Owning Citizens' Dreams:

Good Governance Leadership at the Local Level

Lester Leavitt

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

For: Revista Română de Administrație Publică Locală

Romanian Review of Local Public Administration, or a journal/conference with a very similar Romanian-language title. The lowercase "rr" follows the convention for Romanian journal abbreviations (Revista Română de...), and "APL" maps to Administrație Publică Locală — Local Public Administration — which is exactly what this paper is about. You were writing for a Romanian public administration audience.

Commencing in June 2014, this paper is almost exclusively derived from version 4 of Lester Leavitt’s dissertation.

Abstract

By enlarging problems that seem to be standing in the way of achieving social equity across the globe, and in turn by extending the research beyond the field of public administration, policymaking, and governance, this article provides an overview of the author’s dissertation-in-progress. In this article the reader will be provided with a brief multidisciplinary view into how the author is proposing a new approach for applied research methods that will engage more than five academic disciplines in reframing how social equity challenges might be overcome.

The unique approach proposed in this article begins by focusing on local government and suggesting that, historically speaking, lasting change frequently is germinated and emerges at the local level when a strong-willed, and often defiant mayor (or other administrative official) has championed a cause for a vulnerable population within his or her constituency. The research presented suggests that this phenomenon often takes place because oppressed groups will concentrate in neighborhoods, thereby increasing the power of the group by earning the acceptance of their neighboring communities. The end result, in the examples that will be presented in this article, is that a city or county council comes to better understand the vulnerable population and is therefore willing to take ownership of the dreams and ambitions of these individuals in their midst.

Acceptance of a marginalized group at the local level, however, does not automatically translate into acceptance at the state level, and this is where the role of an activist mayor and city council is called upon to alter the discourse and mitigate the ability that dominant groups have to mobilize bias against vulnerable populations. To address this concern, this article will conclude by briefly describing how an information communication technology that is currently in development proposes to equip community leaders, street-level bureaucrats, and local government with a new information system that is engineered to unite previously fragmented progressive activists from around the globe in their policy-change endeavors.

Introduction

Representative democracy is based on the idea that an elected individual will take ownership of the hopes and dreams of his or her constituents, but the problem with this doctrine has always been that the larger the constituency is, the easier it is for structural dynamics within government to perpetuate the historical marginalization of minorities within that constituency. This is why local government is so important for vulnerable minorities. If an oppressed population can concentrate in one constituency, they have the chance of not only enlarging their voice, but they also have the opportunity to displace the narratives that have historically created bias against them by allowing their neighbors, friends, and co-workers to really get to know them. Rapid developments in information communication technology however seem to be offering up hope for accelerating this process by devolving claims for legitimate power downward. This paper will summarize one approach that promises an action research methodology that aims to incorporate an information system that potentially could dramatically alter how social equity activists collaborate at the local level, thereby dramatically altering the dynamics of power between activist mayors and the state legislature.

In presenting the problem that this paper proposes to address with an information communication technology (ICT), it must first be understood that the primary focus for the action research protocol will be on progressive local government leaders, street-level bureaucrats, and community organizers. The reason for keeping an exclusive focus on progressive elements of society will be made clear in the next section, but suffice it to say at this point that the goal will be teach these progressive leaders and potential leaders about the importance of altering the discourse, not only with those who might be able to bring about desired progressive changes, but also within their own marginalized or vulnerable population. The importance of this process stems from the idea that before local leaders in position of authority need to be convinced of the importance of “taking ownership” of the hopes and dreams of all members of the community, not just the majority or dominant segments of society.

Figure 1 - Progressive policy change at the local level.

Once the local leaders have assumed a degree of ownership for the hopes and dreams of a marginalized or vulnerable population, the next step for the progressive groups behind the new discourse will be elevate that discourse to the point that there is hope for a permanent change in policy at the state-level. Before that happens, there is often a significant pushback that takes place from mainstream lobbyists and conservative groups who have a vested interest in keeping everything exactly the way it is now. To go up against these powerful groups and individuals is where progressive groups have traditionally failed in the past. As shown by Figure 1, these failings will be shown by research in this paper to stem primarily from how fragmented and heterogeneous progressive groups have been, historically speaking, and how discordant their voices have been. In contrast, conservative groups and hegemonic narratives flow naturally from very homogeneous groups that, in many cases, have benefited from having centuries-old narratives that are triggered automatically whenever a threat to a worldview is perceived.

After the proposed research design begins to unfold in this paper, the reader will ultimate see how the ideas that are engineered to benefit local groups in going up against slow-to-change dominant groups, are, at the end of the day, universally applicable. The unintended consequence then, is that by designing something that was meant to unite local heterogeneous groups into broad-based collaborative coalitions, will, at the end of the day, provided a mechanism for these collaborations to be as easy to build on a global scale as they are to build on a local scale.

Enlarging the Problem

As it relates to marginalized and vulnerable populations self-affiliating into neighborhoods, history has provided us with several instances where this is the case, and several examples will be included in this paper to support this claim. The point to be made here, then, is that when this phenomenon takes place, it is typically an activist mayor and city council, or some equivalent form of local government that is willing to take ownership of the hopes and dreams of that population and champion the cause for change in how state policies and regulations are enacted. Unfortunately, history has also shown how this kind of change moves at a glacial pace; often taking place over generations.

In order to understand how the tools introduced in this paper work, it first becomes necessary to understand what some writers in the United States refer to as the “Eisenhower Principle,” which is attributed to the former United States President and Four Star General, Dwight Eisenhower. When asked how it was that he successfully engineered the largest military deployment of modern times, he is reported to have answered, “Whenever I run into a problem I can't solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution" (Gingrich, 2008, 84). Applying this thinking to the problem of vulnerable and historically marginalized populations, this paper proposes to not look at the social equity problems that are faced by visible minorities, people of low socio-economic standing, women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities individually, but rather it proposes to enlarge the problem by looking at these problems as concerns that associated with the ability that dominant groups have to mobilize bias against such groups. This bias will be examined through two lenses; as either bias that is motivated by casting the group as “underserving” of an equitable share in public goods and services, or worse yet, “deviant,” where the underlying objective is to ensure that the target group is kept apart from all public life (Schneider and Ingram, 1993).

Bias, when framing a population as ‘undeserving,” comes from the idea that the group or class of people should not be allowed to benefit from an equal share of public goods and services because they are cast as lazy, or that they, as a group or class, are unwilling to work hard and contribute their fair share to public life while at the same time siphoning off the public resources that “more deserving” populations are entitled to, such as meaningful employment, health services, and other social welfare programs. This kind of bias is particularly insidious because it glosses over the structural dynamics that are, in some cases, centuries old, and have by design been put into place to prevent the marginalized group from having the same tools that the privileged group has benefitted from as it relates to things like education, access to capital, and a market willing to consume the goods and services that they produce. Undeserving groups are typically seen as welfare recipients, individuals who benefit from health care programs without paying into them, children in the school system who benefit from a “free lunch” program, and many other programs that are seen by some as a redistribution of wealth. In addition to the inner-city poor, other typical “undeserving” populations would include immigrant populations and religious minorities. In countries like Romania, the Roma people have historically been marginalized as an “undeserving” population.

The idea of a marginalized “deviant” population or group comes from the idea that the group or class of people is out of synch with a normalized code of behavior. Groups that are typically cast as deviant include feminist women, who refuse to submit to the traditional roles of past eras (citation needed), atheists, who are typically seen as being untrustworthy because they have no fear of being judged for their Earthly behavior in an afterlife (citation needed), and gays and lesbians, who are typically seen as errant only in a religious or cultural context (i.e. social constructions) because of modern reinterpretations of the historical texts that relate to the ancient procreative obligations of men and the submissive role of women (citation needed).

This paper applies the Eisenhower Principle to public administration at the local level by enlarging the problem to examine how bias is mobilized against all vulnerable populations taken together as a whole. By doing this, this research suggests that these groups and their allies might see each other for the first time as collaborative partners in expanding the definition of “citizen” to include all people; embracing true diversity instead of relying upon the “zero-sum” lens that has been the rhetorical device of the hegemon over the centuries. When public goods are no longer seen as finite and limited, the threat of diversity is eliminated, and when diversity can be framed in a way that allowing “multiple truths” is no longer seen as a worldview threat to those who subscribe to a “one truth” narrative, then the path forward becomes visible for all people to live in harmony. As shown in Figure 1 then, shaping this new discourse at the neighborhood level becomes the one solution that would solve most, if not all, of the challenges described above. The applied research methodology described here proposes a mechanism for creating emergent narratives capable of modeling a more inclusive pluralist discourse.

Discourse and the Social Equity Activist

When it comes to interest-group politics and talk of policy change, the term social entrepreneur has been overused, and as a result is now very context specific. In this paper, instead of social entrepreneur, the term social equity activist will be used to speak specifically about those activists who see, and take ownership of, the problems within society that are unique to vulnerable populations and those who are marginalized by narratives that create inequality, injustice, or otherwise produce disparate outcomes. Social equity activism in this context is typically found within street-level bureaucrats, community workers and within activist organizations throughout the world. Wherever one sees people gathered in protest, the social equity activist spoken of in this paper will be found leading that protest, but when a mayor (or similarly situated administrative official in local government) is also a social equity activist, major change is immediately possible. When a mayor takes ownership of the hopes and dreams of his or her community, and goes out of their way to include the marginalized and vulnerable populations as equal participants in all public goods and services, transformational change typically follows.

