This study is concerned with discovering relationships between community power structures and economic growth. The economic growth in selected Northeast Texas counties and their major cities is compared with the power structures in each of these communities during the 1944 through 1968 period.

A participant-observer approach is utilized in a case study of Dallas, Texas, homeowners who organized to challenge city acquisition of their property for the expansion of the Fair Park State fairgrounds. From this study, a model of protest and political bias in urban politics is conceptualized. It is hypothesized that some individuals and groups are unable to place their demands, regardless of the extent of their organization and mobilization, on the governmental agenda. This inability to gain access to the decision-making arena is due to the existence of persistent and cumulative political biases. The biases are delineated as systemic, modes of operation, and ideological. Protest activity is a response by powerless groups to encountering these political biases.

This study explored the nature of community power and decision-making surrounding the renaming of Portland's Union Avenue in honor of the slain civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Employing an integrated theoretical framework based on G. William Domhoff's (1967) perspective of the compatibility of c. Wright Mills' Power Elite Model (1956) and Robert A. Dahl's Pluralist Model (1961) plus Claude s. Fischer's (1982) perspective on the nature of the urban social environment, this study attempted to provide insight into and understanding of the dynamics involved in the controversy that developed over the efforts to rename a street for Dr. King, the decision-making process, and the apparent motivations of the participants.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-307). Also available online.

Diplomarbeit - Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-87).

M.Ed. (Community Education) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This study builds on the work on community power structure which had evolved since the publication of the Lynds' Middletown. An empirical examination of the conflict over the proposed construction of the Orlando Utilities Commission's Curtis H. Stanton Energy Center is undertaken in the context of alternative hypotheses concerning the structure of power. The theoretical positions of the two major schools of community power structure--plural-elitist and single-elitist--are examined. The origins and arguments for the plant are presented, and the origins, tactics and counter-arguments of the opposition to the plant are also examined. The interaction and development of the conflict between the opposing strategies is then analyzed. This study concludes that in the case of the Stanton energy Center, the single-elitist hypothesis was confirmed. A small, business-oriented elite, having control over major financial resources and access to the mass media, overwhelmed public advocacy groups which had a narrow base of support, few organizational and financial resources, and little cohesion.

Liverpool and Baltimore in the 1980s were amongst the poorest cities in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Since the 1960s, the ports on which they had built their economies and their reputations had all but collapsed and thousands of manufacturing jobs had been relocated or slashed. Property-led regeneration did more for the investors behind projects and the tourists who enjoyed them than for the cities' working classes. In such cities, battered by forces largely beyond their control, what could people disadvantaged by race and/or economic status do to compete for the resources necessary to improve their living conditions and wield power on a citywide level? This thesis explores the capacity of poor and middle-income people's pressure groups to successfully accomplish their goals in Liverpool and Baltimore during the 1980s. To do so, it examines three case study groups in Liverpool, the Merseyside Community Relations Council, the Eldonian Community Association, and the Anti-Cuts Campaign; and one in Baltimore, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. It follows their trajectories under unusually authoritarian local political regimes, the Militant Tendency-directed Labour city council in Liverpool and the Schaefer mayoral administration in Baltimore, through local elections in 1987, and finally under the more open local political regimes following those elections. Their success depended on three sets of factors. First, strong leadership and an animating cause were necessary conditions for groups to cohere, but were not sufficient to ensure their success. That further depended on a group's goals and the distribution of resources necessary to accomplish those goals, which in turn shaped the strategies each group chose to pursue its agenda. Third and finally, the effectiveness of those strategies depended on the group's ability to access and influence the resource-holders identified and, finally, on the scope for action of those resource-holders themselves.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The Ideology of Stadium Construction seeks to define the application of community power in the process of building sports stadiums. Using data culled from a literature review, this project examines the recent construction of sports venues and the political, economic, and social ideas driving their proliferation. A three dimensional approach to applied power provides a theoretical tool to illustrate and analyze the blueprint of stadium construction. Taking a more broad view of the culture of business in the United States suggests the public funding of stadium construction arching towards Antonio Gramsci’s sense of hegemony. Beyond attempting to merely define the political process driving stadium construction as a significant social problem, this project introduces potential alternatives to the organizational method currently in place.

The thesis is a qualitative study from critical theory perspectives to enhance understanding of how systemically mainstream organizations marginalize social work practice with ethno-racial minorities. It also explores strategic implications for systemic change based on field research findings. Ten social workers from Edmonton – the provincial capital city of Alberta, Canada - participated in investigative dialogues for the thesis field research. These research participants’ workplace stories lend themselves to explore three questions: what does marginalization of practice with ethno-racial minorities look like in mainstream organizational settings; what is there to understand about it as a systemic issue and what the research findings imply for change strategies. A critical analysis of dialogic data thematically identifies everyday work issues that describe how practice with ethno-racial minorities is kept at the operational and service-delivery fringe of individual workplaces. These thematic findings point to broader issues of the mainstream human service organization sector. These broader issues further highlight how the practice marginalization of concern in this thesis is a systemically constructed issue. These broader issues are mainstream benevolence, social work as an employment regime, multicultural service delivery as a thrill and clientization of ethno-racial minorities. In consideration of these sector-wide issues, implied change strategies reveal three thematic directions for systemic transformational change: (i) continued dialoguing involving concerned social workers and ethno-racial minority community leaders, (ii) community social work to build and foster coalitionary activist work and organizations, and (iii) participatory research involving a community sharing concern of the practice marginalization issue so as to build a strong knowledge-base to support and empower broad-base activist endeavour to effect change about mainstream human service organizations. / Social Work / D. Phil. (Social Work)