Highlights of the Week
- The Iain McGilchrist RSAnimate is now live! If you are wondering whether it is worth twelve minutes of your time, take five minutes to read my blog: The Master and his Emissary-The Book of The Century?
- As Emma noted yesterday we had a great event at the RSA yesterady: What is Madness? The best moment, for me, is when the speaker Darian Leader, a Psychoanalyst, spoke about ‘amygdala fetishism’ and the tendency, particularly among males, to try to explain everything with reference to one discrete thing, especially body parts. He added suggestive words to the effect: “As a Psychoanalyst, I have to wonder what is going on there.” He also asked rhetorically about neuroscience: “I mean, which other science do you know that feels the need to put ‘science’ in their name? It was very funny at the time, but on reflection there are quite a few: cognitive science, behavioural science, social science, political science…ah hang on…he means all the flaky stuff…
- I attended an event at the House of Commons, hosted by Rachel Reeves MP, to celebrate the anniversary of the charity, Chess in Schools and Communities and encourage MPs to sign up to early day motion 2158 to get chess into primary schools across the country. There is a readable skit about the event in the Guardian.
- There was a great article in the New Scientist about the Capitalist network that rules the world which gives a much deeper idea about how ‘the 1%’ sustains itself.
- A curious study suggesting Brain imaging reveals why we remain optimistic in the face of reality but I remain mindful of Leader’s comments above.
Social Networks and Public Services (2)
My blog yesterday looked at how a version of Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ could be applied to the way public services impact of citizens’ social networks. Today I want to move this idea forward and look at how the idea of ‘re-ablement’ can be used as a metaphor for a different way of working with service users’ social networks.
The idea of re-ablement will be familiar to those with a background in adult social care. The idea is that service users are given support to develop new skills to help them live independent lives.
Take the example of falls suffered by older people. If, after someone has had a fall, they are given extra help, for example home adaptations or information about home care, they are less likely to have further severe falls and are therefore more likely to continue to lead independent lives. This could also save the public purse some money. At least, that’s the theory.
I believe that we can apply a similar principle to looking at the social networks of service users in at least three domains; caring, transitions and conflict.
The idea of ‘re-ablement’ can be used as a metaphor for a different way of working with service users’ social networks
Caring
Several million people in the UK are carers. Carers UK estimate that every day 6,000 people take on caring responsibilities. When this happens to us it can be a profound change in our relationships.
Take the example of a son or a daughter who suddenly has to care for one of their parents. Or a husband or wife who take on caring responsibilities for their partner. Not only can this change place a tremendous strain on the carer it is also a profound change in the relationship and one that both people have to negotiate.
What might re-ablement look like in this case? It might involve talking with those involved about the stresses and strains that they should expect to face, it might involve giving tips and techniques for how to deal with a new type of relationship, it might even involve introductions to others who have successfully navigated similar situations.
I remember when my grandmother had a nasty fall and broke her hip. My mum took responsibility for providing some of the care that my previously very independently minded gran now needed. No one, at any point, talked to the two of them about how this would work. I believe if they had some of the resulting emotional strain could have been alleviated.
Transitions
Public services often find themselves involved in people’s lives at points of transition. This might be signing on because you have been made unemployed, signing a new tenancy for social housing or leaving prison.
These points of transition inevitably bring about a different quality to our relationships. We may be required to ask more of our friends or family or we may have to become more independent. We may want to use the opportunity to distance ourselves from some previous acquaintances and to make new ones.
Again, these changes can be quite profound. When I worked as a housing officer I would counter sign new tenancies. The new tenants were often young mothers who were moving away from their parents’ home. They would often talk about their nervousness and excitement at having a new type of relationship with their parents. I never knew what to say to them.
Often, a few months later, they would have had a massive fight with their parents and would not be speaking with them. Consequently, they would feel isolated and vulnerable. Public services should be able to offer some kind of support or guidance to people who are undergoing these transitions, to help them navigate the changed character of their relationships.
