Social Work with Communities and Social Action II: Approaches to Community Organisation Practice, with Rothman's Models, Strategies, Leadership Development, Partnerships and Coalitions; Social Action as a Method of Social Work; and the Models of Paulo Freire, Saul Alinsky and Liberation Theology

Roland Warren classified change strategies by the degree of agreement between the change agent and the target. Collaborative strategies suit situations of consensus, where the target agrees that change is needed and the question is how; campaign strategies suit differences of view, where the target must be persuaded by education, bargaining and pressure of opinion; contest strategies suit dissensus, where the target opposes the change and it must be won through conflict, protest, boycott or legal action. The same community may move among the three: villagers may collaborate with the panchayat on a school, campaign for a health centre and contest a mining lease. Community-based organisations are the backbone of each strategy, since they give the community a voice that does not depend on the outside worker; the organiser's task is to strengthen their internal democracy, accounts and leadership so that they are not captured by a few.

Leadership development is central because an organiser eventually leaves. It involves identifying potential leaders, including informal leaders and those from excluded groups, women, Dalits, youth, who rarely hold formal positions; training them in facilitation, negotiation, accounts and the working of government; giving them real responsibility; rotating roles to prevent concentration of power; and building a second line of leadership. Partnerships join a community's organisations with panchayats, government departments, NGOs, academic institutions or companies for shared goals, such as a health partnership between a women's federation and the primary health centre. Coalitions join many organisations around a common issue to gain the numbers, legitimacy and reach none has alone: networks of people's organisations at state and national level, campaigns for rights to information, food, work and forest land, and alliances for disability rights. Coalitions need shared goals, clear decision rules, respect for members' autonomy and a way of managing differences in size and resources among members.

Walter Friedlander defined social action as "an individual, group or community effort, within the framework of social work philosophy and practice, that aims to achieve social progress, to modify social policies and to improve social legislation and health and welfare services". It is the method that addresses the structural causes of problems that casework, group work and community organisation meet at the level of symptoms. Its history in social work runs from the reform wing of the settlements, Jane Addams's campaigns on child labour, housing and women's suffrage, and Mary Richmond's own recognition of "mass betterment" through social legislation, to the radical social work of the 1970s. In India it draws on the social reform movements, the freedom struggle and Gandhian satyagraha, and on the social action groups of the 1970s and 1980s that organised landless labourers, tribals, fishworkers, slum dwellers and bonded labourers, and later campaigned for laws such as the Right to Information Act 2005 and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005.

As a method, social action moves through awareness-building, organisation and mobilisation, the formulation of demands, the choice of strategy, action and evaluation. Its techniques range from the persuasive (education, petitions, memoranda, lobbying, media advocacy, public hearings) through legal action (public interest litigation, which the Supreme Court opened up from the late 1970s by relaxing the rules of standing) to the confrontational (rallies, dharnas, gheraos, boycotts, non-cooperation, strikes and fasts). Gerald Britto, writing from Indian experience, listed principles such as credibility building, legitimisation, dramatisation of the issue, the use of multiple strategies, a dual approach combining pressure with cooperation, and manifold programmes that meet immediate needs while working for long-term change. Social action must remain non-violent and within the profession's ethics to count as a method of social work; the worker's authority comes from the people organised, not from the worker's own position.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, developed his approach in adult literacy work with peasants and set it out in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written in Portuguese in 1968, published in English in 1970). He criticised the "banking concept" of education, in which the teacher deposits knowledge in passive students, as an instrument of domination that adapts people to an unjust world. He proposed problem-posing education, in which teacher and learners are co-investigators who reflect together on their reality through dialogue. In his literacy "culture circles", learners discussed generative words and themes drawn from their own lives, such as "slum", "land" or "wage", and learning to read these words went together with analysing why their lives were as they were. The goal was conscientização, conscientisation: the development of critical consciousness, the capacity to perceive social, political and economic contradictions and to take action against oppression.

Freire described levels of consciousness: magical (or semi-intransitive) consciousness, which attributes one's condition to fate or God and accepts it; naive (semi-transitive) consciousness, which sees problems but explains them in individual terms and looks to paternalistic leaders; and critical consciousness, which understands causes in social structures and acts. He called the silence of the oppressed, who have internalised the oppressor's view of them, the "culture of silence". Praxis is "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it", neither alone. For social work the model means that the worker does not bring solutions to a passive community but engages people in dialogue about their situation, starts from their own words and experience, and treats their growing understanding and collective action as the outcome. Freire's influence is visible in adult education, in the social action groups of the 1970s in India and in participatory research.

Ideology, a system of ideas about how society is and ought to be, plays several roles in social action. It provides the analysis of why a problem exists; it defines the goal; it unites members and sustains commitment through setbacks; it legitimises the chosen methods; and it links local struggles to wider ones. Social action in India has been shaped by Gandhian ideology (non-violence, trusteeship, sarvodaya), Marxist ideology (class struggle), Ambedkarite ideology (annihilation of caste, constitutional rights), feminist ideology and liberal rights-based thinking. Ideology also has risks: it can make a group rigid, blind it to evidence or divide potential allies. A practitioner needs to be aware of their own ideology and of the ideologies at work in a movement.

Saul Alinsky (1909 to 1972), a Chicago-trained criminologist, organised the Back of the Yards neighbourhood beside the city's stockyards in 1939, founded the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to train organisers, and wrote Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971). His model starts from power: the poor lack power because they are unorganised, and they gain it only by organising around their own self-interest into a broad-based "people's organisation" of existing churches, unions and clubs. The organiser is an outsider who agitates, "rubbing raw the resentments", builds indigenous leadership and then withdraws. Conflict is accepted as necessary. Among his rules: power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have; never go outside the experience of your people, and wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy; ridicule is man's most potent weapon; a good tactic is one your people enjoy; and pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it. Critics object to his pragmatism about means and to the risk that organisations built on self-interest lose their radical edge once demands are met.

Liberation theology arose in Latin American Catholicism in the late 1960s. Its founding text is Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971), and its leading figures include Leonardo Boff and, in practice, Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador. The Latin American bishops' conference at Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) spoke of the Church's "preferential option for the poor". Liberation theology reads the Christian gospel from the standpoint of the poor, sees poverty as the product of structural injustice, "institutionalised violence", rather than fate, and calls for action to change it. Its method is often summarised as see, judge and act, and its organisational form was the base ecclesial communities, small groups of poor people who read scripture together in the light of their own lives and organised for change, a close parallel to Freire's culture circles. In India, Dalit theology and the work of church-based social action groups show its influence.