Marjorie Mayo

Partnerships for regeneration and community development Some opportunities, challenges and constraints

From a range of perspectives, participation and partnership have been considered key elements of regeneration. This article starts by unpacking this view, exploring some of the differing definitions and models of part nership for urban regeneration. Partnerships can be empowering, but they can also be disempowering for communities and for the pro fessionals who work with them. Drawing upon case study materials, the article concludes by exploring how community participation might be supported in empowering rather than disempowering ways.

Identity, Life History and Commitment to Welfare

Using detailed extracts from two life histories, this article examines the nature of the personal identifications that often underpin the commitment of welfare workers to their jobs. We explore the paradox that it is those identifications such as class and gender, mediated through individual biography, that fix the ‘self as object’ and that also provide us with the resources for self-transformation. In this respect, the article not only throws light upon the psychical and emotional roots of commitment to the other, but also upon some of the impasses ‘identity theory’ currently finds itself in.

Learning global citizenship? Exploring connections between the local and the global

This article identifies historical connections between adult learning, popular education and the emergence of the public sphere in Europe, exploring potential implications for adult learning and community development, drawing upon research evaluating programmes to promote community-based learning for active citizenship in UK. The research findings illustrate the relevance of the global and indeed the regional levels, when addressing concerns with active citizenship, locally. The article then moves on to examine experiences of global citizen advocacy coalitions, experiences from which participants have been drawing differing lessons about global citizenship. Finally, the conclusions raise questions about the scope for adult learning and community development in the current policy context, shaped so significantly by neo-liberal agendas. Social movements in general and popular education movements, more specifically, would seem to have vital roles to play, facilitating adult learning for critical democratic engagement with the structures of governance, locally and beyond, internationally.

Learning for active citizenship: Training for and learning from participation in area regeneration

Abstract Although recent debates on lifelong learning have focused upon economic aspects, social aspects have received some attention, particularly in the context of current debates on active citizenship and social exclusion. This paper starts by exploring some of the contested concepts, differing discourses and varying agendas beneath the ‘suspiciously unchallengeable’ consensus that seems to pervade so much of these debates. Drawing upon UK research, the paper then focuses upon the training being provided to facilitate capacity-building in area regeneration programmes, and the learning that is actually taking place. Despite examples of good practice, the overall situation is problematic and specific groups, including ethnic minority communities, emerge as particularly under-resourced (potentially compounding their experiences of social exclusion). The paper concludes with some policy implications. A national policy framework could set standards of provision, but this should be enabling rather than prescriptive, negotiated with the different stakeholders to meet their needs as they define these.

The obsession with outputs: over regulation and the impact on the emotional identities of public service professionals

This paper draws upon research on the ways in which public service professionals working with disadvantaged communities, manage the ethical dilemmas and emotional tensions experienced in role. We view the public sphere as a dilemmatic space and the effective use of emotions is seen as essential. We explore the emotions engaged and the coping strategies adopted by these professionals and their sources of support, both internal and external, in response to over-regulation. We explore the reactions to such changes in the nature of the work and the implications for policy and organisational practice.

Psycho-social Perspectives in Policy and Professional Practice Research

In this chapter we explore the use of a psycho-social perspective in a two-year research project1 on how public service urban regeneration professionals negotiate ethical dilemmas and the coping strategies and resources they draw upon in doing so. We examine some of the dilemmas and challenges to emerge from the adopted research methodology. We suggest that a psycho-social perspective adds a valuable dimension to the field of qualitative research when using in-depth narrative interviewing. Further, it heightens awareness of the researcher-researched dynamic and its relationship to both data production and analysis. In contrast to other psycho-social researchers, we argue for more of a dialogical relationship between researcher and research participants. This provided additional insights and enabled us to share our understandings with the research participants throughout the process. The research outcomes were intended to have an impact on professional training, practice and development, and the method gave due recognition to the participants’ value-base and provided a reflective space for participants to develop new insights and change behaviour. We begin by outlining the development of a psychosocial perspective to research. We identify its core components developed to date and explain how we modified a number of them before exploring some of the dilemmas in using a psycho-social approach.

Access to Justice for Disadvantaged Communities

Access to justice for all, regardless of the ability to pay, has been a core democratic value. But this basic human right has come under threat through wider processes of restructuring, with an increasingly market-led approach to the provision of welfare. Professionals and volunteers in Law Centres in Britain are struggling to provide legal advice and access to welfare rights to disadvantaged communities. Drawing upon original research, this unique study explores how strategies to safeguard these vital services might be developed in ways that strengthen rather than undermine the basic ethics and principles of public service provision. The book explores how such strategies might strengthen the position of those who provide, as well as those who need, public services, and ways to empower communities to work more effectively with professionals and progressive organisations in the pursuit of rights and social justice agendas more widely.

Individualization and ethical agency

According to Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, the accelerated pace of modernity pushes all societies and their citizens toward intensified forms of destructive innovation and adaptation. Humans are forced into a world of increasing social complexity in which the stable anchors of tradition are loosened. The taken-for-granted loyalties of the past are challenged, and with this, the challenge of finding satisfactory values that can act as a guide in private and public life becomes evermore daunting. This new and complex world poses a challenge to individuals’ moral and ethical capacities that were previously held more firmly within the embrace of unquestioned and simple loyalties to one’s group. Today, increasingly, individuals belong to many different groups. Alongside the belongingness to class and nation, people become aware of new group affiliations based upon the largely ascribed but also partly chosen affinities of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, place, and culture. Moreover, changes in the social relations of production and consumption generate a range of new occupational and lifestyle identities. Today’s citizen belongs to multiple groups, and in the course of a week, her many different identities become salient according to the social relations she engages in. These identities pull individuals this way and that, sometimes, as Bauman (1993) puts it, “one praising what the other condemns.” Tradition sheltered people from responsibility. They did not have to think too much. Humans acted in certain ways because “people like us” did that kind of thing. In contrast, to cite Bauman again, modernity condemns people to freedom, condemns individuals to having to think.

Providing access to justice in disadvantaged communities: Commitments to welfare revisited in neo-liberal times

Access to justice was central to the post-war Welfare State but this has been under attack, as part of wider neo-liberal challenges. The impacts have been experienced particularly sharply in disadvantaged areas where Law Centres have been providing services to those unable to access welfare rights by other means. The research that underpins this article set out to explore the ways in which these policies have been experienced by those who provide these services, examining their dilemmas as professionals and volunteers in the front-line of welfare provision. The article concludes that whilst there was some evidence that professional ethics and values were being maintained, this was too often at the expense of the staff concerned. Marketization strategies had been undermining public service morale, despite evidence of some continuing resilience and commitment to the provision of access to justice and welfare rights for the most disadvantaged, posing questions about the limits of markets more widely.

‘The World Will Never Be the Same Again’? Reflecting on the Experiences of Jubilee 2000, Mobilizing Globally for the Remission of Unpayable Debts

The emergence of global citizen action has been widely recognized as having become part of the discourse and practice of democratic politics and social change. Jubilee 2000 was a remarkable example of global citizen action, campaigning against unpayable Third World debt. Whilst Jubilee 2000 had novel features, however, the conclusion that ‘the world will never be the same again’ invites further exploration, both in relation to the implications for theoretical debates and in relation to social movements as these have been developing globally, in practice. This paper starts by summarizing key features of differing approaches to the study of social movements in general and global social movements more specifically. This provides the context for exploring their relevance to the analysis of the experiences and achievements of Jubilee 2000. The evidence comes from published sources and discussion papers and from interviews with particular individuals involved, as staff and activists, in Jubilee 2000 itself and its constituent organizations.