POL 331s

POL 331spage 1

Instructor

Hahrie Han

PNE 236

781-283-2140

Course Info

Thursdays, 1:30-4:00

PNE 251

Office Hours

XXX

Please sign-upahead of time for a 15 minute appt. using sign-up sheets outside Prof. Han’s office.

POL 331spage 1

This course is slightly modified version of a course designed by

Marshall Ganz at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms

of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

A. OBJECTIVES

This is a course about the theory and practice of organizing for social change. There are many ways to make social change. In the words of long-time organizer Marshall Ganz, “Organizing is an approach to change in which people [work collectively to] acquire the power (capacity, resources) to achieve their purpose (change).” Through organizing, individuals, organizations, and communities gain greater control (power) over issues of concern to them. In the process of developing this power, individuals and communities involved in organizing develop their own resources and capacity to enable others to achieve shared purpose (leadership).

In this course, students learn what organizing is and how it works. They do this by learning on three tracks. First, students learn with their heads, developing cognitive understandings (theory) of what organizing is, how it has historically played a role in making social change, and how it works. Second, students learn with their hands, by engaging in hands-on organizing projects in which they must organize a group of people to achieve a common goal. Students will be introduced to basic organizing practices in the course and must apply them to their projects. Third, students learn with their hearts, using stories to explore the motivations that call them to this kind of work, and the stories that can move their communities to action.

B. PARTICIPANTS

This course is intended for students interested in learning to how to lead social change through collective action.Students with and without “real world” experience find the class equally useful. Students with a strong a commitment to the community, organization, or goals on behalf of which they are working will be most successful.

C. REQUIREMENTS

Students base class work on their experience leading an "organizing campaign" of their own choosing or design. An “organizing campaign” requires mobilizing others to join you in collaborating to achieve a clear outcome that advances your shared purpose by the end of the semester. It should require an average of 6 hours per week. You may choose a project on which you are already working, initiate a new one, or intern with a community or campus organization.

Class participation, Weekly Reflections, Presentations50%

Midterm Papers (due on 3/13)20%

Final Paper (due on 5/11)30%

  1. Getting Started. The course is front-loaded to offer students the opportunity to acquire basic skills useful in their organizing projects.
  1. One-to-One Meetings. To facilitate project selection – and get acquainted - students will meet one-to-one with the professor for 10 to 15 minutes in the first two weeks of the semester.
  2. Community Night/Student Panel (optional). We invite you to meet representatives of organizations inviting organizing interns and to hear former students share their experience of how to make the class work for you. Community Night will be Tuesday, February 5th 6:00-7:30pmin Bell Hall(Belfer fifth floor) at the Harvard Kennedy School.
  3. Skills Sessions: TBD
  1. Reflections: Each week, students submit weekly reflections on the course’s blog in which they analyze their experience of their organizing project. Students are required to make at least one submission each week, but students are encouraged to react to and comment on each other’s submissions, and post pictures, videos, and any other content at any time. Each week we pose questions to stimulate reflection. Reflections are due each Wednesday by XX pm. I will comment and offer feedback, but will not grade each reflection.
  1. Midterm and Final paper: On Thursday 13March in lieu of a reflection, students submit a 4-page midterm analysis of their project: why it is or is not working. At the end of the term, on Sunday 11 May, students submit a 10-page final paper analyzing their organizing project. Students are evaluated not on whether their project is a “success,” but on a demonstrated ability to analyze what happened, how and why.
  1. Each student prepares a 10-minute presentation to be made to the class once during the semester. Students introduce themselves, their project, and discuss how the project relates to the topic of the week. Presentations conclude with questions for class discussion. A sign-up sheet for the presentations will be distributed.
COURSE OUTLINE

Need to add in updated excerpts from organizing notes

INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIZING

Week 1 | Overview of Organizing and pedagogy|Thursday, January 30|

Welcome! Today we discuss course goals, our strategy for achieving them, and the requirements. I will provide a brief overview of what organizing is, and introduce you to the model of learning in this class (which will be different from other classes you have probably taken).

