It will be evident from the discussion thus far that the community developer occupies a unique location with respect to her/his simultaneous accountabilities to the employing organisations, communities shelhe work with and the burgeoning ethics and philosophies of community development itself. As intermediaries between large (often publicly funded) organisations and communities, community developers are embedded in unique sets of power-culture dynmaics that change from context to context. Such power-culture dynamics are contingent upon the various combinations of organisations (the particular institutions, social structures an"; cultural systems they promulgate), community developer (identities, cultures and professional role) and the communities (identities and cultural systems) within any community development initiative. Positioned in between community and large organisations, the community developer plays a complex and 'translatory' role in working between and within these often diverse cultural
Chapter 5 Theorising analysis and practice: critical post
systems to use the power inherent in herlhis locations in ways that transform status quo power relations. The challenges in using these locations agentically, to enable communities to exercise increased levels of agency, produces unique sets of tensions for the community developer. This area appears to be still largely undeveloped within the existing community development literature. Those community developers and theorists (Clague, 1 996; GermAnn, 2000; Ife, 1 995; Labonte, 1 994; Labonte, 1 996a) who have given some attention to these issues have done so in a variety of ways. A common denominator of these writings is the emphasis placed on the community developer's ability to be clear about herlhis locations, accountabilities and what shelhe can and can't do with both organisation and community. Clague (Clague, 1 996) cautions community developers employed by government to "know [their] mandate and what [they] can and can't offer to communities" (p.7). He tells community developers within these organisations to "expect an inherent tension between what the community requires - or perceives it requires and what [they] can and can't offer to communities" (p.7). Clauge (Clague, 1 996) encourages community developers within these organisations to be a strong advocate for the community within their systems, but to also recognise the inevitability of being associated with a system wherein "compromises and trade-offs are necessary between larger and particular interests" (p.7).
Ife (Ife, 1 995) discusses these tensions in terms of the moral and ethical dilemmas a cG,nmunity developer may experience within her/his work. Among these he cites potential conflicts with employers or funding bodies when their assumptions about community development differ from those of the community developer, or when organisational interest is about maintaining political stability rather than genuine participatory processes that may transform existing power relations. Ife (Ife, 1 995) takes the view that a "good community" worker should be able to avoid such conflicts of interest between community and organisation. Ife has written :
Often when a community worker i s 'caught in the middle' i n this way, i t is as a result of the worker taking responsibility for what is really someone else's problem . . . .. Part of the empowerment of a community must be to enable the community to take responsibility for its own actions, and the community worker who allows herlhimself to become the scapegoat for such conflicts is in fact contributing to the community's disempowerrnent (lfe, 1 995, p.258).
However, a critical post-modern perspective on the community developer's locationls between community and organisation potentially draws out a number of complexities inherent in the community developer's locations not iterated by Ife . A critical post-modern analysis p0tentially shifts the argument beyond 'dual accountability' as an ethical or moral dilemma. Instead, the
Chapter 5 TheoriSing analysis and practice: critical post
field of analysis or argument deepens to reveal the shifting and changing nature of the agency terrains (discursive fields) the developer must negotiate within the course of her/his work. These agency terrains are circumscribed by particular sets of (dispersed, changing and unequal) social power relations (Weedon, 1 987), within which the subjectivities, identities, cultural systems and less conscious behaviours of various actors are engaged.
Probably one of the most sophisticated discussions surrounding some of these issues has been provided by Labonte (Labonte, 1 996a). Labonte's doctoral dissertation inquired into how community development practitioners conceptualise the possibilities of community development as an empowering practice as employees within the public health sector. This investigation discusses the complex power issues that practitioners expressed about their location as "bridges" or "hinges" between state institutions and community groups, their dual systems of accountability to community groups and their issues, and to their employing organisation, the Toronto Department of Public Health. It inquires into the specific actions that community developers might take from this location to assist an empowering relationship between state and civil society within the context of community development.
Labonte's study highlights a number of tensions experienced by community developers from these hinge locations of dual accountability. However, the primary experience of dual accountability lay in community developer' s "simultaneous identities with both the Department (employing organisation) and with community groups" (p.424). Community developers within the Department experienced some conflict within themselves regarding whether their primary al legiances lay with community or the Department. When the community developer w?s framed as the "primary instrument" in making relationships between state institutions and community groups more equitable, community developers still tended to view themselves as "having more the identity of the group" (p.425). This was thought necessary to offset organisational forces to prevent community developers and (subsequently initiatives) being co-opted by management' s agendas, the implications being that the power over tendencies o f large organisations could easily subvert the agendas of communities. Labonte (Labonte, 1 996a) also suggests that identification with community groups is used to offset organisational powerlessness that front line community developers experienced within their jobs.
S ignificantly community developers also talk about "this split identity as the 'pain of community development'" (Labonte, 1 996a, p.427). This refers to the struggle community developers experienced regarding "accountability back to [their] institutions versus [their]
C hapter 5 Theorising analYSis and practice: critical post modernism and community development
accountability to community groups, groups which sometimes (saw them) as being representatives of institutions they (felt were) d ismpowering" (p.427). The community worker' s own split identities (or allegiances) between community and organisation were viewed by some community developers as adding to the pain. The study used the term "empowering rage" to refer to the anger of community groups as an outcome of initial differences in power relations. This stage was posited as "often essential to a community group's development of its own power" (p.427). However, the study also recognised that development workers may go through their own "empowering rage" as they grappled with being caught between community rage and their experienced powerlessness within the bureaucracy:
Community development workers straddle two 'cultures', the culture of institutions and the cultures of community groups. There is a personal experience of pain that often accompanies this straddling, a pain that comes from being, yet not being, a part of either culture. Community development workers should expect this pain because it is inevitable. (p.430).
