Appendix - A Note on Method

Summary

In order to research the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)/London Citizens, my research colleague Maurice Glasman and I drew from ethnographic approaches so as to pay close attention to the people, institutions, practices, and processes involved in community organizing. In keeping with ethnographic research methods we became embedded within London Citizens. This enabled us to excavate how those involved conceptualized and enacted their involvement and learn what discourses and practices they utilized. The primary point of data collection was through being participant observers from 2008 to 2012. This involved formally noting and assessing more than 100 events and meetings that themselves represented hundreds of hours and innumerable conversations in and around these gatherings. These mostly took place in London, but also included Chicago, Berlin, and Sydney. The meetings and events ranged in focus from the local, citywide, national, and international levels. They included internal organizational meetings, large public actions, training events (including the five-day training program), seminars, day-long retreats, as well as private meetings among participants and between representatives from Citizens UK and political or business leaders. In addition to those meetings and events specifically organized by London Citizens, we attended numerous meetings put on by other institutions that leaders and organizers from London Citizens attended as representatives of the organization. To supplement this process of apprenticeship in the craft of organizing, we undertook thirty-five in-depth interviews with key leaders, organizers, and critics of London Citizens’ work and organizers from the IAF, DICO, and Sydney Alliance (some of whom were interviewed more than once). The information and reflections based on this process of participant observation and interviews were then triangulated by references to archive material (both from Citizens UK’s records and the IAF archive held by the University of Illinois in Chicago), video footage of assemblies, coverage of the work in the mainstream media and “blogosphere,” and other academic studies of community organizing in the United Kingdom and the United States. The emerging conclusions were then checked with both long-established organizers and commentators on community organizing both within and outside of the IAF network.