Neighbourhoods

Acquaintances: book review

Morgan, D. (2009). Acquaintances: the space between intimates and strangers. Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Reviewed by Kevin Harris.

Some years ago I published an article in which I raised the need for a typology of encounters, because I couldn't find quite what I wanted. I was after some way of helpfully distinguishing relationships by such features as familiarity (close ties - first name - knowing ties etc) and the degree of freedom of the relationship (coerced - kin - coincidental – voluntary – spontaneous - pragmatic and so on). I found a few bits and pieces to draw on, such as some 1996 Scandinavian research which distinguished ‘acknowledge-contact’, ‘greeting contact’, and ‘helping contact’ as forms of weak tie. But no developed typology.

I thought it would be handy to think more systematically about different kinds of encounters or ‘occasions’ - not just whether contact is face-to-face or remote, synchronous or asynchronous; but also the degree of contrivance, covering for instance coincidence, serendipity, whether predictable or explicable, scheduled or contrived and so on. At the time I wasn't aware of Lyn Lofland's marvellous work on the public realm, which would have helped. And David Morgan had not yet written Acquaintances, which I think it's fair to describe as a preliminary study of people who occupy the space between intimates and strangers.

Morgan approaches the subject mainly at the individual rather than the community or social level. Fundamental to his definition is an appreciation of the knowledge that people have of others, which distinguishes acquaintance from stranger. When it comes to thinking about neighbouring, it's interesting to have the phenomenon of noise defined as 'unwelcome acaquaintanceship knowledge'.

Giving acquaintanceship due recognition seems to have had to wait for the relatively recent development of a sociology of the everyday, and the author explains how acquaintances 'are part of the process of building up a sense of the everyday in time, space, practices and orientations to the world'. He's concerned to get us thinking more positively about the role that acquaintances play in our lives, especially in the cosmopolitan context; and to assert that they are necessary for social life to exist at all. 'It would be difficult,' he writes, 'to describe or account for social life without them.' He also suggests (in an introductory discussion, from R4's Thinking allowed programme a couple of months ago [thanks Martin for the headsup] which is still available here at about 13 minutes) that the tendency to romanticise acquaintances as intimates-in-waiting devalues their social significance. Although the book is not based on any fresh research, the objectives are fully achieved in what is a very readable text, refreshingly illustrated with personal anecdote in an easy-going style.

This book will take its place in the literature of social relations because it draws attention to the fact that acquaintanceship encounters take place regularly and unspectacularly, and it is that which is significant. The settings covered include neighbourhoods, the workplace, and relations between professionals. Further chapters cover passing acquaintances, fleeting acquaintances, and distant and unwanted encounters. The potential for the technologies of remote communication to bring about change in our attitudes to acquaintanceship is explored, although not in thorough detail.

It might have been reassuring for the author to make reference to social survey practise, if only to point out the absence of any recorded place for acquaintances. To illustrate the sort of thing I mean: I noted back in August how the government's Citizenship survey has a section about 'social networks' in which all the questions are about friends. Are acquaintances generally screened out of surveys of social interaction? What sort of question would be needed to include them, and just why would that be justified?

I was disappointed not to find any discussion of intergenerational acquaintance: at the very least, a speculation that levels may have diminished and what that might imply. And ideally I'd have welcomed more attention paid to the significance of greetings and of recognition, but maybe that's a whole separate study for someone some other time.

I'm left with a slight sense of frustration with this book: I've enjoyed the company of someone who is expert in sociology but I wasn't sure I was in the hands of an expert in acquaintanceship. That's a consequence of the feeling that the writing has been a little hurried and under-researched: I was left unsatisfied by the reluctance to bring much of the existing literature into the frame. For our friends in publishing I'm afraid there's the routine contemporary complaint about poor editing (eg three typos on p13). And to return to my original interest in a typology, there's a crying need for one or two graphics to present matrices or continua, which are described only in prose at the end of chapter 1.

And finally, if you don't think the term 'acquaintances' tells you enough, you could pass through here fleetingly and ponder the meaning of 'consequential strangers'.

Neighbourhood encounter

A friend told me she was out for a run the other day and saw someone she knew also running. Waited for him, greeted, and was told 'Sorry, I'm a solitary runner'. And on he went. She noticed he had his ears stuffed with, what are they, earpieces of some kind, music let's suppose. The next evening he phoned to apologise for seeming rude.