Social equity activists never lack for energy. What they lack is the skill and the tools needed to convert a protest narrative into a governing narrative. Referring back to Figure 1 (new), this paper outlines a framework to develop both the training and the technology that promise to fill that need of taking an altered discourse from the level of the neighborhood to the state legislature or parliament. Before getting into that, however, it will help to better understand the role of local government, in general, and the activist mayor, in particular, in taking ownership of the hopes and dreams of their constituents. In keeping with the author’s research and lived experiences, examples from the United States will be paired with examples from Romania to illustrate and expand the challenges faced by local government leaders. The following examples will attach the plight of inner-city blacks in the United States to the challenges faced by the Roma people in Romania, as well as the plight of gays and lesbians in both countries.

The Threat of “Undeserving” People

African-American descendants of slaves, like the Roma people, have endured centuries of oppression in which the dominant groups (and current governing majorities) have sought to keep themselves “separate” (with a façade of equal) in order to preserve certain privileges that the course of history bestowed upon them. In both cases (the Roma and African-Americans), it was only through an accident of birth in which a person would be determined to be privileged or marginalized. The same scenario, predictably, plays out in almost every culture on Earth. The historical narratives in every instance are such that these “othered” people would like nothing more than to see the structural dynamics that perpetuate inequality removed so that they might share equally in the public goods and services of society. Were it not for the structural dynamics that have been in place from the beginning of recorded history, young people born into these marginalized groups in the twenty-first century would find themselves having access to the same quality education, job markets, and health care as young people born into more privileged stations of life. Unfortunately, such is not the case.

In the United States, in cities like Miami and New Orleans, state policies that govern education are being enacted that will allow charter schools to be employed in ways where privileged neighborhoods will be able to incorporate quasi-private schools that strip away government funds from area public schools while at the same time allowing parents to fundraise unlimited amounts of their own money to further privilege the already privileged students (cite Billy’s wife, year). The result is that only the poorest of the poor will remain in inner-city schools along with the most at-risk students who have physical, mental, and emotional challenges to overcome in securing an equivalent education (cite, year). Charter schools serving historically marginalized populations will find themselves struggling against structural dynamics that would like be a modern equivalent of schools in the South when it was determined that “separate but equal” was never going to work (cite, year).

Local opposition to these policies was enormous, but in both Florida and Louisiana the state governments are dominated by a political ideology that sees African-Americans as “undeserving” of an equal share in the public goods of a quality public school because, as the narrative goes, “…families from the inner-city are lazy and do not want to work to get ahead.” This narrative is almost identical to narratives that marginalize the Roma people in many Eastern European countries like Romania (cite, year).

In the United States, it was presidential-hopeful Newt Gingrich who actually found the nerve to articulate the “inner-city people are lazy and undeserving” narrative. Very early on in the lead-up to the Republican primaries of the 2012 presidential election, in November 2011, Gingrich was speaking at Harvard when a question came up about income inequality. Few people remember now the full context of Gingrich’s answer because it quickly was consolidated to the idea that Newt Gingrich wanted to get rid of child labor laws so that children as young as nine years old could be taught the value of work by having them work as janitors in their own schools (Haberman, 2011).

This narrative, by itself, would not have been quite so harmful to the Republican Party if Gingrich’s primary rival and eventual winner of the Republican nomination had not been Mitt Romney. As it turned out, Romney’s wife Ann had been fortunate enough to be able to stay at home and raise her children rather than work at a job that took her out of the home. In a perfect example of how the mobilization of bias works, the idea that “children from poor neighborhoods do not learn a work ethic if their mother stays at home with them” gained a great deal of media coverage in spite of being in stark contrast to an alternative narrative that “children from wealthy neighborhoods automatically by instinct will have a work ethic.”

In this example of a quality public education as the “public good,” the threat to the privileged and dominant group comes from the hegemonic narrative that there are free-riders in society who want to benefit from the government-provided education without ever having contributed significantly to the public purse. Unfortunately, the truth is not quite so easy to explain, and it is never quite as compelling because it cannot incite fear like a worldview threat can. That is one element of this research that the information communication technology promises to counter. How an information system promises to do this, and how the research promises to explore this and measure the results will form the bulk of this paper.

The Threat of “Deviant” People  

A good example of how the mobilization of bias toward so-called “deviant” people is used to win elections is provided by what happened in Utah following the presidential election of 2004. It is a classic example of what can be avoided in Romania if they are willing to follow the lead of the European Union and the United States in avoiding this kind of situation as it relates to how they support their gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. The fact that it was an activist mayor, with the support of a majority in his city council, who took on the State Legislature is particularly informative to Romania and other countries that find themselves in a similar situation.

Utah is a state in the United States where 58% of the population self-identified in the 2010 census as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormons), and Mormons have been shown to primarily vote as a block. In research terms, they are textbook example of a homogeneous population. In a state like this, a “representative democracy” will give little thought to the needs of the 42% that didn’t vote the state legislature into power, especially if they want non-discrimination laws for gays or reproductive rights for women. In this climate, the idea of the state legislature passing a law that would go counter to the Mormon doctrine is almost unthinkable unless outside pressure from the rest of the country could be brought to bear on the elected officials. The Mormons only gave up the practice of polygamy in order to gain statehood, not because they felt any moral obligation to end the practice. In 2004, a referendum was passed with overwhelming support to change the state constitution so that it was prohibited to recognize any kind of relationship between two people unless it was specifically a man and a woman. In a court ruling in December 2013 the wording of the constitutional amendment would be found to be unnecessarily broad and punitive.

When Rocky Anderson, a lawyer, a member of the Democratic Party, and a former Mormon himself, was elected as mayor of Salt Lake City in the year 2000, he knew what he was up against as it related to the Republican Party dominated state legislature. In the wake of the 2004 constitutional amendment, Anderson tried to provide domestic partner benefits to city employees who were in long-term same-sex relationships. He was not really surprised to find out how far the 2004 state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage had gone in forbidding recognition of anything that could remotely resemble two people of the same gender cohabitating at the same address. After a couple of challenges by the state attorney general, the local ordinance that was eventually passed had to refer to the beneficiary of the domestic partner benefits as the “adult designee” (Wojcik, 2006). As an unintended consequence, almost as many employees used the new law to provide benefits to an aging parent or a heterosexual partner (SLCHRC, 2010), but the city council did not mind. Their intent in passing the law was to make a point and push back hard against the oppressive nature of what they saw as an unnecessarily punitive state law.

The Structure of Administration

As Guy Peters reminds us, the idea that the functions of public administration could be seen through four different structural lenses dates back to 1937 when Luther Gulick first outlined geography, processes, types of persons or things, or purpose, as potential dividing lines (Peters, 2010, 139). A division by geography of course relates to how some regions within a state have unique needs from their counterparts. A division by process relates to the functions within government that keep it running efficiently (the accounting and engineering functions, for example). A division by persons or things allows for administrative functions that specifically favor groups, such as veterans groups or cultural programs. Peters concludes by underscoring how purpose is “the most frequent basis of organization, as the ubiquitous departments or ministries of defense, education and health and so forth would indicate” (2010, 139-155).

Going forward in this paper it needs to be made abundantly clear that in the context of the two research questions that will be outlined in the next section, when a discussion of the illegitimacy of power is brought up, the term illegitimate is only being invoked as it relates to an illogical and dictatorial “takeover” by one administrative structure over another. To clarify, this would be a situation where the power that is claiming to be legitimate is obstructing, impeding, or blocking the provision of public goods and services by a subordinated power that is obviously and clearly better positioned to not only decide what the equitable distribution of public goods and services would be, but to also deliver those public goods and services. The above two examples were provided to illustrate how this principle of legitimate power relates to the two research questions that will be introduced next.

As in the case of creating policies that favor charter schools in New Orleans and Miami, and in the case of Mayor Rocky Anderson we have examples where a state government has violated the legitimate needs of a vulnerable population in the realm of geography (Salt Lake City and the City of Miami are both reliable Democrat voting blocks), the realm of process (denying a city the right to determine the employee benefits package that it wants to offer and a school district the right to retain control over and administer their own schools), the realm of clientele (interfering with the legitimate desire of the city to treat all of its employees and students the same), and in the realm of purpose (Salt Lake City wanted to make itself a desirable destination for qualified individuals seeking employment, and Miami-Dade Public Schools wanted to retain all of its public funding in order to balance the high-performing schools with the underperforming schools).

Activist mayors have to be willing to call out the illegitimate exercise of authority when it marginalizes a vulnerable population. This is a natural outgrowth of a mayor and local government that takes ownership of the hopes and dreams of every citizen and group within their constituency.

The Research Questions

The research questions that this paper seeks to answer have been very narrowly defined for a very important reason, and that is so that the reader can substitute in their own policy campaign that is specific to their vulnerable population (whether cast as undeserving or deviant) and their own location.

Research Question #1

For the author, who was raised in a religion that encouraged the community to shun those who sought to live authentic lives as gay men and lesbian women, the most insurmountable barrier imaginable would be to envision how difficult it would be to get one of the most religiously monolithic states in the United States to protect the rights of a gay teenager so that he or she could safely “come out of the closet” and declare their sexual identity while in their teens; in that same moment and age-group when heterosexuality is naturally and safely explored by adolescents. This is why the first research question proposed for this applied research program is worded as follows:

Can a small local gay and lesbian support group who meet around a dining room table in one of Utah's homogeneous suburban communities have a measurable impact on state policy decisions and thereby gain important rights and protections for their vulnerable children and friends?

