Few scholars today would argue that ideas are unimportant or that they are mere epiphenomena in the service of material interests. As sources of change, they occupy an undeniable place.1
Blyth 2003.
Pressman and Wildavsky 1984.
To view big ideas such as education reform from a national perspective over time brings into focus an important interplay between institutions and ideas,3
Lieberman 2002.
Motivations in most settings are complex.5
Our operating assumption is that no single form dominates and analysis needs to be situational, exploring what matters when. As we look at local reforms, we see ideas as consequential but ask in what way. Reform ideas face major hurdles, and it is useful to identify them in order to better understand how and when they are overcome.Reform and Purpose
Reform is not simply an isolated program initiative. Reform is an effort to address a problem by altering practice. It often takes the form of a worthy cause. At the local level, it is associated with matters of community-wide concern, hence is not just relief or a favor for a particular group. A reform is also more than a stop-gap measure, and not to be equated with outrage over a single event. Reform, however, is typically about something more limited than the transformation of society.6
Bear in mind that reforms come in a variety of specificities. Local reforms, such as the ones examined below, draw from (and feed into) a jumble of national movements and ideas. In our analysis we do not assume that movement is necessarily from large idea to particular application. Movement may sometimes go in the opposite direction, and, in any case, at the local level initiatives often rest on a pragmatic amalgam of general ideas
Reform is intentional action, but, as it takes shape, connection to a set of originators may become tenuous. Reforms often fall short of expectations and sometimes fail completely. They may take on new dimensions and assume a direction not anticipated by their originators. The character of a reform may evolve over time, and patterns of support and resistance alter accordingly.7
The social-movement literature reminds us as well that supporters and potential supporters can alter the understanding of what a movement is about. See Benford and Snow 2000.
Relying on observations of experience in three cities, we use the concept of purpose to illuminate aspects of the politics of reform. We draw on the social-movement literature, but see local reform as much more engaged with concrete, everyday reality than is the case with many social movements, especially those calling for society-wide transformation. We employ purpose to recognize the ideational aspect of behavior while at the same time being attentive to bounded rationality. A purpose makes an idea concrete.8
In talking about policy ideas, Béland distinguishes specific policy alternatives from “the organized principles and causal beliefs” in which they may be embedded. See Béland 2005, 2. For our part, we emphasize the concrete side, not because we regard abstract ideas as unimportant, but because we believe their relation to collective action is more indirect and more heavily mediated.
According to James Q. Wilson, purposive incentives “derive from the sense of satisfaction of having contributed to the attainment of a worthwhile cause.”9
Wilson 1973, 34. Social-movement scholars make a parallel point in talking about “conscience constituencies”. See Benford and Snow 2000.
At the same time, we believe that there is something inherent in purpose that can offset the free-rider instinct. We concur with the view that “something is very wrong with the notion that rational people cooperate only out of selfish motives.”10
Jones 2001, 127.
Muir 1977, 150.
King 1986.
In studying police officers, Muir looks at their quest for meaning, particularly meaning that can come from doing one's part. He suggests that police officers ponder the existential question, do I matter?13
Muir 1977, 190.
Roosevelt's phrase was spotlighted in a book with that title by Eric Goldman (1952). It was part of FDR's acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic Convention.
Although it may be the case that the effort of one person often makes no appreciable difference in outcome, efforts on behalf of a purpose may be intrinsically satisfying.15
Chong 1991.
We don't urge abandoning the notion that behavior is sometimes and even often self-regarding, but human nature is complex—with a social side that can transcend self-centeredness.17
See especially Cohen 1985. Myra Ferree points out: “If mother-child, rather than adult male, is seen as the basic human unit, creating community does not seem so fraught with difficulty, nor does competition seem the archetypal human emotion”. See Ferree 1992, 36. See also Evans 1980.
In its concreteness, purpose holds a political advantage over theoretical principle. A purpose can bring together people who don't share a world view. Particular concerns may vary. Supporters may be ideologically diverse, and their motives may not be identical. One backer of a purpose may be idealistic while another is concerned only with appearing responsible in the eyes of others. Purpose thus meets the test of compatibility with bounded rationality, but also easily accommodates the possibility of multiple motivations. It counters exclusive emphasis on rational egoism by explaining why a tendency toward free-riding may not always be dominant. Important as selective material incentives are, they don't constitute the whole solution to the collective-action problem.18
In a broader view, selective incentives cease to be confined to material ones and include “solidary incentives which arise from interaction with others, and purposive incentives, the moral feeling of self-satisfaction from doing the right thing”. See Marwell and Oliver 1993, 7. The difficulty with this broadened view is that it no longer differentiates forms of motivation. To argue, for example, that one cause was deemed more morally noble than another would seem to run counter to Olson's original logic. He argued, in effect, that the difference between a noble cause and a trivial cause is not a foundation for understanding collective action. If not, why would the difference between, say, a somewhat noble cause and a highly noble cause be a better foundation for understanding collective action. Schwartz and Paul seem more on target in talking about “group logic” supplanting “individual logic” when personal ties serve to activate obligations to the group. See Schwartz and Paul 1992, 214. On this issue see various selections in Friedman 1996.
Immediacy
Seen through a local lens, reform does not end with an enactment. Because it involves an ongoing effort among many actors, sustainability is a major consideration. While cooperation comes easiest in small and homogenous groups, reform often involves a heterogeneous body of participants for which centrifugal forces are strong. Given bounded rationality, attention to any one issue is subject to displacement as new circumstances come into play.19
Jones 1994.
As creatures of bounded rationality, people tend to focus on immediate concerns. Even the social side of humanity manifests itself mainly in meeting tasks and responsibilities of everyday life. Only in extraordinary circumstances do individuals consider the larger society and its problems, and that focus is not readily sustained. As Plunkitt of Tammany Hall reminds us, reform in some sense runs counter to human nature.20
Riordon 1963.
We might think of reform as akin to flight. In order for flight to occur, the force of gravity must be overcome. In the case of reform, gravity takes the shape of immediate concerns. Reform involves overcoming the pull of immediacy. In a metaphorical sense, reforms are like bumblebees. Their body weight (the large purposes that give shape to reform) is heavy in relation to wing capacity (the ability to sustain motivation). In a proverbial version, the laws of physics tell us that bumblebees cannot fly. So it is with reform initiatives. A large effort at intended change (reform), according to some “laws” of social science, cannot succeed. The pull of “gravity” (immediacy) is too great. Yet, just as bumblebees fly, reformers, albeit at a lower rate of success, make a go of their efforts.