This was someone who would be classed as an acquaintance, neither friend nor stranger. I'll be posting a review here shortly of a book about acquaintances, by David Morgan.

Ho ho ho

In a Connected Communities newsletter, the RSA has announced that it is working on the “RSA Civic Certificate" -

'We are in the process of designing a new community development qualification with the aim of recognising, encouraging and supporting civic action.'

This'll look good in the field - an imperiously-bestowed qualification emanating from a London-based organisation made up of wealthy well-intentioned professionals, with the word ‘Royal' in its name, and one hell of a track record in community development. How have we coped without it all these years?

I could be wrong, but I reckon the anti-professional ethos of CD practice should just about remain intact.

Pause, look back, reflect

Julian Dobson uses a handy live metaphor, a 404 on the community empowerment action plan, to illustrate the fickleness of priorities in government policy.

He points to the amount of energy that gets put into whatever is the current Big Idea until it moves into the 'file and forget' phase. I was told at the time of the empowerment white paper that more than 100 officials were working on it, suggesting a CLG equivalent of Parkinson's law, that work consumes the time of as many people as can be made available for it. Julian notes that:

'This form of leadership, sadly, appears ingrained in our political system,'

and goes on to link the syndrome to international political failure in Copenhagen.

To be fair, the CLG website is a large and very fluid organism and I hope we can forgive the occasional 404. I hope we can also recognise that not all politicians have been slow to respond to climate change and not all can be blamed for the failure of the summit.

But the connection between transitory, even capricious, attitudes to policy and critical failures of leadership is wholly valid. I'd like to add that it's part of a wider culture which may or may not be fuelled by government attitudes. This culture includes over-emphasis on novelty and innovation; reluctance to refer to the past of more than a few months, in case it tells us things we don't want to know; and systematic dismissal of the experience of older people.

It also encompasses the cultural devaluation of loyalty. Sports celebrities aren't expected to show loyalty to their teams; nor employers to their employees or vice versa; nor teachers to their schools, nor consumers to their brands. Nor families to each other. Nor, as Julian's post reminds us, do governments seem concerned to remain loyal to their policies. Only people of faith seem to be exceptions to this rule. If young people are supposed to inherit values from the adult world, this does not bode well.

This phenomenon plays out in a curious way in our hurried public language, nowadays saturated with Important Verbs. Take this for example from Steph Gray's Helpful technology blog, coralling verbs from various government departments:

At the FCO, it’s Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate. In the DIUS of Justin Kerr-Stevens, it was Educate, Enable, Engage, Promote.

For Steph, it's listening, explaining, engaging, convening. Others commenting think 'connect' and 'collaborate' should be in there. I've played this game meself in suggesting a model for participative evaluation (Listen, Interpret, Play back, Listen, Interpret, Report). And so it goes on. A few weeks ago DCMS published a widely-condemned document called Empower, Inform, Enrich - of which Rachel Cooke wrote 'sounds like a scented candle'.

Why are we all doing this? I suspect the media and politics engine driving this culture can't stop itself accelerating and we're at risk of losing the habit of reflection. I'm not sure I want to be on board. (Just a quick observation, feel free to tweet).

Decline in informal volunteering: time for a network solution?

The latest topic reports from the 2007-2008 citizenship survey have been published, one on race, religion and equalities, and this one on volunteering which shows a 2% overall drop in regular informal volunteering and a 5% decrease among young people.

Informal volunteering covers things like giving advice, transporting or escorting someone, keeping in touch with someone, doing shopping, collecting pension, writing letters, filling in forms and so on.

Back in October we had the headlines for the first quarter of 2009 which revealed an overall 5% decline among adults volunteering informally 'at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.' I note that the latest release is from pre-recession data.

As I wrote in October, I fear this 5% statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem. I wonder how policy is going to respond?

Comparable decline in formal volunteering might bring specific investment through the volunteering agencies: but who assumes responsibility for promoting informal volunteering? Whose desk does this problem land on? The general erosion of informal interaction at neighbourhood level has worrying implications, because it’s the invisible foundation of many other social benefits we ought to be able to take for granted. We co-produce safety in our own neighbourhoods just as we co-produce our own health and the socialisation of our children. It would be nice to think we also co-provide the dignified ageing of our elders. We can't do that if fewer and fewer people are informally helping each other out.

