Editorial

for Concept Volume 16, Number 2

by Mae Shaw, Executive Editor

We live, it seems, in a precarious world, amid war and the threat of war – both internal and external. Fear, risk and the necessity of choice have become the mantras which dominate political priorities and policy discourses. We have become all too accustomed to the exigencies of ‘risk assessment’, ‘best value’ and all the other jargon associated with the market and the managerial state. I use the term jargon here deliberately because it is, in my experience, too often equated quite wrongly with theoretical language – usually as a means of deriding and dismissing theory – with profound consequences for our ability to think about what we do and why we do it. The function of jargon is to confuse, obfuscate and elide. The proper use of theory is the opposite: to analyse, explain and illuminate. The articles in this issue are firmly for theory and determinedly against jargon.

Ian Martin’s article on diversity, difference and justice characteristically cuts through what he calls the ‘equivocations of equivocal times’. Drawing on the work of the feminist social policy scholar Fiona Williams in particular, he charts what he fears is the premature abandonment of traditional political economy to the current fixation with diversity and difference. Alongside the need for new ways of making sense of the reality of change, he stresses the importance of fixing those ‘key continuities we need in order to engage more purposefully with change.’ In a closely argued and engaging text, he exposes the theoretical problem of a blind adherence to ‘diversity’ as ‘a diversion from the crucial theoretical task of explanation, analysis and generalisation’. He argues that the relationship between the universal and the particular is at the heart of concerns about recognition of difference; that unarguably differential experience cannot be understood outside of those universal normative categories which are constructed in and through the social relations of power.

The relationship between micro and macro dimensions of human experience is also of interest to Akwugo Emejulu in her provocative and very refreshing article on community development. Following Ian Martin, her concern is that key continuities – in particular the ‘much loved but rarely used values and principles’ – are becoming atrophied at best or at worst appropriated for the wrong purposes. She places the blame for this at least partly at the door of community development itself. Professional preoccupation with definition alongside ‘an outdated theory and practice base’ are held jointly responsible for community development’s credibility problem. The prevalence of a ‘practice/theory’ divide which fails to prepare workers for the realities of practice breeds a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which leads to demoralisation and a lack of agency. Arguing compellingly for the necessity of theory to illuminate practice, she compares it to meaningful community participation: ‘theory takes time and effort’. If a good society is to be envisaged then community development has a central role to play in creating a new theoretical framework that combines, in Martin’s terms, both ‘a modernist rigour’ and ‘a postmodern sensibility’.

Chik Collins offers a forensic and disturbing account of the changing policy context of regeneration. Mapping the machinations of the Scottish Executive over the past four years, particularly its increasingly compromising relationship with the private sector, it exposes the way in which the neo-liberal agenda has become deeply embedded in policy. What is perhaps most disturbing for us is the way in which ‘community engagement’ has been deployed ‘not simply to co-opt and manage local communities to allow the implementation of the neo-liberal agenda, but to recruit their active participation in the task of bringing it about’. In other words, the partnership regime which is at the heart of regeneration is a very unbalanced one in which companies ‘go local’ in order to achieve the legitimacy necessary to ‘dispossess local communities of the resources won by previous generations of struggle – through privatisation’. He warns of the dangers of giving legitimacy to those ‘community voices’ which are strictly mediated through top-down organisations set up by government bodies to facilitate this process. Instead, he argues that there is ‘a vital need to connect to, and work with, local communities – so that the frustration and resentment they rightly feel … is directed at those institutions and ideologies which really have driven their underlying neo-liberal agenda…’. As Collins reminds us, however, participation which is legitimated through ‘community’ can be both a problem and a possibility for partnerships.

The act of theorising community is in itself an important form of agency and Walter Humes’ erudite article provides an excellent resource. The ambivalence of community is the central focus of this first part of a two-part paper (the second part will appear in the next issue). Despite (or, maybe, because of) the current interest in community ‘as a driver of social policy … the political rhetoric … requires a deeper level of analysis’. Drawing on the recent work of Delanty, he offers a framework for making sense of current debates. He also points to the problem of language and the need to deconstruct it in political terms. This means that questions such as ‘Why has this term assumed such importance? Why now? Where has it come from? … Whose interests does it serve? … How does it shape our professional thinking?’ need to be asked as a routine corrective to mind-numbing performativity

Community, like partnership or diversity for that matter, can be a theoretical idea to be explored, or it can simply be coded jargon to be accepted without question. The former can lead to an open and critical exploration of its potential strengths and weaknesses whereas the latter is more likely to confuse, obfuscate and elide issues of power.