American Neighborhood Organizing in Historical Change

Abstract

Robert Fisher, a famous American sociologist, a professor of social work at the University of Connecticut and an enthusiastic participant in the neighborhood movement, has engaged in social work for a long time. Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America is a revision of its first edition published in 1984. The author summarizes the developmental process and the basic approaches of neighborhood organizing from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s, and proposes, from a left-wing perspective, that this movement can be revived only when the idealism of the 1960s is injected into the realism of the 1980s and the 1990s. A masterpiece examining the United States from the perspective of actions of the lower class and scrutinizing the actions of the lower class against the backdrops of the United States, this work is of a global significance and contemporary value, and also provokes useful thinking and inspiration for Chinese scholars to pay more attention to and conduct in-depth research on social movements.