| Abstract: | State bureaucracies create community advocacy organizations in an attempt to increase constituency support and promote local citizen efforts to organize and advocate for service needs. Relationships between a state bureaucracy and community advocacy organization can be expected to follow a variety of patterns. Using a sample of four case studies in which state human service bureaucracies promoted community advocacy organizations in Georgia, this exploratory, qualitative study demonstrates that loosely bounded bureaucracies are consistent with the promotion of autonomous community advocacy organizations and tightly bounded bureaucracies are consistent with the generation of dependent and closely coordinated community advocacy organizations. The converse situations of tightly bounded bureaucracies attempting to generate autonomous community advocacy organizations or loose bureaus trying to organize dependent community advocacy organizations will produce confusion and conflict. |
