Consensus analysis, a technique developed in cognitive anthropology for analyzing structured interview data, produces three useful results: (1) a measure of the degree of agreement among informants about a domain of knowledge, belief, or practice; (2) the "culturally correct" information about that domain according to the pooled answers of the informants; and (3) a score for each informant representing that person's knowledge of the domain. Consensus analysis is not just for high-agreement domains, however. This article explores a typology for conceptualizing diversity in low-consensus domains, including (1) weak agreement, (2) turbulent, (3) subcultural, and (4) contested domains, using case study examples from an English social movement, a Scottish high-technology firm, and a Scottish business support and training organization. The typology helps measure and interpret diversity and change within organizations and social movements.Consensus analysis (CA) was originally developed as a technique for discovering which respondents are most knowledgeable and reliable in a particular cultural context. It is based on the assumption that individuals vary in their mastery of particular domains of knowledge Romney, Batchelder, and Weller 1987;Boster, Johnson, and Weller 1987;Weller and Romney 1988). 1 Not everyone knows the same Our thanks to two anonymous reviewers who gave us much useful guidance; we alone are responsible for any remaining errors. We are grateful for the hospitality of the Anthropology Department, University of Durham (England), which hosted us at different times. Hyatt also thanks members of the Department of Social and Economic Studies at the University of Bradford (England) for their support for this and later research projects. Caulkins acknowledges his intellectual debt to the late Michael Scott and thanks the University of Stirling (Scotland) and the

As a political and economic philosophy, neoliberalism has been used to reshape schools and universities, making them far more responsive to the pressures of the market. The principles associated with neoliberalism have also extended to programmes for urban economic development, particularly with respect to the largescale gentrification of neighbourhoods rendering them amenable to investments aimed at creating spaces attractive to white, middle-and-upper class consumers. In this article, I discuss how universities themselves have come to play a significant role as urban developers and investors, promoting commercial retail development and building upscale housing in neighbourhoods adjacent to their campuses. My entry point into this discussion is through describing an ethnographic methods class I taught in 2003, whereby students carried out collaborative research in the African-American neighbourhood surrounding Temple University's main campus in Philadelphia. As a result of their work, we produced a neighbourhood newspaper that sought to disrupt the commonplace assumptions about 'rescuing' the neighbourhood from what was presented as an inexorable spiral of decline; rather, our work showed that actions taken by the university, itself, had helped to produce the very symptoms of decline that the new development project now purported to remedy.

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In this commentary, I argue that Obama's victory in the recent Democratic primary was largely a consequence of his early experiences as an Alinsky‐style community organizer in Chicago. I compare the nature of the broad‐based organizing that Obama was trained in to a newer model of “community building” called Asset‐Based Community Development (ABCD). ABCD promotes the belief that communities suffering the effects of economic restructuring, such as abandoned housing, crime, and deindustrialization among others, can “heal themselves” by looking within for resources—or “assets”—rather than by making demands on the state, a stance its proponents stigmatize as evidence of a “client” mentality. I argue that however chimerical its promises of redemption are, ABCD illustrates an important shift in contemporary understandings of citizenship, away from the possibilities for collective action that characterize Alinsky‐style organizing and toward a view that is both radically neoliberal and potentially totalitarian in its homogenizing notions of its two key concepts—”community” and “assets.” I suggest that the grassroots nature of the Obama campaign may have the potential to reanimate an interest in broad‐based organizing toward the end of creating a more just distribution of resources.