Social Justice and the Politics of Community

Christine Everingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138717435
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351768535
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003. Social welfare is the focus of much discussion and there is a broad spectrum of political opinion that agrees on the need for urgent reform. The literature informing these policy debates draws on a diversity of theoretical traditions and discourses concerned with remaking community, yet there has been no in-depth, coherent political analysis of these various positions. This captivating volume provides such an analysis, enabling the diverse discourses informing current social policy debates to be identified and understood in broader perspective. The book frames the debates within the context of globalization and the accompanying shift in focus of social policy from issues of social justice to questions of social order. It identifies 'the community' as both the site of today's social problems and the main tool that governments have at their disposal to address these problems. This portrayal of 'the community' is both theorized and illustrated with empirical material drawn from the Australian experience of community action.

Part I

Challenging Narratives of Community Decline

Introduction

In his influential treatise on the state of community in the United States, Robert Putnam (2000) warns readers about a treacherous enemy in our midst:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into even deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago - silently, without warning - that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century. (Putnam, 2000, p.27)

Encountering this kind of rhetoric used by Putnam, readers might be wondering what the ‘treacherous’ enemy force is that has so ‘pulled us apart’. Is it a pandemic disease, a fifth-column attack or an alien invasion that threatens our very existence? Fortunately, Putnam’s treacherous force is more mundane: social activism, libertarianism, social justice campaigns, and the desire for more inclusive communities based on a respect for human rights and cultural diversity. These cultural currents emanated from the new social movements in the 1960s. They shaped the mind set of the generation of Baby Boomers, largely held responsible by Putnam for community’s decline.

The fact that Putnam’s work, along with others that promote the same values, is enjoying such tremendous popularity in the mainstream press and political debates, as well as across a wide range of academic disciplines, indicates that his version of the events of the latter third of the twentieth century is deeply political and value-laden. His narrative provides a very influential lens for viewing the climatic events which shattered the old world order over the last few decades of the century. Is it also shaping the way we understand the construction of the new?

Discourses of ‘community’ are a useful rhetorical tool for such a hegemonic project. This is because the word itself is quite empty of any meaning in particular. The word ‘community’ reveals nothing about the ‘we’ that makes it up. The ‘community’ that Putnam describes as declining is problematic for this very reason; the ‘we’ is an unexamined entity. This suggests that there is an urgent need to examine the contemporary discourses of community that are being used so prolifícally in public policy debates. What kind of community has declined, and what kind of community are the many and varied discourses of community attempting to re-constitute?

Putnam’s narrative of community decline resonates with the current mood of community nostalgia which seeks to address the fragmentation of today’s social order by resurrecting the traditional ‘family values’ of the 1950s. These are the very values, however, which isolated families in the suburbs and oppressed women and minority groups. They were challenged by the libertarian social movements of the 1960s for the way in which they relied on a repressive and hierarchical social order which was unable to accommodate cultural difference and gender equality. While Putnam’s narrative locates the offspring of these movements as responsible for turning around the spirit of community, I locate the progeny of the new social movements as creators of new forms of community. During the era Putnam identifies as turning the tide of community spirit, the offspring of the new social movements were identifying the very same communities as sites of oppression. They became locations around which new forms of community were mobilized, built on libertarian values and principles of social justice.

The activists who sprung from the cultural currents of the 1960s did not valorize the ‘spirit’ that connected the communities of the day; rather they saw these connections as based on social exclusion and repression. The community spirit identified by Putnam was not mourned by the community activists of this period, but challenged precisely for this reason. The communities identified by Putnam as being in ‘decline’ were not socially inclusive and they relied too heavily on repression for their ‘social glue’.

Putnam’s narrative of community decline begins by identifying the wartime adversity and economic depression which promoted social capital, Putnam’s central concept that he portrays as the ‘glue’ of community. These adverse conditions generated social cohesion as people discovered their need for others and the benefits of working collectively to meet their common goals. According to Putnam (2000, p.267), American communities thrived on this community spirit born of a ‘wartime Zeitgeist of national unity and patriotism’ which reinforced civic-mindedness and sparked extensive volunteerism. This intensified community spirit carried through into the early post World War II years, where it became manifest in the dramatic expansion of secondary associations. Almost every association investigated by Putnam’s research team, including associations as diverse as the Boy Scouts and the League of Women Voters, expanded their membership dramatically in the period between the 1940s and mid-1960s (2000, p.268).