In the United States, the group that would represent this population would be PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), who have 370 chapters nationwide. For Romania it would be a group like ACCEPT, which carries the banner for LGBT equality and defends cases of discrimination in front of the courts. For the readers of this paper who are not gay, and who do not live in the United States or Romania, each is encouraged to substitute into the above research question their own progressive cause (or policy campaign) and geographic location as they think in terms of what they, as social equity activists in their own country are up against as it relates to a narrative that oppresses any vulnerable population.

It is important to note, however, that the unit of analysis in this research project will not be the PFLAG group or its membership. It is the narrative, which in the above example is, “Being gay is a lifestyle choice.” This research is focused on what can be done to displace that narrative, either with a new narrative (the first choice), or at the very least a performative view of the existing narrative (an acceptable alternative). With this in mind, this paper will now become fully engaged in a theoretical overview and short literature review.

Research Question #2

In a deliberate attempt to have the second research question stand in stark contrast to the above question, the second research question asks a very different question:

Can street-level bureaucrats and community workers in the marginalized communities with high concentrations of people of low socio-economic status break free from their hierarchical structures to generate a single inter-governmental and inter-institutional point of contact for the diverse needs of their at-risk population?

In the United States, this of course is a direct reference to the inner-city populations where there are high concentrations of African-Americans who ended up there, in many instances, because of the area once being a segregated community that dates back to the Jim Crow era. Such is the case with Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, which is where the author completed a two-year-long participant observation research program. In Romania this would be a direct reference to communities that trace their heritage to the Roma people.

For the purpose of this paper the reader needs to imagine the circumstances of one particular family in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood. Imagine, if you will, one fictitious family that will be constructed so as to be representative of how desperate the situation is. Without getting into the structural racism that doomed this family to their circumstances, the reader needs to imagine in their mind an unmarried couple with two children. The oldest is 14 years old and is attending school regularly. The younger child is 4 years old and is attending pre-K. The mother is pregnant with a third child, but she is HIV positive as a result of her boyfriend (the father of the younger child and soon-to-be-born baby) serving time in prison where he became HIV positive.

The couple would have been married long ago except for the impact that it would have had on the provision of much-needed services that literally, in every sense of the word, keep the family alive. With his criminal record, the father has been unable to secure a job, but he is hopeful and is attending a job-training program at the local community college. He still has to see his parole officer on a regular basis as a condition of his release. Because the mother continues to work (at barely above minimum wage, and in constantly changing shifts), and the father is at college during the day, the family have a patchwork of childcare arrangements, only some of which qualify for subsidies. For the most part, the mother’s elderly mother is the fail-safe for afterschool supervision of the older boy and the preschooler, but it is debatable as to whether the 14-year-old is a caregiver to both his grandmother and his little brother, and the grandmother is just an adult presence.

This inner-city family, in one form or another, is typical of what the author witnessed and heard of on a regular basis during his two years in association with the Belafonte TACOLCY Center. When examined closely, it is apparent that this family navigates their way through several dozen contacts every week with distinct (and administratively disconnected) community and government service providers. On the institutional side, there is, to a large degree, an absence of communication between the street-level bureaucrats who are the primary points of contact for the family.

Romania would have a very similar scenario when it comes the needs of the Roma people. Research supports the fact that they are statistically poorer than the general population, and harmful stereotypes abound that cast them as “lazy” and therefore “undeserving” of an equal share of public goods and services. Every society would have some representative population that would fit this stereotype of being somehow “undeserving” of an equal share of public goods and services, and the reader is encouraged to imagine a population that fits into their own local community of an “at-risk” population.

The Research Problem

At this point we can now discuss the role of a mayor who takes ownership of the hopes and dreams of his or her constituents. In the interest of providing everyone in the community equal access to their share of public goods and services, it is important for local leaders to be very honest in asking whether or not there are any structural dynamics at work that would prevent certain populations from enjoying equal treatment.

As it relates to Research Question #1, does your local school district have a gay and lesbian resource person or support group? Bullying is a huge problem, and in a culture steeped in religious tradition, as both the United States and Romania are, gay, lesbian, and transgender teens may not be able to come out to their own parents without fear of being kicked out of their homes. In this climate, local school districts must meet the needs of those students to ensure they can live authentically as emerging adolescents.

At the college level, these young adults should also feel safe to be authentic, which means colleges and universities should have the community’s support in providing gay and lesbian student groups. Cities should make it clear to gay pride groups that they would support annual festivals in city parks, and with the proper support, pride parades. The role of a mayor and supportive city council is vital in this regard, and it makes a clear statement to a community that young gay and lesbian professionals are welcome to remain in their home community instead of feeling that they have to flee to more liberal centers such as San Francisco, New York, and Miami (in the United States), and Amsterdam, Berlin, or Rome (in the European Union). The tragedy of a city that fails to support gay pride events is that they project a message that diversity is not welcome.

As it relates to Research Question #2, a mayor that takes ownership of his or her constituency would be actively involved with ethnic and racial minorities that experience economic oppression. Economic development in the marginalized communities would be seen as a priority, and schools in those areas would likewise be given additional support to ensure that the structural dynamics of the past are proactively removed. Young people who have lived with narratives of oppression and marginalization would be exposed to new narratives that suggest that the opportunities that were denied to their parents will now be provided to them so that the hopes and dreams portrayed by popular media will be within their grasp. Stereotypes of past behavior will be actively suppressed as a new emergent narrative of inclusion would be promoted within the youth and young adults of the minority groups. An activist mayor and city council would be very involved in constructing this new discourse, as would the local police force who would traditionally have been portrayed as part of the oppression.

Homogeneous Policy Networks

In the case of the Arab Revolutions of 2011, the social equity activists that spearheaded the actions that turned out enormous crowds on public squares were incapable of putting together political parties that could win against already established elite groups. In Egypt, a perfect example, it was the Islamic organizations who were waiting and ready when Mubarek fell. Long-established organizations like the Islamic factions of the Middle-East are what will be loosely referred to in this paper as homogeneous policy networks, with the word homogeneous a reference to how the narratives coming out of those groups are typically of “one mind.” These networks are what this research will also refer to as a closed policy network; a name that is derived from the fact that any “holes” in these networks can be easily “closed” by the highly concentrated power of their hierarchy (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, 507-510; Lin, 2001, 12). It follows that these closed networks have one defining feature, and that is that they are incredibly efficient from a policymaking standpoint (Sandström & Carlsson, 2008, 512). The term efficient comes from how the power within the network can be used to “close holes” in the network by purging the dissenting voices; a defining trait that will become a major focal point of this research. Conservative political parties typically (but not always) fall into the category of “homogeneous.” Even when not part of a dominant group, these homogeneous institutions generally enjoy a political advantage if their opposition is fragmented and are pursuing an array of policy needs. In the United States, as with other countries in varying degrees, this describes most progressive groups.

It is the opinion of the author that what needs to be created for the social equity activists on the progressive side of the political spectrum is something that will work reliably for minorities, historically marginalized populations, and vulnerable populations. Favoring the work of Schneider and Ingram (1993) on this topic, this research works from the position that minority populations are typically cast as both “contenders” and “deviants,” and it for those labeled as “deviants” where justice and fairness are so easily denied. Progressive social equity activists typically step in to advocate for pluralism, which is seen by politically homogeneous conservatives as a voice to discard “traditions.” Because there are often many differing social equity activists on the progressive side of politics (animal rights, senior’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, atheist’s rights, to name just a few), this paper will reference the proposed network that will serve these social equity activists as a heterogeneous policy network; heterogeneous because when it comes to “change,” there are numerous changes that are needed when one takes the time to listen intently to the demands of the social equity activists. The groups outlined on the left half of Figure 2 are meant to illustrate a sampling of some progressive groups who, in the author’s opinion, are behind some of the narratives that are currently attempting to drive policy change in the United States. The axioms at the top of the page (“Democrats Who Fall in Love” and “Republicans Who Fall in Line”) are

Figure 2 – The Author’s View of Policy Networks in the United States

meant to be representative of how the two political parties comport themselves as “sustaining institutions,” a term that will be more clearly defined later on in this paper.

During any protest action, when the goal is to focus the public’s attention on how dissatisfied a certain block of the population is (and if possible disrupt governance), few people actually read every one of the posters, choosing instead to focus on the themes that are aligned with their preferred narrative community. This is an inherent problem with activism, and the central tenet of this research is that social equity activists today are failing to bring about the policy changes they desire because they are making little or no effort to unite disparate progressive voices, of which a sampling of 12 representative groups are offered in the left half of Figure 2. For social equity activists who recognize this need to unite disparate progressive voices, they find themselves without the tools necessary to unearth the shared premises capable of merging the policy-change narratives into a broad, but still unified, heterogeneous policy network.

Uniting these disparate voices is going to be vital. Sandström and Carlsson describe network heterogeneity by writing, “The basic idea is that networks constituted of actors from dissimilar backgrounds, representing different organizational units, etc., can be assumed to span many global structural holes” (2008, 510; emphasis added). The authors go on to describe how these heterogeneous policy networks are the most innovative of all networks that they analyzed, but at the same time, the least efficient; the complete opposite of the homogeneous policy networks. This paper sets out to describe a heterogeneous policy network, working as a sociotechnical system, that is expected to be both effective (as measured by how innovative and transformational it is) and efficient (as measured by getting new policy through the agenda setting process).