We could also include the trickier category of people who want to change their social circles. This could be people who previously had a problematic relationship with drugs or alcohol who want to distance themselves from their friends who still have a problematic relationship. It could be people coming out of prison who are wary of falling in with the old crowd. Currently, what can the rehab or probation services offer to these people?
Conflict
Public services are often called to intervene in conflicts. This might be complaints over noise nuisance between neighbours, allegations that a pub is breaking the terms of its license or community tensions around race or religion.
The predominant response from public services in many of these cases is often informed by a law and order approach. One party is designated as a perpetrator and the other a victim. This initiates a process of evidence gathering in which the public services (be they neighbourhood wardens, environmental health officers or police) attempts to prove that the perpetrator has broke a set of rules. If sufficient proof is obtained the public sector will then use some of the sanctions that are available to them, for example, issuing anti-social behaviour orders or reviewing the terms of a pub’s license.
This approach is appropriate in many situations. However, an approach based on early mediation can be more effective. This does not have to be a value neutral type of mediation. In fact, it is often quite appropriate for public services to express a view on the type of settlement that should be reached between the two parties, so-called ‘evaluative mediation’.
At it’s best this form of intervention can prevent further conflict arising. Rather than delivering solutions to these conflicts the public sector has a powerful role in bringing people together in a safe environment to negotiate their differences.
In all three of these examples I believe that public services can provide a service similar to re-enablement. They can assist the users of public services and the people in their social networks to navigate changes in their relationships and the resulting stresses and strains that come from these changes. This approach can prevent the need for more extensive interventions in the future and it can assit people in what are often very trying times.
Social Networks and Public Services (1)
David Brookes recently argued that our view of human nature should have profound implications for how we run public services.
What are those implications? Or, as Americans say, “where’s the beef?”
Over the course of this week I am going to try and sketch out what I think are some of the implications for public services of new insights into human nature. Specifically, I will be looking at the implications of findings on the importance of social networks.
Anyone who wants to acquaint themselves with these findings could do worse than listen to lectures at the RSA given by Christakis or Cacioppo or Omerod.
I would really appreciate your feedback on what I write here.
- Do no harm
I think the most obvious and least contentious implication of the importance of social networks is analogous to Mill’s Harm Principle. Wherever possible public services should attempt to ensure that they do not damage people’s social networks. If they do, they should be conscious of what they are doing and have weighed carefully the costs and benefits of such a course of action.
Although this may seem a fairly obvious principle it does immediately raise the question as to whether social networks are good in and of themselves and whether there are optimal arrangements of social networks. I am indebted to Perri 6 for raising these points with me.
I am not arguing that simply having a large number of friends or acquaintances is a good thing or that there is a perfect arrangement of acquaintances that we should aspire to. However, I think there are clear cases where damaging someone’s social networks can have negative affects on people. For example;
Isolation
We know that loneliness and isolation can be very bad for people. However, those people who are most isolated or lonely are often those who benefit from a large number of public services.
In many cases these public services actually reinforce isolation. This could be through agency care workers that come and go at a bewildering rate or online customer services that are completely impersonal.
Being forced to think about how the bread and butter work of public services can reduce isolation, rather than reinforce it, is one of the most striking challenges to come out of the work on the importance of social networks. This could come through initiatives like TimeBanking, Co-Production or by networking services users, as is done in Southwark Circle.
Governance and participation
For several decades now there has been a cross-party consensus that the users of services should participate in the governance of those services. This can be seen in a range of initiatives from Safer Neighbourhood Teams to tenants sitting on the board of Arms Length Management Organisations for housing stock to Local Involvement Networks for health.
The coalition government have continued this approach, notably encouraging parents to be more involved in the running of schools and giving patients a role in the new health and wellbeing boards.
A social networks perspective throughs up an interesting take on the idea of participation in the governance of public services. One of the strongest reasons for encouraging this type of participation is that service users understand the needs of other services users and are therefore representative of other users, in some sense.
