Carmen Sirianni
Professor of Sociology
email: sirianni@brandeis.edu
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Focus of Research Civic Innovation and Public Policy, Community Organizing and Civic Associations, Network Governance, Youth Civic Engagement, Political Sociology, Civic Environmentalism, Public Policy for Democracy, Work and Organizations, Democratic Political and Social Theory. Education Ph.D., State University of New York, Binghamton. |
Carmen Sirianni is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, with a joint appointment at the Heller Graduate School for Social Policy and Management and the Center for Youth and Communities. He has also held teaching and research appointments at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Though originally a comparative historical sociologist with a focus on workplace democracy in Europe, Professor Sirianni’s recent work has focused on civic capacity building, community problem solving, and “public policy for democracy” in the contemporary U.S. His work combines organizational and policy research and interviews with some 1,000 innovators, as well as convening national strategy conferences, consulting, and leadership roles in a variety of institutional settings, including:
- National civic, youth, and higher education associations: National Civic League, Campus Compact, City Year, YMCA of the USA, Study Circles Resource Center, Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, American Health Decisions, Hastings Center, AARP
- Federal agencies: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Corporation for National and Community Service, City of Seattle
- National commissions and forums: National Commission on Civic Renewal (senior advisor), Kellogg Forum on Higher Education
- White House: Domestic Policy Council’s Reinventing Citizenship Project under President William J. Clinton (research director)
- Media: PBS Democracy Project’s Citizens’96 and Citizens State of the Union, CBS Radio’s Democracy, Citizenship and Community series, National Public Radio’s Democracy in America series, Dallas Morning News’ The People's Movement series
- Youth Civic Engagement Research director, Youth Civic Engagement Mapping Project (Pew Charitable Trusts); advisory board, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)
- Online: Civic Practices Network (co-founder and editor-in-chief)
Professor Sirianni is currently working on the third book in a series on civic innovation in the United States. The first, Civic Innovation in America (University of California Press 2001), examines innovation as a process of social learning over four decades, beginning with the “participatory democracy” of the 1960s and manifest today in many forms of relational organizing, community visioning, collaborative problem solving, and deliberative democracy. In this book, he and co-author Lewis Friedland (Brandeis Ph.D. 1985 and Professor of Journalism, Mass Communication, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) focus especially on innovation in four arenas: community organizing and development, civic environmentalism, healthy communities, and civic journalism. His book is based on nearly 500 interviews with innovators, as well as participant observation, and various types of organizational and policy documents.
The second book, The Civic Renewal Movement: Community Building and Democracy in the U.S (Kettering Foundation Press 2005), develops the social movement dimensions of innovation. This book is written especially for civic leaders, community and youth activists, and professional practitioners, though it contains an extensive guide to scholarly and other resources across the entire spectrum of civic innovation. It is based on more than 200 additional interviews and organizational analysis in several new arenas, including community youth development, K-12 civic education, information commons, and the movement to renew the civic mission of higher education through service learning and campus-community partnerships. As part of this research, Professors Sirianni and Friedland, and their teams of graduate and undergraduate research assistants at Brandeis and Wisconsin, convened a series of national strategy conferences among more than 120 movement leaders, in partnership with youth from community organizations, high schools, and campus groups. The book examines organizational networks and civic frames in each particular arena, as well as the process by which a movement “master frame” and broad, cross-cutting networks and projects have begun to emerge. It also looks critically at the opportunities for, as well as the political and organizational obstacles to, building a broad movement for civic renewal and democracy in the U.S., and analytically distinguishes a movement that foregrounds pragmatic and collaborative democracy from various rights and justice movements, while also exploring their overlaps.
Professor Sirianni’s current book project, Investing in Democracy: Government as Civic Enabler, examines a series of local, state and federal agencies and programs that have been on the cutting edge of building civic capacity, and develops an ambitious public policy agenda to promote further change. The overall argument is that we must “bring the state back in” to both analysis and strategy of civic renewal, which involves some refocusing away from broad indicators of social capital and the classic multi-tiered civic associations that were so important at earlier stages of U.S. history. Professor Sirianni examines policy design, agency culture change strategies, administrative and professional practices, government support for building the field of civic associations, and information systems to support citizen problem solving. Among the case-study chapters are Seattle’s department of neighborhoods and neighborhood planning, Hampton’s youth civic engagement system (youth commission, youth planning, principals’ and superintendent’s advisory boards), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s community-based and civic environmental programs, and the Corporation for National and Community Service’s AmeriCorps and Learn & Serve programs. Sirianni explores the strengths and limits of a broad range of past and current policy designs to build civic and community capacities and develops an ambitious but realistic public agenda for government to invest in democracy. For a selection of some of this ongoing research, see:
"The Civic Mission of a Federal Agency in an Age of Networked Governance," American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming, special issue on Democracy in the Age of Networked Governance (forthcoming, Winter 2008)
"Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design," Journal of the American Planning Association 73:4 (Fall 2007), 373-387.
"Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design: the Case of Seattle," Journal of the American Planning Association 73:4 (Fall 2007).
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as Civic Enabler: The Watershed Approach," National Civic Review 95:3 (Fall 2006), 17-34.
"The New Student Politics: Sustainable Action for Democracy," Journal of Public Affairs 7:1 (2004), 101-123.
"City Government as Enabler of Youth Civic Engagement: Implications for Policy," in James Youniss and Peter Levine, eds., Policies for Youth Civic Engagement (Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming).
Professor Sirianni’s previous books include Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy: the Soviet Experience (Verso, 1982), Work, Community and Power the Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900-25 (Temple University Press, 1983), Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy (TUP, 1984, revised edition 1994), Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform (TUP, 1987), Working Time In Transition: the Political Economy of Working Time in Industrial Nations (TUP, 1991), and Working in the Service Society (TUP, 1996). He is editor of the 45-volume series, Labor and Social Change, for Temple University Press. And he has written many articles on civic democracy, youth engagement, employee participation, women's grassroots organizations, working time innovations, workers councils in comparative revolutions, and political and social theory.
Professor Sirianni has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, co-chair of the Labor and Industrial Relations Study Group at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, Visiting Professor in the honors concentration for the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard (where he received the Hoopes Prize for Excellence in Teaching), National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Faculty Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (Eastern European/Global Studies), Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, and visiting professor of political science at the University of Genoa.
Publications
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The Civic Renewal Movement: Community-Building and Democracy in the United States, (Kettering Foundation Press, 2005). |
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Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy and the Movement for Civic Renewal, (University of California Press, 2001). |
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Working in the Service Society,(with Cameron Macdonald, ed., Temple University Press, 1996). |
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Working Time In Transition: the Political Economy of Working Time in Industrial Nations, (Temple University Press, 1991). |
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Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform, (Temple University Press, 1987). |
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Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy, (Temple University Press, 1984, revised edition 1994). |
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Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900-1925., (Temple University Press, 1983). |
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Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy: the Soviet Experience, (Verso, 1982). |