Social Work and the Community:
A Critical Context for Practice,
Paul Stepney and Keith Popple,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
This is a generally very sound book that, with the exception of my thoughts in the last paragraph of this review, is well conceived and executed. It provides an authoritative and up-to-date grounding in aspects of ‘community’ that are relevant to social work in the twenty-first century. There are some minor irritations—notably writing about ‘New Labour’ as though the authors take for granted that it is still novel, on so many pages that I lost count of them. Aware as I am that, by the time this book comes of age, there will be children in secondary schools who were not born when ‘New’ Labour came to power in 1997, I shall agree to differ with the authors over this particular editorial decision. However, there are so many ways in which the book pleases me that I incline towards concentrating on its strengths in this review.
We don't have enough really good books about ‘community’ as it applies now in social work, so this book is a welcome addition to my shelf. It begins appropriately enough with familiar discussion about the nature of community and the contribution of community students and different forms of state intervention in communities. The reader needs to note that although the treatment of concepts crosses national boundaries into Europe, the discussion of community work, by and large, is not exactly permeated with discussion of global aspects (some of the discussion in Chapter 9 is the exception to this). In a book that uses notions such as ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ and deals, albeit briefly, with globalization, this is a shame. On page 154, under the heading ‘European policy context’, we are told in the first sentence that Part II contains a detailed analysis of the wider policy context. I must have misinterpreted this because I was disappointed to find that the chapter beginning Part II was a very British—indeed, with its early emphasis on Community Development Projects and so on, a rather English treatment. (There isn't a huge amount about Scotland or Wales in the book and there is even less about Northern Ireland.) However, by the same token, it was a fine-grained yet robust analysis, so I became absorbed in it and put my reservation on hold. Throughout, I found this capacity to retain my interest a feature of this well written book. Indeed, the great strength of the book is that it devotes space to analysis of aspects of community policies and practice of great relevance to the practitioner in England.
The sequence of the book is that it proceeds from ideas and concepts in Part I (Chapters 1–3), to policies in Part II (Chapters 4–6) and practice in Part III (Chapters 7–9). It is good to see in Chapter 3 a substantial discussion of reconceptualizations of ‘community’. Chapter 6 in Part II is a particularly fascinating examination of post-welfare state assumptions and policies. I like the breadth of the treatment in Chapter 9 of ‘international’ aspects, though I think that, apart from occasional references to, for instance, Latin America, and pages 169–71, which refer briefly to the USA and Australia, this has largely a European focus and, under that umbrella, the bulk of the material is restricted to comparisons in a few UK and other European locations.
The book does tend to omit a more systematic consideration of the wider global scene rather than making somewhat incidental references to the world beyond Europe, which, for me, means that the extensive literature on global aspects of community social development doesn't intersect significantly with the approach taken in this book. Some people may not view this as a problem, but, given that this book's title includes the word ‘context’, I regard the context of participatory and collaborative initiatives in many developing countries—with their accompanying messages about empowering research—as of relevance to a book of this nature. I guess the authors will say they can't include everything, but I would welcome attention being paid to the economic and political forces that structure and define ‘our’ world, allocate resources for development and, in the process, exclude not only the faintest, seldom-heard voices, but many other communities as well. The authors take a welcome case study approach to this kind of aspect—as in the comparative study of initiatives tackling exclusion in three European cities (pp. 167–9)—and it would have been good to have seen this approach extended to materially less wealthy parts of the world, contextualizing this, perhaps, with some critical material on the limitations of anti-poverty initiatives and the conditionality of aid with, perhaps, some ‘post-structuralist’ and feminist analysis and illustrations to extend critical perspectives referred to in the book, and demonstrate that poor people in communities can resist and fight back. There is some illustrative material on pages 169–71 on critical approaches, but this discussion of how we can move beyond structural analysis is placed late—creating the impression of an afterthought in the book—rather than heading it up. I think the authors' view is that the structural analysis should be combined with ‘critical postmodernism’, to sustain what I believe the authors are advocating at the very end of this book—critical, community-based practice. Having concluded this, I think, in the next edition, they should go back to the beginning of the book, recast the introduction to bring it out more and reshape Chapter 1 so that it brings to the foreground and expands into a more fully theorized statement the lone sentence that sits just before the conclusion about arguing for a critical practice. I had to be patient and dig for this, the most important and enduring message to take away from this otherwise very interesting book.
