Introduction

In the last chapter I discussed the formation and structure of three American community development discourses dating from 1968 to 1975. I demonstrated how, in the context of the problematic protest transition from civil rights to economic rights, the language and social practices of the once influential Civil Rights Movement fell out of favour. Filling the vacuum were two discourses – one focusing on zerosum power plays and the other on rational scientific planning – both of which positioned community development as a hierarchical process of a professional or radical activist acting on a bewildered and confused community. In this chapter I will analyse the competing discourses and identities within the Urban Programme's Community Development Projects (CDPs) in Britain from 1968 to 1975. Unlike community development in the United States, and as I shall demonstrate in this chapter, community development in the UK should be understood primarily as an official institutional practice of the welfare state. From my analysis of texts I will show that community development is typically defined as a contentious state-sponsored activity whereby the goals and purposes of community development are contested between technocrats wielding official state power and some ‘radical’ community development professionals seeking to redistribute state power to local people.

I have identified two discourses for analysis in this chapter. The ‘Rationalist discourse’ is constituted by the texts, language and practices of the Wilson Government's Home Office and the Gulbenkian Foundation which sought to construct and prescribe a framework for a new emerging profession called ‘community work’ to support the efficient coordination of local government service delivery and counter a destructive ‘pathology of the poor’. The ‘Structuralist discourse’ is constituted by the texts, language and practices of those newly created professional community workers seeking to reconstruct the identity and practices of both the community development profession and the role of the state in order to support the redistribution of power, wealth and resources to working class communities. Although the discursive repertoires of the Structuralist and Rationalist discourses appear to be in conflict, I shall demonstrate that there are few significant differences between these two discourses.