Organizations As Polities: An Analysis of Community Organization Agencies

In contradiction to much of the theoretical literature on the community organization field, this paper assumes that the practitioner is not a free agent but is bound by the goals and structure of the employing agency. An attempt is made to sort out the variety of agencies in the field by analyzing them as miniature polities. Focus is on organizational constitutions and goals, the limitations on agencies imposed by their constituencies, dilemmas of agency-forget relations, and the foreign or external relations among agencies.