Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology

Fighting for Housing in Los Angeles

Paul Lichterman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200040
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ways that social advocates organize to fight unaffordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, illuminated by a new conceptual framework for studying collective action How Civic Action Works renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem solving. Paul Lichterman follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. Lichterman shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic.Lichterman presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem solving, both contentious and noncontentious, by grassroots and professional advocates alike. He reveals that advocates' distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. Lichterman concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers.Using extensive ethnography enriched by archival evidence, How Civic Action Works explains how advocates meet the relational and rhetorical challenges of collective action.

1

A New Sociology of Civic Action

HOW DO ADVOCATES for social change act? Cultural stories give us familiar answers. They march down the street, chanting, fists aloft. They risk arrest, jail time, and occasionally even life itself. They scale high-rise office buildings and unfurl banners with cheeky messages; they snarl traffic. Scholarly accounts show us the flashy, risk-taking aspects of advocacy too. They add, though, that advocates spend much of their time writing position papers, raising money, enduring meetings, or running educational workshops—like the ones that taught local residents in ISLA how to think critically about the work of downtown city planners. All these activities fit within the usual definition of a social movement: collective action that challenges institutional authorities to redistribute resources, remake policy, or bestow social recognition.¹ In the last several decades, studies of both the showier and more backstage kinds of movement activity share something else that may seem simply like common sense, but should not.

Problems with a Prominent Approach to Social Advocacy

The Entrepreneurial Actor

Researchers often assume that social advocates are goal-oriented operatives. Yet the scenarios in the introduction could suggest that housing advocates in Los Angeles were sometimes confused, petty, even incompetent. We would expect leading advocates to use easily accessible reasoning, like appeals to compassion, for people who need housing and health care. Leaders with widely appealing rationales should entice more people to join the cause. We would expect advocates to be happy when the powers that be see the problems the same way they do. And we would expect that advocates want to keep relationships with their allies strong and positive so that they keep working together to achieve whatever participants consider success. There is power in relationships as well as rationales.

Studies that rest on assumptions like these imagine the social advocate as what I will call an entrepreneurial actor. They think of actors, individual or collective, who take initiative proactively, using their skills to launch collective efforts, convince people to join up, and take risks to win their ends. In this view, social advocates are like savvy business entrepreneurs.

More and less explicit notions of the entrepreneurial actor animate many studies of social movement activity. In fact, the term “social movement entrepreneur” helped destigmatize collective action participants in the eyes of social scientists a half century ago.² Previously, scholars had imagined the participants as not patient or reflective enough to translate personal grievances into calmly stated claims, and communicate those through the normal channels.³ The image of the entrepreneur seizing opportunities to turn grievances into powerful campaigns dignified extrainstitutional, collective action as rational and political, not just a collective behavioral meltdown.⁴ As sociologists Patricia Ewick and Marc Steinberg (2019, 22–23) argue, the predominant view of social advocates in contemporary research is that of actors who carry out preplanned strategies that drive consistently toward preplanned goals. They execute plans instrumentally in hopes of (uncertain) success, taking the kinds of risks entrepreneurs take.

Some social movement studies depart markedly from the entrepreneurial actor model, and I have benefited greatly from their insights.⁵ Some conceptual statements open up room for social advocates whose moral understandings as well as emotional or self-expressive motives matter alongside entrepreneurial ones.⁶ And to be clear, not all studies that lean on the entrepreneurial model do so exclusively or say so explicitly. The model, I am arguing, is often an implicit intellectual sensibility, or a way of wording research questions, even in works that aim to challenge that model. The image of the striving entrepreneur is in some ways useful for our thinking—and decades of research bear that out. Still, it is good to be critically aware of this imagery whether or not we are academics. It limits our imagination for what advocates do. The more we rely on that image and the vocabulary that goes with it, the harder it is to break away and ask other important questions.

Recently, some scholarship argues for broadening beyond the focus on material and political grievances along with governmental targets that has characterized a lot of research on social movements. Social movements challenge cultural as well as economic or political hierarchies; they want to change our ideas of what women are suited to do, what a family should be like, and what counts as a good life—as ends in themselves. These challenges may be “instrumental” and “expressive” at the same time, not simply either rational or irrational.⁷ Important institutional challenges come into view that we otherwise miss or dismiss when we think of these kinds of social movement goals. We see that powerful cultural contexts set the stage for some social movement activity. This valuable scholarly move multiplies the kinds of targets we can recognize and kinds of challengers—LGBTQ advocates, for example—we can study as social movement actors. It puts more emphasis on the question of what strategies develop, and somewhat less on what current political opportunities activists can exploit.

These moves go as far as the gravitational pull of the entrepreneurial model allows. They broaden our horizons helpfully, while leaving unaddressed the question of what counts as a strategy and goal.⁸ Undisturbed is the entrepreneurial actor who carries out preplanned strategies, whether instrumental or expressive, toward preplanned goals, whether those involve change in corporate, legislative, or cultural institutions.