In some ways perhaps it's as well if there isn't a policy in-tray for this issue, because policy makers tend to reach for their favourite organisations and in my view it's not an issue for organisations but for network-based initiatives. Someone said to me the other day that there is a local authority that seems to think Fix My Street is theirs in some sense: it's so successful that they don't realise it's not their organisation's product - a result of hierarchical organisational decision-making, which is the only form of behaviour they understand. How do we come up with a Fix My Street type solution to the decline in informal support?

One answer might be Talk About Local, which is promoting local social blogging. Since it's not an explicit purpose of the project, it might not be fair to measure the impact on informal volunteering over time in areas where Talk About Local has generated activity, but it would be interesting.

A Copenhagen for the ageing crisis?

Short moan. This past couple of years I've been at quite a few events about social policy and older people, and on each occasion conscientiously made a point from the floor about the ageing population and the looming crisis of informal care. I've written to people in think tanks and the Guardian and so on, and blogged about it. Policy concerning older people in this country is largely concerned with pensions and benefits, and those themes dominate the debates and the thinking.

Back in July I sounded more patient, referring to

'the simmering question of quite when policy will get hold of the issue of informal social care and start to do something about it. Given the difficulty I had in getting the ageing agencies interested in neighbouring I'm not sure where the impetus is going to come from.'

Just for reference and as an indicator, the recent government consultation on the Ageing Strategy had just two questions in the section (ch.8) on communities and neighbourhoods:

Q9. When you stopped driving, what helped you stay mobile and active in your community? What options would have helped?

Q10. We want to improve attitudes towards ageing across society. What more could be done to challenge outdated stereotypes and tackle negative perceptions about being old? Can you share good examples of where this is already happening in your local community?

I'd feel even more disillusioned if it weren't for the fact that in the Netherlands they're doing something about it, running several pilot projects on how to stimulate informal support at local level, and I'm lucky enough to be involved in that work. In the UK, policy blindness to this growing crisis is a disgrace.

End of moan, for the time being, because here's Jackie Ashley in the Guardian with more influence, arguing that 'It could be as serious a threat as climate change, yet so far politicians have barely considered what needs to be done about our ageing population.'

How long will the politicians leave it before any Copenhagen-style twelfth hour consideration, I wonder?

Up the wrong tree? Social exclusion in the network society

Yesterday, absorbed in that well-known activity of looking for something else, I happened across a book chapter on 'income inequality and the information society'. It argues that poor people stand to be excluded from the information society by being priced out of commercial information services,

'and left with an impoverished and over-stretched system of public provision which is increasingly unable to meet their needs.'

The second bit resonates at least, and it's a curious little discovery just after a colleague and I had a meeting in a borough which has challenging levels of poverty and low levels of technology use.

The author was the much-respected Graham Murdock and the chapter appeared in Excluding the poor, published in 1986 by the Child Poverty Action Group (still listed on their publications page).

It's a good example of the thinking at the time around what was called 'information poverty' and concerns over the levels of exclusion that would result from these things called computers, telecomms and databases. I was involved in a lot of the debates at the time and we thought the threats were very real.

But they did not really emerge. It's hard to say how much of that is down to the refreshing initiatives taken by the incoming Labour government in 1997. Perhaps it was even down to the influence on those policies of people like Graham Murdock. Or were we all just wrong about information use and poverty? Britain did indeed become information-intensive, but we stopped hearing arguments about the widespread denial of access to information for people in poverty.

Then we started to see adverts on the London tube with the mysterious letters 'www'. Around 1999-2000 I served on a government task group tasked to consider 'access to IT'. Suddenly the issue was about people on low incomes getting their hands on the technology which provided access to the information they weren't otherwise being denied. Then came an insistence in some quarters that people on low incomes weren't participating in this tech-binge because the diet wasn't to their taste, ie there wasn't enough content of the right kind.

This was accompanied and then succeeded by efforts to promote a more empowering, less philanthropical approach, which would necessarily mean stimulating self-publishing. Oh and then something called web 2.0 came along, and behold, before long people did publish stuff themselves. (See, in this respect, my thoughts about where local websites fit into this history).

So where are people on low-incomes in all this now? Sorted? If it wasn't about access to information sources; and it's clearly not about appropriate content if it ever was; and for all the rhetoric about 'digital divide' it's no longer significantly about access to the kit or connections; is there still a sense in which people who experience exclusion are constrained in their use of information and communication technology to address their own circumstances? Yes there is, as I and my colleague heard clearly while we sat in a town hall the other day learning about the difficulties of bringing social media to certain culturally self-excluding groups.

