AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Empowerment in Chicago: Grassroots Participation in Economic Development and Poverty Alleviation by Cedric Herring, Michael Bennett, Doug Gills, Noah Temaner Jenkins, Douglas Gills ISBN: 0-9660180-0-1 Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Pro Ref) Pub. Date: January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Empowering the Poor
Comment: Empowerment zones represent the latest in a series of market-centered federal efforts to revitalize cities by promoting economic competitiveness, attracting investment capital, and creating a favorable "business climate." Like the Enterprise Zone program of the Reagan-Bush years, the Clinton-Gore Empowerment Zone initiative embraces a supply-side policy approach that provides economic incentives to the private sector to invest in central city communities. However, under Clinton-Gore, economic incentives are targeted to resident-based 11 empowerment zones" rather than to industry-based businesses, as in the Reagan-Bush initiative. Whereas the Reagan-Bush program included no direct, citizen-based participation, a hallmark of the Clinton-Gore initiative is the creation of partnerships among government, business, and community organizations to encourage and sustain grassroots participation in policy making and implementation.

Empowerment in Chicago draws upon the research of a diverse group of scholars, graduate students, community leaders, and local activists involved with the National Empowerment Zone Action Research Project at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and DePaul University. The volume contains eight essays, and its contributors bring diverse methods and data to examine Chicago's experience in the early stages of the implementation of the Empowerment Zone (EZ) legislation (from December 1994 through 1996). Scholars looking for a broad overview of the effects of Empowerment Zones on business growth and investment, grassroots participation, and poverty alleviation will find much to like about this book.

The contributors use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, including participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, focus groups, content analysis of government reports, and statistical analysis of census and survey data. In the opening chapter, Michael Bennett, Noah Temaner Jenkins, and Cedric Herring introduce and develop an inductive methodology--critical events analysis--to understand citizens' participation in the EZ process as well as to examine and interpret data from specific events that predispose subsequent actions to follow identifiable lines. This analysis begins with a specific event or development and works backward in time to identify the important actions, decisions, and previous events that led up to it. Sociologists will recognize this method as a variant of path dependency used in political and historical sociology. Bennett, Jenkins, and Herring argue that critical events analysis can be used to "inform discussions about the content of authentic democracy and how forms of citizen participation potentially influence who gains what from the Empowerment Zone process" (p. 9). The method remains implicit throughout the book, and it is useful for understanding citizen participation in the EZ process.

The book succeeds in its major goals. The contributors build eclectically on several analytic perspectives to examine the implementation of the EZ initiative, at the same time interrogating the term "empowerment," using it as a normative standard for evaluating the relative success of the program. For the contributors, empowerment "depends on the success of requirements for citizen participation and on attempts to ,reinvent' government" (p. 7). Urban economic development means little, according to the editors and authors, if there is no direct participation of urban residents in the economic and political decision making that affects their lives. Chapter 2, by Doug Gills and Wanda White, is particularly strong in this regard. According to Gills and White, access to resources through formal organizations and informal networks is a requisite for initiating and sustaining grassroots participation (pp. 57-59). Indeed, as these contributors document, Chicago city officials have tended to restrict citizen access to decision making and have been reluctant to accept the notion of government-business-community partnerships in the EZ process. As the authors point out, the "fiercest battles have not been about fashioning a vision of change, but about implementing that vision into the practice of governance and into decisions about resource allocation" (pp. 64-65). Thus, it comes as no surprise that the city of Chicago has failed to acknowledge community structures in the formal makeup of Empowerment Zone governance.

Whereas Gills and White imply that EZ program can succeed with local government reform and the cultivation and development of resource networks, Cedric Herring (Chapter 3) and Nikolas Theodore (Chapter 7) are more pessimistic, arguing that the program is shot through with inconsistencies and opposing conditions. On one hand, to qualify for designation as an empowerment zone an area must exhibit high poverty, high unemployment, and other social problems-characteristics typically associated with socially and spatially isolated minority communities. On the other hand, residents living in the empowerment zone must participate directly in the policy making process to keep receiving federal money and economic incentives. As Cedric Herring points out, this expectation is based on a "one size fits all" model by which inner-city residents can forge a collective awareness of social problems and work together toward common objectives. Thus, rather than addressing the structural causes of urban social problems, the EZ legislation assumes that high levels of local political activism and collective action can combat poverty and solve the problems of distressed inner-city communities. As the chapters by Herring and Theodore point out, while political empowerment can address some urban problems, it cannot, by itself, remedy the problems of continuing racial residential segregation, minority poverty concentration, and urban disinvestment-complex and interrelated problems that are national in their scope and effect. The lesson here, according to the contributors, is that policies geared toward economic development, including the EZ program, must reject the false dichotomy between "empowerment" and urban "development." Urban areas need both kinds of targeted programs to help residents in their bottom-up efforts to revitalize their communities.

The advantage of the volume is that it provides a critical analysis of the assumptions and aims of the EZ program. However, some historical background and comparative insights would have helped. Nevertheless, Empowerment in Chicago is an informative and well-written book that will appeal to a general audience as well as urban planners and policy analysts interested in urban revitalization strategies and community organizing.