Negotiating social change in international contexts: A study of discourse, development, and participative organizing

Development fuels a discourse filled with prejudices and contradictions, yet also flexibility. Development discourses ground this study of alternative organizing. Against the backdrop of well-rehearsed critiques of mainstream development, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) are now major players in the conception and implementation of alternative development. This study explores how U.S.-based members of an international NGO negotiate the difficulties of adopting participative discourses by turning towards alternative modes of international organizing. I see their everyday negotiations of participative development as a place to gain insight into the complex issues that surround professions that attempt to solve social problems.; I argue that articulation theory and postcolonial insights inform an understanding of the discursive processes of organizing, while a focus on a micropolitics of democracy provides additional grounding. Direct, long-term immersion with members allowed me to trace organizational discourses from their construction to their subsequent mobilizations. Participant observation data included formal and informal meetings, an advisory retreat, everyday talk, and informal interviews. Such an approach allowed access to the mundane and situated communication practices that helped shape and refute meanings about development. My analysis highlights how members articulated competing visions of development to help negotiate the issues of power embedded within advocacy relationships. These visions each provided different subject positionings that allowed members to both embrace and reject political motivations for their work. The rearticulation of development visions allowed members to both reproduce, and resist against, historically embedded dominant articulations of development.; This study contributes to the development of three areas of research. First, it provides insight into the role of discourse in processes of organizing, and expands our understanding of issues of power and resistance involved with advocacy work. Second, development NGOs are key actors in globalization processes; this study contributes to our understanding of how global relationships are discursively negotiated and organized and how they might better meet democratic standards. Finally, it corrects the tendency for research to overlook the ways in which the discursive practices of U.S. development practitioners provide possibilities for resistance to dominant articulations of development.