Activism, Inc.

Activism, Inc.

Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America is a book by Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher, based on an ethnographic study of Fund for Public Interest Research canvass offices during the summer of 2003. Fisher argues the corporate fund-raising model mistreats idealistic young people by using them as interchangeable parts and providing them with insufficient training; Fisher also believes that the outsourcing of grassroots organizing by political groups led to the decay of grassroots infrastructure and opportunities for involvement on the left.

Fisher was inspired by her own experience as a canvasser and a 2001 lecture by scholar Harry Boyte.