JUDITH ALLEN

IT AIN'T NECESSARILY SO: SOCIAL EXCLUSION, SOCIAL CAPITAL AND LOCAL ASSOCIATIONAL

ACTIVITIES

In the first round of National Action Plans to Promote Social Inclusion, seven of the EU15 member states saw neighbourhood disparities as the most significant spatial dimension of social exclusion, and a further three identified it as important in combination with rural or regional dimensions. The Commission commented that all of the Plans were weakly developed in terms of involving poor people themselves and involving other stakeholders (European Commission 2002).

A key element in the discourse associated with the National Action Plans has been the idea of building social capital among the poor by enhancing their participation in localised community or voluntary groups. Such participation, it is assumed, will promote trust and reciprocity among neighbours, lead to enhanced life opportunities underpinned by locally tailored delivery of public services, and serve as a prophylactic against race riots, criminality and other incivilities.

There are a number of reasons for thinking ‘it ain't necessarily so’. This paper reviews some of the analytical puzzles embedded in the moral-practical assertion that building neighbourhood-based social capital among poor people should be a key strategy for combating social exclusion, and/or promoting social inclusion and/or cohesion and/or solidarity. It then presents the results of a cross-national research project focusing on 11 neighbourhoods in nine west European countries. The paper focuses on local associational activities. It identifies who the neighbourhood actors are, the relationships among them, and how these relationships are structured into a web of networks which may be or may not be effective in addressing social exclusion, inclusion, cohesion and/or solidarity60.

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60 The study, "Neighbourhood governance: Capacity for social integration", was funded by the European Commission (HPSE-CT-2001-00080), and included nine countries: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, German, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Two of the 11 neighbourhoods had internally differentiated structures and could be, themselves, regarded as several neighbourhoods taken together. The case studies and final report can be found at www.infra.kth.se/SB/sp/forskning/index.html.

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CONCEPTS AT THE HINGE: CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL PUZZLES

The central problem with concepts such as social exclusion, social inclusion, social cohesion, etc is that they lie on the hinge between political and scientific practices. As elements in political discourse, they signal broad visions about the future of society and inform broad policy orientations. Their political meaning shifts as policies deliver the usual mix of intended and unintended consequences, effectively or less effectively, as the same broad objectives are pursued by different levels of government (from supra- to infra-national) with different configurations of competencies, and as underlying political alliances form and re-form. As a ground for scientific research, this terrain is particularly sandy. The scientific concepts which grow in this soil have their own natural history, shaped both by the need for focused evaluative research to underpin policy initiatives and by the relative autonomy of intellectual practices from political discourses (cf Buck et al, 2001, for an excellent discussion of these issues). When the political discourses and intellectual practices are located in relationship to supranational institutions and their member states, these complexities become even more multiplex.

This discursive context is both a curse and a blessing for social researchers. The curse lies in the usual problems of attempting to do politically relevant and intellectually rigorous research. The blessing, however, is that it points directly towards cross-national research. Neighbourhood or community studies within a single country face immense difficulties in disentangling the causal efficacy of national contextual factors. The best that can be said, in most instances, is that contextual factors create opportunity and constraint structures at a local level. Cross-national research yields the possibility of identifying which national contextual factors play a causal role in determining localised social processes.

The root concepts informing the research reported in this paper were social exclusion and social capital. Since both concepts have a deep fuzziness arising from their political/scientific nature, they were used as guiding threads in designing the research, that is, they were subject to critique at each stage and alongside the development of the empirical work61. The comments below set out key elements of this critique in order to show how the comments and critique oriented the research.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION: HISTORY OF A EUROPEAN POLICY

The French concept of social exclusion was adapted when it became institutionalised in the European Union's Action Programme to Combat Social Exclusion and Promote Social Solidarity, launched in 1993. The central republican element of the concept was retained.

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61 An earlier project by the same team, on neighbourhoods and social exclusion, had established a common language, orientation and basic methodology (www.improving-ser.sti.jrc.it).

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This asserts that "Government [takes] seriously its responsibility . . . for the provision of order and cohesion in public space and social life of all citizens . . . that is, committed to combating (or mitigating the impact of) a range of different logics that threaten to exclude the citizenry from full participation in the broader republic" (Taylor 2003, p 17). Thus, the European approach rests on the notion of social cohesion, underpinned by a common citizenship, in which the rights and obligations of citizens are reciprocated in the actions of agencies and partnerships throughout the Union. The notion of governance, in the sense of mobilising a very wide range of actors to work in concert, replaces the emphasis on government and is also central to this political programme.

