CONFRONTING RACIALLY BIASED POLICING IN FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES: HOW ORGANIZATIONAL FIELDS SHAPE ANTI-RACIST STRATEGIES AND TACTICS.

Racially biased policing has been a central concern to a wide variety of social change organizations in both France and the United States. While French and American organizations have deployed a strikingly similar repertoire of strategies and tactics to combat this social problem, the kinds of organizations that implement specific tactics differs significantly in the two countries This paper argues that analyzing the vast and varied work of social change organizations in terms of organizational fields is uniquely helpful for understanding how organizations are constrained and enabled by their field positions. Organizations vary in their field position according to resources in the form of material and social capital. The comparative model illuminates the significant impact of inter-field and intra-field relations. This study draws on two and a half years of field work in Paris, France and the San Francisco Bay Area, include ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with 76 individuals representing 52 different social change organizations, and the analysis of hundreds of pages of textual and digital data. In France, where the nonprofit sector is comparatively weak--more dependent upon the state, and less able to engage legal institutions--organizations are required to pool resources. As such, organizations engage in an exchange of resources, particularly economic and social capital, across the organizational field. Additionally, organizations of different forms and in different field clusters engage in overlapping strategies and tactics, signaling looser boundaries between organizational forms. In the United States, where there is a relatively strong nonprofit sector, collaboration and resource exchanges are less imperative. Instead, the more rigid boundaries translate to a division of organizational labor in terms of organizational activities. In addition, the organizations that are best poised to lead the fight against racially biased policing are those that possess significant amounts of both economic and social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]