COMMUNITY INFORMATICS AND THE LOCAL STATE IN THE UK: Facilitating or assimilating an agenda for change?

Abstract

The emerging discipline of community informatics (CI) has begun to trace out a distinct agenda for change in the social uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Focusing upon the appropriation of ICTs by local communities who have been disenfranchised by technological development, this agenda foregrounds uses of the Internet in the pursuit of distinctly community-related objectives. However, the role that the local state ought to play within this agenda for change remains marked by a degree of controversy and ambiguity. Assertions of the need for community autonomy coexist uneasily with a recognition that the local state can help develop and sustain CI. Much current work therefore focuses upon exploring notions of ‘partnership’ between the local state and local groups in developing CI. Against this background, this paper draws on a case study of Birmingham City Council (BCC) in order to explore a series of significant organizational changes to local government, which have seen BCC adopt a fundamentally new ‘community leadership’ role. This shift to community leadership is being expedited by innovative uses of Internet technology. It is argued that, rather than straightforwardly re-creating BCC as a better partner to community groups in developing CI, such changes are deeply paradoxical. In the first instance shifts to community leadership have enabled BCC to develop valuable web resources that enhance their role as a partner facilitating citizen-led CI. Conversely, however, these changes are bound up in a broader attempt by BCC to reassert managerial control at a time when its legitimacy as a social institution is being questioned. Faced with a series of external challenges, BCC has replicated important CI activities in the pursuit of its own interests. Ultimately it is argued that this assimilation of CI could eventually undermine the broader CI agenda for change.

Keywords:

• Community informatics
• Internet
• local government
• local governance
• partnership
• community leadership

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Frank Webster for his advice and support during the conduct of this research, and would like to acknowledge the UK Economic and Social Research Council for their support (award number R00429934167). Any limitations or defects in the article are, of course, the author's responsibility.

Notes

1 CI is not simply an area of ‘academic’ study. Rather, it is both a field of study and a field of practice. Although the practice of using ICTs to develop communities has been around for some time ‘the definition of that practice and the study of its effects are still emerging as a field’ (Stoecker 2005, p. 14).

2 The third sector includes ‘traditional voluntary, not-for-profit and community bodies and agencies … [and] grassroots community groups, associations, interest and cultural groups, trade unions etc’ (Day 2004, p. 34).

3 The tracking of relevant national policy documentation, SOCITM reports, and Audit Commission reports continued until the end of 2005.

4 See Briggs (1952, 1963) for an overview of Birmingham's rich history as a key manufacturing centre of the industrial revolution in Britain. Webster (2001, pp. 35–39) provides an excellent critical overview of how a declining industrial base has forced BCC, from the mid-1980s onwards, into an attempt to reinvent Birmingham as an ‘information city’.

5 To clarify, the need to shift to a ‘partnership approach to governance’ has become accepted, particularly at a managerial level. However, the pre-existing structure, culture and managerial hierarchy of BCC complicate the ways in which this goal gets interpreted within the organization (Goodwin 2005). There is a large degree of disagreement and contestation in this respect.