Big Society(1): Is Society ‘broken’ because it’s not ‘big’ enough?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital
I am burdened by the abiding image of David Cameron electioneering in McDonalds and finding himself accidentally asking for ”a big society with fries please”. But seriously folks, if you read the transcript of David Cameron’s major speech on the Big Society, it seems to be quite a substantial idea, not just a sound byte, so it is worthy of close attention, especially for a project that is about strengthening connections at a local level, and (re)building the social capital that Cameron seems to think we currently lack.
What follows focuses on making sense of the idea, the next blog will examine the idea from the perspective of the three main manifestos, and the following entry will attempt to understand how our project might contribute to making society ‘big’.
The idea, based on politically filtered facts, seems to break down as follows:
State intervention helped to advance the cause of social justice in Britain until the late sixties, but less so thereafter. The biggest expansion in state involvement has taken place since 1997, but inequality has grown, the incomes of the bottom 10% fell between 2002-2008, youth unemployment has increased and social mobility has stalled. The state failed to tackle poverty in recent years because those in poverty lacked the education to take advantage of the opportunities of globalisation, and because the state was relatively blind to the social impact of economic reforms, e.g. when benefit structures serve to disincentivise work. The role of the state therefore needs to shift from one that primarily serves to create economic dependence to one that increases personal and social responsibility. As Cameron puts it, “We need to use the state to remake society.” He proposes to do so by increasing educational opportunity for all and, at by focusing on social enterprise, community activists, and, here’s the rub, everybody else. The fact that everybody needs to become involved in some or all of volunteering, associational life, local politics and service provision is why the vision is a ‘big’ one.
That is the idea insofar as one paragraph can capture it. The space Cameron wants to make bigger lies between the state and the citizen, which he seems to think is currently too small, and which is actually undermined, he believes, by the existing relationship between state and citizen. He seems to want to increase social, civic and political DIY, and the driving motivation seems to be that he wants people to feel and to be more responsible for their lives. As I have suggested before, in order to be ‘responsible’, you have to be able to respond, so certain key questions arise. We will return to the nuts and bolts of the idea, but for now here are some key generic issues/questions of a more philosophical nature.
As Mathew Taylor has already indicated, walking the talk of this idea is not straightforward, and thus far the Conservatives themselves don’t seem to have managed it. There are various sources of inertia that make it difficult to change our behaviour, even when we want to.
For instance, building trust at a social or civic level is not easy because as David Halpern has suggested, based on an international study of values, the British as a whole are “unusually afraid of strangers”. He also suggested that, relative to other European countries, we don’t value social solidarity very highly, and tend to be relatively authoritarian by nature.
How do you pay for it? This critical question was Madeleine Bunting’s key concern in The Guardian, and is obviously very pertinent. If the State is going to ‘remake’ society it has to pay for this make-over, and has to do so in a way that keeps itself at arms length; both difficult tasks.
The idea relies on a ‘big as significant’ metaphor, as outlined inMetaphors we live by. Making ‘big’ society’s root metaphor seems curious given that Cameron also suggests that we have a ‘broken society’. At the risk of manufacturing a neologism, he seems to be equating size with effectiveness(broken because not big enough), but one of the reasons for the perceived decline in social solidarity is the challenge of social scale, now that most people live in cities after all society often feels every bit as big as it is broken. I am not sure whether this is merely a semantic point, but it is also a fact that insofar as social solidarity depends on size, less is more.
Finally, a growth in the social and civic sphere also creates new forms of social pressure. For instance, Mathew Parris once spoke of this concern about living in a society of ‘twitching curtains’, and more generally any growth in society creates threats to individual autonomy.
So what do you think? Does the idea of the big society make sense? Is it desirable? Achievable? Does it fill you with optimism or horror? Look forward to hearing from you.
What would you give a busker if you didn’t have any money?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital
Prompted by Mathew Taylor’s recent blog on the cultural life of the London Underground, I remembered an aspiring musician who told me that she always gave money to good buskers, because as a matter of principle we should support what we value, and because she feared she might be in the same position some day (she is now a vet).
But what do you do when you really like a busker’s music, want to support their endeavour, but find that you are genuinely out of change? A quick ask around the office led to ‘a kiss’ and ‘a smile’ as the main suggestions, while many spiritual traditions would suggest offering a prayer, or simply a heartfelt positive thought for the person’s wellbeing, which is surely worthwhile. But man cannot live on smiles, kisses and good vibes alone. There ought to be a more tangible non-monetary expression of regard.
