Public Community Organising: A Defence Against Managerialism

Jérôme Grand

doi:10.1080/17496535.2020.1831571

Abstract

ABSTRACT Community organising is subject to several interpretations, and community practises have spread worldwide over the last three decades. This paper understands community organising as a distinct methodology adopted by very different actors under very different objectives and uses it as a critical concept to analyse the role of the voluntary sector in social services. Through an account of the social service of Geneva, Switzerland focusing on community organising between 2002 and 2017, I offer a defence against the managerialist justification relied upon by the city’s municipal council when it shut down the unit. The argument is premised on an appeal to a liberally conceived right to equality of opportunity for freedom of association. It supports an orthodox view of community organising as a bottom-up way of working for certain social services of public administrations, which justifies an exceptional and circumstantiated deviation from public management core principles.

Highlights

Community organising is subject to several interpretations, and community practices have spread worldwide over the last three decades (Mizrahi 2016; Tattersall 2015)
This paper understands community organising as a distinct methodology adopted by very different actors under very different objectives and uses it as a critical concept to analyse the role of the voluntary sector in social services
Through an account of the social service of Geneva, Switzerland focusing on community organising between 2002 and 2017, I offer a defence against the managerialist justification relied upon by the city’s municipal council when it shut down the unit

Summary

Introduction

Community organising is subject to several interpretations, and community practices have spread worldwide over the last three decades (Mizrahi 2016; Tattersall 2015). Adopting the idea of community organising for power, it could be argued, for instance, that the main purpose of the social service of Geneva should be to fight political inequalities and to organise and defend marginalised groups, and that such imperatives outweigh public management requirements It should be noted, first, that this rationale does not fit with the actual work of UAC with associations. If the general mission of social service is focussed on the most vulnerable and the financial situation of those of modest conditions, the community sector supports any type of group that pursues a non-profit purpose; the UAC is not based on specific issues or target audiences (Horber-papazioni et al 2015) Their mission is strictly limited, in theory and practise, to the non-political domain (Sa Barretto, Grand, and Pedrazzini 2015). Public community organising could be valued in the liberal political perspective – not because it ‘empowers’ citizens, helping them widen their sense of interest, influence public deliberation, to make them better represented, but because it ensures an equal access to freedom of association and protects a fundamental individual interest in the capacity for the good

Conclusion

Findings

Notes on contributor