title: Health politics meets post-modernism: its meaning and implications for community health organizing.
abstract: In this article, post-modern theory is described and applied to health politics with examples from community health organizing, social movements, and health promotion. Post-modernism questions conventional assumptions about concepts such as representation, participation, empowerment, community, identity, causality, accountability, responsibility, authority, and roles in community health promotion (those of expert, leader, and organizer). I compare post-modern social movements with their modern counterparts: the organizational forms, leadership styles, and substantive intellectual orientations of the two differ. I explain the social planning, community development, and social action models of community health organizing, comparing them with the priorities of post-modern social movements, and show the similarities and differences between them as to structural preferences, process, and strategies. Finally, and most importantly, I present the implicit lessons that post-modernism offers to health politics and outline the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to health politics.
authors.affiliation: Health Science Center, University of Texas-Houston.
authors.forename: P V
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Rosenau
mesh_terms: D003153:Community Health Services / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003256:Community Participation; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D006291:Health Policy / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D010344:Patient Advocacy; D010684:Philosophy; D012931:Social Environment; D012939:Social Planning; D012941:Social Responsibility; D014481:United States