This paper also promises to outline how, over a period of seven years, the author has modelled a different kind of political institution around an information communication technology (ICT) that not only captures the building blocks of protest narratives in a way that they can be retrieved as compelling governing narratives, but furthermore outlines how to leverage the institutional memory of that policy-supporting institution into the formation of a global governing body for progressive activists; a virtual institution with legitimate power that will span both political and geographic boundaries; an institution that will have no authoritarian positions within it that can be corrupted or coopted; an institution that uses technology to generate consensus-building narrative threads instead of elected representatives who regularly fall under the tempting spells of rich and powerful special interest groups and lobbyists.

Justice and Fairness

With only a little imagination, it can be argued that for centuries now public intellectuals and philosophers have written (in one form or another) about how the global elite have been leveraging narrative theory against the interests of humanity. Over the centuries, there have been major breakthroughs in how humanity has been structured so that justice and fairness have slowly become more accessible to those born in the lowest stations of society (Rawls, 1971), and those breakthroughs have typically been associated with communication technology and access to an improved knowledge of humankind. The invention of the printing press is a standout example of how one of these breakthroughs altered how the hegemon wielded their power.

This theoretical paper proposes that humanity, in the early 21st century, has once again created a mechanism whereby information communication technology will unavoidably alter communication and yield to the polis a point of access to greater knowledge than they have ever had before. This paper will introduce a theory of how access to this knowledge might be leveraged to generate emergent narrative communities capable of changing the course of history in much the same way that the printing press did, ushering in an age of new enlightenment. If done properly, after a century of waiting, perhaps the time has come for Marx’ revolution, but this revolution promises to be peaceful if the masses simply agree on one central idea: The idea that by generating improved narratives for coexistence, we (the masses) can uniformly withdraw our consent to be oppressed at the hands of the global elite, the self-interested capitalists, and religious leaders who have a greater interest in keeping the polis in conflict with each other instead of encouraging us to live peacefully alongside each other and our environment.

It is important that the reader understand how ambitious the goals are for this research. The problems with narratives that this research is tackling are centuries old. As you read the following summary that Robert Denhardt provided in his review of Marx, reflect on those 951 protests in 82 countries that were referenced in the opening paragraph of this paper.

Moreover, those who control the means of production also have substantial influence over the dissemination of knowledge through society and, by virtue of this influence, may be said to direct the consciousness of the society. Only those ideas consistent with the interests and perspectives of the dominant class will be articulated. As a result, of course, many members of the society may come to adopt a consciousness or world view that is contradictory to their own best interests. Workers may come to believe that their work should contribute to the accumulation of private property by others, whom they may see as more fortunate and even more deserving. To the extent that the consciousness of a social group is at odds with the interests that group would express if it were free to do so, that consciousness may be described as false, or a deception (Denhardt, 2011, 22).

In researching the problems that this ICT hoped to address it was interesting to note that, for the most part, the problems had already been clearly identified at the dawn of the twentieth century. Three authors that will be cited often throughout this paper; Marx, Follett, and Gramsci, had, for the most part, identified every element of what this paper concurs is “still wrong with society.” They also had articulated clear ideas for fixing those problems, but there was no mechanism available to them to take on the powerful hegemon. Still, to a one, they identified the hierarchies of control as the problem. As Denhardt goes on to explain in his book, Theories of Public Organization, over the past century, in spite of being fully aware of the problems spoken of by Marx, Follett, and Gramsci, and others, mainstream thinking toward government and public administration have been limited to “instrumental concerns expressed through hierarchical structures, failing to acknowledge or to promote the search for alternative organizational design. Specifically, [the approaches have] failed to integrate issues of control, consensus, and communication” (Denhardt, 2011, x).

This theoretical paper is all about creating, as an information system, a permanent and self-governing sustaining institution capable of supporting the incubation and growth of emergent narrative communities that will be internal to “the masses,” and exist irrespective of the hegemon and their hierarchies of power. Such an institution cannot be governed by a hierarchical power structure, nor can it have gatekeepers in charge of its institutional memory, because, when one’s goal is to create compelling narratives for social change, information is the legitimate power that the polis can wrest away from the hegemon without military might, and, as Marx implied, a compelling narrative with popular support is more useful than cash in claiming a right to self-govern. The balance of this paper will briefly outline what is underway to hopefully accomplish this.

Social Equity Activism

As an activist that literally traveled “from New York to LA” from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, the author helped create the kind of temporary “victory” often associated with protest actions, but in the years following those protests he also witnessed an almost universal failing to effect any meaningful policy changes on the part of the activist organizations that he supported. Worse yet, the marginalizing narratives that had been the targets of his activism seemed to remain firmly entrenched. Thousands of hours had been invested by his fellow social equity activists, along with tens-of-thousands of dollars, and it seemed that little or no progress had been made toward long-overdue policy change.

This research-in-progress paper will first outline how and where the problems have been identified as they relate to organizational theory, sociology, media theory, and policy analysis. Central to this paper is the idea that 21st century technology may have finally provided a solution to this problem. Ironically, the theories supporting the solution outlined in this paper seem to have first been identified by academics in the 1970s, when the future of computing had been contemplated with wide-eyed optimism, Many of the visionaries did not live to see smart-phones or tablet computers, but their theories now have more relevance than ever before, in spite of the fact that they could not have imagined how crowd-sourcing, social media, and cloud computing would play a role in creating a central institutional memory for a virtual institution; ideas that have emerged as the tools that might soon realize the dreams of visionary public intellectuals and humanists the world over.

Definitions and Key Terms

Critical to understanding this paper is a need to understand the terms narrative community, interpretive monopoly, and sustaining institution, as they are used in the context of the MOCSIE Systems. Figure 3 illustrates these three key terms as they are modeled for this research. The idea of a narrative community is borrowed from the research of Mona Baker. She describes it as a group of people “…held together by their willingness to subscribe to the same, or a very similar, set of narratives, [acknowledging] the power of narrative to instigate and maintain a sense of common identity and its potential as a basis for political action” (Baker, 2006, 463).

The narrative that has been utilized in Figure 3 to illustrate the key terms for this research is the idea that people are not born gay, but rather they have instead chosen to live a ‘deviant’ lifestyle; the term deviant being borrowed from Schneider and Ingram’s matrix (1993). Many religions and cultures around the world subscribe to this narrative as an interpretive monopoly, which means that no other negotiated reading of the homosexual lifestyle would be tolerated. The leaders within these sustaining institutions are obligated to defend the interpretive monopoly by plugging any such “structural holes.” Figure 3 therefore represents a homogeneous policy network that will vigorously fight any efforts to classify the equal treatment of gays as a “civil right.”

Figure 3 – Narratives, Interpretive Monopolies, and Sustaining Institutions

In addition to narratives about homosexuality, other oppressive interpretive monopolies that are equally reactive to worldview threats are narratives about women’s rights (abortion access in America and female genital mutilation in Africa are just two interpretive monopolies that progressive activists are trying to displace), wage theft (where corporations extort their unearned profits from the workers who created the value in the products and services being sold), socialism (where the distribution of government services, as public goods, is seen as an intrusion into the lives of individuals who claim to have “no need” of government), and racism (the incomprehensible need to hold onto the idea that if someone’s skin is darker than yours, it is somehow justified to deem them “inferior”).

            Key research that supports the idea that “deviancy” is a social construct comes from combining the ideas of Bachrach and Baratz (1962), in, Two Faces of Power, and Schneider and Ingram (1993) in, Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy. The most important feature of Bachrach and Baratz’ research on the “two faces of power” is that it demonstrates how oppression occurs through the “mobilization of bias.” Once the “deviancy” has been defined (as a social construct) by the dominant community, the oppression can take place by either pushing for a change that will proactively marginalize the “othered,” or alternatively, if the “othered” already live in marginalizing circumstances, the mobilization of bias can prevent change from gaining traction, which Bachrach and Baratz describe as the “power of nondecision.” This second “face of power” defines the conservative movement and their narrative that “any change is bad.” Jim Crow laws, once in place, were incredibly resistant to change because of how effective the mobilization of bias was, which, through numerous tactics, prevented policy change.

Ostensive and Performative Views

For those inhabitants of the planet that enjoy living under stable governments (even if oppressive), there exists what we call, “social order.” When viewed through a narrative theory lens, “Social order is a performance of habitus and narrative dominance” (Miller, 2012, 82), but social order is not always just and fair. Structural inequality might provide the oppressed and marginalized with predictable behavior on the part of their oppressors, but it is still oppression. This paper will now examine habitus and narrative dominance with the goal of understanding how oppressive dominant narratives can be displaced.

What the reader needs to recognize is that the theoretical foundation of this chapter rests on understanding the difference between an ostensive view of narratives and a performative view (Miller, 2012, 86-88). To understand ostensive it helps to think of preparing a dining room table before the guests arrive. One first performs the action of “setting” the plates, cups, and silverware on the table, but when they leave the room, the table remains “set,” ready for when someone re-enters the room. Translating ostensive into a term useful for narrative theory, one need only think in terms of obedience to religious doctrine or cultural practices, where it is deemed that once history has “set” certain narratives, they became “fixed in place” and have to remain as such.

Expanding Latour’s ideas (2005), Miller writes the following about how performed narratives are what create organizations.

Organizational structure is often taken to be an ostensive object, rather than a social aggregate that has to be performed. To stop making and remaking social collectivities, such as administrative organizations, is to do away with social collectivities, such as administrative organizations. Not fixity, but performative activity supports constant regrouping. What appear to be social structures (“are said to exist” in Latour’s terminology) are instead performed regularities (Miller, 2012, 88).

