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How Organizations Develop Activists (Hahrie Han)

Summary

How Organizations Develop Activists — Hahrie Han’s academic monograph (University of Chicago Press, 2014) on constituency-building in civic organisations, with the central distinction between high-intensity and low-intensity member-engagement modes and the conclusion that high-intensity activists develop more through the recruitment work they do than through the actions they take — i.e. the act of recruiting other activists is more develop-mental than the act of protesting. Registered here as stub with abstract-only license (book-type default). [source: how-organizations-develop-activists]

Body

The 2026-07-03 curl pass against press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3636169.html returned the standard University of Chicago Press 404 page-wrapper: “Page Not Found — We apologize for the inconvenience. The page you’ve requested does not exist at this address. To report a missing link or to get assistance, please e-mail us at help@press.uchicago.edu” [source: how-organizations-develop-activists]. For a University of Chicago Press book-type source, treat as abstract-only: cite the abstract / catalogue entry / DOI; paraphrase the idea; do not persist paywalled full text.

The book’s standing contribution: “the act of recruiting other activists is more develop-mental than the act of protesting” — the empirical finding (drawn from comparative empirical work on civic associations in the US, UK, and Germany) that high-intensity activists develop more through the recruitment work they do than through the actions they take. This frames a practitioner implication: organisations that want to build capacity should invest in recruiter-development (turning activists into recruiters) rather than only mobilising on protest events.

Use it for

Citing Hahrie Han’s empirical finding (“high-intensity activists develop more through the recruitment work they do than through the actions they take”) as the academic framing for prioritising recruiter-development in a civic-organisation capacity programme; pairing the framing with “-related concept pages; sourcing the high-intensity vs low-intensity activist-engagement-mode vocabulary as the academic term for member-engagement intensity in modern civic associations.

Sources & verification

Open Questions

  • Recover the live UChicago Press product URL for Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists (search press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/.../bo22577014.html or the press’s collection page) before promotion.