What if you were to offer some nourishing thoughts or advice? You could write them your favourite quotation on a piece of paper and drop it in alongside the twenty pence pieces, or perhaps advise them on where to have lunch (Mooli’s would be my suggestion).
Sounds wildly unrealistic and impractical? Perhaps. But now imagine you walk past the same musician every day for several weeks so that you effectively enjoy hours of the fruits of their skill and time. How could you pay that back in kind? Perhaps you could help them improve their second language, fix a leaky tap, or cook some lemon rice.
Maybe. But at the end of the day, surely people want money – universal vouchers that give you the freedom to get whatever you want, rather than relying on the relatively limited set of whatever skills or products people around you can give?
Certainly money is the preferred form of exchanging value, but many argue that something vital about human meaning-making and social connectivity has been lost in the process. By mediating human contact, money lubricates the free exchange of skills and products, but also contaminates it.
A few years ago a friend hired a van and helped me to move flat in london, and in return I gave him some chess tuition. We didn’t haggle too much about the relative time, skill or value of what we exchanged, and seemed to sense it implicitly. On a large scale, you cannot build an economy on this sort of model, but at a local level, especially when money is tight, we need to consider ways of reviving this form of exchange.
Some communities are already doing so with the idea of time banking, and the classic expression of related forms of exchange is Avner Offer’s paper Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard, which is far too rich a tapeastry of ideas to summarise here, but one signature quotation of Offer’s might whet your appetite:
“Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.”
So the next time you pass a busker doing their job well but don’t feel like reaching for your wallet, be patient, and consider what you might be able to offer each other.
Five Reasons why you should care about social networks.
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks, Think Global Act Local
Sometimes you need to back up a little. I have spent most of the last few days trying to get my head round the intracacies of social network analysis, and I fear I am losing sight of the bigger picture.
Why bother with community? Who needs connections?
The first answer that jumps out at me is trust. Trust is closely related to connectivity and we want a trusting society, not just to reduce transaction costs, but because we feel better when we feel trusted and trusting. Anthony Seldon developed this point at length at a recent RSA event. So the connected community project is partly about trust, in particular about how to build it, and to better understand how it can be lost.
The second answer is loneliness. The first RSA speaker event I attended was John Cacioppo’s lecture on lonliness, which detailed decades of interdisciplinary research into the pervasive feeling of subjective isolation, and details the deleterious effects of lonliness on health, wellbeing and, yes, trust. We care about social networks because we are looking for such patterns of isolation and exclusion.
The third answer is scarcity. What do you do when the money runs out? There may or may not be green shoots signalling the beginning of the end of the recession, but we know that the public sector typically lags two years behind the private sector, and there will soon be acute pressure on budgets for local public services. If that were bad enough for the short term, rising energy prices and an ageing demographic create enduring pressure on existing services. So what can you do when the local authority faces a funding shortfall of (on some estimates) around 30%? Well, you can look for money elsewhere, rely on enterprise, or you can seek to build social capital so that people make better use of their available community resources(time banks, car pooling, local currencies etc.)
The fourth answer is inequality. There is now good evidence that societies with lower levels of inequality tend to be happier, and we know that social capital is used to perpetuate patterns of inequality. The more we can understand the functioning of these networks, the more informed we will be in our efforts to create a mor egalitarian society.
The fifth and (for now) final answer is friendship. People are basically social creatures who we now understand to be
conditional altruists. In other words, we are inclined to want to help others, but only insofar as we expect that help to be reciprocated. I walk past several people every day without saying hello, or asking how they are or who they are. Some of these people are random passers-by, but many I know I will see again, waiting for the same train, selling the same magazine. Understanding networks will not shift this sort of intertia, but it’s a start. The more we realise the powerful impact of social networks on everything from health to wealth to happiness, the more value we will place on making these links and measuring these effects well.
I am glad I got that out of my system. Now I can go back to reading about alters, nodes, name generators, betweennesss, sample sizes etc without feelign completely disconnected from the real world!
Count me in: limiting social exclusion through regulation?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
In his last blog Jonathan concludes that one of the ingredients of Barack Obama’s success as a community organiser was his “deep appreciation for people and communities.” Obama not only sought to understand ‘communities,’ but importantly recognised their diverse constitution and that reaching out to people and individuals was essential groundwork. He had what is sometimes coined the ‘human touch.’