Gravity, however, takes many forms, one of which is a tendency toward what Bryan Jones calls attention shift.21
Jones 1994.
Giving center stage to purpose spotlights the question of issue displacement, and it does so without treating people as impelled to be free-riders. Part of human behavior is to be purposive, but any given purpose, even if regarded meritorious, can be displaced by subsequent purposes. A broad reform purpose is susceptible to displacement by smaller and more immediate concerns, or it could be nudged aside by the emergence of a different set of broad concerns. Hence the central focus of our analysis is issue displacement.
Our argument is that large purposes possess a fragile but important presence. They can provide a framework within which diverse actors pursue a shared aim, but a reform agenda is vulnerable to displacement through the susceptibility of boundedly rational creatures to attention shifts. The politics of reform thus involves questions about how and under what conditions a purpose can be made less vulnerable to displacement. That has to do with auxiliary means, especially interpersonal and interorganizational networks. There is, however, a reciprocal relationship between purpose and networks. Purpose can redirect or expand or even help create a network, but a network is also a reinforcement for purpose and a counter to attention shift.
A Focus for Studying Reform Politics
Drawing from literature on social movements and agenda-setting, our analysis emphasizes networks, both those built around reform aims and those enlisted in the service of reforms. While the substance of ideas plays a part, we direct primary attention to networks attached to purposes, the needs they meet, and the contextual forces they supply.23
Moore 1988.
The quoted phrase is from Friedman and McAdam 1992, 158. Along with their analysis, see also McAdam and Paulsen 1993.
Any given purpose, no matter how favorably viewed, is susceptible to displacement. The politics of reform thus turns, in significant part, on the extent to which auxiliary factors prevent broad reform aims from being displaced. Interest plays a recognized part, but that observation does not spotlight the problem of issue displacement.
To be perceived as wearing the mantle of reform, a purpose needs to be seen as responsive to the concerns of a wide public, and to be perceived as fair. However, even if a reform purpose crosses this threshold, the challenge of issue displacement must still be met. That is why networks deserve attention.25
Our use of the term network overlaps greatly with the idea of institutionalization, especially since we emphasize interorganizational networks. Even so, by connotation “network” suggests links that are less formally structured than what is suggested by “institutionalization.” It may also be that the local political landscape is more fluid and more personal than is the case with the national landscape (cf. Berman 2001).
- enhancing the credibility of the reform goal as an achievable purpose;
- bolstering identity with the reform goal;
- providing cognitive reinforcement for the goal.
All three factors guard against displacement, and they provide a counter-force to the tendency for more immediate concerns to preempt the attention space in which reform activity needs to operate. Thus network linkages serve to highlight a central purpose and give it credibility, keep communications flowing around that purpose, and provide means by which actors can identify concretely with a central purpose.
Consider first that without visibility and a credible base of support, reform purposes lack feasibility in the eyes of potential supporters. A purpose merely discussed in a one-to-one conversation lacks the credibility that a purpose possesses when backed by an elaborate network.26
Gould 1993.
Kingdon 1995, 171.
The promotion of group-mindedness is a second function met by a supporting body of connections. Partly this is a matter of a tendency toward social connection rather than isolation.28
Jones 2001.
Wilson 1962.
However, treating opportunities for social affiliation as a side benefit does not capture a fundamental point about group mindedness that many social-movement scholars have grasped. Identifying with a group can activate obligations to that group. Such an obligation can bring March and Olsen's institutional perspective into play, and lead people to act on the basis of what they deem appropriate.30
When the logic of appropriateness operates, individuals are imbued with a tendency, as Schwartz and Paul put it, to avoid “free-loading”.31Schwartz and Paul 1992, 214.
Ibid., 215.
A third function is providing cognitive reinforcement and amplification. Networks provide not only the means through which purposes can be reiterated and explained, but they also provide ongoing means by which they can be adapted and applied to changing conditions.33
To be effective, linkages need to include organizations and people with the time and skills to develop specific programs of action.Narrowly defined and established purposes such as those found in policy subsystems typically center on an agency staffed by experts, with professional commitments to the purpose. Staff serves as a core of communications and they translate the purpose into concrete plans and proposals. As staff, their immediacy of interest and concern glue connections together. Broad, locality-wide agendas, especially newly formed ones, face the same need for a structure of reinforcement and elaboration.
Some Lessons from Urban School Reform
Although reform has kinship with agenda setting, much research on the latter treats national legislation, focusing on such matters as issue salience, the attention cycle, and the role of public opinion.34
Although Baumgartner and Jones mention “institutional legacies”, their main concern is the politics of policy change.35Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 87.
El Paso, Texas
El Paso is a border city, with a population over a half million, and that population, especially the school population, is preponderantly Mexican-American.36
This section is based on a case study for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (Stone 2003).
A dialogue began, but Chamber officials maintained that they could not shoulder the responsibility of a local compact. As this initial effort was reaching impasse, a new president, Dr. Diana Natalicio, took office at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and she was in search of ways to link the university more closely to the community and its problem-solving activities. Natalicio also began a conversation with Dr. Susana Navarro, a native of El Paso with experience in civil rights work and a leadership role in education reform in California. With Sister Maribeth Larkin joining the conversations, discussion extended to school officials and various community-based players. President Natalicio agreed to house a school-reform entity, the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, on the campus of the university.
The Collaborative was established with a governing board that was and continues to be chaired by President Natalicio. Importantly, membership on the board is allocated to institutional positions, with Natalicio joined by the lead organizer for EPISO, the president of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce, the head of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, the county chief executive, the president of the community college, the three school superintendents, and the chief of the regional district of the Texas Education Agency. Dr. Navarro is executive director. The Collaborative thus joins business, government, and community representatives with key educational institutions around the aim of improved academic achievement. The Collaborative Board also serves as a means by which new position holders can be socialized into the purpose of academic improvement.
This array of actors contributes time and resources that, without the pull of an institutionally centered purpose, would likely be diverted into a variety of alternative purposes. After all, the appeal and demand of purposes vary in intensity across a range of actors. The Collaborative has a small paid (and bilingual) staff with the time and skills to meet core needs, including communication with and enlistment of a wide range of participants not in a position to devote full-time efforts. In this way, structured ties blend varying levels of commitment.
The Collaborative was officially launched in 1992, and it continues at this writing with a strong record of funding from the National Science Foundation as well as support from private businesses and philanthropies. The activities of the Collaborative and its staff involve professional development for educators, site-based management (wide decision-making at the school level), curriculum alignment around more rigorous standards, promotion of a higher level of college attendance, and technical assistance with the diagnostic uses of standards testing. It also includes the promotion of parent involvement, complete with an ongoing parent-engagement seminar.
