Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter (eds): The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare?

Abstract

‘Big Society’ is the latest slogan used by a British government to encourage citizens to volunteer in their localities and communities. It follows and is closely related to New Labour’s idea of the ‘Third Way’, which dominated the political landscape for 10 years. Like the Third Way, ‘Big Society’ is a concept with a long history but, unlike the Third Way, it has yet to gain a significant foothold in international discourse on social welfare and active citizenship. This edited book by Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter of the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge interrogates the genesis of and influences on ‘Big Society’ and seeks to establish if there is any substance to the idea beyond the purposes of sloganeering. The book contains a substantial introduction and conclusion and 14 wide-ranging chapters which are divided into sections on history and policy. The introduction establishes the historical embeddedness of ‘Big Society’ and the calculated nature of its conception. The ‘‘deliberate vagueness’’ (p. 2) of the idea allows David Cameron and other actors to apply it to a range of very different circumstances and occurrences. Acknowledging the ambiguity surrounding the concept, the editors refrain from defining ‘Big Society’ and instead pose a set of five key questions concerning the nature, purpose and outcomes of the idea. They point out that the focus of Big Society is the encouragement of empowered ‘‘citizen-volunteers’’ (p. 4) to organise to do good and meet the needs of their local areas, but that the simplicity of the idea belies the complexity of achieving this aim. Szreter and Ishkanian challenge some of the assumptions and biases that underpin Big Society, including the ‘sister’ slogan of ‘Broken Britain’, the idea that ‘big government’ has rendered citizens unable to act on their own volition, and the championing of some forms of