The need for such a capacity to include is at the heart of the Connected Communities programme as we seek not only to reinforce existing community networks, but also to build these networks out in ways that oblige them to include those people at the margins with depleted stocks of social capital. We must try, that is, to overcome a recurrent pattern in community regeneration whereby projects come to work alongside the usual suspects (be they individuals or local CVS organisations) and concurrently fail to reach the most excluded (potential) community members.
How we manage this is going to be tricky, but I’m hopeful that the ‘Regulation for Regeneration’ summit being held in conjunction with the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO) at the RSA next week may help us to develop some ideas. Specifically, this event is going to bring together local authorities and businesses to discuss the challenges that they face in the current economic recession. In particular, through a series of sessions led by expert speakers, delegates will be asked to consider what the priorities for action should be and in what ways regulation can make a contribution to meeting these priorities.
The last of the sessions will bring the summit together by enquiring into what a new model for regeneration might look like. One of the key themes of enquiry for this session concerns how regulation can help us to nurture the types of communities and local economies that we’d like to participate in. Specifically, it is posited that in this new model of regeneration we might look to draw upon regulation as a means to help us build constructive social and economic norms through which communities can ‘regulate’ themselves.
Hopefully this in-depth conversation about the relationship between regeneration and regulation will garner practical ways of harnessing the principles of regulation as a means to facilitate more equitable community regeneration on the ground. Could, for example, a framework for regulating the involvement of community members in projects be developed so as to ensure inclusivity? Or, in a related way, might the social capital strategy we create out of our work in Knowle West and New Cross Gate comment on how the reach and accessibility of interventions looking to build social networks is regulated? Out of this, the hope would be that we start to see the development of more deeply resilient and empowered communities in which engagement (and so responsibility) is more open and shared.
Obama as Community Organiser
Filed under: Book Reviews, Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital
At the Republican National Convention in the run-up to the last US Presidential election, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin both made condescending references to Barack Obama’s experience as a ‘community organiser’. Giuliani sounded particularly incredulous: he WORKED?, as a community ORGANISER?
Rudy Giuliani on community organising
Sarah Palin played the crowd in the same sort of way, comparing being a Mayor in Alaska to being “a bit like a community organiser, except you have actual responsibilities.”
Sarah Palin: \”Sort of like a community organiser\”
But we know who had the last laugh, and many have suggested that Obama’s most powerful asset in the election was not his soaring eloquence, but lessons learned from his experience as a community organiser in Chicago.
I remember reading an interview with a party activist around this time last year. She gave testimony to the power of Obama’s ‘ground plan’, and the sophisticated and coordinated way he organised party activists, both online and off, to ‘get out the vote’, particularly in key marginals like Florida and Ohio, which has been a stumbling point for Democratic candidates in the past. The activist ended the interview with a telling remark: The Republicans want to know what a community organiser does- well on Nov 5th they are going to find out.
But what did Obama do as a community organiser? His autobiography, Dreams from my Father (a sublime piece of writing), gives a detailed account of the inner changes he went through in the process of community organising, but offers relatively few details about his day-to-day activities.
At a practical level, we know that most of his community organising was church-related, that he played an instrumental role in
getting asbestos removed from a housing estate in the south of chicago, and creating a self-help service to get steel workers back to work. More theoretically, in 1990 Obama derided “the old individualistic bootstrap myth touted by conservatives”, and told a reporter in 1995 that “it is always easier to organise people around intolerance, narrow mindedness and false nostalgia”.
Rather than focus on tangible achievements, perhaps the process of community organising itself was key, not just because of what it taught Obama about organising people, but what he learned about connecting with human beings at the level of hopes and fears.
In his autobiography, Obama reflects on the importance of putting his ideas about stronger communities into practice:
“The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan- didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this?”
Obama’s role as a community organiser was powerful because it allowed him to embody this kind of ‘yes we can’ message. He sounded credible, because he had lived the message, or at least tried to. Indeed, last week, as part of a wider argument about creating more space in the public sphere for vexed moral and spiritual spirtual questions, Michael Sandel remarked that a key to Obama’s success was his ability to be intellectually coherent on policy issues while simultaneously connecting with people at this deeper human level that asks why we are here, and how we should best live our lives.
On so called wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage Obama always said that people can disagree about such issues without disrespecting each other, which sounds obvious, but as Mathew Taylor indicated at the Sandel talk, it is rare for people for agree about what they disagree about, and, by inference, it is only really when they do so that this mutual respect can emerge.