Evidence of the sustainability of reform is an Education Summit, co-chaired by executive director Navarro and a local business leader. Conducted in February 2000 and given significant support by a variety of elected officials, the Summit was a two-day session that brought together some 300 educators, parents, businesspeople, government officials, and community representatives to explore specific steps for the future. To follow up, a number of task forces were created to pursue various aims identified through summit deliberations. Further evidence of sustainability comes from the fact that the six smaller districts in the county have begun to work with the Collaborative.
The Collaborative can be seen as a source of benefits to its three key architects, and also to other contributors to its activities. Its work has been accompanied by improved school performance—increased test scores and a higher level of student enrollment in demanding academic courses. Hence one could link the creation and continuation of the Collaborative into a selective-incentives explanation, and that is not a trivial point. But it also misses some important features of El Paso's experience. The main one is that the shared purpose at the heart of the Collaborative provides a framework in which important institutional actors, all with many demands on their time, can combine their efforts behind a highly visible, area-wide activity that has a capacity to attract and maintain the engagement of a variety of civic and political players. While the Collaborative may be seen as a positive-sum game in which intangible and expressive benefits play a major role, that is only part of its story. Institutionalization of reform in the Collaborative provides means by which a purpose is served by an ongoing agenda of concrete activities. In this instance the purpose is more than a broad and socially worthy aim; it is also a set of related and highly concrete activities around which a number of people in varying capacities can contribute their efforts. Purpose operates at multiple levels and taps more than one form of motivation.
In this vein, the Collaborative gives UTEP a focus for several related activities, including a re-orientation of its college of education and that college's own engagement in school reform activities. The Collaborative thus provides an umbrella under which a range of activities by a variety of actors can be combined and sustained. The board of the Collaborative offers a means by which new players (e.g., school superintendents, mayors, and organizers for EPISO) can be socialized into a shared and ongoing purpose. The staff of the Collaborative does not consist of employees concerned with the usual mix of career opportunities and material benefits. Instead, the Collaborative's staff is mission-minded and deeply committed to their task, more akin to a cadre organization than a standard bureaucracy.37
During its formative period, the Collaborative overcame the centrifugal force of multiple actors being pulled in disparate directions by competing demands. As a border city facing a declining economy, El Paso provided a setting in which a unifying purpose could take shape, but for that purpose to gain lasting form, a key set of actors had to tap into a loose body of contacts and institutionalize a network that brought together major sectors of community life. At its core, that network has a professional staff recruited around a purpose to which they are deeply committed. The institutionalized network also provides means by which a variety of other actors can be drawn into a complex but durable purpose. This array of actors contributes time and resources that could potentially be drawn into a variety of alternative aims without the pull of the Collaborative.
Significantly, as an embodiment of purpose, the Collaborative has a presence with its own momentum. Consider that, as the initial sparkplug for school reform, Sister Maribeth Larkin has, in line with IAF practice, moved on to a new place and assignment. However, as an organizational participant in the city's dialogue about school reform, EPISO holds a seat on the Collaborative's board, and both EPISO and the chamber were involved in the 2000 Education Summit. Yet neither is a central player. Each is a multi-issue organization with built-in tendencies toward issue shift. Both have a continuing interest in school reform, but it is the sustaining institutional force of the Collaborative that gives form and direction to the overall network. As the inner core of that network, the Board of the Collaborative, staffed by the executive director, is structured so that school reform has anchoring that other issues cannot easily dislodge.38
Significantly, Collaborative seats are held by superintendents, not elected school-board members. In Texas, the latter are easily pulled into distributive issues about such things as the allocation of construction contracts; further, board members are not as closely linked to academic performance as superintendents are.
In neither origin nor lasting form is the Collaborative a demonstration of the disembodied power of an idea. The Collaborative combines idea with resources around a concrete purpose, given tangible and detailed form by an expert staff and amplified by volunteer activities. Purposes are highly fragile and easily displaced, but they can also bring together needed ingredients for a sustained and multipronged effort. Selective incentives play a part, but they operate within a framework. Further, purpose has a potential to motivate extraordinary effort and, through such means as civic pride and expressive rewards, set in motion a process greater than the sum of its individual parts. The Collaborative shows how congruent aims, backed by resources, can come together in such a way as to withstand the corrosive force of attention shift.
Hampton, Virginia
Hampton offers a contrasting approach to reform.39
A small city of just under 150,000, Hampton is an older city across the river from Norfolk and part of Virginia's Tidewater region. Hampton has an even racial divide between Blacks and whites. Its school population is majority Black. During the 1980s and 1990s the city developed a reputation for innovation,40Osborne and Plastrik 1997.
In 1982, James Eason opposed the incumbent mayor, Thomas Gear. As mayor, Gear was a hard-line proponent of minimal government, having once entertained the idea of selling city hall. Eason was a member of the school board and had long been involved in civic affairs. Whereas Gear saw a city faced with inevitable decline that could only be slowed by lowering taxes and cutting services, Eason called for the city to shape its own destiny. Once elected as mayor, he recruited a young city manager, Robert O'Neill, out of the “reinventing government” movement. Together this duo recruited other innovation-minded professionals to key positions and established a climate where creative thinking was valued. The police chief, for instance, was a pioneer in community policing.
When, faced with strong neighborhood opposition to a highway in the comprehensive plan, the city turned to a facilitated consensus process. Judged a success, the consensus process became the mode of operation for the Planning Department. Around the same time, the city school system faced a rampant drug problem among high school students. A coalition composed of the police department, the school system, the PTA, and Alternatives developed HIPP, Hampton Intervention and Prevention Project. From these two experiences, a problem-solving pattern took shape.
By 1990, the stage was set for a new agenda. The mayor and city manager pursued a staffing strategy of recruiting, developing, and retaining able professionals by giving them latitude to take on interesting and challenging projects. Although staff was very active in professional circles, many chose to remain with the city for periods up to 20 years or more.
As a one-time member of the school board, Mayor Eason was mindful of a need to break down the insulation of the school system from the community and from the city's civic life. At first neither he nor the city manager had a specific plan for taking on this issue. However, in his 1990 “state of the city” address, the mayor made a case for a human-capital program to respond to an increasingly global economy. Eason and O'Neill followed up by forming a working group of about 40, ranging from city and school officials to military officers along with executives from NASA and Newport News Shipbuilding.
