Community work, citizenship and democracy: re-making the connections: Fid-Bau Portal

Community work, citizenship and democracy: re-making the connections

Shaw, Mae / Martin, Ian

This paper is an attempt to do four things: first, to review key phases in the post-war development of community work and to identify the discourses of citizenship implicit within them (i.e. social democracy: the problem of the inactive citizen; the structuralist critique: the problem of citizen action; marketization: the problem of the citizen as customer; democratic renewal: the challenge of active citizenship); second, to argue that the contemporary context requires new ways of thinking about the relationship between community work, citizenship and democracy; third, to assess the significance of the recent history of community work for this task; finally, to consider the extent to which the current interest in democratic renewal presents opportunities for reconstructing this relationship. At a time when community work seems to be so directly tied to the apron strings of the state – indeed, increasingly incorporated within state policy – it is all the more important to stand back and take stock. The main elements of the argument are brought together in a summary table at the end of the text.