However, a paradox here is that those service users that do participate in this way are often labelled as ‘the usual suspects’ by public officials and their views can be discounted. Worse still, their connections with other service users can be weakened as a result. Partly because they spend so much of their time attending board meetings and the like but more profoundly because they are seen to be part of the system.
The implication is that when public services create space for the participation of service users in governance arrangements they need to ensure that they go out of their way to support these service users to network and remain in contact with as many other service users as is possible.
Disrupting social networks
There are often reasons why government programmes might radically disrupt people’s social networks, for example a transport project, such as a new high speed rail link, or a regeneration project such as the one currently taking place in the Aylesbury estate.
These large infrastructure projects are very difficult to cost. Considerations over land prices, optimism bias from contractors and the availability of finance all need to be weighed up.
It is much harder to put a price on the social networks that are disrupted by such projects. It is also harder to mitigate against the disruption that will be caused. However, I think that one of the conclusions we should draw from insights on the importance of social networks is to be wary of projects that will radically disrupt social networks and take all possible measures to mitigate the damage that might be caused.
I would love to hear your thoughts on what I have written here and whether you think there are other implications for public services.
There’s more to getting “a stronger voice” than AV
On 5th May British citizens will be asked to vote on their preferred voting system; First Past the Post (FPTP) or the Alternative Vote (AV). One of the boldest claims that the proponents of the AV make is that it will give voters “a stronger voice”.
If this were true (I have no idea if it is true I’m afraid) it would be an attractive offer to a lot of people. According to the Citizenship Survey just over a third (37 per cent) of the UK adult population believes they can influence decisions in their local area whereas almost three quarters (73 per cent) feel that it is important to have an influence and 44 per cent said they would like to be more involved in decisions made by councils affecting their local area.
Of course voting is only one part of this problem. There are a number of ways that we can influence the world around us ranging from voting to campaigning to getting out our brooms and cleaning the pavements ourselves.
The government has recognised this and have announced that they will fund the training of 5,000 community organisers; to act as “catalysts for community action at the neighbourhood level”. This has proved to be a controversial decision. There are even those who argue that community organisers should never take money from any government, ever.
Tessy Britton has written a couple of blog posts (here and here) with an interesting take on these questions. I think she is arguing that an Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) (http://abcdeurope.ning.com/) approach is preferable to an Alsinky style community organising approach if you want to build stronger communities.
You might crudely boil the question down to; “do we want to run projects or campaigns?”
I think the discussion can usefully be split into three parts (As Matthew Taylor has written it always seems to be three parts…); building campaigns, building stronger communities and building more empowered communities.
Building Campaigns
The main achievement that the London Citizens like to boast about is their success in securing the ‘London Living Wage’ for a number of workers, for example cleaners at major banks. This campaign used a number of classic Alinsky style techniques including focusing their campaign on one individual (normally the CEO of the bank in question).
These campaigns are able to achieve certain types of change. They are good at changing the practices of organisations that benefit from a community but are not rooted in that community (e.g. slum landlords, employers that pay low wages etc…).
Building Stronger Communities
The Alinsky model for community organising brings together existing organisations (e.g. churches, trade unions etc…) and gets them to focus on campaigning. Part of Tessy’s argument is that this approach is not conducive to building better connected, creative and stronger communities. Since the campaigns are designed around conflict and attack there is little space for creative collaboration. Instead, she argues that we should use an approach that brings people together in shared spaces in a way that celebrates and builds on those things that people already value. An example she gives of the type of project she supports is the People’s Supermarket.
This type of approach can be very successful, especially in areas that have a large amount of “hidden wealth” i.e. community assets (broadly defined), that can be connected or mobilised.
Building Empowered Communities
This suggests the tricky question; which of these approaches will give people the influence that they seem to want and that AV is promising?
Alinsky’s supporters point towards visible changes that happen directly as a result of their campaigns, whereas the ABCD enthusiasts point to the spontaneous emergence of new projects that arise out of their approach.
You will have to make your own mind up on this question. However, I do see a deeper similarity between the approaches than might be apparent.
