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embraced by policy makers and the state, analysts, academics, advocates, and the growing not-for-profit sector. This is true in much of the world, but is probably most pronounced in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. In these countries, which are the focus of this book, community-based efforts are being promoted as the solution to a whole host of social, political, economic, and cultural issues and problems. But this embrace has been of community initiatives that, in both theory and practice, are politically constrained and limited in their goals and aspirations . It is based on an understanding of community that is largely divorced from the goals of social, economic, and political justice. Instead, community and community-based initiatives have increasingly become part of the regulation and management of social problems such as poverty, and have often emphasized some of the most conservative understandings of community. Community, in short, is being embraced by the state and capital precisely because it is being used in ways that are not only uncritical of the larger political economy but actually largely in line with the needs and interests of that political economy—and those who benefit most from it. While we see strong convergence of community-based policy and politics in the three nations under neoliberalism, we also see differences. We do not argue that each nation, with a different history and political culture, responds in the same manner to each challenge. Nevertheless, we intentionally travel between the three nations, emphasizing ones when they are the center of activity—such as the United States around the history of community organizing or the United Kingdom around contemporary “third way” politics—or when we want to emphasize the breadth of the phenomenon across national contexts. We do not treat each subject equally for each nation, and this is not meant to be a definitive study of community efforts in the Anglo-American world. We use a cross-national approach because the shift in context and community-based efforts is so obvious across the three nations and because the cross-national approach broadens the discussion beyond any national parochialism. Finally, a brief note about terminology. Because we study the subject in three nations there are often different terms used to describe what, in reality, are quite similar processes and programmatic activities. But rather than imposing a standard label, we simply use the specific Introduction 3 phrases and terms that are used in the different countries. This has the benefit of being precise, but the drawback of potentially being both a bit confusing and giving the impression that there is greater variety in practices than there actually is. If contemporary community efforts are marked both by a loss of radical politics and an explicit commitment to social and economic justice, they also suffer from recurrent failures to critically analyze their contemporary political and economic context. Thus Contesting Community is also prompted by the need for community organizations to better understand contemporary processes of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. We see the political economic context as vital in shaping the potential and actual impact that community efforts have—both in their magnitude and in their political meanings, goals, and implications. While the focus of the book is on community organizations and community-based efforts, our emphasis on the importance of context means that we devote a great deal of attention to understanding the political economic roles played by communities in contemporary forms of capitalism, as well as the ways in which community is understood theoretically—and therefore enacted and acted upon politically and practically. The chapters in the book build an argument that is, on the one hand, critical of the way community practices and the policies that shape them have developed since the 1980s, and on the other, sympathetic to the practices of organizations that both challenge dominant practices and fight for economic and social justice. In chapter 1, we set out a basic framework for understanding community, why it is limited and why it is important, and what is its context. The second chapter examines the history of how community has been used as an idea and in practice. There are important lessons to be learned from the historical record, in terms of the shifting relationships between community and the state, and the different organizing strategies, tactics, and political goals of efforts over time. One of the central lessons is that community is a politically neutral term, that is, it can be used by practitioners...

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