In addressing social issues, organizations have a responsibility to promote diverse participation, yet often struggle to harness the benefits of racial and gender diversity. Using a community-based participatory research design, with data collected over an 18 month field study, we examined how a social change organization, FoodLab, facilitated diverse collaboration. FoodLab aimed to grow a good food economy in Detroit, Michigan, through working with their members, local food entrepreneurs. We found that recurrent episodes of practicing dialogue catalyzed collaborative action around (...) multiple issues, including shared kitchens, licensing, and membership. Practicing dialogue included intentional convening, participatory devices, and collective language. While leaders set up the initial procedures and rules, leaders and members, together, enacted these structures. Through high quality interactions, participants developed additional resources, knowledge, motivation, and relationships. Across episodes of practicing dialogue, traces of high quality interactions supported sustained effort around social issues. Our findings demonstrate the dynamic aspects of organizational structure and individual action in working towards diverse collaborative action. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of experiential careers, drawing theoretical attention to the routinization and de-routinization of specific experiences as they unfold over social career trajectories. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in two religious communities, we compare the social-temporal patterning of religious experience among newly religious Orthodox Jews and converted Muslims in two cities in the United States. In both cases, we find that as newly religious people work to transform their previous bodily habits and take on newly prescribed (...) religious acts, the beginning of their religious careers becomes marked by what practitioners describe as potent religious experiences in situations of religious practice. However, over time, these once novel practices become routinized and religious experiences in these situations diminish, thus provoking actors and institutions in both fields to work to re-enchant religious life. Through this ethnographic comparison, we demonstrate the utility of focusing on experiential careers as a sociological unit of analysis. Doing so allows sociologists to use a non-reductive phenomenological approach to chart the shifting manifestations of experiences people deeply care about, along with the patterned enchantments, disenchantments, and possible re-enchantments these social careers entail. As such, this approach contributes to the analysis of social careers and experiences of “becoming” across both religious and non-religious domains. (shrink)