The State And Community Action

The State And Community Action

Synopsis

Community Development has gone through many stages since the early days of independent radical community activism. It has acquired the trappings of a much more complex, broad social movement, rooted in an entrepreneurial ethos. State agendas on social policy and welfare have been uncritically embraced by the community movement and responsibility for the management of state-determined programs of community care accepted with silent and uncritical approval.Terry Robson draws on Gramscian concepts of hegemony, civil society, and the contradictory role of the community worker as a radical intellectual to demonstrate the problems inherent in this co-option. Against a background of continuing civil and political conflict, he looks at case studies in the United States, Romania, Northern Ireland, and throughout Europe. Robin challenges the optimistic belief that community development, in its present form, has any potential to effect real social change. The possibilities that community development itself might create the basis of an alternative political bloc, he reveals, have now been swallowed up in the rush to take advantage of lucrative funding opportunities. In the process, community activists have adopted the values and habits of the ruling class.

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