Social Movement Strategies in Human Service Delivery: the Dilemmas of a Community-Based Service Organization.

As human service organizations have become large and bureaucratic, their members typically become professionalized and assume rigid and narrowly specialized roles. Community-based organizations have tried to alter this trend by providing personal and individualized services to clients in the context of general social change goals. Unfortunately, the literature on these organizations indicates that they have many problems--notably, the loss of the community or social change orientation. This study reveals circumstances in which variations in that outcome occur. This study examines WOMAN (Women's Organization Moving Against Alcoholism and Narcotics), an organization in Detroit having both human service oriented (HSO) members interested in drug treatment services for women and social movement oriented (SMO) members interested in a community organization for poor and working class women. The study uses participant observation methods, supplemented by systematic surveys, interviews, and analysis of organizational records. It examines the relationship between these two groups from 1974 to 1977, when the community organization received federal funding to deliver drug treatment services. To trace their relationship, the dependence of each group on the other is described in detail and analyzed for six periods. Changes in the relationship are described and possible causes are cited. The findings reveal that the SMO members survived and , in some respects, dominated the HSO members. Two reasons for this outcome are proposed. One is the SMO members' ability to control the dependency of HSO members in critical areas, particularly by having some fundable ideas for the service delivery program. A second reason is the SMO members' network with other social movement groups which could provide support for the work at WOMAN. Although they did survive, SMO members did not achieve all their goals. This can be explained in part by HSO members' control of some critical resources and by the constraints of SMO members' ideology, including a belief in collectivity which limited their ability to acquire power. The roles of resource control, ideology, and the environment in dependency between HSO and SMO members are highlighted.PhDSociologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159006/1/8224964.pd