I’m now beginning to get to the stage the JRF want me to be
at for my evidence review – thinking about what works; or what policy
interventions might you used to develop social networks and social capital to
help tackle poverty. In my previous post I used the mixed evidence around
neighbourhood effects to question whether mixed communities policies might mean
people in poverty might gain more links to more affluent people. Since then I’ve
not read any evidence that counters that. In fact, evidence from the US Moving
to Opportunity programme suggests that people who were given vouchers to move
from deprived to more mixed neighbourhoods often then felt lonely and isolated
from previous social networks. There was also depressing evidence from Dutch
studies that although less affluent people wanted to mix with their more
affluent neighbours, the latter did not reciprocate, or were not there to
reciprocate.
So, the picture is much more complex than the idealistic
concept of a less affluent person befriending an affluent person and suddenly
being inspired to be less poor. What there does seem to be consistent evidence
on though is the role of informal, unstructured meeting places in
neighbourhoods which allow people to mix and build up trust. In particular the
role of primary schools and parents bumping into one another when they drop
their children off seem to be key in a lot of the studies of mixed communities for
the development of social networks between affluent and less-affluent people. Similarly,
good quality community centres and parks offer a similar, if more limited role.
Trust building is important. The US work on social capital,
led by Putnam, puts a lot of emphasis on the development of trust in developing
networks that help a society get on. I’ve not seen any convincing evidence of
this in my review, but what does seem to be the case is that trust helps reduce
stigma and prejudice against marginalised groups.
One of the markers for trust within groups is a high-level
of generalised reciprocity – in a twitter discussion I referred to this as the
sociology of buying rounds in a pub. Basically, if a group has very little
trust and there are lots of you, people won’t buy rounds for the fear that they
won’t have a drink bought for them the same drinking session. If you have trust
and generalised reciprocity then rounds will be bought knowing that you will have
a drink bought for you sometime in future. It would be really nice if the sort
of trust developed by passive acquaintance in public spaces could lead to
generalised reciprocity.
However, I doubt this would happen in a society as
socio-economically unequal as the UK because poverty and low income reduce
generalised reciprocity as people withdraw from reciprocal networks or are
excluded because they cannot offer anything back.
Which doesn’t neatly bring me on the internet and libraries.
Hey-ho. Anyway, let’s see if I can shoe-horn a connection back in. So, the JRF
also want us to look into the “digital divide” and whether the affordances of
new information communication technologies could help develop social networks,
and social networks which can make a difference. So far in the evidence: use of
email helps develop loose ties that help you get on; social media tends to help
build strong ties that help you get by. Also, interestingly, people in poorer neighbourhoods
who have less access to the internet at home, are not affected by distance to
their local library in their internet use – they will overcome geographicalbarriers to use the internet.
Which got me thinking about the role of libraries in
developing social networks within communities, and I found this rather nice
evaluation of the Big Lottery Fund Community
Libraries Programme. Reading through it I was immediately reminded of a
quote from a former community worker I spoke to during my PhD who described the
Ferguslie Park Community Library in the 1980s thus:
“I say the local community library who were…I’ve I mean the
first time I’d ever been in a library in my life where they played really loud
music during the day but it was great because it meant there wasnae this kind
of, wasn’t seen as an educational establishment it was seen as a community
establishment and that was a really important factor”
And I think this sort of library could be a really important
resource for alleviating and tackling poverty through developing social
networks: providing space for learning activities; provided cheap rooms for
groups to meet; providing an access point onto services or the “bridging”
capital (people that matter like Councillors or MSPs/AM/MLAS/MPs) to make
changes in their life.
However, this is a big change is the nature of what a
library is – moving a big way from the Victorian philanthropic ideal of the
library as a space for self-improvement by immersing oneself individually in
good reading matter. This is thinking about the library as a community space,
seeking to foster community, and lend out books. The evaluation of the Community
Libraries Programme highlighted how this change of use for libraries had a big
impact on staff – some felt energised and developed a great deal, others
thought something had been lost in their role as librarians.
This got me thinking about a good response I had to my first
encounters with community policing in Scotland. The police in Scotland, and particularly
the bits of Lothian Borders Police I saw in my PhD, did community policing
really well – working closely in partnership to deliver preventative action
against low level criminality. When describing this to someone, they agreed,
but countered that there was a danger police officers would become social
workers, which they definitely should not be. And is the danger that librarians
become community development workers or social workers and libraries are just
community centres with books, left after all the community centres are closed?
Or, if we are going to radically reshape services to coproduce them, should
every public sector worker be a community development worker with the requisite
training and supervision support?
No comments:
Post a Comment