Importantly, the mayor and city manager also saw a need for more than elite engagement. Given limited resources, they sought to align city government with community efforts in solving problems. HIPP, along with the consensus process, provided a model of how this could work. In collaboration with Alternatives, the city obtained a grant to develop a consultation process, which involved over 5000 youth and adults.
From that process came three major initiatives: creation of a Coalition for Youth as an agency of city government, focused on youth development and positioned to foster cooperation among the school system, Alternatives, and city hall; a neighborhood-improvement initiative institutionalized through the creation of a Neighborhood Office, with a Neighborhood Commission to guide neighborhood policy; and the formation of a Healthy Families Partnership, involving city agencies along with local hospitals, concerned with preventive program for at-risk children.
This bare sketch shows an agenda taking shape, which guided the city through the 1990s and left an institutional legacy that still operates. Concentric circles of purpose are at work. At the beginning, Mayor Eason put forward a positive vision of a city shaping its own destiny. That carried the day over the notion of a city managing its decline by retrenchment. That vision was the umbrella under which a motivated staff pursued innovative problem-solving. Experiences with community policing, HIPP, and consensus planning pointed to the contributions that could come from aligning community and city efforts.
Top city officials linked the idea of alignment to a human-capital agenda to be pursued by means of community involvement. This agenda not only encouraged city staff to initiate activities consistent with the mayor's vision, it also had an impact on individuals engaged in community work. Institutionalization of purpose in such bodies as the Neighborhood Office gave community actors a visible partner in the city government, and grass-roots initiatives began a process of creating community centers, housing afterschool programs.
The alignment initiative gave birth to a new partnership between municipal government and the city's public schools. The school system had a representative on the Neighborhood Commission, and the school superintendent at this time had earlier been the assistant superintendent who had worked on the HIPP initiative. During the 1990s city and school officials took steps towards building stronger connections between schools and the communities in which they were located. This was a logical outgrowth of the human-capital agenda and the specific concerns about youth development and neighborhoods. A key initiative was In-SYNC (Innovations for Schools, Youth and families, Neighborhoods and Communities). To head the initiative the Neighborhood Office and the school system jointly created a staff position filled by a former principal. The stated mission of In-SYNC was to build “neighborhood-based partnerships that maximize and mobilize family and community resources to promote strong schools and youth success.” To date, the program is primarily centered on providing and supporting a series of after school programs.
In-SYNC operates these programs by fostering collaboration among the Department of Parks and Recreation, the school system, the Coalition for Youth, and the Neighborhood Office. Beyond intragovernmental collaboration, In-SYNC seeks alignment with the efforts of engaged communities. Some centers are run by community members, and many of their programs rely heavily on volunteers. An important addition is Queen Street Baptist Church, with its wide range of services and activities. The city provides support, but full capacity comes from the involvement of community members. In-SYNC's mode of operation calls for an array of neighborhood stakeholders to assess community resources as well as needs. Ultimately the objective is to connect community resources to community needs. Because the city has limited resources, sustainability requires a continuing ability to attract community-based resources.
A network of professionals and community leaders.
Under Eason's agenda, an informal network of professionals and community leaders took shape. Eason remained as mayor until 1997, when he left office to lead the newly formed Hampton Roads Partnership. The head of the Planning Department during the consensus process moved over to head the Neighborhood Office when it was created, and she still holds that position at this writing. The city manager did move on when Eason left the mayoralty, but that was after 14 years, an atypically long time in a position for a city manager, especially a highly visible and award-winning manager. An assistant city manager recently retired after 20 years in his position, again an extraordinary length of time in position. Similarly the head and founder of Alternatives recently stepped down after 20 years in his position. The Alternatives staff member who worked on HIPP also chaired the community consultation process and became the director of the Coalition for Youth, a position she still holds. The assistant school superintendent who was the main school-system participant in HIPP subsequently became superintendent. He was the key supporter of the effort to build neighborhood-school partnerships and was the superintendent when In-SYNC was founded. He also worked closely with the Coalition for Youth in an asset-mapping and school environment process for the school system. As superintendent, in the spirit of youth involvement, he created a student advisory committee for the superintendent's office and mandated that all high school principals create such bodies for their schools.
Beyond this cadre of professionals, there also evolved a group of community leaders who were key in efforts aimed at alignment. Early on, city officials appreciated the role that community leaders could play in advancing their agenda and sought to cultivate that leadership. In doing so, one of their primary tools has been “Neighborhood College,” a city-run program for citizens to learn about the functions, resources, and limitations of city government, and also about how to access resources for their community efforts, as well as how to collaborate with each other and the city government. Many of the key community leaders in the city are graduates of Neighborhood College, and they credit it with promoting a favorable climate for partnerships.
Continuity among central players clearly helped deflect issue displacement, but as no mere happenstance. Hampton's experience suggests that a broad purpose, pursued by a mode of operation consistent with many smaller and more concrete purposes, offers a counter to attention drift and issue displacement. Significantly, Hampton's human-capital agenda took shape and was pursued in the face of declining government resources, accentuated by a national recession. The emergence of that agenda had much to do with what Baumgartner and Jones call positive feedback.41
Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 16.
Institutional legacies in the face of agenda change.
Following the departure of Eason and O'Neil, the city continued its commitment to a human-capital agenda. However, as the 1990s came to a close, the city's visible priorities began to shift toward economic-development projects. Although the shift coincided with a change in leadership, the picture is more complicated. With O'Neil's departure, George Wallace became the city's first Black city manager, after an extensive time as an assistant city manager. Wallace, whose focus had been economic development, continued to support a broad human-capital agenda even as economic development became a heightened priority. Wallace was a strong proponent of what proved to be a controversial and contested program. Specifically he led the way towards significant city investment in a convention center, as well as a major retail and entertainment complex. This was pursued at a time when the city's revenues were declining.
Wallace's pursuit of development was not unprecedented. The convention center and commercial development were long-standing ideas, kept alive by the fact that the city had two business improvement districts as well as an economic development agency. Furthermore, the early years of the Eason administration were themselves marked by significant downtown projects. Still, there was an unmistakable shift in city hall's agenda, driven partly by the city's revenue position. In this context of agenda shift, the continuance of the human-capital program is impressive. Consider In-SYNC. The initiative was sustained, and the agency even expanded its activities despite shifting agendas for both the city government with its revenue crunch, and a school system under tremendous external pressure from Virginia's high-stakes testing regime.