Connectivity
Both approaches rely on building and utilising relationships within communities.
The Alinsky model works on the assumption that there are more or less formal associations already in existence within a given area. The organiser’s job is to bring these associations together, to connect the connectors, with a sense of purpose.
The ABCD model also tries to make new connections, although these are often between individuals rather than formal associations. Once these connections have been made the creative collaboration can take place.
One might even speculate that a community organiser using the Alinsky method would be much more successful if they worked in an area that had benefited from one of Tessy’s Traveling Pantries than if they worked in an area where there was much weaker levels of social connection.
But perhaps I am drawing connections where none exist?
Can you cut it when the cuts come?
With the recent publication of the Localism Bill and the release of information about cuts to funding from central government, local authorities and local communities now have a clearer idea of what the future looks like. It’s hardly news to say that many will not like what they see, and that the poorest areas are facing the largest cuts. But it is perhaps worth dwelling on the impact that the combination of these two developments might have on communities in different parts of England.
Ironically, councils with the most deprived residents seem to be facing the deepest cuts precisely because their residents are the least affluent. They receive less council tax than local authorities with more affluent residents, which means that not only are they more reliant on funding from central government (which is what is being cut), but also that they are not eligible for so much subsidy from central government to compensate for the coming freeze in council tax payments. As a result, inner-city councils such as Tower Hamlets and Southwark in London are facing cuts that are twice the size of the national average, and larger still than in many affluent areas.
There is plenty to suggest that the empowering effect of the Localism Bill will be weakest in the very areas where cuts are to be deepest. If this is the case, the effect of the Bill is likely to be to widen the gap between communities, not narrow it.
The effects of these cuts might be mitigated by the provisions of the Localism Bill, much of which seems to focus on releasing councils from the control of central government, and releasing local people from the control of their council. Basically, councils will have greater flexibility to spend their (reduced) budgets as they see fit, and local people will have more power to take on services themselves, buy up local buildings, exert greater control over planning decisions and so on.
In theory, this double removal of red tape and restriction might soften the impact of the cuts on the local services people receive, and perhaps allow communities facing more stringent cuts to narrow the gap between themselves and those in areas where cuts are to be lighter. But I think there is plenty to suggest that in practice the opposite will happen, and that the empowering effect of the Bill will be weakest in the very areas where cuts are to be deepest. If this is the case, the effect of the Bill is likely to be to widen the gap between communities, not narrow it.
I’m guessing that people are most likely to take advantage (if that’s the right way to put it) of the extra power offered by the Localism Bill if they are a) part of a strong community and feel it will be worth making the effort on behalf of others, and b) used to taking the initiative and getting involved in council-type issues, and know how to go about this.
I’m also guessing that these kinds of communities and people are more likely to be found in affluent areas than deprived areas.
Evidence for this comes not least from the RSA’s Connected Communities project, which is looking at social networks and access to power in New Cross Gate (a multiply deprived area in Lewisham, right next door to Southwark and Tower Hamlets). Social network analysis has revealed that large numbers of people in the area not only feel that they have no direct access to sources of local power and influence, they also do not know anyone else who might be able to put them in contact with such sources. A quarter of the people interviewed effectively felt unable to change things locally, either directly or indirectly. The analysis also shows the extent of social isolation in the area and the sparseness of local connections more generally.
All this suggests that many people in New Cross Gate are not used to getting involved, do not know how they can access power and are unlikely to feel it will be worthwhile trying. Contrast this with well-publicised middle class efforts to set up free schools and the well-known phenomenon of the pushy middle classes getting better services because they know how to ‘use the system’ and make themselves heard. These are the people who appear to be most able to use the provisions of the Localism Bill to mitigate the effects of the cuts – and they tend to live in more affluent areas which will be less seriously affected in the first place. By comparison, the residents of Tower Hamlets and New Cross Gate are in for a double whammy of deeper cuts that they can do less about.
The Connected Communities project is looking at ways to reduce social isolation and improve access to power in New Cross Gate and elsewhere; it seems that the events of the past few days have made this more important than ever.