  1. Justin Davidson “Measure for Measure” New Yorker August 21, 2006.
  1. Ellen Langer, Mindfulness, Chapter 3, "The Roots of Mindlessness," (pp.19-35); Chapter 4, "The Costs of Mindlessness," (pp.43-55); Chapter 5, "The Nature of Mindfulness," (pp.61-77); Chapter 7, "Creative Uncertainty," (pp.115-129).
  1. SimSitkin, "Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses", Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol.14, 1992, (pp.231-256).
  1. ORGANIZING CASES

SIGN-UP FOR INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS

Week 2 | what is organizing?|Thursday, February 6 |

Today we discuss organizing as an approach to social change relative to other approaches to change. We will discuss what organizing is and the way in which it challenges power. What is power, how it it visible and invisible, and how organizing can challenge it?

Organizers start by asking three questions: who are my people, what is their problem, how can they use their resources to solve the problem? Who are your people? Who is your constituency whose values are at risk? What urgent challenge do they face? How could they turn resources they have into power they need to solve the problem? How could they design a campaign to achieve an outcome within the next 12 weeks? Please turn in your first version of your “campaign plan” as your reflection paper this week.

Start reading here as we will start class with this case:

  1. Rebecca Skloot, “The Miracle Woman,” O, The Oprah Magazine, Feb. 2010
  2. Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2011), Chapters 13, 23, 25, 29

Then read these descriptions of other approaches to change. How might each of these approaches tackle the questions raised by Skloot’s story?

  1. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. 2009. Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin Books. Introduction.
  1. John McKnight, "Services are Bad for People," (pp.41-44).
  1. AnandGiridharadas, “Real Change Requires Politics”, New York Times, July 15, 2011.
  1. David Bornstein, “The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur” New York Times Opinionator Blog, Nov. 13, 2012.
  1. Marshall Ganz, Organizing Notes: “What is Organizing?”
  1. Ellen Ryan, “Whatever Happened to Community Organizing?”

Let’s dive deeper into organizing and power:

  1. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster 1988, p.143 -205.
  1. Bernard M. Loomer, “Two Kinds of Power,” The D.R. Sharpe Lecture on Social Ethics, October 29, 1975,Criterion, Vol. 15, No.1, 1976 (pp.10-29).
  1. Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century, Chapter 1
  1. ORGANIZING CASES
LEADERSHIP PRACTICES: Relationship, Structure, Strategy, and Action

WEEK 3 | turning values into action: story telling| Thursday, February 13|

Organizers challenge people to act on their shared values. Today we learn how stories equip people with the emotional capacity to act. Come to class having completed your “Public Narrative Worksheet”.

a.Marshall Ganz, Organizing Notes:“What Is Public Narrative?” Charts, Questions. 2013.

b.George Marcus, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics, (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), Chapter 4, “Becoming Reacquainted with Emotion” (pp.49-78)

c.Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions and Judgments of Value”, Chapter 1 in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), (pp. 19-33).

d.Barack Obama, Keynote Address, “The Audacity of Hope”, Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004, Boston, Massachusetts (first 7 min).

e.Marshall Ganz, “Why Stories Matter: The Art and Craft of Social Change”, reprinted with permission from Sojourners, (March 2009), pp. 18-19.

Week 4 | Mobilizing Relationships to Build Community| Thursday, February 20|

Today we explore how organizers build relationships among members of a constituency to create commitment to a common purpose. Gladwell reports on the power of relational networks in everyday life – with people “like us” and people “not like us.” Simmons and Rooney describe relationship-building in action. The second Gladwell piece and Brandzell’s response explore the difference in “online” and “offline” relationships. The two video clips describe the role of “house meetings” in the 2007-8 Obama campaign.

a.Malcolm Gladwell, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” in The New Yorker, January 11, 1999 (pp. 52-63).

b.Jim Rooney, Organizing the South Bronx, Chapter 6, “Relational Organizing: Launching South Bronx Churches”, (pp. 105-118).

c.Ian Simmons, “On One-to-Ones,” in The Next Steps of Organizing: Putting Theory into Action, Sociology 91r Seminar, (pp. 12-15) 1998.

d.Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: why the revolution will not be tweeted”, in The New Yorker, October 4, 2010.

e.Ben Brandzell, “What Malcolm Gladwell Missed About Online Organizing and Creating Big Change”, in The Nation, November 15, 2010.

f.Reflections on how “one on one” meeting can turn into “house meetings” and what they are from the 2007 Obama primary campaign in South Carolina, organizer Jeremy Bird and local leader Grace Cusack.

