Where is the Community Which Cares?

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper attempts to answer three questions. Of what does a community consist in industrialised societies and why does it have such evaluative appeal? What are evaluative assumptions behind current emphasis on community care, and are attempts at it inevitably authoritarian? Can communities be redeveloped where they have apparently disintegrated? The answer to first question stresses management of personal networks of supportive and socially integrative friendship relationships as basis of a community in modern urban societies, and independence of these from limited neighbourhood locations, because of modern communications systems. In answer to second question, community care is argued to be impossible if reconstruction of solidary neighbourhood communities is what is envisaged. On other hand, level of competence necessary to develop and manage an evolving supportive friendship network may be beyond capacities of many of dependent and inadequate who are presented as candidates for community care. Nonetheless, in answer to third question, mobilisation of a diverse range of organised social resources, voluntary and state financed, offers both best hope of achieving social competence and autonomy and of avoiding authoritarian dependence upon limited sources of assistance. 'In vocabulary of social scientist and social worker, there must be few words used with either frequency or looseness of the community. It is one of those terms which, as Le Bon said, are uttered with solemnity, and as soon as they are pronounced an expression of respect is visible on every countenance, and all heads are bowed.'1 Norman Dennis's remark serves to remind us how well established is concern with nature of community in both its descriptive, taxonomic and evaluative aspects.2 In what follows I will attempt to answer three questions about community in light of current manifestations of continuing concern with it in both its descriptive and evaluative aspects. First, of what does a community consist in industrialised societies, and what is it in particular that gives it such persistent positive evaluative appeal? Secondly, what are evalua tive assumptions behind contemporary emphasis upon community care, and in particular, are attempts at community care necessarily authoritarian and oppressive? Finally, can communities be redeveloped where they have apparently disintegrated, and if so in what sense is this possible? The