Institutions as Fields of Action

Institutions shape how citizens think about the social problems they handle, repelling public awareness and involvement by performing tasks in ways that neutralize the citizen’s role. Democratic professionals seek to change this dynamic by building access points and infusing citizen agency at critical junctures throughout major public institutions. The kind of citizen–professional collaborations democratic professionals aim to foster directly address the kinds of counter-democratic tendencies that reinforce callousness and make social problems difficult to handle. The motivations of democratic professionals can be understood through the theory of participatory democracy, which draws attention to the hazards representative governments create by thinking and acting for citizens. Participatory democrats acknowledge the difficulties of fostering civic agency in modernity and attempt to theorize how citizens can occupy a more active role in contemporary political culture and take up a civic responsibility for the public goods and social harms produced by their institutions.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter discusses ways democratic professionalism can be cultivated. To share information and experiences, existing networks of reform-minded professionals in fields such as education, criminal justice, and public administration can be supported by nonprofit organizations concerned with citizen agency and democratic renewal. There is also a role to be played by colleges and universities, whose specialized degrees and advanced training are gateways to the professional world. Unfortunately, non-participatory managerial tendencies are common in higher education. To foster democratic professionalism rather than reproduce social trustee attitudes, universities need greater power-sharing on campus and a different conception of professional education. To be contributors rather than barriers to an emerging culture of participatory innovation, academics need to listen more, take up the knowledge of people outside normal disciplinary channels, and learn about different modes of task-sharing, collaboration, and co-ownership pioneered by non-academic innovators.

Democratic Innovation in Public Administration

City and local governments have welcomed public participation, in short-term ways, on issues such as crime prevention, affordable housing, urban planning, service provision, and general budgeting. They have been reluctant, however, to include citizens in substantive, long-term collaborative governance. At a time of budget constraints, multifaceted social problems, declining public trust, changing citizen expectations, and social media transparency, public administrators are motivated to experiment, but only incrementally. Drawing from interviews with reformers, this chapter discusses ad hoc strategies of citizen involvement directed toward specific policy problems, environmental commitments to participation involving multiple forms of citizen engagement, educational innovations such as citizens’ academies, and power-sharing innovations such as participatory budgeting. While some participatory innovations dissipate after a few months, others take root in a self-sustaining civic environment. Factors relevant to sustainability include divisions of labor between citizens and city managers, persistent outreach, substantive work done by citizens, and real power-sharing opportunities.

Democratic Innovation in K-12 Education

Civic engagement and service learning are now part of mainstream American education, but such programs are normally embedded in hierarchical, rule-bound, and inegalitarian institutions. Even while called to service outside, most students are excluded from meaningfully shaping the social environment inside their schools. This chapter examines schools embracing a different model. Democratic schools involve students in curriculum design, teaching, and institutional governance. Regular all-school advisory meetings, student-led inquiry, peer juries, and other forms of participatory conflict resolution are common in these schools. Historically linked to progressive education reforms and to student power efforts in the 1960s, contemporary democratic innovators in mainstream K-12 education are motivated by three factors seen as under threat: professional identity, academic engagement, and genuine civic education. Drawing on interviews with teachers and principals working in democratic schools across different regions, this chapter describes barriers to growth as well as available resources for sustaining long-term reform.

Democratic Professionals as Agents of Change

The democratic professionals in this study encourage load-bearing work by citizens in education, criminal justice, and city government. They share professionalized tasks and encourage lay participation in ways that enhance and enable collective action and deliberation about social issues. Democratic professionalism is an alternative way of understanding professionals’ potential to impact social change that differs from a “social trustee” perspective that ignores their power and a “radical critique” that shuns its use. Democratic professionals relate to society in a particular way: they regard the layperson’s knowledge and agency as critical components in resolving what have been seen as strictly professional issues of education, government, health, justice, and public safety. Contemporary democratic theory has overlooked the kinds of citizen agency and power-sharing encouraged by democratic professionals, so a more grounded theory is needed to bring into focus how individuals come together in closer proximity to handle pressing social problems.

Growing and Sustaining Cultures of Participatory Innovation: Barriers, Openings, and the Role of Democratic Inquiry

Democratic reformers confront bureaucratic, legal, and economic barriers to professional culture change, yet they also find openings to pursue their innovative work. The complexity of social problems can prompt collaboration with community members, and participatory processes can yield better results by using local knowledge. Some scholarly critics of participatory innovations are concerned, however, that they are fragile and easily co-opted by elites. To address these concerns, strategies are required to block privatization of participatory innovations and provide greater transparency. Networks of activists working closely with reform-minded professionals can also reinforce norms that empower laypeople. In one case example, a network of mental health professionals, service users, activists, and academics are reforming disempowering practices in mental health facilities through new forms of professional training and collaborative evaluation studies. The efficacy of participatory innovation can thus be evaluated through collaborative, ground-level social inquiry linking together disparate groups pressing for more power-sharing.

Democratic Innovation in Criminal Justice

Criminal justice institutions contain multiple access points for innovation, and the professionals working in them have normative, political, and economic motivations for improvement. While dominant tendencies incline toward managerial control and bureaucratic rigidity, pressures to rethink and reform criminal justice professionalism stem from deep concerns about the fairness, efficacy, and sustainability of mass incarceration and from citizen protests spotlighting racial bias and violence in conventional policing. This chapter considers four sites of innovation: community organizations developing restorative justice approaches, police departments using community policing, schools involved in participatory conflict resolution, and prisons opening up to higher education partnerships. Drawing from interviews with reformers, it discusses motivations for encouraging citizen participation, notes barriers to change, and identifies resources available to sustain and expand innovation. These innovative practices challenge prevailing assumptions that criminal justice institutions are inherently undemocratic and must involve coercion, hierarchy, and inequality.