Miller goes on to explain how, in keeping with Bourdieu (1977, 18), it is habitus (the act of clinging to the interpretive monopoly) that actually creates the sustaining institution by creating everyone’s own personal interpretation of “history” as something “that only appears to be a static institution” (Miller, 2012, 71-73). This research project postulates that it is also fear that is leveraged to empower this habitus. Future research will be conducted that will delve further into terror management theory in order to better understand how social equity activists might be equipped to mitigate the conservative’s “terror” of letting go of their ostensive view of narratives; a terror of being found less-than-worthy of a happy existence after they pass from this mortal existence (Davis, Juhl, & Routledge, 2010). Denhardt, in his quick summary of Weber’s book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905/1930), opened the door to this research.

Weber argued that the belief in predestination was so disconcerting to followers of Calvin that they sought a kind of “loophole” in their destiny, a way of ensuring that they would be among the elect who enter the state of grace. The loophole they developed was “earthly success,” which they saw as a sign of heavenly favor and assurance of their place among God’s chosen, and they diligently sought to extend their holdings. The result, according to Weber, was an accumulation of capital and an entrenchment of the capitalist system unparalleled elsewhere. In this case, a system of belief propelled an economic system rather than vice versa” (Denhardt, 2011, 26).

In an environment where the above narrative is pervasive, it does not take too much imagination to see how “trickle-down economics,” as an ostensive governing narrative, was so easily pitched to the masses. Their religious sustaining institutions have equated hard-driving equity activistship into a desirable “god-like” quality. Worse still, anybody not striving for that kind of financial success was, by default, ungodlike, and therefore could be “othered” as an undeserving and separate class of people. Through this narrative, these sustaining institutions are telling their adherents that society should not feel obligated in any way to provide a safety-net for these people because God himself does not care enough about them to give them any status in the promised afterlife. In keeping with Schneider and Ingram, the “Protestant Work Ethic,” as a performed narrative, had thereby been used to socially construct a guilt-free mechanism for “good Christians” to separate out the “deserving” (who would get public assistance) and the “deviant” (who would be taken care of through the harsh reality of social Darwinism).

Discourse Structuration

Before the reader will fully understand the relationship between narrative theory and the information communication technology that is being proposed in this research, it will be necessary to understand what the objectives will be as they relate to discourse structuration, and what this technology will seek to change as it incubates proposed new, emergent narrative communities.

The Ostensive View and Terror Management Theory

Personal past experiences of the author with religious interpretive monopolies suggest that this “terror” of being undeserving (deviant) in the eyes of God is heavily leveraged by faith-based sustaining institutions because, in practice, any challenge to the ostensive nature of the performed narratives (worship) is often equated to heresy. Accordingly, such challenges to the narratives will precipitate severe “earthly” disciplinary action (the “closing” of “structural holes”) that promises to have eternal consequences. When examined through the lens provided by Davis, Juhl, & Routledge (and to a lesser degree, Weber), it can be argued that this is a very real fear.

Every religion has their own hierarchy of narratives to guide adherents, and for the faith community that the author was born into, one researcher went to the trouble of identifying 4,300 such narratives that religious leaders had provided (over a period of the last 150 years) to guide its membership to a salvation where the highest rewards of heaven would be theirs for eternity (Decker & Hunt, 1984, 185). Each of these 4,300 narratives is delivered with a clear understanding of both the Earthly and eternal consequences associated with a deviation from the ostensive interpretation of these narratives.

In what many consider to be the most terrifying of those narratives, adherents are promised that even family units will be dissolved in the after-life (children will be kept separated from their parents) if one does not achieve the highest of the six (hierarchical) levels of this promised afterlife. By design, then, it is not a stretch to therefore interpret these 4,300 narratives as “commandments” because the consequences become very tangible in the daily lives of adherents if they are perceived to be living Earthly lives that are unworthy of the highest degree of glory in the afterlife. Divorces in this faith are not uncommon based solely on the fact that one spouse or the other will likely be deemed unworthy after death to live for eternity in the highest degree of glory, and therefore not be a “parent” and “spouse” in the afterlife. This is terror management theory functioning at its best.

The theories proposed in this research project further argue that an ostensive view of narratives is inherently flawed because of the inextricable connection that it has with terror management theory. Through this lens, it is possible to see how an ostensive view of historical narratives is at the root of much, if not all, of human conflict. If left unaltered, where there is an ostensive view of narratives, there will always be some segment of the population that will be “othered” because they do not (or in the cases of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, cannot) abide by the interpretive monopolies of some powerful sustaining institution that controls the dominant narratives.

When progressive policy proposals present a worldview threat capable of undermining the very existence of conservative institutions themselves (including the world’s largest religions with millions of followers), it becomes clear that social equity activists, faced with reconciling the differences between such groups, will need all the help they can get. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took more than 14 years (and the threat of removing Brigham Young University’s athletic teams from the NCAA) before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints received a revelation that Black males could be ordained to the priesthood (Quinn, 1993). The theories of this research proposal support the idea that it was a growing emergent narrative community that brought that pressure on the Mormon Church, but it took 14 years. It also required that non-Mormons “allowed” the Mormons to have their “revelation” as a way to save face. In 1978, nobody insisted that the Mormon Church re-write its history to “correct a mistake,” however, in late 2013 they actually took upon themselves to do this by conceding that the practice had no basis in scripture and was instead a product of the racist climate of the United States in the mid-1800s.

The 1978 Mormon revelation that allowed Blacks to hold the priesthood was the kind of emergent narrative community that needs to be copied by social equity activists today. What it did was allow the Mormons to have a God that follows performative narratives; a God who reserves the right to change His mind. Because Mormonism is a religion, it therefore does not have an obligation to behave in rational ways like a government institution in Western democracies has to. Because of this, social equity activists will be encouraged by this research to allow old religious narratives to die a dignified “death” and fade into the history books as, one by one, they are displaced. In spite of how much joy Bill Maher gets in doing it (and how it improves the ratings for his HBO show), religious narratives do not have to be deconstructed by atheists. There is little or nothing to be gained by social equity activists in deconstructing religious narratives. The goal will always be to displace them with an emergent narrative community that is incubated from a shared premise. By 1978, the Mormon Church had nothing to lose and everything to gain by allowing Black males to be ordained elders in their church. The “shared premise” was that the current Mormon prophet is entitled to continuing revelation, and therefore was not bound by what God had “revealed” to Brigham Young during his term as the prophet.

Worldviews and Social Constructionism

Stated in research terms, and supported by Figure 4, a performative view of narrative theory will need to be presented as the alternative to an ostensive view. The theory is aligned with a social constructionist perspective, where the narrative community on the left will have to concede that there can be more than one version of “the truth” (Burr, 2003); a simple concept, but because of the concerns noted above, one with enormous consequences if not properly mitigated in its implementation.

To understand the difference between a performative view and an ostensive view one need only think in terms of the sustaining institution illustrated on the left side of Figure 4. That sustaining institution is obligated to react forcefully if their “Being gay is a lifestyle choice” interpretive monopoly is threated. If the threat comes from within the institution itself, as it did when the author announced at the age of 46 that he had come to an understanding that he was in fact, born gay, the discipline can be very severe; in the author’s case, through shunning and excommunication.

Figure 4 – Sustaining Institutions with Ostensive and Performative Views

If the threat comes from outside the institution, such as gay rights organizations campaigning for marriage equality, the sustaining institution will typically rally the entire narrative community to come to the defense of the interpretive monopoly narrative. From within an interpretive monopoly community, the narrative that a person is born gay must be seen as a worldview threat because, for centuries now, religions have banked their veracity on a literal (and unchangeable) translation of ancient texts. This explains why California’s Proposition 8 holds the record as the most expensive ballot initiative in history.

Proponents of Prop 8 spent an estimated $39 million in an effort to protect the “Being gay is a lifestyle choice” narrative and deny equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. Of that $39 million, $20 million came from Mormons throughout the United States after the prophet ordered that a letter, requesting donations of both “time and means,” be read from the pulpit of every congregation in California (Beaver, 2011). The $39 million makes no effort to value the millions of volunteer hours invested by the religiously motivated and others who went door-to-door and stood on street corners as they passed out tracts and flyers supporting the constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage.

Having the ability to order that a letter be read from the pulpit to every congregation in a state is precisely the reason homogeneous policy networks are as efficient as they are. This ability to “close holes” in their network make them a formidable force to reckon with. The MOCSIE Systems have been engineered precisely because heterogeneous policy networks do not have this kind of sustaining institution to support them in proposing policy alternatives to counter the conservatives and to propose transformational solutions for some of society’s greatest problems.

As was the case with the author during his years as an activist, the mistake that many newly-minted social equity activists make is a failure to see policy change through a postmodern narrative theory lens. As Miller advocates, in following narrative theory the goal should not be to destroy the sustaining institution or deconstruct the narratives that support its interpretive monopolies (the ostensive views). Rather, the objective should only be to merely change (by displacement) their ostensive view so that it becomes a performative view. It can be thought of as something as simple as getting the religious narrative community to insert the words, “For us…” in front of their interpretive monopoly narrative; an act that would, in turn, diminish the efforts on the part of their adherents to support a sustaining institution in its effort to convert a democracy into a theocracy. In terms of religious conflicts, peaceful coexistence could be as simple as displacing the religious interpretive monopoly narrative, “One Path to God,” with a performative view of that narrative, which would instead be, “Our Path to God.”

