Cohen offers a new framework for analyzing social projects and local social activism. Rather than look at how single projects are designed and managed to evaluate their impact, the approach calls for analyzing fields of social action: policy and politics, institutional behavior, social networks among policymakers and practitioners, and availability of funding and other resources. Combined, they affect the conceptualization of a social problem and the design and practice of social intervention. More broadly, through circumscribing the range of thinking about social problems, they delimit...

As austerity measures continue to lead to cutbacks in basic social services, a number of grassroots organizations have grown up or expanded throughout Europe to help provide for citizens' basic needs. This book looks at a number of both secular and faith-based groups in Berlin and London to show how they and their activism have evolved in response to those changes in economic policy. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and practitioners in several areas of social intervention to explore how the very ideas of citizenship and community have begun to change in the wake of...

Cohen offers a new framework for analyzing social projects and local social activism. Rather than look at how single projects are designed and managed to evaluate their impact, the approach calls for analyzing fields of social action: policy and politics, institutional behavior, social networks among policymakers and practitioners, and availability of funding and other resources. Combined, they affect the conceptualization of a social problem and the design and practice of social intervention. More broadly, through circumscribing the range of thinking about social problems, they delimit...

Exploring secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the UK, this book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective and State responsibility.