We were told about an area comprising mainly white working class families after the collapse of a dominant industry, where the dependency culture is deeply embedded, racist tension is high and levels of motivation to overcome disadvantage are very low.

The neutering effects of this culture are profoundly damaging. I think the central point is this: workers feel that people self-exclude from contexts of dialogue and engagement, so there is little advancement of thinking and no empowerment. This means that the openness of social media may be a non-starter.

From his study of contributions to neighbourhood email lists, Keith Hampton concludes firmly that a significant proportion of people in disadvantaged localities in north America are online and participating in discussions; and also that those contributions afford the formation of collective efficacy in ways that other media do not. This evidence is hugely valuable, but it still leaves us in the UK with a lot of people in low-income areas, who have a connection and spend time online, but are unwilling to participate in digital conversations with others or to engage with agencies online.

Perhaps in time, once again it will come to be seen that we've been barking up the wrong tree, but how do we identify the right one? I'm not aware of any studies at local level, since those I was involved in a few years ago, that are involving people on low incomes themselves in exploring the answers to these questions. I'd be keen to hear of any, cos that's what we need.

Older and young people relate differently to neighbours: shock news

Survey research commissioned by the housing provider Circle Anglia and published last week focuses on the difference in neighbourhood connections between young people (18-24) and older people (over-65). As reports on these sorts of surveys go, this is refreshingly informative.

The claim is that 92 percent of the over-65s say they know the name of their neighbours (which ones?). This compares with 66% of young people - which I'd have said was pretty encouraging. Older people tend to have lived in the same place for longer than younger people, especially if you subtract the first few years of a young person's life when they're less likely to be that sharp with names.

Also I'm surely not the only to have noticed that young people don't tend to place a great deal of demand on informal social care locally, so somehow I wouldn't expect them to be getting into lots of conversation with neighbours. And since their neighbourhoods got covered with cars owned by adults, they're hardly inspired to hang about in the street, so we wouldn't expect much relaxed interaction with adult neighbours to be generated on a day-to-day basis.

The report notes that 56 per cent of older people enjoy spending time with their neighbours. For me, this is the worrying statistic, if it means that means 44 per cent don't or are indifferent.

The encouraging statistic is that 47 per cent of 18-24 year olds agree that living in a diverse neighbourhood is a good thing.

Via the Beeb's coverage.

Creating greater value: participation in Milton Keynes

Back in the summer I worked with Bev Carter reviewing levels of social and civic participation in Milton Keynes. The report has just been published by Citizens:MK - click on the research tab here.

For a small study it's quite a lengthy report, because a lot of stuff came up. We based our work on the belief that social participation and informal involvement with others in everyday life underpins and is critical for civic participation.

Here are some of the main points:

• Cohesion and stability among existing groups has to precede participative integration into broader civic structures. If young people feel despised and unwanted, or Somalis feel unsupported and victimised, those claims have to be addressed before we can raise expectations about integrated participation.
• Perhaps partly because of the town's geography, people seem to be lacking association with a defined, distinctive neighbourhood which offers them something to be proud of, to defend and develop.
• We noted a shift in the areas where young people can or cannot exercise autonomy; and an apparent general decline in their experience of organisation. We think that most young people have no difficulty understanding the nuances of democracy and the value of participation. The problem is more about policy-makers appreciating the importance of social participation in everyday life at local level. It doesn't help that participation principles are not reinforced consistently in the adult world, and loyalty of any kind appears not to be valued.
• Popular participation does not just create connections, it also depends on connections - between citizens, agencies and representatives. A healthy variety of connections is of massive, barely-noticed social significance. Without them we cannot develop a participative politics that resolves social problems by involving all kinds of people collectively in addressing them.

Previously:

Found difficult and left untried?

Invisible mutual support at the margins

You'd hope they'd be angry

Civic health and social impact

Yesterday we had another government public service modernisation strategy, Frontline First, which contains a couple of very interesting ideas likely to attract attention. In 2010 government says it will:

• Build a stronger civic society and give communities more say in shaping public services. We will map civic health in every community through a new Civil Health Index, transfer more public assets to the third sector, and develop new ways of providing capital to civic society organisations - such as through a new social investment wholesale bank and piloting Social Impact Bonds.

The idea of social impact bonds is to reward social investors for work that reduces future social costs.

Social Impact Bonds seek to drive significant non-government investment into addressing the causes of deep-rooted social problems with returns generated from a proportion of the related reduction in spending on acute services. The ambition is to create positive government spending cycles that enable significant tax payer savings through improved social outcomes. (Social Finance report).