Bill Hicks and the Big Society
What do the great American comic, Bill Hicks, and the Big Society have in common? Probably not a great deal but one of Hicks’ gags about the illogic driving so many ‘pro-life’ activists in the US suggests a possible link – in my head in anyway. He asks the question: how committed are pro-lifers to the premise that all life is sacred. His gag goes something like this. It’s the funeral of Joseph, a 95 year old guy, who has lived a ‘full and happy life’. The family of Joseph – solemn but with joy in their hearts – carry him through the graveyard to the burial ground. But the family are greeted by a screaming mob of twenty people. They form a human daisy-chain around the burial site. The mob scream at the family: ‘He’s not allowed in”. The family respond, “but what do you mean, Joseph lived a great, long life, and he passed away in his sleep?” And the mob reply, as quick as a gun shot: “You’re missing the point, we’re pro-life, we love life, the old man’s not allowed in, he’s not ready yet. No one’s allowed to die”.
This issue – the issue of commitment to principles and premises – made me think of the Big Society. Just how committed are the coalition government to the Big Society? Now, this is precisely the kind of question that usually makes me want to poke people in the eye – particularly when it comes out of the mouths of reactionaries, from the left and right, who dismiss it without it even engaging with it.
But it’s a question we need to be asking. Because it’s becoming hard to believe the coalition has really thought through its Big Society policy agenda, or at least, how it fits within its overall policy agenda. The recent polemic (and hyperbole) over cuts to housing benefit and the cap on the maximum amount of housing benefit families can claim, would seem to be a case in point.
According to DWP figures, 21,000 people will be affected by new caps on the amount families can claim for five, four, three, two and one-bedroom properties across the UK. This includes 17,000 in London, the majority of which are out of work. One consequence of this will be large number of people having to relocate because they can no longer afford their rent. This will mean people leaving homes they’ve lived in for a long time, leaving the communities they have been apart of and no longer having the support networks many people depend on.
From the perspective of a government who say they are committed to building the Big Society, this seems a very odd policy decision. The large and extensive literature on social capital by Bob Putnam, David Halpern and others, over the last fifteen years, shows that social trust, co-operation, solidarity and feelings of belonging – the things that bind us together with other people – will be forcibly undermined by families and people having to move and relocate as a direct result of the above changes to housing benefit. The big problem for a government committed to the Big Society is this: a Big Society that is sustainable needs a strong ‘economy of regard’ based on strong relationships of trust, co-operation, solidarity and a shared sense of purpose – the very social norms and relations these housing policies threaten and weaken.
And from the perspective of a government looking to make significant savings to public services – 81billion over the next five years – these housing reforms might even prove to be economically ill-thought through. Why? We know that when people, particularly those most likely to depend on public services, move from one place to another, they not only leave behind their family home, they leave behind the networks of support they have depended upon, which saves the state huge amounts of money. Social care is a good example of this. So the result, we can speculate, might be to increase new demand on public services not reduce existing demand, and thereby reduce the anticipated savings generated by putting a cap on housing benefit.
Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong. I certainly hope so.
Small worlds and lost diamonds
Filed under: Arts and Society, Education Matters, Social Economy
Fairness seems a recurrent theme of late. Today’s breaking news cries: “UK society divided and unfair, report claims.”
That ‘report claims’ gets me every time. UK society is unfair: we do not need social network analysis to tell us that who you know matters. UK society is divided: the world is only ‘small’ (all six billon, eight hundred million of us) because we inhabit very specific parts of it.
But my science only gets me so far: I can construct you a diagram that highlights divisions; others can produce research that suggests that inequality fosters both unhappiness and unsafe societies; academics can debate as to what the conflicting libertarian and egalitarian views of fairness are. Yet birds of a feather flock; we fear difference and help our kind; and if inequality and stigma become the very lay of the land, then it is hard to see them.
