Public Community Organising: A Defence Against Managerialism

ABSTRACT

Community organising is subject to several interpretations, and community practises have spread worldwide over the last three decades. This paper understands community organising as a distinct methodology adopted by very different actors under very different objectives and uses it as a critical concept to analyse the role of the voluntary sector in social services. Through an account of the social service of Geneva, Switzerland focusing on community organising between 2002 and 2017, I offer a defence against the managerialist justification relied upon by the city’s municipal council when it shut down the unit. The argument is premised on an appeal to a liberally conceived right to equality of opportunity for freedom of association. It supports an orthodox view of community organising as a bottom-up way of working for certain social services of public administrations, which justifies an exceptional and circumstantiated deviation from public management core principles.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare state
• social work
• community organising
• political liberalism
• freedom of association

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants of the methodological seminar of Cevipof, IEP Paris, on 9 December 2019 for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. I am especially grateful to Friederike Richter and Camille Collin for their careful reading of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Between September 2012 and September 2015, I was employed by the social service of Geneva in the district of Eaux-Vives/Champel. In this context, I participated in a research group that realised a study on the methodology of UAC and the support it provided to associations. I thank the city of Geneva and the head of social service for agreeing to make these documents available.

2 In 2014, the community sectors represented approximatively 40% of the whole staff of the social service and their budget was close to 7 million CHFS (Horber-papazian et al. 2015).

3 These are the original names of the interviewees. They were provided with the option to stay anonymous, and they have chosen to have their identity revealed.

4 Women, foreigners, and people with lower training tend to less associate with one other. In a country such as Switzerland, the typical profile of a member of an association is a male, of Swiss nationality, with tertiary education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Swiss Science National Fundation) under [grant number P1GEP1_187873].

Notes on contributors

Jérôme Grand

Jérôme Grand is a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva, Switzerland and Ph.D. student in Political Theory at Cevipof, Sciences Po Paris, France. He is a long-time third-sector activist and worked for the social service of the City of Geneva as a community organiser for several years. He is currently deputy mayor of the municipality of Puplinge, Switzerland and in charge of social cohesion. Institutional address: Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, 40, bd du pont d'Arve; CH, 1211 Genève 4. Email: [email protected].