The European Union's Action Programme emerged shortly after the first direct elections to the European Parliament and the Maastricht Treaty and can be seen as an important component in establishing a "European political and social space". Governance, citizenship, social solidarity and social cohesion were linked together in a programme designed to address the wide variety of social processes leading to the emergence of what was then seen as the 'new poverty'. Age, gender, and regional differences were seen as fundamental dimensions of these social processes. Whether worklessness, in itself, generated poverty or threatened social cohesion was seen as contingent on national, regional and local social structures, labour market practices and welfare systems. Ironically, the key role of citizenship in this constellation of political ideas was quickly associated with an increasingly exclusionary treatment of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers – newcomers and non-citizens.

Along with many other academic commentators, Taylor interpreted economic restructuring in the 1990s in terms of de-industrialisation and neo-liberalism. While this view was no doubt true for some of the member states, it is certainly far too simplistic to capture the dynamics of economic change across the whole of Europe (Cars and Allen 2001, Allen et al 2004).

In 1993, there was an important discursive shift in European Union political discussion, away from seeing problems as matters of harmonising the activities of independent nation-states towards seeing them as affecting the whole of the Union, which happened to be structured into member-states. The overarching problems associated with creating a European society turned around two broad issues. One was how to support the development of a European social welfare model which could give substance to the idea of a common European citizenship. The other was to guide economic change in order to position Europe as a whole within a global economic structure. By the late 1990s, it was clear that economic change could best be characterised at the European level as a process of tertiarisation. This formulation of the issue captured both the processes of de-industrialisation in some member states and the shift from rural agricultural economies to urban service based economies in other, never-very-industrialised member states. This view of economic change at the European level is now embedded in a range of policy initiatives to promote a knowledge based economy. At the same time, the project to promote a European social welfare model proved to be misplaced. The model was loosely based on corporatist models associated with Fordist manufacturing industry. Given the disparate welfare regimes among member states and the limited competencies of the Union itself, the project mutated into one of promoting active welfare states capable of adapting to the tertiarisation of the European economy. The main tool for promoting active welfare states is to require member states to prepare National

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Action Plans to Promote Social Inclusion and to engage in a process of mutual learning (known as the open method of co-ordination). The emphasis on governance, on mobilising all relevant bodies, is one of the four fundamental objectives of the programme agreed by the Council of Ministers in Nice in December 2000.

Thus, the central linkage between governance, on the one hand, and social inclusion, solidarity and cohesion, on the other hand, which characterises the current programme can best be seen as part of a commitment to managing structural change in a way which supports the development of a European political, economic and social space while tailoring specific welfare actions to national and local situations.

SOCIAL CAPITAL: HISTORY OF AN IDEA

The notion of social capital is now in such general political/scientific usage that no research touching on localised interpersonal relationships can be innocent of it. Scientific approaches to the notion of social capital can be divided between those based on Bourdieu and those based on Putnam. The Bourdieusian approach locates social capital as a characteristic of individuals, given their biographies and social positions. Since the research focused on relationships among groups and agencies working within neighbourhoods, Bourdieu's approach was both inappropriate and too reductionist for this purpose (cf Paadam 2004 for an excellent development of Bourdieu's work).

Putnam's work, however, presents more subtle issues. His approach originated in a study of Italy, in which he attributed the relative economic prosperity of central Italy to the presence of lively social networks and their role in creating a civic culture over a long historical period. In contrast, he explained poverty in southern Italy in terms of the absence of such networks, essentially reproducing Banfield's "amoral familism" argument (Putnam 1993, Reis 1998). He then further elaborated the concept of social capital in his expansive, ingenious, and immensely influential study of the history of voluntary associations in the United States in the twentieth century (Putnam 2000).

There are some important problems with this intellectual history. Firstly, there are alternative explanations for the relative prosperity of different Italian regions, for example, the relative fertility of the land itself or differential histories of land ownership and control, that is, agricultural social production structures. Secondly, there are historiographic problems with how Putnam's work is rooted in a Tocquevillean vision of American society. Observing American life in the early nineteenth century, de Toqueville not only noted its rich community based associational structure, but also argued that it served as a substitute for the more robust governmental structures in Europe at the time. In other words, de Tocqeville saw local associational life as a weakness which would inhibit the development of government in the

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United States. Putnam follows the dominant American historiographic tradition, which celebrates local associational life and ignores questions about the role of governmental structures. In other words, he fails to see, in either amoral familism in southern Italy or local associational life in the United States today, how these structures of social relations substitute for weak states which are unable to ensure the welfare of their citizens.

