Big Society(2): What’s Blue and Yellow and Red all over?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital
If you still don’t know who you are going to vote for, you could do worse than read the manifestos of the three main political parties. I recently read the three tomes for the first time in my life and was impressed by their scope and level of detail.
With respect to yesterday’s blog on ‘The Big Society’, all three parties have policies relating to revitalising the civic sphere, but they differ in emphasis.
The Conservative Manifesto, subtitled: ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’, has a large section called ‘Change Society’ and relevant policy proposals include public service reform (changing the ‘civil service’ to a ‘civic service’- encouraging civic servants to walk the talk on social action; introducing a ‘big society day’- I guess it’s like a big picnic but more serious…; creating a National Citizen Service so that 16 year olds get inculcated into the spirit of volunteering and service. There is also the intent to use sport in general and the Olympics in particular to strengthen social bonds. The Conservatives also promise to redirect National Lottery funds back to their original purpose of community development.
At a more macro level, they see the family as the core unit of society, and they seek to support them accordingly, through tax credits and an extension of flexible working, as well as an interesting but underdeveloped promise to protect ‘childhood’, rather than just ‘children’.
The Labour Party seem to have decided to link communities to creativity, reflected in the section of their manifesto called: ‘Creative Britain: Active and Flourishing Communities’. Community activism is grounded in a commitment to arts, sports and culture….and the volunteering such activities engender. They also promise to protect post offices and pubs as community ‘hubs’. Likewise they promise £235 million for ‘play areas’ like adventure playgrounds. Labour hope to encourage a vibrant voluntary sector and to develop a National Youth Community Service in which youngsters complete at least 50 hours of community service before 19.
I am surprised I haven’t heard more of their emphasis on ‘The New Mutualism‘ i.e. people buying shares in local pubs, football clubs etc so that they become stakeholders in key aspects of community life. This strikes me as a conceptual counterweight to ‘The Big Society’, but the first time I came across the idea was the manifesto, so either I have been looking in the wrong places, or Labour decided they didn’t need/want to push the idea.
The Liberal Democrat Manifesto makes no big thematic claim on the big society other than to reiterate their longstanding commitment to localism, and to emphasise, as all parties do, that strong communities are important. They do have a section on communities that focuses on crime, housing and immigration, and they promise to put more police on the beat, make the immigration system more transparent, rail fares cheaper, homes affordable, keep post offices open, protect and restore natural environment, and scrap council tax and make it on the ability to pay. They also propose a community owned energy scheme, but I couldn’t trace the details.
So with respect to building the big society, the parties are all the same… except for the ways that they are different. The Conservatives are explicit about ‘using the state to remake society’, Labour’s manifesto suggests that communities flourish most tangibly through sports and art, and the Liberal Democrats want communities to be ’strong’ and more politically active, with a host of policy proposals to make them so.
Two main reflections come to mind:
1) Obliquity. If all parties agree that we need stronger communities, a more vibrant civic sphere, or even a ‘big society’, does it follow that we should seek these things out? John Kay argues quite forcefully that we rarely achieve social and personal goals by seeking them out directly because the world is just too complicated. Maybe the Big Society is something that has to emerge indirectly from a succession of small gains rather than something that can be created on a national level.
2) Associational Life: In this respect, while all of the parties mention sport, none of them seem to place much emphasis on other forms of informal social life, mother and toddler groups, book clubs, chess clubs, writing groups etc. All parties seem to support the strengthening of social bonds that arise through these less glamorous forms of associational life, but there seem to be few policies in place to support them. In this respect, such aims may be informed by research at ‘My Tribe’, a site run by Henry Hemming which is a Nationwide survey of Clubs, associations, societies and informal groups in Britain. This survey will inform a book to be published in 2011, when we may or may not explicitly be trying to build a big society.
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.
Is Rigorous Advocacy an Oxymoron?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl: “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”
I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).
This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.
When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change, there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.
You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative, methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose. As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.
Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.
So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.
The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron? Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?
Are you in Control of your Life?
(By Rohan Talbot, RSA Intern for Connected Communities and Social Brain)
Reading through the 2008 Social Capital Survey carried out in Camden, I came across something that piqued my interest. Among the various findings of the survey was the discovery that residents’ perceptions of whether they could influence local decision-making (either individually or collectively), are related to their satisfaction with their local area and quality of life. Higher satisfaction with quality of life was also found among those who thought they had a choice over whether or not they had to live in that local area.
This seems to chime with research in clinical and health psychology demonstrating the importance of personal ‘perceived control’ to human wellbeing. There is a wealth of evidence suggesting that people in stressful circumstances (including physical or mental illness) who believe that they have some control over the situation and their lives generally tend to have better physical and psychological health outcomes.
Sir Michael Marmot, professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UCL and author of ‘The Status Syndrome: How social standing directly affects our health and longevity’, has pointed out that socioeconomic status is inversely related to health and life expectancy, even when risk factors such as smoking or high cholesterol are controlled for. Resources such as income and social support give people more choices and therefore more opportunities to change aspects of their lives that they may be dissatisfied with. Understandably, therefore, those with lower socioeconomic status often feel a lack of control over their lives. A lack of perceived control may therefore be not only contributing to the low reported wellbeing and satisfaction in deprived communities, but also to their significantly poorer health. Marmot argues that this link is due to the fact that low status leads to stress, which in turn can directly harm health.
Reviewing research into personal control beliefs, John and Catherine MacArthur also found that perceived control may buffer against some of the negative effects of low socioeconomic status:
“…among those with less education or income, those with strong control beliefs reported health outcomes comparable to those seen in higher SES groups for self-rated health, acute physical symptoms, depressive symptoms and life satisfaction.”