Robert Adams
We don't have enough really good books about ‘community’ as it applies now in social work, so this book is a welcome addition to my shelf. It begins appropriately enough with familiar discussion about the nature of community and the contribution of community students and different forms of state intervention in communities. The reader needs to note that although the treatment of concepts crosses national boundaries into Europe, the discussion of community work, by and large, is not exactly permeated with discussion of global aspects (some of the discussion in Chapter 9 is the exception to this). In a book that uses notions such as ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ and deals, albeit briefly, with globalization, this is a shame. On page 154, under the heading ‘European policy context’, we are told in the first sentence that Part II contains a detailed analysis of the wider policy context. I must have misinterpreted this because I was disappointed to find that the chapter beginning Part II was a very British—indeed, with its early emphasis on Community Development Projects and so on, a rather English treatment. (There isn't a huge amount about Scotland or Wales in the book and there is even less about Northern Ireland.) However, by the same token, it was a fine-grained yet robust analysis, so I became absorbed in it and put my reservation on hold. Throughout, I found this capacity to retain my interest a feature of this well written book. Indeed, the great strength of the book is that it devotes space to analysis of aspects of community policies and practice of great relevance to the practitioner in England.
The sequence of the book is that it proceeds from ideas and concepts in Part I (Chapters 1–3), to policies in Part II (Chapters 4–6) and practice in Part III (Chapters 7–9). It is good to see in Chapter 3 a substantial discussion of reconceptualizations of ‘community’. Chapter 6 in Part II is a particularly fascinating examination of post-welfare state assumptions and policies. I like the breadth of the treatment in Chapter 9 of ‘international’ aspects, though I think that, apart from occasional references to, for instance, Latin America, and pages 169–71, which refer briefly to the USA and Australia, this has largely a European focus and, under that umbrella, the bulk of the material is restricted to comparisons in a few UK and other European locations.
The book does tend to omit a more systematic consideration of the wider global scene rather than making somewhat incidental references to the world beyond Europe, which, for me, means that the extensive literature on global aspects of community social development doesn't intersect significantly with the approach taken in this book. Some people may not view this as a problem, but, given that this book's title includes the word ‘context’, I regard the context of participatory and collaborative initiatives in many developing countries—with their accompanying messages about empowering research—as of relevance to a book of this nature. I guess the authors will say they can't include everything, but I would welcome attention being paid to the economic and political forces that structure and define ‘our’ world, allocate resources for development and, in the process, exclude not only the faintest, seldom-heard voices, but many other communities as well. The authors take a welcome case study approach to this kind of aspect—as in the comparative study of initiatives tackling exclusion in three European cities (pp. 167–9)—and it would have been good to have seen this approach extended to materially less wealthy parts of the world, contextualizing this, perhaps, with some critical material on the limitations of anti-poverty initiatives and the conditionality of aid with, perhaps, some ‘post-structuralist’ and feminist analysis and illustrations to extend critical perspectives referred to in the book, and demonstrate that poor people in communities can resist and fight back. There is some illustrative material on pages 169–71 on critical approaches, but this discussion of how we can move beyond structural analysis is placed late—creating the impression of an afterthought in the book—rather than heading it up. I think the authors' view is that the structural analysis should be combined with ‘critical postmodernism’, to sustain what I believe the authors are advocating at the very end of this book—critical, community-based practice. Having concluded this, I think, in the next edition, they should go back to the beginning of the book, recast the introduction to bring it out more and reshape Chapter 1 so that it brings to the foreground and expands into a more fully theorized statement the lone sentence that sits just before the conclusion about arguing for a critical practice. I had to be patient and dig for this, the most important and enduring message to take away from this otherwise very interesting book.
Robert Adams
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