Sustained activity was due in part to the strategy of In-SYNC's staff. With limited resources even in the best of times, they engaged in a strategy of leveraging these resources through aligning city efforts with the efforts and resources of community organizations. This process was helped by the successes of the Neighborhood College—as graduates tended to recognize the city's limited resources, and thus were willing, particularly through the Neighborhood Office, to partner with the city.
With testing increasingly highlighted, community-school partnerships assumed less priority for the school system. Yet the high-stakes testing regime also provided an angle for In-SYNC to promote community centers and after school programs as tools to support academic achievement and bolster test preparation. Navigating the changing context, In-SYNC served as a vehicle for the maintenance of purpose in the face of a shifting agenda. Through concerns about youth development and “school climate,” the Youth Coalition, for its part, offered a counterbalance to a narrow focus on test scores.
Hampton illustrates how purpose can be institutionalized and how institutionalization can preserve an agenda and sustains its momentum even in the face of various obstacles. To be sure, the process is far from easy; there is more to sustaining reform than creating an agency with a mission. In Hampton, the “reform” institutions were established within a context defined by a broad purpose that had currency both within government and the community.
In that context institutionalization signaled that the city could be a real partner, thus increasing the possibility of alignment. Furthermore, the institutions—once they began to pursue their missions—mobilized other actors with an interest in the human-capital agenda, and they contributed their efforts and resources to a shared idea. While the human-capital agenda required significant alignment with community resources, alignment also helped sustain the institutions. Institutionalizing the agenda provided crucial policy feedback—the establishment of a constituency, with awakened interests, which in turn helped sustain the reform efforts. One observer of Hampton's Neighborhood Office likened the “awakened” community groups to a proverbial “bear,” noting that when one begins to dance with a bear, it is the bear that decides when the dancing will stop.42
This metaphor captures well the idea of a lock-in effect. See Pierson 1994, 42–45.
In sum, not only were new agencies and initiatives established, but agencies did not operate in isolation from one another. Instead they were linked around shared missions and a collaborative mode of operation. Because the program initiatives required alignment with the resources and efforts of community groups, an active constituency was also incorporated into operations. Inevitably, the context changed. In response to external conditions, the city's agenda began to shift. Still the city's human-capital legacy had a sustaining network of interactions.
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore is an aging industrial city, with a population of 651,154.43
This section is based mainly on Orr 1999.
Until 1997, the mayor had charge of the school system.44
Under the restructuring agreement steered by the state, the governor and the mayor jointly appointed members of the city school board from a list provided by the State of Maryland Board of Education. For a full account of the struggle over restructuring, see Orr, 1999, 165–184.
Schaefer easily won reelection, but never lived up to his promise. Murphy's candidacy and BUILD's organizing, however, provided the spark that ignited a dialogue between the city's African-American community and white civic leaders about steps to reform the school system. As a result of these discussions, the city's business community became active in school affairs. GBC (Greater Baltimore Committee), the city's key business organization, studied the system's management, recommended school-based budgeting, and hired a staff member for education. In 1986, BUILD, the school system, and the GBC developed a compact—the Commonwealth Agreement, committing the signatories to work toward reform, through linking good performance by students with guaranteed entry-level jobs. In that same year, Schaefer was elected to the office of governor, and the stage was set for a significant transition in city leadership.
In the 1987 municipal election, voters elected Kurt Schmoke to the mayor's office. Against the advice of political advisers, Schmoke (the city's first elected Black mayor) made improving the performance of the schools a top issue in his new administration. But Schmoke was not operating alone. The 1987 campaign had also seen BUILD launch a petition drive that gathered more than 55,000 signatures endorsing its six-point antipoverty program, including systemic school reform. As a powerful African-American led organization, BUILD put a major constituency in line with the mayor.
Schmoke's election thus made school reform into a focal purpose in which Baltimore's civic and political communities could join the mayor in devoting their energies. GBC became increasingly active in school affairs, forging partnerships with schools, providing management training to principals, meeting with and paying the travel costs of candidates for school superintendent, and testifying before the legislature in favor of increased funds for the city's schools.
The Abell Foundation, one of the state's largest private philanthropies whose politically connected president Robert Embry emerged as a staunch advocate of school reform, devoted a considerable proportions of its grants to education programs in Baltimore. The Citizens Planning and Housing Association, a non-profit formed in 1940, added education to its portfolio and in 1990 hired its first education director and established an education committee. Two of the most powerful school employee unions, the Public School Administrators and Supervisors Association and the Baltimore Teachers' Union, began to look for ways to join the school reform effort. In 1985, the two unions became constituent members of BUILD, giving them a more powerful voice in the nascent school-reform movement. Initially BUILD closely aligned with the Schmoke administration, holding meetings about specifics on education and taking the lead on forging a plan to implement site-based management system-wide.
By the late 1980s, Baltimore seemed to have developed the wings needed to lift and sustain systemic school reform on to the city's action agenda. However, the pull of immediacy and the weight of such a large purpose began to tug on the reform coalition. Consider the effort to install site-based management throughout the system. The plan, developed by BUILD and the two education unions, endorsed by Mayor Schmoke, and announced in fall 1989, received considerable criticisms. Parents complained that the proposed school improvement teams were stacked in favor of teachers with parents and community members having little say. GBC criticized the plan for lacking provisions authorizing those at the school site to hire or terminate teachers. In short, the plan protected the interests of the teachers' union but lacked broad appeal.
The school board ultimately modified the proposal, removing the requirement that all teachers on the school improvement teams be union members and requiring that parents and community representatives constitute at least 40 percent of the membership of each team. However, when the 177 schools in the system were asked to submit applications to pilot site-based management, only 27 schools presented proposals and only 14 applications were approved. Asked about the low response rate, principals responded that teachers believed it would be too demanding. Many of the principals were also less than enthusiastic, noting that they were not trained as facility managers and preferred such functions to remain in school headquarters. Central office administrators (including Mayor Schmoke's hand-picked superintendent) displayed little enthusiasm for school-based management and were reluctant to relinquish control over spending and other matters to the principals, teachers, parents, and others. School-based management never took hold.
Another disappointment was the Commonwealth agreement. With Schmoke's personal involvement, BUILD, GBC, the school system and the city's job-training agency came together to sign an expanded agreement. But the agreement temporarily papered over conflicting ideas about both the nature of the problem and therefore what should be done about it. Only a small number of students met the grade and attendance requirements, and within five years the agreement dissolved as GBC, the school system, and the job-training agency each returned to its own particular agenda.