If we wish to improve the community wellbeing, perhaps we should seek to increase the control people feel they have over their lives. The most direct way to do this is to increase the material resources and developing education, income and public services. Nevertheless, in a time when financial belts are being tightened and there are fewer resources available for development, we may have to look at less expensive ways to increase people’s actual and perceived control.
Informing people of what decisions are being made in their local area, and ensuring residents’ voices are heard in decision making (e.g. the Tower Hamlets ‘You Decide!’ initiative to give residents a say in how the local budget is spent), may contribute to perceived control. Enabling people to connect to a wider social network of others with similar interests and concerns, who may be collectively able to influence decision-making, may also help. Perhaps even the process of surveying communities may have a positive impact, so long as those being surveyed believe that their opinions and concerns are being listened to and that the research will address local problems.
Whatever projects giving people more control over their lives and communities are pursued, they can clearly a positive impact beyond people’s engagement with the community and satisfaction with their quality of life. They may help make our communities not only happier, but potentially healthier too.
Share the Love?
Filed under: Book Reviews, Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Capital, inequality
Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as “one of the digital pioneers” in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, ‘You Are Not a Gadget.’ In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.
Instead, he argues that a more pernicious by-product of the mantras of ‘open culture’ and ‘information wants to be free’ is coming to dominate. This by-product is a destructive new social contract whereby, as he writes, “authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
This raises an interesting point for us in Connected Communities, for it suggests that this ’social contract’ might be re-spun in a more positive light, whereby culture becomes precisely nothing but altruism. This possibility is deflated, however, when we consider what John Tierney, in the New York Times, describes as a “crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.” The problem, then, isn’t so much the giving, but rather the disequilibrium that has emerged between those who provide and those who retrieve online content.
It is in part in response to this disequilibrium that Jaron proposes an overhaul of the ideological underpinnings of the Web, comprising a revision of its software structure and, notably, the introduction of a universal system of micropayments (among other innovations). The suggestion is that even in the online world where the scope for a global economy of regard is huge – in so far as transaction costs can be minimised and information shared with incredible ease – penalties, controls and prices need to be introduced to ensure that this vast potential is not abused.
This seems, in sum, to be a call for a more healthy form of reciprocity, whereby payment is not so much seen as antithetical to reciprocal relations – as Tim Harford put it recently “many policy wonks believe …that cash incentives are counterproductive and even morally corrosive” – but rather, where needed, as a formalisation of the very process of reciprocation.
Back on the ground, in traditional, place-based communities, the implications of this are as yet unclear. However, as we start at Connected Communities to try to lubricate the exchange of individuals’ and groups’ social capital, assets and resources, it does raise the question not only of how we should expect communities to cope with unequal flows of time, knowledge and resources (time banks may be one possibility), but also of how any regulatory framework that we develop around this accounts for the differentiated stocks of social capital (and so individuals’ capacity to share) that already exist.
Reed’s Law
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
The main reason social research is so difficult is that human interaction does not lend itself to law-like regularities. However, after stumbling across ‘Reed’s Law’ (more on that in a sec) in an article about social capital, I was moved to examine wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws i.e laws named after people. These laws range from the serious, like Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”, to the troubling, like Wirth’s law: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”, to the wry, like Hofstatder’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”.
In the context of social capital, a core concept of the connected communities project, Reed’s law is particularly pertinent. Like many of the eponymous laws, Reed’s law initially sounds like it came from ”The Department of the Bleeding Obvious’, becuase it simply states that networks grow exponentially i.e. the more people there are in a network, the more scope there is for sub groups that connect with other networks. Reed’s analysis amounts to saying more than that network growth is geometric(2,4,8,16,32 etc) rather than arithmetic(1,2,3,4,5 etc), because the key elements of a network are groups rather than individuals, and connecting with one group invariably means connecting with more than one group, if only because each individual member of a group typically belongs to other groups too.
The idea is a bit more subtle, but basically contends that connectivity feeds off itself, a point that becomes clearer by considering the morphology of networks. Broadcast networks are the most basic, amounting to a ‘one to many’ network. In this sense my network is everybody I know, and spreading the word across my network merely means broadcasting information rather than an exchange of information. Transaction networks, or one-to-one networks, are more complex, featuring an exchange of information between two people. However, the most powerful form of network is the many-to many network, also known as group forming networks or GFNs. These networks are at the heart of Reed’s law, because it is the connection to another group that significantly increases your resources. This kind of bridging or linking capital is the kind of connectivity we most need.
Reed expresses his own law in the following technical language: “Let’s say you have a GFN with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2n. I call that Reed’s Law. And its implications are profound.”
Profond indeed, because it means that every time you aad a person to your network, you are really adding several people from several different ‘packs’. A fuller exposition can be read in a Harvard Business Review article aptly called ‘The Law of the Pack’.
I am not totally sure what Reed’s law means for community regeneration, but I think it suggests that, at least in network terms, the more people you know, the more access you have to potentially valuable sub-groups, and that the really valuable people to know are those who have the most connections to several networks. Such assumptions are already built in to our empirical work, which is designed to guage levels of connectivity in areas like New Cross Gate, without making any judgment on how valuable particular networks are. Our contention is that GNFs, group forming networks, are one of the most important antidotes to the pending public sector squeeze because we all need to become more adept at mobilising existing resources, rather than buying new ones, or waiting for the government to bail us out. Following from Reed, our claim is that the value of such resources has until recently been underestimated.
As I think I have said before, and as Reed’s law seems to confirm, it is not what you know nor who you know, but who they know that matters.
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.
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