Our flocking and fearing are very human, but are they fair? Fair for me is that distribution of benefits and duties that reflects our conception of human beings. If we understand all human beings to be equal, then that distribution should reflect this. If a woman is worth half of a man, then so too is her testimony. Whilst this all very much ties into how I view human rights (a post for another day), and borrows from Rawls in a way both outmoded and possibly to his displeasure, this understanding of fair is very important for the good of society.
Leaving the various statistical squabbles to more accomplished statisticians and their point-scoring, this unfair distribution of opportunity harms not just the individual but, lest we forget this is in our liberal age, it harms the collective. Our collective talent is our collective wealth, but this is squandered to stigma and lack of vision. If it is most often those born at the top that rise to it, we must either believe that it is only these children that hold the seeds of future success, or we are victims of a collective insanity that allows raw diamonds to pass for pebbles, as we laboriously polish cubic zirconia.
In my recent dissertation, alongside positing an understanding of social capital as the indicator for whether the right to participation is fulfilled (another day!), I followed the development of five girls as they took part in a film making and human rights course. These girls found a voice, found themselves as agents of change , and will soon find themselves addressing panels of their fellow residents, and Universty of London MA students. In this project, as in others I have worked on, we see that little is needed to turn aspirations around. And it is our aspirations that drive us.
The UK has shown us that equal opportunities is not equality of opportunity. If social mobility can be understood as sets of escalators, with some automatically on the up, and others automatically being driven down, then it must be surely viewed as discriminatory to not focus efforts on halting the downward trends of the marginalised ‘escalators’, and to instead provide equal amounts of electricity and oil and wish them both well. The fact that in a liberal society any individual can aim for anything in theory, must not be used to obscure the fact that in a liberal capitalist economy individuals are constrained by their societal and economic circumstances in practice. Life isn’t fair, but less stigma and more tailored and deliberate help to those handed a raw deal might help us on our way. And here my science may help.
Helpful arrows?
I map for clarity. My mind works through arrows: possibly through my musical education, with its hairpin crescendo and diminuendos, my notes have always been notated both mathematically and musically. Employment ↓, as inflation ↑. Neoliberalism → to an < in soup kitchens. Economic growth ≠ socio-economic development. I do not think in a linear fashion, so these small arrows then become cross-referenced by the type of ↘ and { that would cause word to have a hissyfit and then die.
At the RSA I am social network analysis ‘champion’, trying to mainstream my love of sociograms and graphs across the whole organisation. These visual maps of people’s social ties and information flows allow us to ‘unpeel’ the community, laying hidden links and structural weaknesses bare.
Yesterday I was thrown an interesting challenge. If I map out all the civic actors in a given place, do I make it easier and more efficient for them to act, or do I merely make it easier for the most powerful to co-opt what they are doing, all in the name of the Big Society? In an era of open information, but unequal access, who does the democratisation of information actually benefit? In a recent blog Thomas Neumark directed us to a report that showed that computerising all land records in Bangalore had lead to increased monopoly and far more targeted corruption.
This all → the question. How can our mapping for clarity be targeted at those who need such clarity most? Finding that postmen and dustbin men (people?) are hidden reserves of connectivity is fascinating and sheds new light on how we view those links that make community. Yet using this information to re-brand badly paid public servants as big society information outlets would be exploitative and probably achieve the opposite of its intended outcomes. Highlighting community organisers can make volunteering more effective and far-reaching; yet we do not want those who live to organise and do, to become next years’ unpaid social service providers. If information is power, how do we stop this open-source informational power disproportionately benefiting those who already pull the strings?
Where’s the Big Society when you need it?
Last night Newsnight told us what most of us knew already, that local councils are being forced to play slash and burn with services in a bid to cut around 25% out of their soon-to-be-shrunk budgets, in anticipation of the Comprehensive Spending Review this Autumn.