There's no detail about the proposal for a Civic Health Index in the UK and an annual Civic Health report. It sounds a bit like an idea I had about 8 years ago for a local community index. Maybe that will follow in time.

Frontline first press release.

Local markets: spectacle, event, occasion, or just dull?

The government, it says here,

'is taking a leading role in protecting the traditional market... Markets play a valuable social and economic role in communities. They offer good value fruit and vegetables, encourage added footfall for town centres, offer new businesses a more affordable way to trade in the current financial climate and provide local jobs with flexible hours for people working part-time.'

I didn't realise we have a minister for markets, and you wouldn't know it from her biog. As a job title it may not sound like the pinnacle of political aspirations, and it's curious that the role seems to have been established against the recent recommendation of a CLG parliamentary committee (para 133 here). (But see also para 134, in which they also recommend that the 'clear strategic central government focus' for markets should be reflected in the portfolio of a named Minister).

The committee's report has very little about the social benefits of markets, but it does include a note about the way the new specialist markets ('local farmers' markets') have been packaged as events:

'the whole atmosphere is an event atmosphere that all markets historically generated, but which some older markets have now lost... that was what markets were a thousand years ago; farmers bringing their products to market, selling their goods and creating a community.' (para 59 here)

It feels like there's something peculiarly contemporary about this tension between the creation of something special or spectacular and the perceived need for occasions around which 'community' can be identified. This is emerging in the essay I'm (still) writing about a community picnic, where I'm tweaking some thoughts about how our instinct remains strong for an unmanipulated experience of being outdoors-with-others. In a recent paper, Sophie Watson claims such attributes for markets:

‘markets have the potential to offer precisely such a space, in their haphazardness, serendipity, physical openness, a typically long local association with a local community and place, the lack of a profit-driven company in charge and an often-limited overarching design or strategy.’ (Watson, Urban studies, 2009, p1590)

All very well, but the economic platform is very wobbly and the disneyfication of semi-public space (for mall-minded people) continues to erode it. And when I think of the three-day-a-week closed market in my local town it always seems just plain dull. I don't know what the answer is, but I suspect that climate change and the recession in combination may force widespread revision of views and practice.

Perhaps there's a case for more third sector and public agencies to have a presence in markets, developing opportunities from the continuing disintegration of barriers between the sectors? How about the local strategic partnership having a stall just along from the fruit and veg?

Dun't Put Thi Muck In Our Dustbin

I often wondered about the neighbourhood relations that might explain the origins of this song. Tony has a gem of a version here with informative notes in the sidebar. He suggests the full dustbin is a metaphor for having enough problems and not being able to take on those of others.

'The story tells of a family who, on a regular basis, hide in their coal cellar to avoid various debt collectors':

We've got nowt to pay 'em an' there's none for to lend us
an' doctor's man mekkin' 'is way dahn t' front path

The 'doctor's man' apparently collected a kind of medical insurance premium.

Community Conversations

I've been talking about conversations in the community development context for years without being aware of a project called - wait for it - 'Community Conversations'. Galling at first, then immediately inspiring.

Conflict and Change is a group of people working in east London who have backgrounds in mediation work, and they marry this with a community development approach to help local people explore issues of potential or actual disagreement, misunderstanding and conflict.

Conflict and Change recently published a set of learning points from their experience. They've run over 70 conversations with between four and 20 participants in each, including inter-faith, intergenerational and multi-ethnic encounters. I'm told they have just received funding for another three years, which seems like a good thing. The key learning points include these:

• Community conversations impact on participants by finding common ground and increasing respect for difference.
• Good facilitation skills – including an ability to work with conflict - are essential to ensure that participation and energy remain high, and that every person’s contribution is given value.
• It is helpful to develop and utilise partnerships with other agencies to help recruit participants and to ensure that there is a forum for any actions resulting from the conversations.
• The positive and future-focus of community conversations can enable participants to go on to take part in shared activities. In this event, it is helpful to provide training in participative facilitation skills to participants and to partner agency staff so that the inclusive approach can be taken forward.

This experience attracts comparison with Living Library. Community Conversations seems to have a less photogenic style with more emphasis on the local level, is more likely to work with groups, and is more likely to require effort put into the recruitment of all participants. But for both, I'd have thought the pre-negotiation of trust must be crucial; and there are sure to be common lessons which might profitably be shared.