The effect of locating the concept of social capital in this frame is to focus attention on its affective components, the trust and mutual reciprocity which is built up among members of voluntary associations. The analytical problem is that these affective components carry extremely strong normative elements within them. The overall effect is to reduce Putnam's analysis to a simple injunction: building local associational social capital is a good thing. As a moral-practical proposition, this raises questions about the appropriate circumstances within which it can and/or should be pursued. Some of these questions, about the systematic distortion of communication associated with disparities in power, can best be analysed within the framework of Habermas' theory of communicative action and are clearly relevant to the groups which are formed when the state promotes local associational activities as part of neighbourhood programmes. Other issues relate to what might be called the governance of welfare, that is, the way political systems manage the links among welfare state provision, labour market practices and family/kinship/friendship relationships. Welfare governance clearly shapes the societal spaces within which local social capital can be built. Systems of welfare governance vary among the European countries, but the European countries as a whole are significantly different from the United States, which stands out from almost all other advanced industrial countries, in Esping-Andersen's terminology, as a liberal residualist welfare state (Esping-Andersen 1990: see also the analysis in Allen et al 2004). In such circumstances, de Tocqueville's fear, that local association life would work as a prophylactic against the state taking responsibility for welfare, seems well founded. In the European context, however, the picture appears more complex.

The normative elements within Putnam's concept of social capital can easily lead to premature closure in scientific work. To summarise: Putnam suggests that participating in community groups builds interpersonal relationships of trust and mutual reciprocity, which congeal into forms of social capital which can be used to combat social exclusion. (Over)stating Putnam's position in this way helps to clarify the critical scientific issues: Under what circumstances is the absence of trust, or even active mistrust, a fully reasonable response by local actors? Under what circumstances do interpersonal relationships congeal in ways which counteract social exclusion, and under what circumstances do they congeal in ways which intensify social exclusion?

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POLITICAL/SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Analysing the concepts of social exclusion and social capital as moral-practical propositions helps to distinguish issues of political relevance from those of scientific rigour in framing research. Identifying the specific moral-practical propositions embedded in the political use of these concepts lets the political context determine the broad orientation of the research while at the same time opening up a space for specifying scientific-technical propositions to guide the research. The general research question can, thus, be framed as identifying how and to what extent local associational activities support the creation of forms of social capital which contest social exclusion within specific national welfare governance systems.

REFRAMING THE PROBLEM: OPEN QUESTIONS

Framing the research questions in terms of local associational activities has two advantages. First, it isolates scientific propositions from moral-practical propositions. Second, it facilitates transferring Putnam's concept into the context of modern European welfare states. This approach places community activity by residents in the context of the activities and services provided by the state (and, in some places, NGOs) on a localised basis.

There is scattered evidence which suggests that common images of socially excluded neighbourhoods are too simplistic. For example, of the indicators of social capital used in the General Household Survey in Great Britain, there is only one which strongly distinguishes rich and poor households: feelings of safety after dark. On three indicators relevant to assessing local associational activity, poor households report higher social capital than richer households: neighbourliness, friendship networks, and relative's networks (Social Trends 2004, table 5.24: see also Hall 1999 for a longitudinal analysis of these indicators). Detailed analysis of opinion poll data shows that rich people living in predominantly poor neighbourhoods are far more dissatisfied with local facilities than poor people in any neighbourhood (MORI 2004). More generally, Crow (1997), reviewing the literature on neighbouring and community, argues that neighbouring relationships are the outcome of a set of dynamic tensions at both structural and local levels. Consequently, it is not possible to predict, in principle, what the pattern of relationships will be in specific local areas.

What is required for comparative studies is a systematic analytical framework within which different patterns of local associational activities can be identified. Shaping the central research question in terms of local associational activities opens out the research along two broad dimensions. The first is to look at the links between localised social processes and social exclusion. The second is to look at the social dynamics which localise problems. Both these dimensions give depth and range to the notion of localised associational activities.

