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Review of Literature

Literature review start from “Civic agency and the cult of expert” Harry C. Boyte- The Kettering Foundation

Civic agency according to Harry C. Boyte of the Kettering Foundation is defined as “self-organizing, collective citizen efforts to solve problems and create public things in open setting without tight prior scripts”. In his article titled Civic Agency and the cult of expert, Boyte states that a “civic agency approach is built through what we call public work, based on a sense of the citizen as a co-creator of a democratic way of life and a view that emphasizes politics’ productive as well as participatory and distributive aspects”. This way of thinking is different from both conventional ideological politics and basic community service and volunteerism. Civic agency, as Boyte states is “an alternative (form) with rich emergent practices and concepts, it intimates the fulfillment of the vision of humanizing an impersonal world”.

Boyte in his article describes our current thinking of political involvement as a result of the “cult of the experts”. Stating that these experts are “detached and technocratic champions of the singular authority of scientific and disciplinary knowledge”. This way of involvement has empowered the “best and brightest” to bring forth solutions to help the ignorant, passive, needy, and pitiable. Boyte states that a consequence of this way of thinking has resulted in organizations that have lost their community roots, “institutions have come to be conceived as abstract, bureaucratic, and largely impervious to culture change, defined by rules, regulations, structures, and procedures.”. In this article the author makes a strong case for civic agency, stating that “the capacities of people and communities to solve problems and to generate cultures… community is the living contect for evaluating expert knowledge”. Boyte points to the highly successful Obama Presidential Campaign as a key example for the success and need for civic agency. Transforming typical campaign volunteers into empowered organizers, with the hope that individuals would be empowered to create their own public narrative, that individuals would be meaning-making co-creator of their own world, taking ownership in their work. Boyte points out that “the introduction of civic agency themes into the presidential election suggested possibility for the large-scale appearance of civic agency in contemporary society”.

Civic agency differs from distributive justice and communitarian frameworks of civic engagement several ways. Civic agency defines democracy as a “way of life built through public work” and views the citizen as the co-creator or “civic agent” directly involved in the democratic process. While the distributive justice engagement model states that ignorance of citizens as a key problem in a democracy, civic agency views the key problem as citizens being powerlessness. Civic agency model of civic engagement goes beyond voting and advocacy as key methods of engagement, and stresses the importance of organizing, popular education, and creating cultures of public work. Power in the civic agency model is the “power to” not the “power over”.