Using stories and exercises from grassroots organizing experience ... [this book] walks you through the steps of starting a new group or strengthening an old one - to build a better world.-Back cover.

This book will have two purposes. First, the book will educate readers on how research can be used to help their organization more effectively reach its goals. Second, it will educate the reader on how to conduct different methods of research and use the findings to improve their product, find customers and develop effective promotion.

Scholarship establishes a new field of study in the organizational sciences. Just as positive psychology focuses on exploring optimal individual psychological states rather than pathological ones, Positive Organizational Scholarship focuses attention on optimal organizational states --- the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in employees, make healing, restoration, and reconciliation possible, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance. While the concept of positive organizational scholarship encompasses the examination of typical and even dysfunctional patterns of behavior, it emphasizes positive deviance from expected patterns. Positive Organizational Scholarship examines the enablers, motivations, and effects associated with remarkably positive phenomena --- how they are facilitated, why they work, how they can be identified, and how researchers and managers can capitalize on them. The contributors do not adopt one particular theory or framework but draw from the full spectrum of organizational theories to understand, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity. Positive Organizational Scholarship rigorously seeks to understand what represents the best of the human condition based on scholarly research and theory. This book invites organizational scholars to build upon and extend the positive organizational phenomena being examined. It provides the definitional, theoretical, and empirical foundations for what will become a cumulative body of enduring work.

Local nonprofit organizations are often small, loosely structured, and democratically governed, and therefore do not fit conveniently into traditional theories of organizational behavior that are rooted in administrative science and bureaucratic structure. Treating community organizations as parts of larger systems--organizational fields or ecologies and communities--this collection of papers presents various perspectives on local nonprofit organizations from the standpoint of organizational theory. The essays draw on an array of methods and theoretical approaches taken from population ecology theories of organizations, laying the foundation for the structural analysis of community organizations.

This volume shines a light on Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs), an emergent wave of non-hierarchical, community-based socio-economic movements, with alternative forms of consumption and production very much at their core. Extending beyond traditional ideas of cooperatives and mutualities, the essays in this collection explore new geographies of solidarity practices ranging from forms of horizontal democracy to interurban and transnational networks. The authors uniquely frame these movements within the Deleuzian concept of the ‘rhizome’, as a meshwork of alternative spaces, paths and trajectories. This connectivity is illustrated in case studies from around the world, ranging from protest movements in response to austerity measures in Southern Europe, to the Buen Vivir movement in the Andes, and Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada. Positioning these cases in relation to current theoretical debates on Social Solidarity Economy, the authors specifically address the question of the persistence and the durability of the organizing practices in community economies. This book will be a valuable tool for academics and students of sustainable consumption, environmental policy, social policy, environmental economics, environmental management and sustainability studies more broadly.

The book focusses on the historical emergence and contemporary challenges of Muslim community organizations and their struggle for recognition as ordinary voices in multiethnic and multi-religious civil societies of Western democracies. It offers a range of different perspectives on how Muslim communities position themselves and navigate the social and political landscape shaped by, on the one hand, normalization of ethno-religious diversity and, on the other, ongoing misrecognition and essentialisation of Muslims in the West. The contributions from internationally acclaimed scholars as well as emerging researchers from Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland and Australia shine new light on both country-specific similarities and divergences.

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid. Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.