Understanding Your Social Agency, 3rd Edition

Provides readers with an array of lenses for looking at a social agency from the outside in, and from the inside out

This highly accessible text takes into account the organizational dynamics that readers are likely to have experienced and provides them with the conceptual tools for reassessing their understanding and considering how to act on their new insights. Renowned scholar Armand Lauffer shows readers how to apply organizational theories to challenges they confront at work, and to uncover other challenges they may not yet be aware of.

Armand Lauffer’s books are widely read. Since Community Organizers and Social Planners appeared in 1972, he has authored 20 books and edited two anthologies on organizations, community practice, training, fundraising, continuing education and staff development, and management in nonprofit organizations. Understanding Your Social Agency has been continuously in print since 1977. The current edition is much expanded. It draws on both classic and contemporary practice and theory, to provide users with hands-on tools for understanding their social agencies and improving their performance.

A series editor for SAGE since 1977, his books have been published by a number of firms, among them: SAGE, John Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and the Free Press.

A co-founder of ACOSA (the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration), Lauffer pioneered the establishment of a number of professional associations and academic units, both at the University of Michigan, from which he retired in 2001, and abroad. His consultative work on nonprofit management, community organizing, and fundraising has taken him across North America, Israel, Europe, and the Former Soviet Union. He currently makes his home in Jerusalem.