Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

A key book for me still is Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States by Marris and Rein (1967) original but later published as a Penguin. This was a publication of the Institute of Community Studies and whilst I have severe criticisms of some of their books, which were widely read by the educated public, this one is different. By the way Family and Class in a London Suburb is still worth reading and one of the very few studies which deals with the middle mass of people. It dealt with the experiences of the Ford Foundation funded Grey Area projects which preceded and informed the massive set of social interventions under the Johnson administration’s Great Society programmes. I was involved both in left student politics, particularly in organizing opposition to and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but also through friends on the student left with community action in the West End of Newcastle and through that with the West End tenants association. Through John Gower Davies students from my department including me were drafted to carry out a large scale survey of the area. At the time this included Newcastle’s Red Light district in Rye Hill, since replaced by Newcastle College buildings. I had arranged to meet a fellow female student, fortunately a former nurse and a tough customer in her mid 20s, and she was early. I turned up on time and she had been propositioned 12 times in the interval. She dealt with this with flair but it illustrates the complex character of the area. Davies later wrote a book informed by these engagements and his relationship with his colleague Norman Dennis on The Evangelistic Bureaucrats – a study of a planning exercise (1972). This was in the Dan Smith era of large scale urban planning involving mass demolition of working class areas.

Davies was involved but the more active person was John Taylor, a former journalist and later a WEA tutor and district secretary who obtained duplicators for Solidarity in Gdansk by charging them as for export to his WEA district in the UK. This was action research in practice and when I read Marris and Rein’s book I encountered all the debates about engaged research versus detachment and in particular extreme experimental detachment which then plagued research engagements of this kind. The UK Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) of the 1960s were plagued by this kind of insistence on experiment although largely ignoring it in practice. In a subsequent blog I will describe how in the Community Development Projects of the 1970s we either ignored it (most of my colleagues in the radical CDPs) or explicitly rejected it (me). John Taylor just got on with it in an engaged fashion which has served as a model for me ever since.

I wrote my M. Sc. dissertation (Social Policy and Planning) at the LSE on action research based on a highly idiosyncratic, but it was my own, reading of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and Marx”s Thesis XI on Feuerbach drawing on Marris and Rein to illustrate the argument. I largely ignored the phenomenology after Schutz but anyhow not much of a loss given my future engagement with Merleau Ponty and theories of embodied mind. It was this interest in action research which as we will see led me to abandon a permanent post from which I could only be dismissed for persistent gross moral turpitude (in principle at least) for a temporary one which did actually almost double my salary though. My then wife was as always utterly supportive in this move.

The other thing I got first from the Newcastle degree and then very much from the LSE Masters was experience in reading policy documents and in realizing their importance not only as indicators of policy developments but as sources of both qualitative and quantitative information. I will return to this in relation to my experience as Research Director of the North Tyneside Community Development Project but key documents included the Baines Report on the management of local government, the Redcliffe Maude Commission reports, and especially the minority report by Derek Senior, on the reorganization of local government in England and Wales, and the Skeffington Committee report on public participation in planning. Norman Dennis’s books on People and Planning (197) and Public Participation and Planner’s Blight (1972) took me into understanding the significance of engagement with local policy documents, especially plans and the documents and data informing them. Dennis’ subsequent unfortunate engagement with right wing think tanks informed by his innate social conservatism and some rather shoddy research should not detract from the significance of these books. So next blog – back to statistics, methods and data and the value of the partial correlation coefficient.