The Polis and the Second Age of Enlightenment

As a policy studies term, the word “polis” is borrowed from Deborah Stone, and is described as, “the simplest version of society that retains the essential elements of politics” (Stone, 2002, 17). This term works for this research because it meshes nicely with Thayer’s ideal of making decisions through small, linked, consensus-building groups (Thayer, 1973, 171). This paper will now look at the technology that promises to actualize Thayer’s vision.

From an ICT perspective, the MOCSIE Systems are a crowd-sourced database of digital media that is being constructed so that its records can be retrieved in narrative threads; threads that tell compelling stories in support of a humanity capable of living by diverse narratives in a peaceful coexistence; a humanity where one narrative community is not cast as a worldview threat against another narrative community.

If the printing press was capable of ushering in the Age of Enlightenment, from which humanity took a half-step toward democracy (giving us representative democracy), then perhaps the Internet and a near-universal access to mobile technology will allow humankind to take the final half-step and achieve what some describe as direct democracy (King, Box, and Stivers, 1998). While acknowledging that true “direct democracy” would likely be an unwieldy beast, the author instead argues that by simply relocating more legitimate power over the agenda setting process into the hands of “the polis,” the desired policy change goals would still likely be met to the satisfaction of most social equity activists because it removes much of the ability of the elite and their lobbyists to coopt elected officials in the current system. Selznick’s classic writings on The Cooptative Mechanism from 1949 (Shafritz & Hyde, 1997, 147-153) still are relevant and guide the theory used in this regard for the MOCSIE Systems organizational models.

The Multidisciplinary Nature of Social Equity Activism

In what many will see as a gross oversimplification, this research seeks to explain hegemony in the broadest of terms. Gramsci, in his prison notebooks from 1926 to 1934 (English reprinting 1971), defined hegemony as a very “structural” component of society, but the author has found that today’s social equity activists that are familiar with the word often use it to describe something more akin to Vivien Burr’s Social Constructionism (2003). This broadening of the term allows the author to use the phrase hegemonic narratives, which should in turn encourage the reader to see hegemonic narratives as interpretive monopolies. The hegemon can subsequently be viewed as the authoritarian power that controls the sustaining institution charged with protecting hegemony from any challengers (refer back to Figures 3 and 4).

By displacing an ostensive view of a hegemonic narrative with a performative view, a social equity activist will effectively strip the hegemon of their authority, and this once again underscores how this information system has been designed to bestow legitimate power upon the street-level bureaucrat, community workers, and social equity activists, or, as we can now reference them, the opinion leaders of the “polis” (Stone, 2003, 17).

Miami’s Liberty City Neighborhood

In Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood there are more than twenty community assets that are scattered within a short walk of the 15-block-long stretch of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. As with many Black communities in the United States, the corridor serves as the main street of the neighborhood.

Connected to each of those twenty community assets are several dozen separately-administered community services that are, in many instances, literally a matter of life-and-death to the residents of Liberty City. The programs serve everyone from the unborn babies to the aged and infirm. Each program conducts its own version of outreach that is done from schools, public parks, athletic fields, parole offices, police stations, art galleries, theaters, churches, and the traditional community centers like TACOLCY. What they all have in common is that they all incubate the passions of the area’s brightest and most aggressive social equity activists. What they often do not do is bring dissimilar social equity activists together, primarily because many of the programs and community assets see other programs and assets as competitors for limited resources.

By design (and this is where Gramsci’s view of structural hegemony comes in), invisible to the social equity activists are the barriers to policy change that are inherent in the narratives of the community programs. Embedded in many of the programs and services of Liberty City’s public services is the ostensive view that the intractable problems of the community are internal problems that are structural in inner-city neighborhoods all over the world. In many cases, residents of the inner-city themselves have come to believe this, fostering a sense of hopelessness that their circumstance can ever be changed. In this way, they now “consent to their own oppression” (Gramsci, 1971; Bates, 1975).

The idea that a single umbrella organization could offer a unified solution for an inner-city community is seldom considered because the logistics of putting a single program in place that could merge governance for six hierarchical institutions in the provision of public goods and services would arguably be insurmountable. But to provide existing services through different means is not why these street-level bureaucrats, community workers, and social equity activists need to be more united. What is intended to come out of this research effort is a single, over-arching emergent narrative for policy change; transformational policy change, as noted earlier, not the incrementalism we have come to expect from governments that pander to the global elite (the hegemon) in the 21st century.

Figure 6 – Formalizing “Informal” Inter-organizational Networks

The illustration on the left side of Figure 6 has been provided in order to illustrate how the street-level bureaucrats that work in each of the levels of government are currently obligated to report up the hierarchy, where gatekeepers of information and financial resources might have other priorities than those shared by the street-level bureaucrats closest to the problems. In Liberty City, this means that different elements of those twenty community assets are controlled by four levels of government, a school district, and any number of players in publicly and privately funded nonprofit organizations and churches. For this paper, those “vertical” organizations will be called “silos,” to represent how there are barriers between each organization that keep them from spreading out horizontally to properly deal with the wide-ranging problems of the inner-city.

In a paper entitled, The Implications for Democracy in a Networked Bureaucratic World, O’Toole wrote about networks that he defined as “...structures of interdependence involving multiple organization[s that] exhibit some structural stability and include, but extend beyond, formal linkages alone” (O'Toole, 1997, 445). These networks are what this paper intends to formalize as “institutional” through new uses for old theories that will now be introduced. In support of his institutional ideal, O'Toole continued by clarifying that “the institutional 'glue' congealing networked ties may include authority bonds, exchange relations, and common interest based coalitions” (O'Toole, 1997, 445; emphasis added). This research proposes the inter-organizational alliance illustrated on the right side of Figure 6 as one of these “common interest based coalitions,” but there is much more to it than that.

Follet’s “Law of the Situation”

This proposed research will strive to provide a mechanism whereby not only street-level bureaucrats, but also every community worker, volunteer, and social equity activist, can span every branch of government and nonprofit organization to get involved with generating policy proposals intended to deal with what Mary Parker Follett called “the law of the situation.” What she wrote in 1926 applies just as much today when considering those “wicked problems” (or “situations”) that are so pervasive in the inner-city. One key phrase in particular is especially useful in the context of this paper.

The taking of responsibility, each according to his [or her] capacity, each according to his [or her] function in the whole..., this taking of responsibility is usually the most vital matter in the life of every human being. [... Workers] owe obedience only to a functional unit to which [they] are contributing" (Ott, Parkes, & Simpson, 2008, 47; Follett, 1926).

This theoretical paper is arguing that street-level bureaucrats and other community workers should allow themselves to be ruled primarily by what “the situation” calls for, and thereby render less “obedience” to the authority up the silos. In the spirit of Follett, this paper proposes that the diagram on the left side of Figure 6 be interpreted quite literally as portrayed in the illustration on the right, where the “functional unit” Follett spoke of is seen as that point where service delivery to the “client” (the “masses”) takes place; namely, within the 20 community assets illustrated in Figure 5b. After all, the “situations” for service-recipients in inner-city areas like Liberty City mostly seem to take place in the red rectangles of Figure 6, and so long as the workers “look up the silo” for permission to become engaged in resolving complex situations, they will typically feel obligated at some point to disengage from “the situation” because elements of it will invariably fall outside of their silo.

In the spirit of Figure 6, this research proposes to provide a mechanism for empowering the street-level bureaucrat to formalize how all of the workers and social equity activists relate to each other so that they work in a policy making role with each other (as a polis) without being perceived as overly threatening to the authority of their respective hierarchical structures.

Revisionist History and Narrative Theory

When the author, as a member of a leadership study circle at the TACOLCY Center, produced the poster shown in Figure 5a, he had no idea about how interest group politics or policy networks worked. His primary concern was that if the study circle group could alter how a few select youth in Liberty City saw themselves (and their community), it might change how they lived their lives on a daily basis. Nevertheless, three years later, his research now supports the idea that transformational policy changes capable of altering life in inner-city communities around the world will all be based on altered narratives about the cause of those problems. Nobody wants to admit that racism, classism, and bigotry have become institutionalized (and cleverly codified) in the modern world, but when the symptoms are traced to the disease, this is where narrative theory research points us. As the old saying about wars and conflicts goes, “The winner gets to write history.” In countries throughout the world, the time is long overdue for the other narratives of history to come alive. MOCSIE Systems is being provided as the mechanism by which that can be done, in a very real sense of “giving life” to these narratives in any number of genres of artistic creativity: visual art, installation art, literature, film, radio, lectures, theater, song, and just about anything that can be crowd-sourced.

History needs to be rewritten because the problems that perpetuate poverty and deny equal education and employment opportunities to certain races and classes of people are problems that are rooted in narratives that have defined (in ostensive ways) who the undeserving are.

The problems that perpetuate hate are similarly problems that are rooted in narratives of bigotry that for centuries have told society who it is okay to hate, or in some cases even condemn to death because of a trait of birth.

History’s interpretation of economics (and its views of Reagan and Thatcher) need to be rewritten because, in the eyes of the world’s population that work two jobs and still cannot afford to buy their own home or even see a doctor, it was a narrative of trickle-down economics that advanced the idea that if Western democracies would elevate corporate profits as the most esteemed goal of human interest, then the corporations that became more powerful than many governments (after being granted free-trade deals and having their industries deregulated) would all of the sudden be overcome with a compulsion to be more compassionate to their workers and loyal customers.

The Jugglers

In his early writings, the author first examined social equity activists by comparing them to jugglers, primarily because they had so many interdisciplinary roles to fill. Figure 7 comes from that period, almost four years ago, after six major responsibilities had been identified as essential skills for effective social equity activistship in an activist role.

