BOOK REVIEWS

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David J. O'Brien. Neighborhood Organization and Interest Group Processes. Princeton University Press, 1975. Pp. xii, 263. $13.50. This rather short volume might be thought of as a companion volume to Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. O'Brien's book is a derivative of his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University where his contact with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom has surely influenced his approach to the study of neighborhood organization. O'Brien's book, like Olson's, focuses on the individual as the basic indispensible unit needed to understand collective phenomena. The study perceives neighborhood groups to be made up of self-interested individuals who attempt to be rational in their decision processes. With this in mind, the neighborhood organizer (to whom, I feel, the book is directed) sees as his fundamental task the job of finding and using the correct incentive system. The exemplary neighborhood organizations examined by O'Brien flesh out many of the ideas which readers will associate with Olson's work. This framework for understanding collective groups pioneered by Olson is used effectively to explain why so many neighborhood organization efforts have failed. The social-psychological and cultural characteristics of the poor (images which many associate with the writings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan) are downplayed as reasons for the impotence of neighborhood organization efforts. The "culture of poverty" thesis popularized by Michael Harrington, which portrays a powerless poor bounded by a subculture quite apart from the affluent in society, is also given short shift as a probable reason for the lack of political involvement by the poor. O'Brien consistently emphasizes the environment and situational constraints as reasons why the poor rationally decide to spend most of their resources on nonpolitical activities. Inability to afford the luxury of political activity is construed as being in the rational self-interest of the poor because political activity only promises to yield results in the future while alternate activity could benefit the individual immediately in the short run. Central to each of O'Brien's three empirical areas of investigation is his interpretation of the "public goods dilemma:" there is no rational economic reason for an individual to make a voluntary contribution towards provision of a public good. Since most neighborhood organizations, by their nature, are public goods providers, O'Brien finds that failure to cope with the dilemma explains most failures. By failure to cope with the dilemma he means a failure to employ one or both of the strategies outlined by Mancur Olson: 1) coerce individuals to pay the costs of the public good, or 2) provide, in addition to the public good, a noncollective good. The three empirical situations which are explored are community development, which many will associate with overseas projects of a Peace Corps nature, social action-protest strategies like the civil rights movement, and community action programs initiated during the War on Poverty by the Economic Opportunity Act. The author offers a short explanation of each of these project types and then uses examples to make his general case. A number of interesting examples crop up like the explanation of the Black Panther free

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breakfast program. It seems the Panthers used a breakfast giveaway as an individual benefit to gain support for the costs of broader neighborhood goals. O'Brien points out that since the Panthers failed to exclude nonsupporters from the free breakfast program there was little rational incentive to join their organization. This oversight was a failure to recognize the public goods dilemma and eventually helped bring about the failure of the program. Not surprising to Public .Choice researchers would be O'Brien's finding that the thrust for developing programs for neighborhood organization under the Economic Opportunity Act . . . "did not spring so much from response to political pressure by the disadvantaged as it did from 'reformer-technicians' in government." This appears to be a clearcut example of what Gordon Tullock calls the economists' motto, de gustibus non est disputandum or, if what the voters want is employment for themselves, as bureaucrats, then why not? Perhaps the most informative chapter of the book is the last chapter; in fact, it might best have been the first chapter. It lists the author's principles of interest group organization and examines the problems of recent approaches to organizing by reference to these principles. This chapter reads like a handbook for organizers and, indeed, even contains a section titled "Strategies for Building Neighborhood Organizations." It might best have been the first chapter in the book because it gives in compact outline form all the ideas presented elsewhere in the volume and there is little reason to keep the readers in the dark about the final outcome of an analysis. While the book does not contain the elegantly rigorous formal model many have come to expect of academic writing, it is relevant in the sense that it examines real institutional arrangements in a useful methodical fashion. Olson's dictum that rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests unless there is coercion or some special device is verified. Barry Keating Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University