The ‘treacherous rip current’ that endangered this ‘vibrant’ community life was no less than ‘the slow, steady, and ineluctable replacement of the long civic generation by their less involved children and grandchildren’ (2000, p.283). According to Putnam, the generation responsible for this dramatic reversal in community spirit was the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, who, in his reckoning, accounted for approximately half the decline in the nation’s stocks of social capital. Their formative years were spent in an environment of unprecedented affluence and the warm glow of their parents’ community vitality. However, Baby Boomers also grew up exposed to television and the socio-cultural currents of the 1960s. These currents espoused personal liberation and cultivated an attitude of tolerance towards diversity rather than the values of community. Despite being highly educated compared to their parents’ generation and exposed to a period of uncommon social and political mobilization, Baby Boomers did not end up taking much interest in politics and in general avoided their civic duties (2000, pp.257-58). According to Putnam, they became a generation less committed to their personal relationships and their local community, guided more by their desire for freedom and individual expression than community spirit.

The increasing individualism sought by Baby Boomers has increased the level of tolerance in modem society and, according to Putnam, is a positive outcome of the 1960s libertarian movements. However, Putnam’s finger of blame for the decline of community points to other attributes defining this generation that accompanied increased libertarianism - disrespect for authority, religion and patriotism. Their demand to be considered ‘free agents’ undercuts the vitality of American communities, meaning ‘less volunteering, less philanthropy, less trust, less shared responsibility for community life’ (2000, pp.258-59). Moreover, while the Baby Boomers turned the tide against community spirit, their children, as a generation, are hastening its decline.

The children of Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers, have continued and intensified the trend away from community, towards the materialism and individualism begun by their parents (2000, p.259). Putnam’s evidence reveals ‘that almost all forms of civic engagement - from union membership to church attendance to petition signing to public meeting attendance - continued to plummet among young people who were in their twenties in the nineties - that is, Gen X’ers’ (2000, p.259). According to Putnam, this generation has never experienced a connection to politics as their parents did during the sixties. Being more attuned to popular culture, they are ‘visually orientated, perpetual surfers, multitaskers, interactive media specialists’ (2000, p.259). Moreover, while they are even more materialistic in their goals than their parents they are shrouded in insecurity, facing an uncertain future. Gen X’ers may be politically unconnected, individualistic and materialistic, but they are also a very insecure and anomic generation, marked by a ‘remarkable, well-established, and disturbing trend towards suicide, depression and malaise’ (2000, p.264). Putnam’s story ends here, with a more optimistic view of the future. Pointing to a recent trend for today’s youth to volunteer, he foresees the possibility that ‘the forty year trend toward generational disengagement is at last bottoming out’ (2000, p.265).

Putnam’s work is not the only academic tradition feeding into public policy trends emphasizing the importance of re-making community. His metaphor of the tide is remarkably similar to that of the pendulum used by the influential American communitarian, Amitae Etzioni (1993; 1996). Etzioni’s narrative of the decline of community is one of moral decay. He points the finger at the loss of the ‘core values’ of American society. These began their decay during the same era that Putnam identifies as the beginning of the decline in social capital. What began this decay, as in Putnam’s narrative, was the arrival of the libertarian movements of the 1960s. According to Etzioni, these went ‘too far’ to the side of individualism. It is now time for the pendulum to swing back to the community side, to ‘restore the balance’ - a balance which American society had apparently got right in the 1950s:

One cannot deny that the occurrence of anti-social behavior in American society of the 1950s (and that of other Western societies) was much lower than it was by the end of the 1980s...core values were widely shared and strongly endorsed - added to this was an anti-communist ideology. Patriotism was high. America had saved the free world and had the strongest economy in the world...members of society had a strong sense of duty to their families, communities and society...laws made family breakup and abortion difficult...cultural pollution proffered by television had barely begun. (1996, p.61 )

What these two influential social analysts have in common is a narrative of community decline set in motion by the libertarian rhetoric of the social movements of the 1960s. To a very large extent, the shift away from community towards greater individualism is identified in their narratives as one of the root causes of our current social ills.

While the social changes identified by Putnam and Etzioni are not in dispute, many objections arise and questions remain begging over these authors’ interpretations of these changes as ‘community decline’. For example, it may well be that communities are in a state of transformation rather than decline, suggesting an urgent need to examine the kinds of communities that are actually existing today. Is social capital the ‘glue’ of contemporary communities? Or do contemporary communities gain their solidarity more from their symbolic underpinnings? How can we judge whether communities are inclusive if we are not able to analyze and criticize the values and assumptions upon which communities are built and thrive? Putnam’s conceptualization of ‘social capital’ as the glue of community explicitly prevents these questions from being raised.