Baltimore's experience with a pilot project—contracting out the operation of nine schools to a private firm—provides another illustration of the heavy pull of immediacy. In 1992, after five frustrating years of trying to build on the momentum gained with his 1987 election, Mayor Schmoke sought a dramatic way to push the school reform agenda forward. With the initial approval of the union leadership, support from the Abell Foundation, and a strong endorsement from business leaders, the school system signed a contract with Education Alternatives, Inc., allowing it to operate nine schools. The teachers' union president approved lifting union restrictions, asserting that the union supported the pilot project “because the end results are good for kids.” The contract allowed the teachers and principals in the nine schools to stay in place if they so chose or to transfer to other schools. No such provisions were made for the teachers' aides in the nine schools. When Education Alternatives, Inc. sought to replace them with lower-wage recent college graduates, union concerns about job security heightened. The unions and BUILD leaders became vocal opponents of the privatization experiment.
Underlying BUILD's worries about private management were concerns about job loss. By the mid-1990s, with more than 11,400 employees, the school system had become the city's largest employer. African Americans held over 70 percent of the jobs in the school system, and BUILD argued that privatization threatened the historical role schools had played in providing opportunities for upward mobility to Baltimore's African-American community; opportunities that were limited in the private sector. As the pilot project moved toward implementation, BUILD and the unions criticized Mayor Schmoke, joining with the mayor's political opponents on the city council to urge an end to the experiment. Ultimately, because of its costs, the limited impact it had on improving student performance, and facing an election challenge, Schmoke ended the experiment fifteen months short of the original five-year contract.
After the structural changes implemented under the 1997 “state-partnership” legislation, city schools continued to face considerable difficulties. For example, the system has experienced high turnover in the superintendent's office. Four different superintendents led the system between 1997 and 2004, and there has been high turnover in other key management positions. In the seven years since the restructuring of the school system, there have been three chief financial officers and two chief academic officers. Moreover, management problems continued to plague the system. In 2004, the school district accumulated a $58 million deficit. Hundreds of school personnel were laid off. A study conducted by GBC found that “systematic adherence to the budget process” was missing.45
Greater Baltimore Committee 2004, 9.
Maryland State Department of Education 2004, 23.
Baltimore's struggle to improve its public schools encountered deep-seated resistance, based in two very substantial and interwoven networks. One was a professional network among the educators themselves. Immediate concerns and perquisites provided ample fodder to feed resistance to proposed changes in school operations. Opposition to site-based management illustrates how immediate concerns competed with the broader community purpose of reforming the system. When school system personnel faced having to change their favored way of doing things, many balked.
The other significant network is wider in scope, but is reinforced by the material and symbolic importance of school system to Baltimore's African-American community. Beginning with Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro, III (1967–1971), and accelerating considerably under Mayor Schaefer (1971–1986), white political and civic leaders began to view the school system as a principal means for consolidating African-American political support. With its many jobs and contracts, the school system served the immediate interests of Black and white civic leaders. The system became the “Black” agency of government, providing economic opportunities for African-Americans and addressing Black demands for more influence in city government. In 1971, the school system became the first city department to be headed by an African-American. For nearly thirty years, every permanent school superintendent was an African American. During the same period, Blacks maintained a majority on the school board, and the Black community came to see the school system as their special, hard-fought-for turf.
Within this historical and racial context, a powerful network of school employees and school activists resisted the private-management experiment, perceiving it as a threat to the school district's long role as an employment channel. In 1997, when Kurt Schmoke agreed to the city-state partnership, many leaders in the African-American community opposed him, viewing the move as a threat to the tenuous power position of the Black community. BUILD, an original promoter of school reform, would have no part of initiatives that threatened either the distributive benefits of the status quo or the symbolic importance of African-American control of the school system.
Baltimore's experience also shows that the office of mayor has a significant susceptibility to attention shift. Since the 1960s, despite considerable authority over the school system, the level of attention mayors have paid to improving the school district's performance varied. Mayor Schaefer, for example, kept the school system at arm's length, focusing his attention largely on downtown redevelopment. On the other hand, Mayor Schmoke early on tied his political career closely to improving education, giving considerable attention to school affairs. Nevertheless, near the end of his 12 years in office—after the state imposed limits on city hall's formal authority in school issues—observers noted a shift in Schmoke's attention toward downtown redevelopment.47
Matthew, 1998.
Orr, 2004.
Even in Schmoke's mayoralty, attention to school reform, from all indication heart-felt, was nevertheless selective. For example, Baltimore was one of the original Empowerment Zone cities, and that federally funded program could have been used to support educational improvement through such efforts as expanded afterschool programs. However, the mayor and the school superintendent showed little interest in that possibility.49
As with the compact earlier, school officials seemed unwilling to look much beyond the classroom, and the Empowerment Zone had a structure (and a network) focused on job creation and workforce development, largely disconnected from the school system. Mayor Schmoke was not known for hands-on attention to administrative matters, and, as chief executive for a city beset by economic decline, he was never able to bring to bear the enormous effort and resources it would have taken to integrate school reform into a strategic vision of a revitalized Baltimore.50By contrast, Mayor Menino in Boston had a stronger city economy to work with, and he inherited a business and civic sector already heavily engaged in school reform. See Portz, Stein, and Jones 1999; Usdan and Cuban 2003; and Yee 2003. Schmoke held no such trump cards. Those who see mayoral leadership as a silver bullet of school reform would do well to remember that city hall is only a limited part of any city's civic arena. See Henig and Rich 2004.
The place of community organizing
Along with EPISO in El Paso, Baltimore's BUILD has claimed a large role as a reform force. It is useful, then, to look at community organizing and its relation to purpose, but also its susceptibility to attention shift. By focusing on “winnable issues,” community organizers have long encouraged purposeful activity.51
Alinsky, 1971.
Sen 2003, 48.
Saul Alinsky, an architect of community organizing, emphasized that small victories bolster morale and make credible a capacity to address larger issues. Alinsky put it this way:
The organizer's job is to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence and the feeling that “if we can do so much with what we have now just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong.” It is almost like taking a prize-fighter up the road to the championship—you have to very carefully and selectively pick his opponents, knowing full well that certain defeats would be demoralizing and end his career.53
Alinsky 1971,114.
The hunt for winnable victories, however, encourages issue shopping. It also makes leaders of community-based organizations skeptical of engaging intractable policy matters such as urban school reform. In Baltimore, when education reform proved difficult, BUILD turned to new issues. During much of Schmoke's last term as mayor, BUILD's involvement in school affairs was limited to a program designed to provide a safe place during after-school hours, a program operating in only ten schools.54
Orr 2000.
Many community organizers embrace Alinsky's dictum that “organizations must be based on many issues”.55
Alinsky 1971, 76.