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LOCALISED SOCIAL PROCESSES AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

Jordan (1995) argues, in general terms, that local associational activities can solidify broader processes of social exclusion, and Warren's (2001) detailed study of the effects of different kinds of civil associations shows that they vary systematically in terms of the extent to which and how they promote the civic virtues associated with democracy: tolerance, ability to negotiate differences, representation of specific groups, etc. Our earlier study on neighbourhoods and social exclusion suggested that where the only outlets for expressing broader social conflicts are contained within localised areas, then there was an implosionary process which intensified divisions among local groups. These studies suggest that not enough is understood about the linkages between basic social dynamics and local associational activity. It is clear that three fundamental cleavages underlie conflicts within neighbourhoods: age (youth versus elderly), race and ethnicity (both between indigenous and non-indigenous groups and among different non-indigenous groups), and length of residence. However, they don't work in the same way in every place. Some places are riven by deep schisms between groups: Other places exhibit a tolerance verging on indifference.

There seem to be a complex underlying dynamics at work in neighbourhoods. Some of this is captured in Elias' classic study of newcomers in a suburb in Leicester in the 1950s. This study of newcomers and long-settled residents, in which there were no significant social differences between the two groups, showed how the long settled group's exclusion of newcomers from local status positions, together with the use of gossip which labelled aspects of the newcomers' behaviour as uncivil, created strong incentives for newcomers to assimilate into the normative order of the established group. Parallel processes clearly characterise adolescence as a social process of assimilation into adulthood and can be made more complex by ethnic diversity. However, processes associated with both adolescence and ethnic diversity have other complicating features. Adolescence becomes more difficult if the normative order of adulthood is itself undermined by economic tertiarisation, and the assimilation of ethnic minority newcomers into a dominant normative order may be inhibited by the existence of alternative normative orders associated with religious differences. Clearly, the time scale of these processes is generational and continuing. But, what is more important in generalising Elias' approach is to recognise a central irony: ‘Localised’ social exclusion can be part of a process which has the effect of integrating outsiders into a normative order in a way which combats ‘globalised’ social exclusion.

What this suggests is that timing is everything in looking at specific neighbourhoods. One output of the sequencing of these complex, relatively autonomous and dynamic social processes is the continuous re-creation of local social structures. These structures can be analysed in terms of three questions (Vranken 2001):

The extent to which social differentiation becomes social fragmentation, or the extent to which different groups live separate and parallel lives

The extent to which social differentiation is associated with social inequality, or the extent to which local status hierarchies are associated with privileged access to resources

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The extent to which social fragmentation and social inequality combine to create the social exclusion of specific groups

This analysis suggests that some sorts of interventions in local associational activities may intensify processes of fragmentation, inequality and social exclusion, while other sorts of interventions may inhibit these processes. Since it is difficult to measure process using single-point-in-time case studies, reframing the question in terms of a set of criteria for assessing how local structures function is useful.

THE SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF LOCALISATION

Neighbourhood or community studies are the most obvious way to study local associational activities. However, this method raises three interpretative problems. Firstly, however the boundaries are drawn, there are likely to be "size effects". Neighbourhoods are open social systems, in the sense that people are free to form social relationships within them or outside them. The larger the urban area within which the neighbourhood is located and the more diverse the population within the neighbourhood, then the more likely it is that the neighbourhood system will be significantly open. Insofar as the (politically informed) assumptions behind the research are that local associational activities will enhance what is assumed to be residents' restricted access to resources available in the rest of the urban system, then it is important to distinguish between access which builds on local associational activities and other forms of access which already exist.

Secondly, it is important not to confuse spatial and social segregation. On the one hand, not all cities are subject to processes which concentrate poor people in specific areas. Milan, Athens (Maloutas and Karadimitriou 2001) and Genoa (Seassaro 1995), for example, are characterised by a fine grained spatial mix which arises from the significance of vertical social segregation in multi-family housing. Different social classes simply live on different stories of the same building. In a number of southern European cities, where women are still ascribed primary caring responsibilities but access to housing requires two incomes, the increasing use of live-in domestic help leads to a highly dispersed group of marginalised workers (Arbaci 2004ff). On the other hand, the discussion above indicates that the relationship between spatial concentrations of poverty and social exclusion is not always straightforward. Some poverty pockets appear to reflect deeply seated processes of social exclusion while others appear to have little effect on their residents.

