The comments by Beddow reflect tensions which have existed about thenature and identity of community development for over forty years.From the early 1970s into the 1980s, this played out in terms of community development conceived as a professional versus a political activity. The government-backed Community Development Project initiative in the early 1970s generated a Marxist analysis which came to view statesponsored community development as effectively papering over deep divisions created by capitalism. The notion of community development workers being ‘in and against the state’ emerged from this analysis. Against this were those who, while not rejecting such analysis outright, nonetheless saw recognition and a central place for community developPartnership,the Big Society and community organizing 127 by guest on January 23, 2016 from ment as embedded in and funded by the state, ensuring that it was more responsive and accountable to the needs and aspirations of people at a local level, as constituting a bigger prize worth fighting for. David
Thomas’s The Making of Community Work (1983) represented an important scholarly contribution which took this stance. Looking back over the past three decades, we can see that as neo-liberalism took hold and with it consensus-based notions of social change, the nature and profile of community development changed significantly. The aspirations that Thomas and others had in realizing community development as a significant driver of change within the local state did not materialize in any substantive way – in fact, community development as a discrete, distinctive and certainly as a radical democratic practice largely went in to decline – this has particularly been the case over the past decade or so. As the earlier analysis highlighted, even under New Labour with its social democratic tendencies, the leading neo-liberal position and its market-based, managerialist practices predominated, sidelining community development to a bit part, largely bound and prescribed within depoliticized, consensus-based notions of change. So where does this all leave us now and in what ways might things change as a result of the current community organizing initiative? In the final part of the paper, I shall focus specifically on this question and on the possibilities of a more radical and agonistic form of community development emerging as a result of the current interest in community organizing. Before that, however, it is important to look briefly at developments since the general election of May 2010, in particular at the way the expectations and the language associated with community organizing shifted significantly in a relatively short period of time.