  • South Carolina House Meeting:
  • Reflections on a House Meeting:

Week 5| Creating Structure: YOUR Leadership TEAM |Thursday, February 27|

What is leadership? A position? A person? Or a practice? We argue it is a practice that we can structure in different ways. Today we show how we structure leadership so it enables a constituency to achieve its goals. We build on Wageman and Hackman’s focus on enabling others to achieve purpose. Freeman and King challenge assumptions that get in our way.

  1. Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 1970, (pp.1-8).
  1. Ruth Wageman, et al, Senior Leadership Teams. Chapter 9, “What It Takes to Make Them Great”, (207-218).
  1. Dr. M.L. King, Jr. A Testament of Hope, "The Drum Major Instinct," (p.259-267).
  1. Zack Exley, “The New Organizers, What’s Really Behind the Obama Ground Game,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2008. (P)
  1. Hackman, “Imperatives for Leaders,” Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Harvard Business School Press, 2002)
  1. No one on the Podium, Lessons on Leadership from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra,(

Week 6 | managing your team|Thursday, March 6 |

Creating teams and organizations that continue to respond, change, and adapt requires learning how to manage the dilemmas of unity and diversity, inclusion and exclusion, responsibility and participation, and leadership and accountability. We examine those dimensions today.

  1. Kenwyn Smith and David Berg, "A Paradoxical Conception of Group Dynamics", Human Relations, Vol. 40:10, 1987, (pp. 633-654).
  1. Irving Janis, "Groupthink", in Psychology Today, November 1971, (pp. 43-44, 46, 74-76).
  1. Si Kahn, Organizing, Chapter 3, "Organizations," (pp. 55-77).
  1. Mark Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, from “Four, Bridging Communities Across Racial Lines” (98-100; 114-123) and “Five, Deepening Multiracial Collaboration,” (pp. 124-132; 152-155).
  1. McKenna and Han, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Activists Transformed Field Campaigns in America, Chapter 6

Week 7| Strategy: TurNing Resources into Power | Thursday, March 13|

Strategy is how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want. Today we examine readings and cases on creative strategizing.

  1. Henry Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, July 1987, (pp. 66-74).
  1. Si Kahn, Organizing, Chapter 8 “Strategy,” (pp.155-174).
  1. Marshall Ganz. “Resources and Resourcefulness: Strategic Capacity in the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1959-1966”, American Journal of Sociology, January 2000, (pp.1003-1005; 1019-1044).
  1. The Living Wage Debate Comes to Harvard (A) and (B); Kennedy School of Government, 2002.

Mid-Term(4 pages, double-spaced, 12-point, 1-inch margins)due Friday 15 Marchby email.

Week 8| Mobilizing Resources: Action |Thursday,April 3|

Organizers mobilize and deploy resources to take action based on commitments they secure from others. Acting to make change involves risk, and risk requires courage. We examine what makes action possible and probable.

  1. Pamela Oliver and Gerald Marwell, “Mobilizing Technologies for Collective Action,” Chapter 11, (pp 251-271), in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Morris and Mueller.
  1. Kim Bobo, Organizing for Social Change, Chapter 7, “Designing Actions,” (pp.48-53),
  1. Canvassing Video, “The Marriage Plot: Inside This Year’s Epic Campaign for Gay Equality”, the Atlantic, December 11, 2012.
  1. Richard Hackman, “Designing Work for Individuals and for Groups”, adapted from J.R. Hackman, Work Design in J.R. Hackman & J.L. Suttle (Eds.) Improving Life at work: Behavioral science approaches to organizational change. Santa Monica: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1977. (pp. 242-255).Please take special note of pages 242-244, and 248-250 and the Job Characteristics Model and how to use it.
INTEGRATING THE PRACTICES:COACHING AND CASES

For the next three weeks, we devote class to case discussion, integration of practice, and coaching. We’ll focus on cases that can offer us insight not only into how the five practices are integrated in an organizing campaign, but what happens afterwards. We’ll also focus on the practice of coaching as key to all the practices we’ve learned in how we develop the leadership of others, what organizing is really all about.

