Abstract
This paper argues that the increasing international salience of homelessness can be partially explained by reference to the revanchist thesis (involving processes of coerced exclusion and abjection), but the situation on the ground is more complex. It reports on interviews with 18 representatives of 11 homelessness service providers in one city in England. As Cloke et al. found, these providers tended to be either larger, more ‘professional’, ‘insider’ services or smaller, more ‘amateur’, ‘outsider’ services. However, this does not mean that the former were necessarily more revanchist and the latter less so. Rather, the actions of both types of organisation could, in some cases, be construed as both advancing and counteracting a revanchist project.
Highlights
Homelessness emerged as a major global issue in the 1980s (Davis 1990, Takahashi 1996, Mitchell 1997, Wacquant 1999), coinciding with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, associated in the United States with cuts in federal welfare, and in the United Kingdom, with mass unemployment for young people (Furlong & Cartmel 2007)
This paper has shown that homelessness organisations in Stoke formed a community of practice, within which a consortium of larger organisations acted as the main instrument for co-ordinating inter-agency working
Working alongside them were smaller organisations who provided a more specialist, flexible and personalised alternative, geared to supporting people with multiple and complex needs, who were more difficult and expensive to help and where support was more likely to fail. It seemed that some inter-organisational relationships worked well and the resulting forms of collaboration were held up by respondents as exemplars of good practice
Summary
Homelessness emerged as a major global issue in the 1980s (Davis 1990, Takahashi 1996, Mitchell 1997, Wacquant 1999), coinciding with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, associated in the United States with cuts in federal welfare, and in the United Kingdom, with mass unemployment for young people (Furlong & Cartmel 2007). How much services need to interact with and understand one another rather than just act in concert (i.e. co-ordinated) It might be sufficient and more practicable to rely on keyworkers spanning the boundaries of the agencies and ensuring that the right kind of help (from whatever agency) is provided at the right time for their clients, with strategic groups (such as in Stoke – see below) ensuring that continuity is maintained despite changes of staff, government policy and individual agencies – in short, a keyworker model of advocacy at an operational level, in combination with a politically driven multi-agency grouping at a strategic level
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