Community Organizing Work as Contradictory Professional Work

Abstract

Although the professional dimension of community organizing in the United States has been one of its well-established, distinctive features for several decades now, it has remained surprisingly understudied. Drawing from ethnographic data collected in Chicago, this paper takes the professional dimension of organizing work as a genuine object of study in order to shift the focus of analysis from the cause of building people power to its conditions of possibility. Borrowing from theoretical insights developed by social scientists, political theorists, and labor organizers, it develops an understanding of professional work that doesn’t conflate professionalization dynamics with commodification on nonprofitization. Its main arguments are that community organizing work can be analyzed as a contradictory form of professional work performed by an intermediate, semi-autonomous layer of professional organizers, that it produces specific, complex power dynamics over community residents, and that a critical yet balanced perspective on the professional dimension of organizing can yield fruitful conversations about how to sustain organizing practices in the future.