Organizing Locally
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We love the local. From the cherries we buy, to the grocer who sells them, to the school where our child unpacks them for lunch, we express resurgent faith in decentralizing the institutions and businesses that arrange our daily lives. But huge, bureaucratic organizations often still shape the character of our jobs, schools, the groceries where we shop-even the hospitals we entrust with our lives. So how, exactly, can we work small, when everything around us is so big? In Organizing Locally, Bruce Fuller shows us, taking stock of America's rekindled commitment to localism across an illuminating range of sectors, unearthing the crucial values and practices of decentralized firms that work. Traveling from a charter school in San Francisco to a veterans service network in Iowa, from a Pennsylvania health-care firm to the Manhattan branch of a Swedish bank, he explores how creative managers have turned local staff loose to craft inventive practices, untethered from central rules and plain-vanilla routines. By holding their successes and failures up to the same analytical light, he vividly reveals the key cornerstones of social organization on which effective decentralization depends.
Ultimately, he brings order and evidence to the often strident debates about who has the power - and on what scale - to structure how we work and live locally.
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Growing Up Modern, Government Confronts Culture, Inside Charter Schools, and Standardized Childhood. His writings appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Commonweal.