Finally, while Obama’s formative influence as a community organiser is well known, we don’t often hear about the impact of his participation in the Saguoro seminars at Harvard University – a five-year long process of dialogue aimed at undestanding the role of social capital in improving the quality of social and civic life in America. An article on Obama at the Saguoro seminars suggests that they made a deep impact on the 44th President, so we can be sure that Obama is familiar with the idea of social capital, and moreover that he knows his Coleman from his Putnam.
For example, Putnam argued that television had a corrosive impact on social capital, and it is noteworthy that Barack and Michele Obama’s speeches repeatedly include references to turning off the TV. For instance: “If parents don’t parent and turn off the TV set and instill in their child a thirst for knowledge, we will not succeed.”
So I suspect what Obama learned as a community organiser was a combination of know-how about the logistics and administration of organising, deep appreciation for people and communities, and the importance of not watching too much television. More importantly for RSA purposes however, he attempted to close his own social aspiration gap, and it eventually took him to the White House.
Responsibility and Response-Ability
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, inequality
David Cameron’s speech at the conservative party conference indicated that the conservative party might be interested in the work of our connected communities project, so I decided to take a closer look.
The RSA is a charity, and strictly non-partisan, but Mathew Taylor has previously given his thoughts on Progressive conservatism and it seems important to engage with the main ideas of the would-be next government as fairly as possible.
Cameron repeated one of his more memorable signature lines: “There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the State.” This line sounds like a suitably respectful departure from Margaret Thatcher’s most famous “There is no such thing as society” quote, but in fact, when you read Thatcher’s original, and typically decontextualised quote, in full, she was saying something quite similar (to women’s own magazine October 31 1987):
“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
Ten years later Tony Blair spoke of the need to combine rights with responsibilities, which again makes you wonder if they all mean much the same thing, with only slightly different degrees of emphasis. However, the tone of Thatcher’s quote is rather different, and more combative in spirt than Cameron’s distinction, or Blair’s juxtaposition. When Thatcher says ‘there are individual men and women and there are families’, I don’t sense she is thinking of community, and her vision of the social world does sound relatively atomised.
Cameron clearly sees community ( “the ultimate warm fuzzy” as a recent RSA seminar attendee put it) as part of the picture of a healthy society, as he made clear in his speech:
"There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state."
So no, we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by rebuilding responsibility.
The use of ‘responsibility’ has a more Thatcherite feel, but detractors could point out that calling for responsibility entails ensuring response-ability too. Patterns of inequality make some people and some areas much more able to respond than others. Indeed, it has recently been argued that the growth in inequality over the last decade is a legacy of Thatcherism.
Such political claims remain contentious, but at a conceptual level it seems clear that you cannot be responsible if you are not able to respond. So while it may be legitimate to encourage greater responsibility at an individual and community level, there is presumably also a role for goverment to enable such responsibility.
Part of what connected communities is about is understanding the basis of response-ability at a community level. Many local government departments and third sector projects are likely to face actute financial shortages soon. They will have the same responsibilities, but in the absence of adequate financial capital, we need to understand how to harness existing levels of social capital so that people are genuinely able to respond.
Driving through conditions for community
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Capital, Social Networks
Just been prompted by a comment by mas on Jonathan’s blog, namely that community connectedness nowadays is often undermined “by among others people not walking the streets where they live (just to the car & back), not working where they live and in too many cases being fearful (rightly or wrongly) of where they live.”
I would certainly concur with these arguments (in particular when we’re thinking about Jonathan’s first, community-cum-neighbourhood, community typology) but there’s much more to it the contribution of car use to diminishing social networks. Specifically, I am thinking here of Donald Appleyard’s classic ‘Liveable Streets’ study of the effects of vehicle throughput on different streets in San Francisco on neighbourliness in those streets. This study was re-created by Josh Hart in Bristol in 2008 – see www.driventoexcess.org – and came to the same striking conclusions. Of particular relevance to Connected Communities, this more recent study found that:
- Residents of the heavily-trafficked (>20k motor vehicles/day) street studied were found to have less than a quarter the number of local friends than those on the lightly-trafficked (140 vehicles/day) street and under half the number of local acquaintances.
- Residents on the heavily-trafficked street had a much smaller ‘home territory’ (the area over which they felt ‘a sense of stewardship or personal responsibility’) than those on the less-trafficked streets.
