Community work, citizenship and democracy: re-making the connections

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to do four things: first, to review key phases in the post-war development of community work and to identify the discourses of citizenship implicit within them (i.e. social democracy: the problem of the inactive citizen; the structuralist critique: the problem of citizen action; marketization: the problem of the citizen as customer; democratic renewal: the challenge of active citizenship); second, to argue that the contemporary context requires new ways of thinking about the relationship between community work, citizenship and democ- racy; third, to assess the significance of the recent history of community work for this task; finally, to consider the extent to which the current interest in democratic renewal presents opportunities for reconstructing this relationship. At a time when community work seems to be so directly tied to the apron strings of the state - indeed, increasingly incorporated within state policy - it is all the more important to stand back and take stock. The main elements of the argument are brought together in a summary table at the end of the text. Introduction: time to take stock In Britain, New Labour has been concerned to promote 'democratic renewal' as one of its big ideas through a variety of new policy initiatives aimed at devolution of decision-making and community involvement. This could be viewed by some as a deepening of democracy - or 'democratiz- ing democracy' in Anthony Giddens' terms; by others, with more scepti- cism, as a move from formally constituted Local Authority to informally concocted local authority (Patrick, 1999). The question therefore arises as to whether popular participatory initiatives such as these offer real possibilities for a renewal of democracy or whether more governance could, in fact, mean less democracy. In order to address this question, we make a distinction between community development as an instrument of state policy and community work as the active intervention of professional workers in communities (engaging with both the policy context and popular issues and concerns). In this sense, and stated somewhat crudely, for the purposes of our argument, community development may be said to