The same observation applies to important writings since the 1980s that focus closely on the cultural and emotional dimensions of social movements. Many scholars have explored the collective identities, emotional tones, culture-building strategies, rhetorical frames, and stories that animate social movement activity.⁹ On the one hand, these writings show that social movements thrive as their participants develop a new sense of who they are, where they are from, and what they are fighting for.¹⁰ Activists speak, write, and sometimes sing in striking idioms and images; they feel; and they aspire to a more moral social order. This newer work calls into question the whole idea that being strategic means being coolly calculating and unemotional. Yet alongside these helpful developments, important conceptual agenda-setting statements have continued to assume social movement leaders are a particular kind of strategic actor: the savvy entrepreneur.¹¹ “Strategic” means getting new participants to do what movement activists want them to do, as social movement scholar James Jasper (2006) refreshingly puts it. In this view, then, advocates strategize with striking idioms and images, feelings, and moral aspirations in pursuit of preplanned goals.

The problem is that we need room to imagine different ways of relating to intentions and goals, deciding what counts as a goal, and what counts as winning. Rather than look for universal principles and dilemmas of strategic action, in other words, we can learn what being goal oriented means in different settings. I learned in LA housing circles that advocates with different understandings of strategy—not simply more or less efficient strategies—encountered quite different dilemmas. We need a bigger conceptual box to apprehend different ways of getting others to do what actors want them to do.

Prominent social movement scholarship has gone another direction. It fits out the entrepreneurial actor with an ultimately psychological notion of “skill.”¹² Here again is the strategic actor who is a first mover, albeit one constrained by one or more hierarchical social fields, using special skill to conceive plans, meet goals, advance in the field, or create new fields. Situations and opportunities may vary, but in that picture, skill is a generic quality. In this study, in contrast, being “skilled” involved different ways of coordinating action in different social contexts. The entrepreneurial actor model is not necessarily “wrong” in relation to my own findings. It would be right to suppose that housing advocates in Los Angeles craft claims and try to sustain relationships strategically. Advocates certainly did try to get others to do what they wanted them to do. The question is how they did that. The image of entrepreneur does little to highlight capacities and sensibilities that mattered to LA housing advocates, and ought to matter to researchers.

ENTREPRENEURIAL CLAIMS MAKING: THE MISSING “HOW”

In the last thirty years, our understanding of political claims making has become closely associated with research on framing. A “frame” is a mixed package of messages that social movement actors hope will resonate with a targeted audience.¹³ Advocates hope the frame will convince by-standers to become supporters; that aspiration to success is built into the notion of framing in social movements research. In the most prominent statements, framing is the work of innovative, strategic leaders aiming to “sell” a message. This top-down understanding of how ideas generate collective action travels some distance from the framing perspective’s original statement, which presented framing more as an ongoing, collective, sense-making activity.¹⁴ The strategic framing perspective became popular in the study of social movements because it could complement an already well-established “instrumentalist” approach to collective action.¹⁵ That is, it adopted the entrepreneurial actor model.¹⁶ Framing studies have tended to see symbols and meanings as pliable media for movement actors’ strategies.

HJ advocates certainly orchestrated the framing of their campaign message. In position papers and flyers, and on city hall’s steps, leaders consistently referred to housing conditions in Los Angeles as a “crisis.”¹⁷ The solution to the crisis was a “three-point plan” of action that, as one campaign leader told me, the campaign crafted to appeal to a varied set of potential supporters, such as housing developers, tenant associations, and labor groups.

If the point of framing is to produce a winning message, puzzles still remain. Why were the HJ advocates I accompanied to the town hall meeting not happier to hear city planning officials echoing and promoting the activists’ preferred frames? Why didn’t ISLA advocates frame their opposition to the large apartment complex in the compassion terms that many people would find less threatening than more political-sounding appeals?¹⁸ Why did they downplay appeals to quality of life when the city officials they wanted to convince talked in these terms frequently at public hearings?

Skilled actor theorists would find the answer back inside the actor. ISLA leaders applied their skills, sized up the local environment, thought through the different potential pitches, and decided that opportunity and justice language would be more successful than appeals to caring or quality of life, given the array of actors in the field. Skill is a “blend of pre-existing rules, resources, and social skills [sic].”¹⁹ A sympathetically critical response might point out that this is an abstract, broad-brushstroke answer to the puzzle; a crispier response might also note that the definition of skill is circular. In any event, we need to know more about the complicated skills that direct advocates to act compassionately with their constituents while not talking that way in public forums.²⁰

ENTREPRENEURIAL RELATIONSHIP BUILDING: AGAIN, THE MISSING “HOW”

The entrepreneurial actor model understands social advocates’ work of sustaining relationships in two ways. In one of those, building relationships with new participants is a matter of telling motivational stories to entice new members. The relationships are the successful outcome of rhetorical devices that mobilize individuals.²¹ But what about the qualities or textures of the relationships themselves? What do the relationships mean? Studies of social networks focus on the relationships as facts in themselves, not only outcomes. These studies point out that people are more likely to attend meetings or join protests when they know other participants.²² Similarly, when organizational leaders want to r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How about a Bigger Box?
• 1. A New Sociology of Civic Action
• 2. Placing and Studying the Action
• 3. Solving Problems by Fighting for an Interest
• 4. Solving Problems by Protecting an Identity
• 5. Why Follow the Style, Not Just the Organization?
• 6. What Is Winning? How Style Shapes Strategies, Goals, and Trade-offs
• 7. Who Can Say What, Where, and How? Follow the Claims Making
• 8. How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem
• 9. Hybrid Problem Solving: Creating Affordable Housing
• Conclusion: Benefits of a Bigger Box
• Appendix I: Putting Together the Study
• Appendix II: Who Was the Ethnographer? Reflections on the Field Research
• Notes
• References
• Index