Delivering on the Big Society? Tensions in hosting community organisers

Jenny Fisher, Rebecca Lawthom and Carolyn Kagan

Local Economy, 2016, vol. 31, issue 4, 502-517

Abstract: The Big Society, including the community organising programme, was central to the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron’s vision for a redefined relationship between state and society. Promising the devolvement of power to neighbourhoods and citizens – Community organising was funded by the Cabinet Office in 2011. It was conceived of as a means of developing active engagement of communities and individuals to resolve the issues within deprived neighbourhoods. Manchester Metropolitan University hosted one of the first cohorts of community organisers working with a national organisation, Locality. This article provides a case study of a university-community partnership centred on community organising. Drawing on narratives, we consider the tensions inherent in university hosting of community organisers and the framing of the project as community organising as distinct from other forms of community practice.

Keywords: Big Society; community; community organiser; university (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269094216650142 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:loceco:v:31:y:2016:i:4:p:502-517

DOI: 10.1177/0269094216650142

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Local Economy from London South Bank University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().