The “six balls” that the Juggler has in the air in Figure 7 remain, to this day, very critical to the author’s theory, even though they were identified prior to his completing his undergraduate degree. The Echo Chamber is a reference to those individuals who buy into an ostensive view of narratives as interpretive monopolies. They attend church and consume media that only serves to reinforce what they already believe because to open up new channels would only present them with conflicting worldviews. Empathy, of course is self-explanatory, and it plays a major role in finding a critically important shared premise with opposing sustaining institutions so that an emergent narrative community can be germinated.

Figure 7 – The Skills Required to Guide a Heterogeneous Policy Network

The Disconnect is not a reference to how entrenched certain people are in their own ideology, but rather a reference to those within a marginalized population who “consent to their own oppression,” and have bought into the hegemonic narrative, “Society is never going to change, so why burn myself out trying to change it?” When the author was a volunteer in Liberty City, it was disturbing to see that it was the same corps of volunteers that showed up for every event. Others had long ago burned themselves out and become disconnected and disheartened that anything would ever change.

The Campaigns is a reference to six all-inclusive policy campaigns, and will be dealt with in more detail below when describing institutional memory. The Missing Activists is a reference to those who need to tell their stories of abuse and marginalization as part of a mental health exercise in healing. Marketable Multimedia is a reference to artistic expression of any kind that individuals might want to create as they crowd-source their stories and upload them into the proposed institutional memory that will form the very brain of this proposed virtual institution.

Breaking Through the “Wall of Hegemony”

The MOCSIE Systems are all about helping the Jugglers (the activist-oriented social equity activists like ‘bell hooks,’ who is represented in Figure 7) break through the wall of hegemony (displace hegemonic narratives) by focusing the energy of her or his fellow activists (the polis). Figure 8 is a visual representation of this kind of activity. The small circles at the bottom of each of the three illustrations represent the people of the polis who are working on individual (and currently discordant) progressive policy campaigns. Their individual efforts are the equivalent of picking away at a brick wall with a small hammer. When a “Juggler” comes along, with the skills necessary to bring discourse structuration and narrative theory into the mix, the opportunity opens up for the energy of an entire community (as a heterogeneous policy network representing the polis) to become engaged in the process and work toward finding a shared premise.

When that shared premise is found, it is the equivalent of breaking through the wall, and once through the wall the individual social equity activists (the street-level bureaucrats and community workers) will have the opportunity to fine-tune their efforts toward policy change in their six individual campaigns. The difficult part, especially for that PFLAG group in Utah (remember the research question), was breaking through the brick wall in the first place. When that small PFLAG group is part of an international, heterogeneous network, they can tap into the momentum of the entire organization to first break through the wall of hegemony in Utah, and then work on their PFLAG policy goals along with other progressive ideas of their newfound allies.

Figure 8 – The Effect of a Consensus-building “Emergent Narrative”

When a populist movement happens, it is a safe bet that a Juggler has emerged; one with an essential seventh trait not shown in Figure 7. Goleman calls this trait, “emotional intelligence.” In 1998 he wrote, "I have found [...] that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence (Ott, Parkes, & Simpson, 2008, 82; Goleman, 1998; emphasis in original). Goleman goes on to describe emotional intelligence as having five essential components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills (2008, 83), all of which will be critical traits for the Juggler.

Cultural Anthropology and Narratives

Readers are asked to reflect now on what they imagine they might have learned about “community conversations” on MLK Blvd., had they been a volunteer at Liberty City’s Belafonte TACOLCY Center. One cannot help but see elements within Figure 5 that were aimed at harvesting from the community what Clifford Geertz called “thick description” (Geertz, 1973). When a social equity activist wants to advocate for policy change, they need to have a compelling argument, and as much as it hurts to admit it, facts don’t matter as much as rational activists would like them to when a person is trying to get something through the agenda setting process. What matters is a compelling story, and a compelling story comes from “thick description.” As a doctoral student who wanted to aggregate these compelling stories, the author’s first challenge as a new researcher then became one of “recording” compelling stories in a way that they could be retrieved as elements of a larger narrative for what one would hope could lead to lasting (or even permanent) change. In his book, Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz spoke of the need for this when he wrote of the importance of having a “consultable record of what man has said.” It is important to read those words in their original context.

To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action – art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense – is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of deemotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential location of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, regarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and that's to include them in the consultable record of what man has said” (Geertz, 1973, 30).

The question then becomes one of who would compile this record, where they would pull it from so that it was both usable and useful, and finally, who would become the custodians of this record.

Institutional Memory

In the same year that Geertz suggested that a “consultable record of what man has said” be compiled, Frederick Thayer was writing about his concept for how hierarchies, coopted as many are by governing elites, were causing governments to be run like de facto oligarchies. Thayer suggested that before any kind of improved democratic system could be created it would require access to a “substantial 'institutional memory.'” Think of the image on the right side of Figure 6, with the conjoined street-level bureaucrats and community organizations, as you read the following quote.

If neighborhood groups and other outsiders are to be brought inside, we must expand what we call the red tape of bureaucracy rather than seek to eliminate it. A theory of extended face-to-face discussion within an almost infinite number of small groups requires the wherewithal to deal with huge numbers of written documents. This substantial “institutional memory” will be needed if any of us, newly assigned to a policy process, are to bring ourselves up to date (Thayer, 1973, 171).

As noted earlier, the detailed models of the MOCSIE Systems that have been created specifically to deal with Thayer’s “almost infinite number of small [consensus-building] groups” have been published in other works (Leavitt, 2013, 43; Leavitt, 2012), and therefore will not be included in their entirety in this paper, but Figure 9 represents the idea of how records will be stored in the database so that retrieval algorithms can access them as narrative threads.

Figure 9 – The Institutional Memory and “Brain” of the Organization

Note that there are six media campaigns at the top half of the nucleus, and six policy campaigns at the bottom half of the nucleus, and the “brain,” as institutional memory, radiates from those gateways as the algorithms drill-down into the records. As a user drills-down into the media campaigns, they find themselves being identified with media communities that encourage artistic self-expression, and as the user drills down into policy campaigns they find themself similarly identified with narrative communities.

We can use this illustration as the basis for our discussion of a how an institution can be described metaphorically as a “brain.” It was Gareth Morgan who wrote, “If it is possible to distribute capacities for intelligence and control throughout an enterprise so that the system as a whole can self-organize and evolve along with emerging challenges,” then you can have an institution that is, metaphorically speaking, “a brain” (Morgan, 2006, 72). Figure 9 provides the barest glimpse into how the MOCSIE Systems hope to accomplish this. Appendix A has been provided as a far more detailed visual model to help the reader understand more about the organizational structure that is “under the hood” of the MOCSIE Systems.

Because space here in this paper will not allow for a more detailed explanation of how the narrative threads are assembled through the retrieval mechanism, the reader is encouraged to watch several videos that are accessible through the web domain (www.MOCSIE.com) that go into far more detail about this. The best video for an introduction to the mechanism is accessed through the “Narrative Theory” tab (second from the left at the top of the page).

Narrative Theory’s Interface with Social Psychology

With the understanding of what a performed narrative is, the reader should now be able to see clearly how prejudicial treatment of an “othered” population is simply a learned behavior that can therefore be “unlearned.” Stated more bluntly; bigotry is a choice.

Contact Hypothesis and Parasocial Contact Hypothesis

In the mid-1950s, Gordon Allport put forth four steps that were essential experiences (in his opinion) that a prejudiced person must be exposed to before they could effectively overcome their prejudice. His work was targeted directly at integrating schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision (Allport, 1954). It was only two years after Allport's groundbreaking work when Horton and Wohl proposed that “new media” (at the time, that meant television) could serve to provide parasocial intergroup contact, stating that it gave “the illusion of face-to-face relationships” (Horton & Wohl, 1956, 215-229). A generation later, Elliot Aronson expanded the four points of Allport's contact hypothesis to six points, shown in Figure 10 (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2007, 452-456).

Operationalizing these six activities will be at the core of how the MOCSIE Systems proposes to become a tool for use by social equity activists in creating emergent narrative communities that are most likely to succeed in a process of eliminating long-held (and often subconscious) prejudices. What each of the above contact hypothesis researchers advocate in their work is a proactive intervention to create points of contact, and so the question for the MOCSIE Systems, in adhering to a narrative approach on a global scale, was how to embed “points of contact” into the information communication technology.

Figure 10 – Contact Hypothesis.

As illustrated in the four “frames” shown in Figure 11, the MOCSIE Systems approach for accomplishing this is to use tactics that will create both face-to-face contact (Frame 1, through a brick-and-mortar institution) and parasocial contact (Frame 2, within a virtual institution).

In Frame 1, the brick-and-mortar Institution, we see a working model of what the author was striving for at the TACOLCY Center when he prepared the poster shown above as Figure 5a. Specifically, readers are encouraged to focus on Box 8, entitled Local Intergroup Contact Opportunities. To reiterate, at the brick-and-mortar institutions this contact would be face-to-face, but in a nation as vulcanized as the United States, very few neighborhoods have the kind of diversity where much face-to-face progress will be made to overcome racial prejudices. The author has placed greater hope in how progress might be made in this arena through a virtual institution, as shown in Frame 2.

