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‘The Idea of
Community, Social Policy and Self’ is your first book. What made you decide to write it?
Well, in the areas
of work I have been involved in for some years – community work, social
services, social policy, the idea of community is very common. And it is becoming more so. I have come
to feel that it is badly overused.
It is often used without clear meaning. In fact, it is often used quite
unthinkingly. It is seen as a ‘good’ thing, a good thing to be associated
with. A lot of job titles have
‘community’ attached to them. A
lot of government policies talk about community. A lot of institutions talk about
community and describe themselves as being community oriented in some way
or other.
I get the
impression that you are not entirely happy with the way in which the idea
of community is used?
Yes, in fact I increasingly find myself being irritated with the
uses of the word ‘community’ and the label ‘community’. Often it seems to me to have become a
habit of expression. It seems to
me to be attached to job titles or titles of institutions without any
clear logic or without there being any clear distinction between that job
or institution and other jobs and institutions.
Would you like to give an
example of this?
One example I have
noticed recently is the term ‘community pharmacy’. Why on earth use the term community for
a place which is a private business, privately owned, just because it
happens to be doing its business in a public street? Would you talk for example about a
community newsagent? Or a community fruit and veg shop? But this is just
a recent example. Very often
people talk about certain jobs and use the word community, like community
nurse or community health visitor.
And yet there isn’t the difference between those jobs and other
jobs to justify the word. I am
particular about words. Words
should be used because they convey meaning or information. At best when a word like community is
used unthinkingly, it conveys no information to people – at worst it may
seriously mislead people about the nature of what it is they are looking
at. And also of course, it can be
used by some people and by some institutions to put a gloss on what they
are doing that isn’t deserved.
Would
you then reject the use of the idea of community, or simply the ways in
which the idea is used?
Well, certainly I
would be happy if there was a lot less use of the term. And a lot less reliance on the idea
than there is, but not because the idea of community is not important.
It’s precisely because it is important that it should be used
less, and more carefully. In fact I
have come increasingly to think, despite all the things that irritate me,
that community is a fundamental idea, or rather it touches on fundamental
things. It touches on our social
experience, on our relationships with each other in groups
There are quite a
few books on the subject. Do you
feel that your book has something different to offer?
Well, I feel that a lot of books deal with the idea of community,
or rather they touch on it, but often they don’t really explore it. They don’t really explore the idea as
such; they don’t look at it philosophically. A lot of books on community or social
policy for example, refer to the famous difficulty of defining community
and yet go on to take it for granted.
They don’t ask what seems to me a necessary and fundamental
question – is there actually such a thing as community? Because I think you need to ask that
question before you can go on to discuss appropriate meanings of the
word. My own conclusion is that
the idea of community is a valid idea to apply to our social
experience – sometimes. But often
it may not be, so my central concern was to see where the idea of
community may be valid and useful and where it may not be. Because often it is not sensible
or useful or relevant, and yet it is a fundamental idea. That’s why for example in my book I
give up on any attempt to define community, but rather concentrate on
applications of the idea that are useful and applications that are not
useful. Or as I have put it,
helpful or not helpful.
You use the natural
sciences quite a lot to examine your subject. Has science always been an interest of
yours?
I have become
increasingly interested in the natural sciences. I have come to feel that the separation
between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and
arts and humanities on the other that I grew up with is wrong and
damaging. It’s damaging to our
understanding of things and that separation can breed prejudice in one
field against another. I believe
for example that there is a lot of prejudice against the natural sciences
among people like myself who come from a non-scientific background. It’s a prejudice which I think can
sometimes be born from a sense of inferiority you can feel about a subject
you know little or nothing about.
But as I see it now the natural sciences, the social sciences, the
arts and the humanities so-called can all be, and I emphasise can
be, simply different ways of understanding more of the world around us
and our experience of the world and our experience of each other. Also I have referred a lot in the book
to the natural sciences because the subject of the book, the idea of
community, touches on questions about human nature, about the individual
and the social. How can you do
that sensibly without going into the natural sciences, especially into
biology and questions about evolution?
There seems to have
been a great deal of research involved.
Did you uncover anything, which you didn’t expect to?
Well, in terms of
social policy for example, the rejection of institutional care which
seems to be common isn’t always justified by actual experience. The idea of community care rather than
institutional care may be an oversimplification and in any case for some
people in some situations, institutional care may in fact be better. There was also the fact that very often
community care, or care in the community, or community services,
sometimes might conceal isolation and separation. That’s one of the reasons, possibly one
of the biggest reasons, why I distrust the word community. Because it tends to imply
relationships, when sometimes there may not be relationships to justify
the term. I wasn’t surprised by
evidence of people rejecting community or going outside community. My awareness of this was one of the motives
in writing the book. Indeed, it’s
an area to which I would like to return more in future.
If you want to make good use of the
idea of community, I feel you should think about those situations in
which people go outside of community, in other words you should think
about the limits of community. In fact, this is an area especially in
which I think my book is different from most others on community that I
have read myself, in that it very much examines the limits to the
significance of the idea of community.
A lot of the things I came across
in the natural sciences were new to me; not necessarily unexpected, but
new. And also looking at the idea
of community in modern economic and social conditions; what seems to be
the simple idea a lot of people have about globalisation and what is seen
as the loss of community in the modern world are just that – simple. It’s not at all as straightforward or
one-way as many people like to think.
Another area of research which did
not in itself come as a complete shock to me, but rather to the degree to
which it was true, concerned personal care for people who need support
because of physical or mental frailties or illness or whatever. I was
struck by how often in these cases the idea of community was not relevant
because it simply didn’t correspond to how people lived.
You have read and
studied a great deal in the course of your research. Which writers have been most important
to you?
It’s very hard to
narrow it down, but in many ways Karl Popper’s way of looking at things
has influenced me a lot. I have been influenced too by reading Karl Marx,
or some of Karl Marx, though I ended up disagreeing with most of his
ideas. But the process of working
out that disagreement was important.
Reading Richard Dawkins was important, partly because I ended up
disagreeing with a lot of his thinking.
I found many of Mary Midgley’s ways of putting things
interesting. What I have read of
Thomas Hobbes I found very interesting for exactly the same reason as
with Karl Marx; I ended up disagreeing with most of his ideas, but the
process of working out my disagreement was important. Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and
Utopia falls into the same category – the importance of working out
one’s disagreement with someone. Raymond Plant’s book Community and
Ideology is one of the most interesting and useful books I have ever
read on the subject. A
fundamentally useful book on the subject of community care is Martin
Bulmer’s The Social Basis of Community Care – an indispensable
book on the subject I feel. I
found Jocelyn Cornwell’s book Hard-earned Lives: Accounts of Health
and Illness in East London, to be
especially interesting in its harder-edged approach to community. It was she who put forward the phrase
‘the dark side of community’. Karl
Atkin and Julia Twigg’s book Carers Perceived is a fundamental
text on the subject of carers and therefore on the idea of community,
precisely in the way it illustrates the limits of community. I found the ideas and outlook of Richard
Feynman very interesting. I also
found Liz McShane’s little volume Community Support: a Pilot Programme
remarkably insightful and useful.
Will there perhaps
be another book from you?
Several books
maybe, but that’s being very optimistic!
What does your
publisher think?
Well, you will have
to talk to my agent!
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