Week 9| ORGANIZING PROJECTS/Coaching |Thursday,April 10|

Cases TBD

a.Hope Wood, “Hope’s Coaching Guide”, New Organizing Institute, 2011.

b.AtulGawande, “Personal Best, Top Athletes and singers have coaches, should you? The New Yorker, 10/3/2011

Week 10 | ORGANIZING PROJECTS/Coaching| Thursday, April 17|

Cases TBD

Week 11 | workshopping YOUR PROJECT| Thursday, April 24|

This week students have the opportunity to workshop their projects with their peers. Each student will prepare a brief presentation on their project to get feedback from their peers in preparation for the final papers.

Reading TBD by students.

CONCLUSION

Week 12 | BECOMING A GOOD ORGANIZER| Thursday, May 1|

This week we reflect on organizing as a craft, art, and vocation: why do it, what can make a person good at it, what about the rest of our lives, how can we continue to grow? Heifetz poses challenges of accepting responsibility for leadership. Langer reflects on how to work "mindfully” with others. Chavez, Alinsky, Payne and Mandela describe how they came to terms with these challenges.

  1. Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Chapter 11, "The Personal Challenge," (pp.250-276).
  1. Ellen Langer, Mindfulness, Chapter 8, "Mindfulness on the Job," (pp.133-148).
  1. Cesar Chavez, "The Organizer's Tale," Ramparts Magazine, July 1966, (pp.43-50).
  1. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, "The Education of the Organizer," (pp.63-80).
  1. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, “Chapter 8: Slow and Respectful Work” (pp.236-264)
  1. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Chapter 14 (pp. 121-140).

Week 13 | organizing in the big picture| Thursday, May 8|

So what does organizing contribute to public life? We begin with Alinsky's call for broader participation in democratic governance -- as timely now as when it was written in 1946. Skocpol, Weir and Ganz argue a need for greater participation. Judis describes a world of advocacy without participants. Reed describes his organizing successes. Today we hear from everyone about what they have learned from their participation in the course. What have we learned about ourselves as observers, organizers? What have we learned about organizing, how well did we meet goals we set at the beginning of the semester? What's next?

a.Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, Chapter 11, (pp.190-204).

b.John B. Judis, "The Pressure Elite: Inside the Narrow World of Advocacy Group Politics," The American Prospect, #9, Spring 1992, (pp.15-29).

c.Ralph Reed, Politically Incorrect, Chapter 13, "Miracle at the Grassroots," (pp.189-202); Chapter 17, "What is Right about America: How You Can Make a Difference," (pp.249-267).

d.Margaret Weir and Marshall Ganz, "Reconnecting People and Politics," in The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics, (pp.149-171).

e.ThedaSkocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, Chapter 7, “Reinventing American Civic Democracy” (pp.254-293).

f.Dana Fisher, “The Activism Industry”, in The American Prospect, September 14, 2006.

FINAL PAPER due sunday May 11that 5:00PM(Boston time) by e-mail

POL 331s: Organizing: People, Power and Change

Tips for Selecting a Project

Your project will be a central part of your experience in this course. A good project will be one that is both motivating to you personally and fits well with the course's model of organizing and action. Remember that you will be putting at least 60 hours of work into your project (6 hours per week for at least 10 weeks)!

Organizing projects achieve a measurable outcome through mobilizing people.

A successful organizing project has three qualities:

  1. It is rooted in your own values and concerns
  2. It achieves a specific outcome by the end of the semester
  3. It includes mobilizing others to achieve that outcome

You should be able to answer “whom, what, and how,” by completing the following sentence:

I am organizing ____(whom)______to ______(do what)______by ______(how)______.

Should I do a project with an established organization or create my own?

  • Working with an established organization will likely involve you in a larger campaign with communities outside of Wellesley that you might not otherwise come into contact. Working with experienced organizers provides the potential for considerable support and guidance.
  • A project of your own will allow you to tailor your work to your specific interests.

What contributes to success on projects within established organizations?

  • Choose a project where you will be able to earn real responsibility as part of a larger effort (not just doing tasks for someone else).
  • Nest your project within a larger one – create a shorter campaign within a larger one. You should have a clear goal that is achievable in one semester.
  • Schedule an initial meeting and check-ins with your supervisor to define clear goals, responsibilities, and expectations and WHY you are committed to this project.
  • Link your conversations with your supervisor and team members to the course topics and share your reflection papers, midterm and final with them. Hold each other accountable – feedback is important.

What contributes to success in initiating my own project?