We use First Order Advocacy (FOA) to destabilize and disrupt a weak process of the SOF related to disability education legal requirements with which the SOF must comply in order to legitimately use funding (and many other resources like staff, equipment, marketing, etc.). The SOF needs to effectively support these strong processes to reproduce itself successfully. Successful reproduction of the strong processes is necessary to assure the benefits of being part of the SOF, whatever they might be.
The legal requirements of special education are not the only type of weak processes the SOF must accommodate. The resources that the SOF might use to counter a legal disruption are not the same kind of resources the SOF would need to counter a disruption not based in special education law or Section 504.
Remember that the SOF countering a disruption doesn’t somehow restore the resources lost in doing so. There is no simple way to put the resources back into their “best” use in support of strong processes of reproduction. If the conflict (or conflicts) continues for a long time, there will be a more or less permanent redistribution of the available resources that were used.
For example, in the early years of special education advocacy, SOF tried first to negotiate with advocates using bureaucratic methods such as obfuscation, then hired attorneys for specific disruptions, then had a permanent legal presence through retainers, and now mostly hire counsel that have specific special education law expertise, as well as maintaining the retained resources. Each of these steps makes the resources involved unavailable for other purposes. They become the price of doing business and allowing some level of accommodation with the unavoidable presence and actions of advocates.
Once committed to the accommodation of a particular stakeholder, the resources are no longer “fungible”. The SOF will have much greater difficulty shifting significant parts of the resources to any other purpose, even if there is a real need by the strong processes of the SOF to do so.
Second Order Advocacy (SOA) takes these realities into account. Effective advocacy becomes premised on the idea that all stakeholder relationships that are part of a weak process accommodation with the SOF are potential sites of disruption.
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