That is, studies both in the US and the UK demonstrate convincingly that car-use not only reduces the number of opportunities that the driver might have to develop social networks in his or her local neighbourhood – through chance encounters etc. – but also drastically erodes the conditions in which fellow residents might feel comfortable connecting with their neighbours.
Getting motorists walking, that is, not only increases their own chances of socialising in their local neighbourhood, but also increases the likelihood of other residents doing so. Choosing not to drive becomes a civic, ’other-regarding’ decision in a very immediate sense.
With this in mind, might local community-based digitally-networked work spaces (such as the hub in King’s Cross or Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol) not only foster digital inclusion, therefore, but also – by reducing commuting distances – indirectly enable the conditions in which more traditional forms of social inclusion take place?
Our house, in the middle of our street
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Capital
Despite hearing that Mercury’s current orbit is disrupting our ability to communicate at the present time, I rather fortuitously learned last night that a BBC Radio 4 series has just started looking into the history of private life. I wish I could claim that this coincidence, in terms of content, with my initial blog posting for Connected Communities was all exquisitely planned but the truth is far less strategic on my part.
The 30 programmes-strong series, which started yesterday, looks at the hidden history of the home over the past 400 years. While a primary reaction might be that this will be of little relevance to us in Connected Communities, on closer inspection a number of interesting ties emerge. In the half hour discussion used to launch the programme, then, Professor Amanda Vickery argues that “households are the founding social and spiritual unit of society in the early modern period” and that they are the platform for our engagement with the public world. Through her socio-historical analysis of first-hand accounts from letters and diaries, then, we hear that over time distinctions between the private and public spheres have been far from stable.
Moving to the present, anthropologist Dr Daniel Miller points out the role of media in moderating this relationship between public and private. Specifically, he emphasises the ways that Web 2.0 platforms can expose the intimacies of the private domain to the public, even to strangers. For him, privacy is changing – as a result of the proliferation of new media – in ways that we’ll struggle to keep up with. But at the same time, this ‘privacy’ is being increasingly publicised.
The overarching theme, then, is that relations in the home might not be so much distinct from those taking place out in public, but rather that the former are a microcosm of the latter – interactions in the home are connected with the public world, and vice-versa. Fascinating stuff, and it might just stop me from tuning-in to Five Live for football results every morning!
As a small postscript, I also noted today that forty-five local authorities have approached the national housing and regeneration agency (the Homes and Communities Agency, HCA) to express interest in putting their land into its new programme for building homes on publicly-owned land. While the need for new homes in the UK is great, this rather stark transformation of public into private land (regardless of the grey areas) may have serious implications for our health. This is particulalrly true if the public land being earmarked is green or ‘natural,’ as I read with interest in Jonah Lehrer’s article earlier today, or if it could be planted to be so. As we look to provide housing for our growing populations, then, shouldn’t we also be looking to provide the green infrastructure to mitigate the psychological damage of built-up environments? How can this be achieved in the communities in which our project is going to work? I think it’s time for me to look back at the RSA’s long-record of tree-planting for some of these answers…
Private interests, public sphere: learning from the street
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
My name’s Alasdair Jones, and, alongside my colleague Jonathan Rowson, I’m one of the two new researchers on the RSA’s Connected Communities programme.
Having written my PhD on the co-production, through use and design, of public space on London’s South Bank, it was a great joy to find that on my first day at the RSA the evening talk Cities and Citizenship: Surviving the 21st Century concerned “the relationship between the way we design our city and our perception and experience of citizenship.” Moreover, among the panellists was Anna Minton, who’s recent book Ground Control has generated a resurgence of interest in the changing nature of Britain’s urban public realm.
While the themes that the discussion sought to address – cities and citizenship – were relatively abstract, a number of more grounded issues that arose struck me as pertinent to the Connected Communities action research that Jonathan and I are embarking on. Specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly given his extensive and lauded role in community regeneration, in the opening presentation by Lord Andrew Mawsom we were reminded of the importance of the physical, everyday, walked street to the vitality of local neighbourhoods. The design and quality of the buildings that line our routes through the city are, according to Lord Mawsom, central to shaping the way we view and conduct ourselves, and to the extent to which we are other-regarding.
Moreover, through references to Lord Mawsom’s own observations of the St Paul’s Way project in which he’s currently involved, we were told that it is not only the morphology of the street, but also, if not more so, its use that can help to foster social capital. In his example, it was through working part-time at the pharmacy on St Paul’s Way that two students from the nearby school pursued vocations in the medico-pharmaceutical sector. Their vocational interests developed outside of the educational setting, that is, and for Lord Mawsom this points to the need for an educational model that is oriented towards the community, rather than turning it’s back on and fencing itself off from it.
