Reviews of large-scale community coalition evaluations suggest that most have not been successful either in involving a broad array of institutions or in meeting their outcome goals. Informed by the literature and by insights from fieldwork, a socialstructural theoretical explanation is offered for this lack of success. To summarize: coalition structures and the concept of community are loosely defined; local structures attempt to cope with problems that have regional, state, national, and international roots; ethnic, class, and racial divisions lead to cooptation; the narrative of past failed interventions creates current problems; organizations with different sizes and institutional affiliations have problems in working together; and the presence of many organizations leads to confused decision-making processes. In addition, drug and alcohol prevention program funding is dwarfed by the funds of the alcohol and illegal drug industries. Recognizing these issues in advance and focusing interventions can help to alleviate the effects of these structural problems.There has been an outpouring of literature recently on community coalitions that advocates their use and reviews their achievements (Wandersman and Florin, 2003). Community coalitions are widely touted as the solution to a variety of social ills-most prominently, health problems such as adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, and tobacco use (FosterFishman et al., 2001). Literature advocating community coalitions has not, however, been matched by research evidence documenting the success of coalitions. In fact, in the broadest and most systematic review of community coalitions, Berkowitz (2001) concludes that the evidence is, at best, weak and "inconclusive." As policymakers increasingly look to

Even when the timing, sequence, and manner of notification are instrumentally inconsequential, how one conveys information affects the meaning of the telling. This article introduces the concepts of "notification norms" and the "information order," showing how the former constrain the behavior of nodes in social networks as well as enabling manipulation of the relationships that comprise those networks. "Notification" is defined as information transmission motivated by role obligations and notification norms as social rules that govern such transmission. These rules produce patterns of information dissemination different from what individual volition would yield and from what technology makes possible. The capacity to wield a socially sanctioned repertoire of notification rules is a learned competence. Competent notifiers must also understand the local epistemological ecology-the distribution and trajectory of information, as well as the projects, concerns, and priorities of one's fellows. This study of notification introduces the broader concept of "the information order" and is a first step in the project of a sociology of information.

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The rhetoric of “community” is common in talk of social programs. With it comes imagery of common interests, overcoming turf battles, working together, and getting along. When programs fail to achieve goals or turn into outright fiascos, personal, organizational, and community pathology, or simply “politics” are common explanations. Problems are assumed to be endemic and intractable or remediable only by gifted leadership or transcendence of business as usual. This article argues that such thinking is rooted in a false assumption. “Community” needs to be reconceptualized as a community of organizations, not people, and organizations as constrained actors not analogous to individuals. Organizations interact in peculiar, but analyzable ways, giving rise to unanticipated outcomes that could be labeled pathology or mere politics. Community alcohol and other drug AOD programs might be more successful if their logic models were based on realistic concepts of community that can distinguish the actually political from the organizationally normal.

Based on a qualitative case study of a multiyear, multicity attempt to forge community coalitions against substance abuse, this article analyzes three categories of organizational temporalities: cycles, event streams, and temporal style. Community initiatives based on collaboration, coalitions, and cooperation, projects that "bring everyone to the table," provide an opportunity for naturalistic observation of the unanticipated, but analyzable, effects that emerge when mismatched organizational temporalities interact. This article lays out a theory of these emergent effects of interorganizational time conflicts in communities of organizations. The aim is not to argue for the primacy of temporal effects over other dimensions but to include them in a multidimensional view of the causes of problems encountered in multi-organization community initiatives. Keywords: community; time; organizations; community initiatives "Time" is a common scapegoat when broad-based community social interventions face implementation challenges or produce disappointing outcomes: "too little, too late"; "there are only so many hours in the day"; or "the timing was wrong." These clichés suggest, respectively, that the right program arrived at the wrong moment and did not last long enough, that the right people were doing the right things but not enough to make a difference, or that the effort might have succeeded had it occurred under conditions prevailing at some other point in time. Mindful of such observations, both funders and program designers have become "temporally generous," supporting longer projects, providing resources to ensure that new programs represent net increases in effort, and requiring more planning, timelines, and milestones and documentation of community readiness.Nevertheless, even programs with generous temporal endowments seem to be plagued by time-related problems. Participants complain that organizers waste their time in meetings, project leaders cannot keep on schedule, deadlines are missed. Familiar phenomena such as Parkinson's law-the tendency of work to expand to fill the time available (Parkinson 1957