Engaged Publics: Organising in Crisis

Based on multi-sited organisational ethnography, this monograph presents a critical examination of the cultural norms of collective organising in contemporary Britain, through the lens of three community groups engaged in a ‘community empowerment’ programme, called Big Local. The groups had formed to make decisions about funding allocated to their local neighbourhoods. In keeping with the intention of Big Local to ‘empower’, they were given freedom and autonomy to decide how to work. This presented the opportunity to examine the societal norms of organising that had ‘rippled out’ to these community spaces. Fieldwork straddled the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, generating insights into how groups change when crisis hits, and the challenges, and surprising benefits, that arise.
The book presents ‘group habitus’ as a powerful theoretical tool for analysing how groups organise themselves and their work, and the ways in which broader sociopolitical contexts pattern group life. A timely study of collective organising as community groups navigated emerging community needs amidst the disruption of the pandemic, this ethnographic account is used to develop conceptual insights into the sociocultural norms that inform how diverse publics work together, and what this means for our collective capacity to address society’s most pressing problems.