Rather than identifying the values underpinning communities, Putnam (2000) creates a narrative of decline which simply assumes that ‘community’, as a good in itself, has been eroded through the libertarian activism set in train by the new social movements of the 1960s. According to Putnam, although this activism provoked an explosion of mutual support, or ‘self-help’ groups, these and other offshoots of the activism of the new social movements have shown themselves to be no substitute for the secondary associations which, he claims, generate the required social capital for a well-functioning community. According to Putnam (2000, pp. 153-54), although social movements do create social capital by fostering new identities and extending social networks through mass protests, their progenies do not. Putnam argues that these groups, mobilized, for example, around social justice and environmental causes, have become so well organized at a national and international level that they no longer generate social capital. They should now be regarded as ‘tertiary’ rather than ‘secondary’ institutions, offering only ‘symbolic’ forms of identification rather than genuine communities based on personal connections. The assumption here is that communities held together through personal connections are more desirable, and perhaps more ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’, than those forms of community held together through shared convictions.

Beyond social capital: analyzing the political constitution of community

This book goes beyond such formulations as ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ and commonsense notions of ‘community’ to analyze the struggles which have taken place in the name of community. Contrary to the conception of community as a static construct being swept away by a ‘treacherous undercurrent’, I portray communities as dynamic and constantly contested. Community, by definition, has a boundary that marks it off from ‘other’. These boundaries are constantly contested and reconstituted through political processes. For a community to be inclusive, those who make up the community must reflect upon their boundary. How does their boundary match up to standards of social justice? How does one community relate to another? Communities based simply on a set of ‘core values’ will not necessarily be inclusive or socially just.

Moreover, communities may take shape as much through protest and conflict as through the sharing of common goals and values. People may come together because they share the same values or religious beliefs, to help each other out during times of mutual need or to protest against intrusive government or market practices. Social capital is not the only unifying factor of a community; tensions also create processes of identification that can build social solidarity around issues of social justice. Putnam simply dismisses the ‘symbolic communities’ of the protest movements as failing to generate social capital. I argue instead that all communities have symbolic underpinnings and it is this symbolic dimension that we need to understand if we are to attempt to constitute communities that are both socially inclusive and socially just.

If we want to understand how communities come together and assess what kind of society they promote we will need to go beyond the social capital literature and explore their symbolic underpinnings. We will need to ask what ethical principles they appeal to in making their claim to inclusiveness; what values they promote; what their objectives are and we will need to analyze these in the broader, political context. This will require using theories of conflict and resistance. Unlike consensus theories of social change which see ‘the social’ being constructed through shared norms and values, conflict theories focus on social change occurring through political contestation. These struggles need to be explained with reference to the ‘big picture’, that is, the political context of the time.

Part I of this book describes this context. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the new economic conditions associated with globalization began to unravel the welfare state social consensus that provided the political context for debates on social justice during the era Putnam describes. His thesis of community decline coincides with the breakdown of this consensus. The tremendous popularity of his work strongly suggests that the attempt to re-constitute community through the generation of social capital is central to this search for a new social consensus. The unraveling of the old and the search for a new compromise, able to accommodate the diverse interest groups shaped by the new global economy, provides the political backdrop for the analysis of community in this book.

The book focuses on how communities are constituted through political processes, using poststructuralist insights which reveal how meaning is constructed. Within a poststructuralist perspective, ‘community’ has no fixed meaning, but makes meaning through the appropriation of the dominant discourses framing public policy. The fact that the ‘decline’ narratives fall into the modemist view of social change, which sees society evolving either progressively, or regressively, along a linear pathway is telling of the popularity of this genre in the rhetoric of public policy. A poststructuralist perspective, on the other hand, gives insight into the way in which groups involved in social activism create communities through their engagement with the dominant public policy discourses of the day. It provides the tools to analyze the way in which various community-creating discourses have been mobilized at different times to draw people towards one kind of community rather than another. Why is it that people come to identify with a particular cause, or political position? Cultural factors and the manipulation of dominant discourses play a significant role here - but even these cannot be analyzed out of their historical context. It is the historical context which helps explain why some discourses become dominant at any one point of time.

Adopting an historical perspective enables us to see that discou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Challenging Narratives of Community Decline
• Part II: Community as a Terrain of Political Contestation
• Part III: The Search for a New Social Consensus
• Bibliography
• Index