How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century by Hahrie Han (review)

Hahrie Han has, for a number of years, been systematically pondering the issues addressed in How Organizations Develop Activists and also writing extensively about them, having published Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics (Stanford) in 2009 and coauthoring (with Elizabeth McKenna) Groundbreakers: How Obama's 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford) published in 2014, and further having been part of the team that completed the widely known study of local leadership in the Sierra Club (Andrews et al. 2010). How Organizations Develop Activists is, in my judgment, a mature work of scholarship that deftly makes an incredibly important theoretical turn by bringing the most coherent community leadership development model, crafted by congregation-based organizational (CBO) leaders, to a close empirical analysis of the variable effectiveness of leadership approaches in garden-variety nonprofit advocacy organizations, also widely referred to as SMOs (social movement organizations). Not surprising, probably, to those who have long admired the well-documented fruits of CBO leadership development, as well as its codification, elaboration, and application by Marshall Ganz and his students, the elements of the approach make good empirical sense of the differences in the kind of leadership efforts and their effectiveness between the most highly engaged chapters and the less engaged of the two national advocacy groups she studied. These comparisons are the primary focus of Han's book.

I find her effort mature because it is well aligned with and deeply nested within the diverse and extensive empirical findings of the recent burst of scholarship on social change organizational leadership (available to us after a very long drought), a scholarship to which she has already made a major contribution. I call it mature also because it succeeds in theoretically transcending the long-standing intellectual divide between those activists who conceived of themselves as organizing community power and those organizers' stereotypic characterization of the many other activists who conceived of themselves, instead, as organizing social movements. She does so without even clearly acknowledging the divide or its past contentiousness. The work is mature finally in not being cluttered up with diversions from her central argument, while at the same time clearly explaining her rather complicated methodology.

Han's central argument depends upon a straightforward polar distinction between "mobilizing activism" and "transformational activism." Mobilizing activism depends upon "A transactional approach to activism [which] focuses on the quantifiable indicators of the number of people who take action—how many people clicked on a link, looked at a page, attended a meeting, made phone calls, or contacted an elected official" (95). Transformational activism, on the other hand, seeks "transformational outcomes [that] focus on the ways that collective action changes the affects, outlooks, and other orientations of individual and groups" (p. 96).

Han's distinction resonates with the concepts of the leadership development model promulgated by IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) leaders as well as by leaders in other CBO networks who have, together, adopted what became widely known as the IAF model (see Warren 2001). Activism is conceived as a lengthy, deep interpersonal process consisting of developing trusting relationships among a community of believers who commit to collective action in the pursuit of social change around a common set of issues. Central to the approach is the development of indigenous transformational leaders who can, in turn, develop more such leaders. There is no immediately obvious reason why such a model of activism should have necessarily been developed by and restricted to CBO networks of groups and, as Han clearly illustrates with systematic evidence here, it is not uncommon, in a less explicitly theorized form, among garden-variety advocacy groups. Yet, the model saw its early thick development and implementation by theorists and practitioners in the CBO networks, and more recently having been elaborated and more broadly promulgated by Marshall Ganz, prominently displayed in the curriculum for his online Harvard School of Government course "Leadership, Organizing, and...