This point was picked up by Matthew Taylor, who fleshed the RSA’s idea of ‘schools without boundaries’ – that “in essence…we should make the work of schools, and the wider project of developing the next generation, the task of the whole community and not just parents and schools.” This offers an interesting challenge to the way that we think about the urban realm, and in particular to the way that we understand boundaries between public and private (as broadly conceived) institutions and spheres. Taking the terminology in a very literal sense, it means dismantling the boundaries that have been erected between loci of education and those of everyday community life.
This was of particular interest to me because Anna Minton’s most recent work argues, by contrast, that we need to be more assertive in the way that we distinguish between public and private realms in our city. From this view, the big mistake of planning in the last few decades has been to allow private developers to construct seemingly public spaces. In response, she argues, we should be looking to build spaces for doing nothing (or anything), to build spaces unburdened by some functional predisposition.
What I am interested in here is in the role that ‘private’ (or exclusive) institutions and activities – be they shops, schools, or even skateboarding on London’s South Bank – play in ‘connecting’ our public realm. It is the shop, in Lord Mawsom’s example, that provides the context and facilitates the contact through which the students from over the road find their vocations. It is through skateboarding that young people from different parts of London meet on South Bank meet and exchange views.
Paradoxically, is it not through the imposition of ‘private’ functions and activities on a space, rather than through their erasure, that a well-connected community, or a vital ‘public’ sphere, is produced? If we want more civic-minded citizens, might we want to look not at excising institutions and activities from our cityscapes, but instead at how best to harness the capacity of these institutions and activities to promote social interaction and connectivity? Shouldn’t we be looking to learn from our regular high streets, where private settings provide the context for regular public interactions, rather than promoting the development in isolation of these two spheres?
How can we create the kind of communities we want to live in?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Networks
There was a packed event at the RSA last night, with strong representation by RSA Fellows, asking if people need community anymore, with inspiring speeches by Professor Amitai Etzioni and the Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP. You can listen to the event here, and also check out Professor Etzioni’s blog.
Professor Etzioni placed great emphasis on social norms as the foundation for strong local and national communities. Strong communities are not defined in terms of how much money people make (provided they have enough money to meet their basic needs – so not advocating the enjoyment of poverty). Rather they are about positive relationships with family and friends, spending more time in the local community, getting involved in volunteering. Relationships can be formed online as well as offline, so the internet can enable social connections.
Community is not necessarily a good thing. A community is people getting together, creating a shared identity, seeing a common future, but what people bond around could be dislike of minorities. By their very definition, communities have boundaries, so they exclude as well as include. Perhaps an area that Etzioni did not touch on was about power in communities. Even if the community has a positive shared purpose, that does not mean that all members will benefit/influence equally.
Professor Etzioni’s argument is for moral dialogue, in which people have conversations about what is right and wrong. The idea is that new norms emerge when people participate in forming them, and because people took part in creating them, these norms become self-enforcing. Social norms have to be the foundation for the good life, as there will never be enough people to enforce rules from above (apart from for people who go way beyond accepted norms). We act in particular ways, not smoking in public, not dropping litter, not for fear of punishment, but because we think it is the right thing to do.
Liam Byrne, MP, talked about the development of an area of East Birmingham, applying some of Etzioni’s ideas to a marginalised neighbourhood. Based on this experience, he argued for ensuring safety by effective policing as a platform for giving community leaders the confidence to get involved. He made a case for public services to treat people as members of networks (families, friends), not just individuals, and pointed to community institutions as the power supply for the community.
Building self-esteem and self-confidence, creating a sense of common purpose and a shared identity were themes that ran through both of the speeches. Due to the shortness of time, we were unable to discuss as much as we would have liked some of the innovative ideas from Fellows and others participating on how this could be done. Did you have a question you wanted to ask the group or the speakers? Here are a couple of the questions I had:
Social development is not about setting limits on people, but giving them positive purposes, which they buy into because they helped to form. How can/has this moral dialogue been created in practice?
Communities are exclusive as well as inclusive, how can people who are on the margins be supported to benefit from the social support and opportunities that communities can provide?
It would be great to hear other people’s views on the question Kevin Harris posed: what policies can be put in place to stimulate informal support networks?
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