This is why I was less than surprised when a charity worker told me he was being forced to make around 70 of his core staff redundant today, and this is why: government pays for a great deal of what the charity sector does. This is especially so in the case of unpopular but essential services, such as homeless halfway homes, adult education centres and ex-offender programmes, these are programmes charities would not be able to get funding for elsewhere. With local councils cutting back on how much they will spend on such services, the charities providing them are having to make people redundant. Whether the government intended for this to happen or not, local councils have heard the message “cuts, cuts, cuts” and now they are doing so.
Wasn’t the Big Society supposed to stop this from happening?
Well, the concept of the Big Society, as far as I understand it, goes something like this: government pulls back on some of the services it provides and works with charities, volunteers and businesses that step in, form partnerships and help tailor and co-produce locally envisaged, cost effective solutions. This has the potential to be exciting stuff.
Indeed, think tanks and government are already coming up with ideas of how the Big Society could work on the ground. We have had Matthew Taylor appear on Newsnight to talk about the RSA’s approach to the subject (and big up the work of Projects in general, which can be viewed here), our Connected Communities programme has published a report on the part social networks will play in making the Big Society real, there are ideas for a Big Society Bank and National Citizen Service and significant research has been made on the potential of co-produced local services.
But ideas take time. The ink has barely dried on the speeches outlining some of these plans. The pilots for the National Citizen Service are not due to start until mid 2011. The comprehensive spending review will be with us in November.
Some of these ideas really are quite exciting, and plausible too. Take co-production for example. The Nacro Preston Restorative Justice project already enables local people to work with the police and other government agencies to rehabilitate criminals locally, with ordinary people staging mediations between offenders and their victims and helping to design restorative justice programmes themselves.
The lesson we can draw from examples like these is that the Big Society can work, but that it takes more than just a smattering of time, effort and investment (which is not what you want to hear when you have been told you live in an age of economic austerity). Significant funds have been channelled into recruiting and training the volunteers who take part in the aforementioned Nacro project, with the commitment required by volunteers not insignificant. This makes the Big Society timeline fairly incompatible with that of ‘cut and cut now’. With the idea of the Big Society still something of a stick figure drawing, as opposed to a finely articulated policy, I fear time has already run out for those losing their jobs as we speak.
Why should you read our Connected Communities report?
Filed under: Education Matters, Social Brain, Social Economy
“Social Capital is the currency of the Big Society, and social networks hold the reserves of that currency.” -RSA
The connected communities report is a serious piece of work and the result of a sustained team effort, but in case you think it sounds a bit ‘heavy’, here is an alternative perspective on what we did and why you should read it:
1) We arranged a marriage.
We brought together the explanatory power of social network theory and an analysis of community policy and practice in the UK.
2) The marriage was timely.
You need to read the report to know the couple better. They are interesting in their own right, but together they are remarkably productive and help to:
Give shape and definition to the still somewhat aspirational notion of ‘The Big Society; suggest a new way to measure ‘efficiency‘ in the age of austerity; highlight the importance of hidden wealth and how to make better use of it.
3) The marriage gave rise to three offspring:
Building on the work of Christakis and Fowler at Harvard, we called them Connectivity, Contagion and Reflexivity. Together they define the structure, function and process of community networks.
4) Connectivity is the first born.
He (tough call on gender) features most prominently in our year one report, giving a diagnosis of patterns of connectivity in New Cross Gate, signalling weak ties as opportunities for employment, patterns of isolation, under-utilised resources, access to power and influence, and much more.
4) Contagion is the second born.
A powerful specimen, Contagion indicates possibilities to spread pro-social behaviour, including neighbourliness, volunteering, and environmental behaviour. In years two and three of the Connected Communities project, we will get to know her better. Her sibling, Connectivity, suggests how such contagion could spread, but as Ormerod and others have argued, we never really know for sure.
5)Reflexivity is the third born.
A young creature, not yet fully formed, but with massive potential to empower, Reflexivity concerns what happens when we become aware of the conditions of our actions. In this case, when we involve a community in learning about their networks, how will that change their view of themselves, and their possibilities for engagement?
So here is why you should read the report: It’s about a marriage and three kids, and our belief that they have the potential to live happily ever after.
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