A trenchant history of community organizing and a must-read&160;for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from&160;the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past.The community organizing tradition is long overdue for reexamination. In&160;Occupation: Organizer, scholar and activist Cl&233;eacute;ment Petitjean traces that history&160;from its roots in the Progressive movement to its expansion and diverging paths&160;during the social movements of the 1960s and '70s, when Saul Alinsky became the&160;most popular "professional radical" in the US while groups like Student Nonviolent&160;Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers&160;recast organizers as horizontal, antihierarchical spadeworkers-those who do the&160;work as part of the community, rather than standing apart from it.But in the years since, the professionalization of organizing work has only&160;increased, despite the critiques. Only by grappling with its limitations and pitfalls,&160;Petitjean insists, can we learn to build durable, effective organizations for change.