Ibid., 78.
While BUILD helped launch school reform, the organization gave attention to other issues as well. For example, during Schmoke's mayoralty, when education remained a heightened concern across community sectors, BUILD also devoted energy and resources to a living wage campaign, community-based policing, improved city parks, and tougher regulation of check-cashing companies. Clearly multi-issue organizations are susceptible to attention shift.
Implications
What do our three cases suggest about the politics of reform? Although sketched only briefly, each is organized around questions about the sustainability of reform, the role of purpose, and the risk of attention shift. Purpose plays multiple roles. For a few core players, such as the staff of El Paso's Collaborative and key professionals in Hampton's municipal government, purpose provides professional fulfillment and intrinsic satisfaction of a profound and highly motivating form.57
There are many parallels, for instance New Haven's redevelopment staff under Mayor Richard Lee, described in Rae 2003, 320.
Hampton provides an alternative pattern. Here there was no central organization built around a single purpose. City hall was the organizing force for a major agenda, importantly reinforced by and closely linked to entities in the nonprofit sector. The reform strategy was to create a set of programs centered in municipal government and linked by process to the school system. Collectively these agencies reinforced and supported one another, promoting attention to school climate, encouraging youth development in and through the schools, and fostering supportive efforts in the form of early childhood programs and after school programs. Working through community centers and after school programs, In-SYNC made extensive use of both volunteers and city programs. As an agency jointly funded by the city's Neighborhood Office and the school system, IN-Sync was a vital link, itself forged out of earlier links.58
Compare the experience with In-SYNC to Pierson's observation: “Institutional arrangements induce complementary organizational forms, which in turn may generate new complementary institutions”. See Pierson 2000, 255.
Reform in Hampton arose from an existing public-sector network, but also created a body of organizations and related activities that enriched and embedded a human-capital network. The school system, with its sizeable budget and separately defined mandate, retained a degree of autonomy but was nevertheless tied in multiple ways to this more expansive agenda and saw its mode of operation altered by multiple links with city agencies, nonprofits, and processes of community engagement.
The supporting role of networks is evident in both El Paso and Hampton. In El Paso, the heart of the network is the board of the Collaborative. It brings the major sectors of civic life together on a regular basis and serves as a springboard for such special efforts as the February 2000 Education Summit. Hampton had no such central entity, but made use of an evolving strategy of collaboration and a structured community-planning process to weave together a set of connected purposes, which encompassed but by no means was confined to school reform.
Baltimore is the reform bee that did not fly. One factor is that school reform collides with powerful interests, but reform nevertheless keeps resurfacing. Reminiscent of Groundhog Day, school reform in Baltimore is an ongoing replay that never comes out right.59
The reference is to a film in which actor Bill Murray finds himself in a time warp in which he repeats numerous times the events of one Groundhog Day until he finally achieves a happy ending.
Why, then, have concerned actors not come together to create a process capable of bringing disparate reform activities together? One might fault the leadership skills of Kurt Schmoke, charging that he had the aspiration but not the administrative grasp of the situation to wrestle a major reform institution into being. However, that would be to narrow a responsibility that is too large to be borne by a single individual. Schmoke's failure to deliver sustained school reform is more symptom than cause. The great divide in Baltimore is race, and it has hampered efforts by various players. For instance, it confines the reach of Robert Embry as a major philanthropic voice in school reform. A white reformer whose political connections grew from the sponsorship of former mayor Schaefer, Embry lacks trusted relationships with key figures in the Black community. His backing for such efforts as the venture into private management only reinforces the view that he is insensitive to the material and symbolic significance of the school system for African Americans.
Contrast the Abell Foundation with El Paso's Collaborative. In the latter, the visible figures are President Diana Natalicio and Dr. Susana Navarro, reassuring names in a heavily Mexican American area. Bilingualism among the Collaborative staff increases alignment between the organization and a target constituency. In Baltimore with its history of Black-white tensions, neither the Abell Foundation's Embry nor his early patron, William Donald Schaefer, is well aligned with the city's African-American population. The foundation's money perhaps even heightens distrust even though it is a potential fount of selective incentives.
In Baltimore, an African American network around education has deep roots in a long history of struggle to achieve power and status in the face of white opposition. School reform is easily seen as a revival of that opposition, and building a network that bridges the racial divide around education reform is a hugely demanding challenge, not likely to be met without an effort over a very long haul. The within-group network among African Americans brings together an important symbolic aim with protection of material opportunities. It therefore combines immediacy and group purpose, and can be outflanked only by an extraordinary effort of a kind that has yet to be launched. State-city tensions, which reinforce the racial divide, continue to be a significant part of the school reform scene, and therefore only hamper such an effort.
Rallying political support on each side of the racial divide is much easier than mobilizing support that spans the divide. As a declining industrial city with a large poverty population, Baltimore is not promising ground for such major bridging efforts. Hampton, also an old city, but with an even racial balance and a less sizeable poverty population, has had more success. But recent events there show that the racial divide is never totally absent from efforts to maintain networks around important civic aims. El Paso demonstrates, however, that past divides can be overcome and a large poverty population is not an insurmountable obstacle.
The persistence of Baltimore's racial divide in education also contrasts with an experience in Boston with bridging that city's racial divide in combating youth violence.60
Especially noteworthy is the fact that material incentives in Baltimore from the Abell Foundation have not produced a lasting foundation for wide-scale cooperation, whereas a stake in the collective aim of reducing Boston's youth violence showed significant appeal. Material incentives can create short-term cooperation around a purpose, but it may be transitory. At the same time, satisfaction that comes from being part of a worthy cause has potential durability. It is not that one form of incentive is consistently stronger, but that the strength of each depends upon a mix of factors not susceptible to easy generalization. Neither operates in isolation, and the force of neither is constant over time. Boston's experience, for example, came after a series of dramatic events both within the African American community and in police-community relations. These events provided a context within which players could move beyond an initial stage of distrust and turf-guarding to a level of trust and cooperation. Informal and personal interactions played a part, but cooperation among the Black clergy, within the law-enforcement community, and between clergy and the law-enforcement sector was embedded in organizational relationships, such as the Ten-Point Coalition and the Cease-Fire Working group.61For the importance of context and the difficulties of transferring Boston's experience to Los Angeles, see Tita et al. 2003. Lack of stability in key positions was one factor in Los Angeles, but also Boston's reform was home grown and owned in a way that a Rand-initiated effort in Los Angeles could not replicate.
