Dr Imogen Bayfield

This book presents an ethnography of a community empowerment programme called Big Local. Following three community groups as they navigated the Covid-19 pandemic, it offers timely insights into how groups change when crisis hits, and explores implications for our collective capacity to address society’s most pressing problems. 

The book introduces the concept of ‘group habitus’ for interpreting group life, showing how societally dominant ‘cultures of organising’ shape spaces of collective deliberation and action. A close-up examination of how people work together, this book offers a new way of understanding sociopolitical inequalities. 

This paper is based on multi-sited ethnographic investigation into a community development initiative called Big Local. Residents in marginalised areas of England were invited to form community groups to take control of the funding awarded to their neighbourhood, and to make decisions about how that funding should be spent. This paper shows that group members brought with them different «organisational habitus» (Shoshan 2018): developed dispositions about how to organise that had been acquired through previous involvement in collective organising. Rather than focus solely on the practices of collective organising, however, I propose that these organisational habitus were anchored by two different «moral orientations»: one steeped in a sense of responsibility to include, the other to govern resources effectively. My objective is to show that the practices of organisational habitus cannot be isolated from the moral orientations that anchor them. In doing so, the paper shows that morality is not only fundamental to individuals’ motivations for engaging in collective action; why they get involved and what they hope to achieve, but also to the very practice of organising. The analysis illustrates the entanglement of sense and practice, showing how one’s motivation to participate shapes how one goes about doing so. This is both theoretically significant, in illustrating that practices of organising are not merely technical but morally imbued, while also having practical implications, by generating understanding of potential sources of tension, cohesion or longevity in groups. This suggests that those leading and facilitating civil society organisations would do well to facilitate conversations about how community groups choose to work, the way they do, and why. Doing so could help unearth members’ positions about the change they want to bring about, overcoming tensions in groups, and cultivating an empowered civil society consciously working towards its imagined «ideal society» (Lichterman & Eliasoph 2014).

This article has three aims. First, it suggests that for collaborators to navigate their way out of uncertainty, they produce a shared "activity timespace" (cf. Bryant and Knight 2019a). I argue that this involves (i) the coalescence of future orientations, as a shared understanding of the purpose(s) of the collaboration is produced; (ii) rhythmic synchronicity, as activities become coordinated; and (iii) the reproduction of the roles of collaborators in relation to one another. The second aim is to illustrate two ways in which ethnographer and collaborators navigate their way out of a space of uncertainty to create a shared activity timespace. One is intentional and uses questioning to align knowledge. The other is unintentional, as the ethnographer is encouraged to "be there" until an opportunity to collaborate emerges. The third goal of the article is to suggest that analysis of anticipation within ethnographic collaboration needs to focus not only on the anticipation of events but on our roles in relation to one another (cf. Stephan and Flaherty 2019). Through collaboration, it is not only anticipation about what the future could be that is forced into flux, but also anticipation about how those futures might come to be built, as "cultural futures" (Appadurai 2013) are embedded within expectations of how to act and what to aim for in collaborative encounters.

The review builds on existing work being carried out by the British Academy, from which a set of five themes has been developed. These five themes, for the purposes of this review, are meanings of social cohesion; collective memory; identity and belonging; the social economy; care for the future. These themes have been slightly adapted. There are many overlaps between these domains, which may lead to the British Academy encouraging greater interdisciplinary activity as part of its Cohesive Societies programme. Findings from the review demonstrate the importance of building a multi-dimensional concept of social cohesion, which incorporates the structural apparatus necessary for the social components to thrive. Such an inclusive concept has utility both practically and conceptually, by drawing attention to, and enabling analysis of, the different components of social cohesion, as well as the interactions between them.

As Covid-19 spread globally in the spring of 2020 in the UK as elsewhere many people found themselves with new forms of vulnerability, making fundamental elements of everyday life, such as accessing food, very difficult. In many contexts, the most agile responses to these new vulnerabilities came from rapidly mobilising community groups and organisations. By extending existing networks and building on local and hyper-local histories of community organising they were able to respond more efficiently, effectively and appropriately to the contemporary crisis than more formalised or larger organisations.