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.
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.
Meso Soup
Nourishing, healthy, well-balanced - that's meso soup...
Here we are – Connected Communities’ first foray into the blogosphere. As a virgin blogger, I’ve been getting advice from Matt Cain on content, style and readership development. ‘You need a mix of news and research comment, and analysis of some of the high level concepts you’re dealing with. But your project is essentially about understanding and generating change at the neighbourhood level, so you really need to talk about some examples of grassroots action. But you probably need to set out all of this upfront, and simply, so you can take people with you and so they understand what they might be coming back for. You also need to make it personal – give something of yourself’ I paraphrase him as saying. Helpful advice, so…
A couple of weeks ago, I got a flyer from Islington Council. It was entitled something like: ‘Introduce-yourself-to-a-neighbour day’ , the idea being that on some pre-defined day in the near future residents across the Borough would be calling round to the people next door and organically generating a more cohesive community. The idea of a direct call to social capital arms is interesting and raises many discussions about how policy and public sector actors can intervene (and whether they should) to build social relationships. More on this in future blogs.
I like to think of myself as an active citizen, and as a Fellow of the RSA as well as staff member, I want to live the values we espouse as an organisation. I also like to think of myself as a nice guy and given a new couple have just moved into a flat in our building, I decided to invite them round for a welcome-to-the-area-get-to-know-you drink.
They came round. In working our way awkwardly through a few glasses of wine, the inevitable question was put to me: ‘So, what do you do?’. I have never been particularly good at answering this question – having worked in niche areas of economic development and community regeneration, and with a propensity to adopt and use the jargon of these disciplines, my replies have tended to confuse rather than inform. But I’d spent most of the week trying to give an answer to this question to RSA colleagues with respect to the percolating Connected Communities project. I was fired up by the possibilities that were emerging. I let them have it.
‘It’s about how social networks can be better understood and utilised in addressing social problems’ I gushed. ‘It’s about reviewing the utility of social capital theory, turning it into practical tools for social change. It’s about tapping into and building civic capacity, our willingness to do good things collectively, voluntarily’.
I realised I was sounding like John Prescott. I took a breath and tried to calm down. ‘OK, look, simply put, social capital theory 101 says that the connections, or networks, between people have value and there is evidence to show that they impact on important issues like economic performance, educational attainment, health, and crime. But these networks are hard to see, hard to understand, hard to measure, and hard to mobilise strategically in addressing any particular problem. Social capital can also take different forms: it can bond across homogenous groups; it can bridge across diverse types of people, and it can link people to power and decision-makers. These different forms are relatively more or less important depending on what issue you’re dealing with and with whom. So if you were to try and generate social capital, you’d need a kind of multivitamin approach that got the right balance of ingredients according to what mineral deficiencies you were addressing. Or, if you like, a great recipe for a hearty, nourishing soup. You’d also need to think about at what level you might act: most consideration is given to social capital at the meso level – the between, community, level – but some people also talk about the importance of and blend with the micro (family, close friends) and macro (national) level.
‘What I’m interested in is the best recipe for meso soup. What ingredients do you need and how do you measure them out, how do you prepare and cook it, who should cook it, what skills and equipment do you need? I’m interested in understanding how you might create the conditions that support generating the right social capital, particularly if this is then done in the spirit of a new collectivism that is bottom up, networked, spontaneous, resourceful, and not only driven by public sector actors and the usual third sector suspects. I’m going to find new ways of mapping and visualising these networks, and of doing it in ways so that local people are encouraged to own, join, strengthen, enjoy and use these networks for social progress. The ideal communityscape I suppose.’
I looked up. Our guests had subtly, but certainly, recoiled. They were leaning back, chins into chests, peering over glasses, brows furrowed. It’s a reaction I’ve encountered before when I’ve embarked on equally enthusiastic accounts of other favourite topics – logistic regression, spreadsheet functionality, and the like. Usually, one of two reactions presents itself. The first is a mixture of fright and bewilderment; the other simple pity. I waited.
‘You should go the Clock Café‘.
So, pity had won out. I accept that I should probably get out more, but the speed and accuracy of the diagnosis was discomforting.
‘Seriously, I think you should go. Our friend lives at the end of the terrace, his next door neighbour, an elderly man, recently moved in, tripped and fell into his front garden. My mate came out and took him to the Café for a cup of tea. Long story short, they now meet for tea each week or so, he helps him with his garden, he’s plugged into the lunchtime social specials they have there, the police safer neighbourhood lot meet there and now know him and look out for him. They have weekend reading sessions for kids. And the Café itself buys all its ingredients from the other local traders, and they’re completely into fresh healthy ingredients through a local network. It’s all probably much more effective than anything the Council could deliver by itself. You could start to see it and encourage it as the hub of a network for social good. But isn’t who goes there just opportunistic to an extent? If you could identify who uses places like this and why; how to make them more inclusive and understand and address local problems effectively; how to identify and use these kinds of resources in the first place, well…It’s kind of social enterprise through reconceived existing networks. And if you could encourage other positive spin-offs: what good stuff could people who meet their together do? That’s what you’re talking about isn’t it?’ They waited.
‘That’ I said, ‘is exactly what I’m talking about’.
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