As the Baltimore experience shows, it is not enough that actors come together around a purpose. Among other things, the purpose needs to be seen as positive-sum. Thus the perceived nature of the purpose matters, as do the terms on which actors are brought together. Distributive concerns stymie reform in Baltimore. By contrast, El Paso's Collaborative bypasses school board members and keeps distributive issues at a distance. Coming in response to breakdowns in “business as usual,” Boston's campaign against youth violence assumed a positive-sum form.62
Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing our attention to the importance of this point.
Conclusion
Purposes are erratic sources of motivation, sometimes generating an intense form of commitment, but often functioning in a mercurial manner. They need to be seen not as an isolated source of motivation but as a form that can be blended with other incentives. Thus, purposes are far from being a sole source of motivation.
Consider purpose in action. Suppose that in a given community there are two broad social purposes with equal appeal as abstract principles. Both are deemed worthy and both deemed appropriate principles for addressing problems. What might make one a sustainable framework for action and the other not?63
We are assuming the resource-mobilization argument, that a cause backed by resources has legs that a resource-weak cause lacks. The relationship, however, is not strictly one-way. An appealing purpose can generate an inclination to provide resources, as in President Natalicio's sponsorship of the El Paso Collaborative.
Focusing on attention shift moves analysts away from assuming that actors are atomistic. Ongoing socialization into roles of responsibility and reinforcement of those roles also fit into the picture. Further, purposeful actors need not be like-minded and often are not. Aims are rarely fully shared. What brings them into alignment around a given purpose? Networks provide essential context for understanding how aims align even when levels of commitment to a purpose vary.
To fully appreciate the role of ideas, we contend that one first needs to see that they often operate in the shape of purposes, to which creatures of bounded rationality are more readily attracted than is the case for abstract principles. Second, we turn to Bryan Jones's insight about attention shift. Even an appealing idea in the form of a worthy purpose is subject to displacement, not necessarily because of free-rider calculations, but because creatures of narrow cognition cannot keep everything in mind. People are drawn to the immediate. Networks can therefore counter attention shift just as selective material incentives can counter free-riding. As a crucial core to a network, staff provides vital communication links and thereby enhances visibility. They also translate a purpose into the detailed actions that make it operative and adjust it to changing circumstances. It therefore matters how strongly staff are devoted to a purpose.
Hampton's reform network gained from strong connections within the governmental sector, and through the Neighborhood Office and Neighborhood College also built ties to and within the community. However, any given network must compete with others. In Baltimore within-group networks based on race and, for African Americans, overlapping professional ties, proved stronger than the connections assembled around school reform. Significantly, the Abell Foundation could use material resources to advance particular initiatives, but lacked sensitivity to racial concerns and could not weld together a cumulatively effective reform coalition. In Baltimore the school reform idea has ongoing appeal, but by itself lacks the strength to bridge the racial divide. By contrast, El Paso's Collaborative is built to minimize ethnic divisions and lessen zero-sum anxieties. Networks, however, are not neutral means by which ideas are advanced. The character of a network has a potential to reshape a purpose. In Hampton, the difficulty of building a coalition directly around school reform encouraged a set of oblique maneuvers in network construction and agenda-setting.
Our analysis lays claim to no expansive theory. Although the term “reform” is broad enough to include social movements, we have not been concerned with the kind of far-reaching transformation of society many movements are after. Centered on local reforms, our analysis treats particular efforts in problem solving, not society-wide change. With a need for a diverse base of support, local reformers may pitch initiatives as amalgamations of broader ideas. The role of ideas and the nature of motivation in our cases thus differ in significant ways from the focal concerns in much social-movement research.64
For an illuminating treatment of the tension between local reform and a broad social movement, see the study of community organizing by Smock 2004.
Generalizations are greatly constrained by context, and local reform operates in a different setting from national-level struggles over, say, altering the welfare state.65
There one encounters a highly structured arena of partisan conflict in which policy ideas often serve as what may be called “weapons of mass persuasion”.66Béland 2005, 12.
Muir's example of police officers, cited earlier, provides a good reminder that identity may be constituted around a concrete task, deemed socially important, without deriving from an explicit ideology.
We offer our analysis only as an illustration of what a purpose-centered approach might yield. These observations seem in order:
- Positing behavior as interest driven is insufficient. Purpose plays a part, but is vulnerable to attention shift.
- Institutional connections are especially valuable; they socialize newcomers into roles related to the reform purpose in a way that interpersonal connections may not.
- Although elected officials can play a useful part in promoting reforms, elected office subjects occupants to a succession of considerations that readily lead to shifting concerns rather than constancy of purpose.
- Multi-issue organizations are also subject to fluctuating concerns over time unless they are linked with an issue-specific intermediary. In El Paso the anchor for school reform is the Collaborative, not the initiating organization, EPISO.
- Resources enhance the credibility of a purpose. Moreover, expertise and connections to sources of professional knowledge provide a valuable means for matching concrete and specific activities with a broad reform goal.
- Networks in their relationship to purpose depart significantly from the concept of social capital. Social capital emphasizes a generic relationship of reciprocity and trust. By contrast, networks related to a purpose emphasize links to particular goals. Interaction within such a network might, of course, generate a degree of social capital, but does not necessarily do so. Cooperation is often closely tied to specific aims, and may be sustained only as long as an aim is timely and salient.
- Reform ideas play different mobilizing roles in different arenas, hence have different ideational bases. Ideological persuasion may be far less important locally than are task-oriented appeals.
We do not offer purpose and supporting networks as the sole explanation for collective action in pursuit of reform. Our claim is a more modest one, that purpose is an important element, deserving of explicit attention. In its capacity to elicit a strong commitment, purpose can be a powerful motivating force. But in that form it tends to be erratic, compelling to a few but seldom for many or compelling for many but only for a short period. Purpose, however, can provide a framework for cooperation, drawing together participants with a mix of motives and with varying degrees and runs of commitment. Although its drawing power varies, under the right conditions, purpose can have enough pull to structure activity.
The strongest counter force to any given purpose may not be free-riding, but the competing demand of alternative purposes—small and large. Hence in order to understand purpose as a force for cooperation and collective action, one has to confront the possibility of a shift of attention and energy to competing purposes. We need therefore to pay heed to factors that reinforce a given purpose against alternative claims for attention. Selective material incentives are one potential factor, but for many efforts these incentives may be unavailable or even deemed inappropriate. Thus purpose-centered analysis enables us to see the politics of reform as something broader than idealism versus material interest. Much remains to be studied, but we believe that the interplay of purpose, immediacy, and networks is a useful point of departure.