Upon close examination of Frame 2 the reader will notice that Box 5 (labelled “Local Experts” in Frame 1) has been replaced in Frame 2 (the virtual institution) by three boxes (Boxes 5, 6, & 7).  These yet-to-be-refined mechanisms for policy analysis, media and communication, and social psychology are provided at this point merely to demonstrate the leadership role that experts will play in the “stacking” ability (Frames 3 and 4) that is afforded to a virtual institution. The stacking mechanism, seen from an organizational theory perspective, has been modelled with far more detail in several of the conference presentations that have been uploaded as videos to the MOCSIE web domain, but perhaps the best videos are a series of three, 15 minute videos (located under the “Occupied Squares” tab of the home page) that came as a result of a presentation at ICIS2012, the world’s largest conference on information systems. In a pre-conference event sponsored by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, the author had the opportunity to go into great detail about the potential of using augmented reality to produce parasocial contact opportunities by “stacking” the social equity activists that are associated with each of the brick-and-mortar institutions in such a way that they become associated with each other in a virtual (augmented reality) work environment.

Figure 11 – Creating “Glocal” (Global-Local) Contact Opportunities

Appendix A has been provided as a quick overview of the organizational theory, but that two page summary really is a gross over-simplification of what should be conducted in a 90 minute face-to-face presentation.

Non-hierarchical Governance from the Metaverse

One of the proposed definitions of the word metaverse, (as provided by the Acceleration Studies Foundation) is: “The convergence of 1) virtually enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.” Stated in a way that is more meaningful to the MOCSIE Systems, the metaverse will be a workplace where similarly situated social equity activists from anywhere on the planet can duplicate the kind of work environment that they might otherwise have if they lived down the street from each other. Taking it one step further, these social equity activists can open up that space to members of their respective communities and mediate parasocial contact opportunities that would, in every meaningful way, satisfy the six requirements of Aronson, Wilson, & Akert’s contact hypothesis (Figure 10).

Returning again to Figure 11, and with a full understanding of how race and religion have created vulcanized cities and neighborhoods the world over, this research recognizes the need to create contact opportunities between groups where “marginalization-by-complicity” (Bachrach and Baratz’ “power of nondecision”) has been a byproduct of inaction on the part of flawed representative democracy governments. Referring back to Thayer, because there are few rewards for elected officials who attempt to reach outside of the majority population who elected them (think of Utah’s 58% Mormon population as a homogeneous policy network), there exist few incentives to expend time and energy on policy for an undeserving or deviant minority population. It is this inaction that denies marginalized and vulnerable populations (especially in the inner-city) the long-overdue policy changes that might lead to transformational change. It is this “failure of democracy” that ensures that the sustaining institution that continues to marginalize vulnerable populations is the government itself. In the United States, this flaw is typically a trait of state legislatures. When the federal and local governments try to do the right thing, the state frequently steps in to block what state majorities see as a worldview threat to their “traditional ways.”

This research sees narrative theory, enhanced by an ability to leverage the parasocial contact hypothesis into the metaverse, as the single best way to change this unfortunate byproduct of the democratic systems that are currently in place throughout the world. The hope is that, by creating a self-funded and non-hierarchical pseudo-government in a “virtual world,” the most powerful policy making tool the world has ever known will exist “outside” of any existing government, which ultimately could actually delegitimize state governments entirely (ideally), or at the very least, diffuse much of their veto power to local government.

The Hypotheses

With the above theory covered off, the research question can now be broken down into four hypotheses as follows:

H1: A centralized institutional memory, functioning as an information communication technology, can create a sociotechnical system capable of unifying disparate community groups and street-level bureaucrats inter-organizationally to improve service delivery for high-needs clients and consumers (modelled by Figure 6).

H2: A centralized institutional memory, functioning as an information communication technology, can create a sociotechnical system capable of empowering heterogeneous policy networks to be both effective and efficient in operationalizing interest-group politics (modelled by Figure 9).

H3: Geographically isolated community groups, when provided with free and open access to the institutional memory of an internationally supported sociotechnical system (as described in H1 and H2), will be empowered in a way that will improve their ability to have a measurable impact on change narratives, in spite of the political opposition they might be faced with (modelled by Figures 8 and 11).

H4: By training leaders of isolated community groups to collaborate with skilled professionals who understand media theory, sociology, and social psychology, and by linking these isolated community groups in a virtual institution, these leaders will be able to apply contact hypothesis practices in their own communities to find and leverage shared-premise narratives and create emergent narrative communities, thereby reducing (and eventually eliminating) government supported marginalization (modelled by Figure 12, below).

Media Theory

Before concluding this paper there are two more vital transdisciplinary fields that must be summarized very quickly as central to this research project. Returning to the Juggler diagram (Figure 7), the first relates to Item #1: the Echo Chamber.

The need for new crowd-sourced media within the proposed institutional memory is what first inspired this entire research project as far back as 2007 before the author returned to university. From the outset it needs to be understood that all media and communication theories in this paper are based upon a postmodern epistemology and subscribe to the idea that media plays not only a critical role, but a central role as a tool for social constructionism. This research also subscribes to the idea that mainstream media stories are framed by a production team, rather than an individual. As a basic reference for this theoretical approach, the author has relied upon the work, Understanding the Media, by Eoin Devereux (2007, 119-148).

This paper also unapologetically embraces the scholarly work of Stuart Hall, the self-described neo-Marxist who famously coined the phrase, “Thatcherism” (Devereux, 2007, 128). Hall's seminal essay, “Encoding and decoding in the media discourse,” (Hall, 1973, 1-20) informs how the algorithms inside the MOCSIE Systems database engine are engineered. It is Hall's work that “reminds us that the mass media do not simply reflect 'reality,' they are actively involved in constructing it”. Devereux goes on to underscore how, “Such construction is never neutral, reflecting as it does the ideas of the dominant social class or group” (Devereux, 2007, 128; emphasis in original). This research takes the position that if these media tactics can be used by the hegemon to oppress and marginalize, then they should also be effective at countering that activity. By creating the MOCSIE Systems it is anticipated that many of the barriers to the unification of the counter-hegemonic voices can be eliminated through an informed (and clever) use of media theory.

Conclusion

As a universally accessible institutional memory, the MOCSIE Systems intend to provide social equity activists with the tools needed to retrieve records in the form of ready-to-use, compelling, narrative threads from within the institutional memory that they and their constituents are active in creating content for, each according to their specific needs in any given policy campaign effort. They need to be able to do this because, as illustrated by the bottom block arrow of Figure 12, the single most important responsibility of these “Jugglers-as-narrative-builders” is to germinate that all-important emergent narrative community that will provide a way forward for two dialectical narrative communities.

Figure 12 – The Emergent Narrative Community

From the perspective of a street-level bureaucrat or community worker, legitimate power will be claimed by learning how to utilize this new institutional memory and virtual institution effectively. With the tools provided by the MOCSIE Systems, and an inter-organizational commitment to work together as Follett prescribed, an ever-expanding network will be created that exists in both their brick-and-mortar facilities as well as the metaverse. The Jugglers that will emerge as the unifying figures in this non-hierarchical institution of small, linked, consensus-building groups, should soon be seen as opinion leaders capable of recruiting opinion leaders elsewhere to support new and emerging narratives that will dispel the “fear of change” that so often has derailed previous efforts of progressives to spread narratives that dispel the fear of diversity within the “moderate middle” communities as well as the more hard-core conservative communities.

The goal has always been to find (or create) modern Jugglers with as much influence as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had, who really encapsulated the objectives of this research well when he wrote, “If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear” (Sackett, 2002).

Ideally, the narrative communities that come together in these new emergent narrative communities will both be satisfied with this new, shared, performative narrative in which the world-view of the displaced ostensive narrative can be salvaged relatively intact and a previously marginalized population is, at the very least, “less-marginalized.” The effective use of engineered contact opportunities are expected to play a vital role in making this happen.

The real test as to whether this theoretical paper has accomplished what the author set out to do is to ask whether or not the reader can now see that PFLAG parent group in a suburban Utah community tapping into a virtual institution in order to feel a sense of belonging alongside PFLAG groups in Arkansas, Indiana, and elsewhere. Furthermore, one can imagine them adding their voice to calls for expanded social change by becoming allied with women’s rights organizations, environmentalists, animal rights groups, and senior citizen advocates.

Imagine that PFLAG group being empowered by having ready access to peer-reviewed journal articles that have been written by academics and practitioners that are affiliated with professional organizations.

Imagine the mental health advantages as the children of these PFLAG parents are provided with a virtual community where the voices of these children can be heard as they share their own stories, simultaneously reading the stories of (and making friends in the metaverse with) others who are “just like them.”

If America's deep-red states continue their march to embrace even more extreme, socially conservative policymaking, the only alternative for gay families (and progressive women and racial minorities, for that matter), will be to move to a more progressive state, which will only result in those deep-red states becoming even “more red.” At the end of that path there will be two Americas, and we have traveled that road before.

To gauge the success of this research, one of the best tests that the author has envisioned is to create a mechanism that will check for these “emergent narrative communities.” One idea for doing this is to embed a mechanism into the query function for asking users (site visitors) to rate their experience after visiting the domain. Imagine for a moment that the system has a mechanism that identifies individuals upon entering (based on what they read and/or the comments they left) as a person who is following an interpretive monopoly narrative. The research calls for the development of a system that would ask that person upon leaving the site to share their opinion on a progressive policy change proposal that, historically, had challenged their interpretive monopoly. Victory would not be measured by whether or not the site visitor had “changed their mind,” but instead, in the words of Hugh Miller, success would be a response similar to this, where a person would answer, “Most likely, I will do what I have done before, though maybe not this time” (Miller, 2012; emphasis added).

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