News and Views

From Jim Orford:-
Notes on the fourth European Congress of Community Psychology, Barcelona, November 2002, and the 2002 Business Meeting of the European Network of Community Psychology (ENCP)

This was the fourth in what has now become a series of European conferences of community psychology. The series began in Rome in 1995 and the second and third were held respectively in Lisbon (1998) and Bergen (2000). The title of the recent Barcelona congress was Community, Ethics, and Values. It was organised by the ENCP in collaboration with the Psychology Faculty at the University of Barcelona and Barcelona City Council Institute of Education. It was intended as a forum for meeting, exchanging and discussing issues of common interest in community psychology, and it focused specifically on the following four topics:

Social values and their social dynamics
Ethics of community intervention and human development
Sense of community-theoretical and practical meaning
Community psychology-European perspective(s)

The conference had a truly international feel to it, not only because of the excellent simultaneous translation between Spanish and English (and occasionally Portuguese or Italian), but principally because of the plurality of countries represented. The programme included speakers from several different parts of Spain, from a number of other European countries (Denmark, Italy, Germany, Greece, Norway, Sweden and the UK), but with very good representation from Latin America (Argentina, Brazil and Chile), as well as some from Australia and the USA.

For me this was a conference buzzing with ideas. All I can do here is to note briefly a few that particularly caught my attention. They remain as yet fragmentary, undigested, waiting to be absorbed into the store of ideas that I can draw upon and perhaps follow-up and explore further. Having recently embarked upon a study of the impact on health of the British government’s New Deal for Communities urban regeneration scheme in the English West Midlands, I was drawn to sessions on Sense of Community (pace David Smail who often reminds us that ‘sense of’ betrays the danger of reducing the materiality of community to something subjective and possibly individual). There were a number of discussions about the conceptualisation and dimensionality of SOC: emotional connectedness, trust, influence, resources, exchange, attractiveness, distinctiveness. There were discussions too about methods of measurement or assessment of SOC. Ideas ranged from improved SOC questionnaires (much dissatisfaction with the early SC Index especially for young people who figured large in a number of the studies that were described) to much more sophisticated and time-consuming procedures such as community profiling. The latter can include multiple modes of information gathering, from multiple sources, and can include innovative methods such as asking a group of stakeholders to prepare a ‘movie script’ about their community. There was much support for the idea that there was no one method of assessing SOC that would be good for all groups in all places at all times. One speaker from the floor suggested that SOC as a general concept was dead.

Having started to hear from people in some of the more deprived communities in the West Midlands, my attention was also caught by discussions about the localisation, globality and scope of people’s identities. Some people in one study saw themselves as much more locally rooted than others. Was this a source of richness based on intimate relationships and a love of the area, its language and its food for example? Or did it indicate a state of immobilisation, imprisonment, entrapment in a poor and unsafe area, because of lack of transport, social support and other resources? Some people saw themselves as European, valuing freedom, justice, peace between previously hostile nations, and even the euro, all of which were held to be particularly European. Others saw themselves as global, sometimes without roots, but sometimes simultaneously valuing the local community. There was much discussion about ‘glocalisation’ and whether that was where the future lay.

Ability to occupy multiple communities may be a sign of privilege, and other contributions theorised about marginalisation in its economic, social and ideological aspects: was blaming the victim now part of a culture of blame, and were psychologists continuing to collude with it? A number of papers focused on the circumstances faced by immigrants to European countries. One spoke of the aim of group work to restructure immigrant migratory personal histories, and debate ensued about the relative merits of helping immigrants themselves and helping the rest of a receiving society to accept new arrivals.

Controversial was the suggestion that community psychology should not continue to ignore the private sector which, along with public and caring services, might be said to be one of the three essential elements of civil society. Many companies were now adopting ‘corporative citizenship’ programmes, recognising their responsibility towards a healthy society (stakeholder value) not just economic success (shareholder value). The Body Shop giving staff a day a week in order to be social activists was cited as an example. Other speakers, however, drew attention to the paradox that as technology improved so too did social exclusions. The perverse effects of technological change included improvements in roads whilst railways declined or in some countries failed to develop, and a reduction in production costs through automation leading not, as might be expected, to an increase in workers’ free time, but rather to an increase in unemployment and inequality.

My last fragment must make mention of the member of the ENCP on whose shoulders (plus the shoulders of a number of his good colleagues) fell the task of organising this conference. Alipio Sánchez, who works in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Barcelona, has written extensively in Spanish on community psychology in general and on ethics and values in community psychology in particular (it remains an important task to find ways of translating much good material from one European language to another). He spoke and led a workshop on ethics and values. He drew attention to the utmost importance of ethics and values in community psychology, the complexity of the issues involved (two or more ethical principles can often be in conflict; who in the community are you representing when you act as a community psychologist?; who gains or loses from each decision about resource allocation, intervention, etc?), and about the strange neglect of ethics and values in writings and discussions in community psychology.

Business Meeting of the European Network of Community Psychology (ENCP)

The ENCP began as a group of invited speakers at the 1995 Rome conference and has stayed in being, rather to the group’s surprise, since then. Its principal function has been to persuade one of its members to take on the task of organising the next conference and then to support that person as much as possible. It has also from time to time talked of other possible European developments such as a European master’s course in community psychology or a European text on the subject. But there is not a lot that a small group meeting once a year can achieve, and the series of conferences has been the main achievement, of which we are rather proud. A small number of people have joined us since 1995 but we have deliberately remained small so that we can easily work together. Despite the rather grand sounding title that we have given ourselves, we remain in fact a small group of friends and colleagues, a number of us now rather senior in several senses of that word.

For two or three years now we have been increasingly conscious of the fact that we are a rather exclusive, rather academic club, and we have talked of the possibility of forming some kind of European association of community psychology which would be much more inclusive and open to membership by students, practitioners and others. I am pleased to report that the Business Meeting in Barcelona took the decision to form such an association. There are then many details to discuss including: how the aims and values of an association should be phrased, criteria for membership, whether an association should be legally registered and if so where, whether there should be fees and if so whether they should be mandatory or recommended and on what scale, what the structure of such an association should be, and how decisions might be taken. A working group of individual network members from seven different countries has been asked to make recommendations on such issues to the next Business Meeting which is likely to be in Belgium in September 2003. The aim is to have an association in place by the time of the fifth European congress on community psychology which is to be held in Berlin 16-19 September 2004.

Many thanks are due to Donata Francescato of the University of Rome who has been the ENCP co-ordinator these last several years. For my sins, I have been elected as the new co-ordinator of the ENCP (there wasn’t much opposition, well none actually) which has a role to play until a new association is formed. I see it as my main task to steer us through the next two years until we have some European body, whatever its form, that can make itself known to students and others around Europe who are working in community psychology or who might have an interest in the subject. I am very conscious of how marginal community psychology is in the discipline of psychology in Britain, and I want to do all I can to spread the word about the ethics and values, concepts, theories and methods of community psychology. Witnessing the dominant trends in psychology at the present time, I am particularly keen that students should know of the existence of community psychology. I don’t think most people studying psychology in Britain and most other European countries today learn very much about community psychology, and a European association of some kind might go a little way towards correcting that sad state of affairs. It also became apparent at the Barcelona congress that a European association could then usefully collaborate with equivalent associations in Latin America, the USA and Australasia.

Jim Orford
University of Birmingham
Co-ordinator, European Network of Community Psychology