ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts covered in this book. The book provides a conceptual framework that deliberately disregards barriers between social theory, research, and practice in order to provide a means—whether across organizations and policymakers as in Collective Impact or within one organization—for instigating social change. The framework of a field of social action is meant to be a tool for supporting social and ultimately political agency. Political agency that looks to a process rather than a goal evokes the connection Balibar makes between citizenship and democracy. He describes democracy as "a permanent struggle for its own democratization and against its own reversal into oligarchy and monopoly of power". Beyond the framework, however, social action itself provides insight into how acts of citizenship constitute the struggle for democracy and how these acts reflect the particular challenges faced by activists within this struggle.
