It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
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.
Where Is Everybody?
Who would have ever thought that the RSA could be so damn edgy? Andy Parsons is promoting his latest tour of comedy gigs and guess what it’s called? Yup. Citizens.
When you hear that one of Britain’s most popular comics is doing a show based on your egg-head obsession, it’s tempting to think that you’ve finally caught up with the zeitgeist. Or even that, considering that the RSA was founded when people-power was hot the first time around (1750’s), the zeitgeist has finally caught up with you.
It’s more likely to be a case of if you stick with something long enough it’ll be back in vogue eventually. And that shows in Andy Parson’s reasons for doing the show.
“It talks about all the amazing things that have happened…” he says in this morning’s Metro. ”Us now owning the banks… the ability to close down Lapland in Dorset after a Facebook campaign. Now we have started to get some power, what will we do with it?”
Now, just to get nerdy for a moment or three, that’s an interesting account of what being a citizen is. Andy P is not excited about us voting or paying our taxes. It’s what most people would call engaging with civil society, the stuff beyond ourselves but outside of the state. It’s not actually that new and, as befits an organisation that was founded by a group of friends in a coffee shop, we’re rather keen on it.
So what’s the hook, then, Andy? “It’s all about the internet, which makes it easier to find like-minded souls.”
Ah, the internet as democratising force. And there’s the problem. Andy Parsons talks about the new power of grassroots activism, particularly the power in coming together to work for a particular change we want to see in society: he cites the Obama campaign as an example.
But we’re quite a long way from knowing that what’s happened in the last fifteen years is an improvement on what we had before. The democratic deficits of the analogue age are well recorded, but we’re only just learning about exclusion and voicelessness in a digital world.
Some of it’s quite obvious. 51% of people with an income of £10,400 per annum or less have never used the internet. So they’re unlikely to be using it to organise a mass rally or a wombling session in their local area for a start.
Some of it’s less immediately apparent, and still needs a lot of research. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody espouses the “1 per cent rule“, the idea being that one per cent of people create original ideas and content online, but the other ninety nine per cent of us get to choose what’s important or relevant in a way we couldn’t before.
But if the poorest of us aren’t there in the first place, and most of us are not being actively asked what we think’s desirable or not, that’s far from being democratic. I’m not aware of any study of which demographic blogs most successfully, but there’s some anecdotal evidence that women are not well represented in political blogging, for example.
And we still don’t know for sure if and how online communities translate to vibrant real-life communities or social capital; that process remains pretty opaque. That’s why the Connected Communities team are looking into doing some research about it… Watch this space.
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