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Full download Democracy Inside: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places Albert W. Dzur file pdf all chapter on 2024
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i
Democracy Inside
ii
iii
Democracy Inside
Participatory Innovation in
Unlikely Places
zz
ALBERT W. DZUR
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Conclusion 140
Notes 149
Index 171
vi
ix
Preface
Trails
It is hard to see the forest path in the fall just after the leaves come down,
blown by cool winds. It is hard to see in winter on days when there is enough
snow. It is hard to see, too, in early spring with the new grass and also after a
summer storm washes mud and sand around. I know it is there, though, and
I find it every time by moving along.
Democracy is hard to see sometimes too. It keeps getting covered up and
we keep having to find it, together. It is in how we work, and talk, and live,
though, as this book will show. Is it part of our nature? No. Is it everywhere
the same? No. Does it make everything it touches better? No. Democracy
is simply the sharing of power to handle collective problems. It takes many
forms and can be both efficacious and fraught with compromise or indeci-
sion. At the moment, though, we seem to have lost hope in its possibilities;
we are not able to find the path.
I want us to get a better grip on democracy, as a concept, because we often
set either too low or too high a standard. In some high school and college
government textbooks, democracy is achieved merely by following the rules,
obeying the law, and showing up to vote (when we feel strongly enough, that
is). In other, more philosophical conversations, democracy is attained only
when certain cognitive, deliberative, or distributive demands are met that pro-
tect decision-making forums from public ignorance, strategic bargaining, and
x
x Preface
Preface xi
the rest plea bargained or settled.4 Or consider the decline in the numbers of
school boards from 200,000 in the 1930s to 20,000 today, shrinking the ac-
cess points between community members and a vital democratic institution.5
We might suspect, and we wouldn’t be wrong, that the organization of
modern life is unfriendly to democracy. Our institutions are fields of action,
but so often they depress, thwart, and even repel citizen participation. We
have good reason to be anxious about concentrations of power and non-
transparency in our institutions, good reason to be distrustful and to seek to
create wholly different models of democracy. Yet if we know where to look,
we will see some powerful examples of democratic innovation that could
serve as signposts, at least, for thinking of ways out of our current situation.
Collective work in unassuming, everyday places is happening all around us
and inviting us in, sometimes even when we don’t feel like it.
Rooms
Loathing of airbrushed, sparkle-toothed politicians presiding over public re-
lations events masquerading as town meetings does not translate into fond-
ness for bland, local democratic action. It should.
The photographer Joel Sternfeld traveled the country documenting
locations where injustices occurred—murder, vehicular homicide, corporate
and political criminality. Here are the camp remains stretched out under the
open sky of Cody, Wyoming, where 110,000 Japanese-Americans were im-
prisoned during World War II; here is the cozy leafy street in Queens where
Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death while thirty-eight bystanders failed to
come to her aid or call for help; here is the curve in a Los Angeles highway,
winding past a neighborhood park toward the Angeles National Forest in the
distance, a patch of road where Rodney King was pulled over by police officers
in 1991 and savagely beaten. Then, at the very end of On This Site: Landscape
in Memoriam, after the acknowledgments, almost like an afterword and easy
to miss, is a picture of an unassuming place where justice was made; a flawed
place for flawed people.
The room is in a mosque on Central Avenue, in the Watts neighborhood
of Los Angeles, famous for the six-day riot in 1965. A rust-colored pile carpet
covers the floor, two mismatched couches and an overstuffed upholstered
chair cluster along one corner in violation of feng shui, an ancient wall heater
that looks like a cheese grater runs up one wall, fluorescent lights hum in a
stained white spongeboard ceiling—you can almost see divots where bored
people have tossed pencils up into it. Three feet below the ceiling, a cord with
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xii Preface
People
We are often told that there are some more capable, more knowledgeable, and
more skillful at making decisions than others, and this is true up to a point.
But nobody has ever found the formula or rulebook for doing the right thing
at the right moment in the right way for the right reasons. The one thing
that is essential, the ability to see others in their differences, similarities, and
complexities, is exactly what is denied those who are least proximate to others
and sealed off from sharing by their expertise or authority.
The democratic professionals we meet in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are
working in the fields of education, criminal justice, and public adminis-
tration. Many are situated in institutions such as schools, court complexes,
and government agencies in which organizational pressures and profes-
sional incentives encourage hierarchical, bureaucratic, non-collaborative
decision-making. Yet they push back against these pressures and are
motivated to open up their domains—a classroom, police department, city
manager’s office—to substantive participation by the sometimes nonprofes-
sional and usually non-trained layperson. Real participation means sharing
power to define what an institution is producing: education, justice, gov-
ernment. “Power” looks different in different contexts; in a classroom it
xi
Preface xiii
xiv Preface
If not “best practices,” then what? Maybe the best word is “pathways” or
“trails” we can take, or not, shape into new directions, get lost and frustrated
on while bitten by mosquitoes, feel close connection to what is most impor-
tant, sometimes change our lives, or just return home muddy and tired. It
is a folksy, organic image to be sure, but notice how many trails exemplify
stigmergy, the self-organization of beings acting without a centralized com-
mand structure and without specific economic or self-interested motivations.7
In their making and in their use, trails bring people together in proximity
in quasi-voluntary fashion—Thoreau’s “one more in the horse track.” None
are the same but there is an isomorphism across different times and contexts.
They can lead to valuable destinations but are also inherently valuable as one
can learn about oneself and others and the world around well before any peak
or vista or camp is reached. And then again, they may not; you know only by
moving along.
What are you going to get out of this book? A little pressure, I hope, to
look for participatory innovation where you live, and work, and travel. An
invitation to reflect on your own and with others about ways you feel shut
out of important problems and how you might begin to work your way in to
solutions.
xv
Acknowledgments
xvi Acknowledgments
Beattie, Vanessa Gray, Max Kenner, Kimball Payne, and Donnan Stoicovy.
I want to thank them for welcoming me into their work lives, for their time,
and for their devotion to the ongoing effort of humanizing and democratizing
institutional worlds.
This book is dedicated to Kiran and Neena Dzur, a ray of light and a
new hope.
xvi
Democracy Inside
xvi
1
Democratic Professionalism
Democratic professionals are reform-minded innovators working in edu-
cation, journalism, criminal justice, healthcare, city government, and other
fields. They are democratic professionals not because they do democracy
professionally, but because they do professionalism democratically. They
are democratizing specific parts of our public world that have become
professionalized: our schools, newspapers, TV stations, police departments,
courts, probation offices, prisons, hospitals, clinics, and government agencies,
among others. They use their professional training, capabilities, and authority
to help people in their fields of action solve problems together, and even more
important, to recognize the kinds of problems they need to solve. They share
previously professionalized tasks and encourage lay participation in ways that
enhance and enable collective action and deliberation about major social is-
sues inside and outside professional domains.
Professionalism, broadly understood, has important meanings and
implications for individuals, groups, and society at large. To be a profes-
sional is to have a commitment to competence in a specific field of action—
you pursue specialized skills and knowledge so you can act well in difficult
situations. Professionals understand their work as having an important nor-
mative core: beyond simply earning a living, the work serves society somehow.
Sociologists of the professions stress the ways occupations draw boundaries
around certain tasks, claim special abilities to handle them, police the ways in
which they are discharged, and monitor education and training. Democratic
professionalism is an alternative to a conventional form of professionalism
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