community may make it more difficult for campaigns to succeed, this resistance also holds open the possibility for broad shifts in power and in inter-organizational dynamics.