Labonte' s (Labonte, 1 996a) argument touches on the significance of organisational and community cultures as well as the relationship of these to the community developer's own identities or identification with either, from her/his "hinge" location. The reasons for the community developer's identification with either are discussed in terms of power relations. The critical post-modem approach taken to analysing the relationships between community developer, community and organisations taken in chapter nine, views these interrelationships more as a form of "cultural politics" (Jordan & Weedon, 1 995). This approach views the community developer's locations and ensuing experiences of power-culture relations more as the effect of walking the interfaces between the clashing discourses and social structures of culturally dominant institutions and those of culturally marginalised communities. The community developer becomes a lens or prism whose own subject positions (subjectivities, identities and cultures) mediates these cultural politics and often divergent interests. The community developer therefore occupies various external locations in between organisations and community, and various internal locations contingent upon herlhis own sUbjectivities, identities and cultures.
Conclusion
This chapter has established the theoretical paradigm that comprises the analytical framework for the investigation. The explanatory power of this critical post-modern framework lies in the
Chapter 5 Theorising analysis and practice: critical post
various intersections between post-structuralism, post-modernism and feminism in ·so far as
these theorise agency dynamics. Post-modernist emphasis on fragmentation, partiality, contingency and the changing and multi-faceted nature of identity is potentially useful for its elucidation of the changing nature of people's subjectivities and the apparent contingencies and contradictions inherent in these. Also important are post-structural accounts of the dispersal of power and the discursive constitution of subjectivities. Feminism's traditional concerns with emancipation and subsequent engagement with subjectivity, and the relationship between agency and structure, whilist holding agentic notions of the 'subject' also makes vitial contributions to theorising agency dynamics. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also laid the basis for material in part two regarding critical postmodem approaches to community development, the same theoretical framework that informs much of the community development methodology that comprised capacity-building activities within the investigation, therefore joining theory and action. The focus on the three key 'hinges' of development work in the latter part of the chapter is significant in that it has laid the basis for later discussions
pertaining to agency and community development in chapter nine.
33 Advocates of critical post-modem forms of theorising are generally careful to distinguish between what is sometimes referred to as "Ludic Post-modernism" (Kincheloe and McLaren, 1 994) or "Anglo
American" post-modernism (Rosenau, 1 992) from the former critical current of post-modernism with which we are concerned here. For those concerned with research or social theory for changing oppressive power relations, Ludic Postmodenism through its continual playfulness of the signifier and the
heterogeneity of differences is considered to have little to offer (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1 994; WiIliams,
1 998). Critical post-modernism brings to the Ludic critique a form of materialist intervention in which the differing slippage of signifiers is not taken as the result of the immanent logic of language but as the effect of the social conflicts traversing signification (Ebert, 1 99 1 ).
34 As used here, the term 'de-construction' refers to the partiality of knowledge based on numerous different subjectivities and realities, therefore emphasising the 'located' nature of knowledge or experience.
3sThe distinctive meanings of post-modernism and post-structuralism tend to be ambiguous within the literature. For example, writers have used the terms interchangeably (Jordan & Weedon, 1 995; Williams, 1 996), while other writers subsume one term under the other (Kincheloe & Mc1aren, 1 994; Rosenau, 1 994). Each term covers a diverse range of theories whose practical applications have quite different political implications. Briefly, as they are used here, post-modernism emphasises the instability, difference and contingency of agency dynamics, while post-structuralism locates these within a network of material power relations. The use of the term 'critical' in the descriptor for the theoretical framework is deliberate for two reasons. Firstly, it is intended to convey the useful aspects of critical theory (Freire,
1 968; Shor & Freire, 1 987) that include the construction of marginalised know ledges for the purposes of critiquing power relations. While these constructions are necessarily temporary, they may be used as reference points in critically assessing the agency relations that are a product of power-culture dynamics within a given context. Secondly, critical theorists (Kincheloe & Mc1aren, 1 994) concerns with structural forms of power are important because of the connections this draws between the subjective and material aspects of agency.
Chapter 5 TheoriSing analysis and practice: critical post
36Deconstructive criticism will not be considered any further here because it fails to move to any form of re-construction and is of little use in theorising agency relations.
37 These three theses on power are contained in Michel Foucault's works of "Madness and Civilisation" ( 1 982), "Discipline and Punish" ( 1 977) and "The History of Sexuality" (1981).
38 For Kristeva's theory of "significance" see (Weedon, 1 987).
39 Locality development and social planning approaches to community development will not be dealt with any further in this chapter. Briefly, ' locality development' refers to the process of assisting individuals and groups to identify and meet local needs. This is based on the notion that community members have the capacity to solve their own problems. The community developer provides training and support to the natural leader so that they can form a group and work co-operatively. 'Social planning' is a rational, technical approach to community development in which the community developer uses research skills to identify and study social problems. It is often based on consultation with rather than participation from community members. Problems are often defined for communities in broad social service-sector terms (Labonte, 1 996a; Rice, 2000). Both approaches assume consensual relations and a functionalist view of the state (Shirley, 1 982). In contrast with this, ' Social action' or 'community as action' approaches are premised on forms of inter-group conflict and power inequities in society as significant social conditions (Labonte, 1 996a; Shirley, 1 982). The State reflects (and to some extent) reproduces inequities in power relations between groups in wider society (Shirley, 1 982). The emphasis of this approach on shifts in social power relations as a part of community development, distinguishes it from locality and social planning approaches.
40 IIIich (IIIich, 1977) claims a predominant conceptualisation of the professional's role as one that is "selflessly devoted to the good of the weaker and less knowledgeable members of society" (p.9).
Chapter 5 Theorising analysis and practice: critical post