Thirdly, what ‘local’ means in this context is problematic. In practice, spatial boundaries tend to be drawn around neighbourhoods on one of three criteria, defined by:

The local authority, either as a sub-unit of government or as the promoter of a specific programme of intervention

Spatial concentrations of poorer people

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Natural urban physical boundaries (similar housing types, major roads, rivers, discontinuities in public transport systems, etc)

These boundaries may overlap or even fully coincide. However, only the first relates directly to local associational activities, in the sense that local authorities are local social actors within the spatial area. For this reason, the size, competences and spatial structure of local government are important. In terms of the other two criteria, the relationships are more contingent. Spatial concentrations of poverty depend on the processes which have brought people to live in the area eg the role of social networks in accessing housing, choice versus constraint, bureaucratic methods of allocating housing, etc. Natural boundaries are only likely to affect local associational activities insofar as the friction of distance comes into play.

REFRAMING: STEPPING STONE OR SIDE-STEPPING?

The remarks above show how some of the widely held but crude images of socially excluded neighbourhoods embodied in political initiatives import a range of questionable hidden assumptions, some derived from the strength of political intent and some derived from previous sociological studies. In such a context, stepping stone concepts, or provisional concepts, often provide a useful way of moving forward scientifically.

The notion of local associational activities is proposed as a way of focusing the empirical research on phenomena which can be observed in all neighbourhoods. The criteria derived from Vranken can be used to link an account of the way these activities are structured to an assessment of how processes of social exclusion have an impact on the neighbourhood, taking into account local demographic dynamics, local authority services and programmes and the national contextual factors summarised under the concept of welfare governance.

In this way, the notion of local associational structures is not so much a stepping stone concept, as a side stepping concept, designed to evade some of the complications of doing politically relevant and scientifically rigorous research.

Neighbourhood governance and structures of local associational activities

A key output of the research project as a whole was to synthesise a framework for analysing structures of local associational activities. This section of the paper focuses on explaining the framework and the subsequent section analyses the framework in terms of networks of social relationships.

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RESEARCH PROCESS AND ANALYSING THE RESULTS

The empirical research was based on case studies of 11 neighbourhoods in nine of the EU15 member states. Effectively, the neighbourhoods were chosen because they were the focus of government (local or national) sponsored programmes to address localised areas of social exclusion. These programmes were just beginning in some neighbourhoods and just drawing to a close in other neighbourhoods.

The case studies were designed to explore four neighbourhood issues which had been identified in the previous project: safety and security, managing public spaces, education, and unemployment. In the event, local respondents paid little attention to unemployment issues, generally seeing them as a wider-than-neighbourhood problem. A first round of interviews with residents and local agencies identified governance arrangements in the neighbourhoods: Who did what and with whom did they work? A second round of interviews with professionals working in the neighbourhood assessed the effectiveness of neighbourhood governance arrangements.

Each of the case studies was reported in a comparable format, answering a set of questions which reflected the concept of neighbourhood governance behind the overall project. The initial analysis of the case studies was structured along the same headings, and then synthesised. It, thus, reflects the whole data set for all 11 neighbourhoods62. The framework for analysing local associational activities is at the heart of the synthesis. It starts by identifying "neighbourhood actors", then discusses how they work together and the types of networks which structure their relationships. The main findings from comparing the neighbourhoods are incorporated into the discussion of the framework.

IDENTIFYING NEIGHBOURHOOD ACTORS

‘Mobilising all actors’ is a key element in all strategies to combat social exclusion.

Four groups of actors were identified in the study neighbourhoods: residents, professionals, framework setters and elected officials. Each is discussed in turn below:

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62 The next stage would be to apply the synthesis to re-analyse the neighbourhood data, but this requires further funding or another research project.

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1. Residents: Three types of residents' groups were identified:

Completely voluntary groups of residents: These were relatively rare. Some groups started out in this way and moved on to become more formalised over time. Other groups disbanded after a short period of activity, or were not observable because they considered their activities as private.

Groups of residents set up by professionals and agencies as a way of delivering services: There were two types of such groups. The first was where "group working" was the preferred method of service delivery, eg family support groups, youth clubs, language classes, etc. The second was where professionals and/or agencies were required to set up consultative user groups as part of consultative and/or quality assurance processes. Some of the consultative groups were quite powerful since professionals were dependent on them to meet wider requirements.

Groups of residents set up by professional community workers as part of a community development initiative: These were the most frequently observed form of residents' groups.

2. Professionals: Two general types of professionals were identified. With the exception of a few in Dublin and one in Turin who had been ‘home grown’, professionals did not live in the neighbourhoods.

Professionals rooted in the neighbourhood: The formal role description for these professionals focuses on work in the neighbourhood. They may be employed by a variety of different agencies, local public agencies, non-governmental agencies, national and even supra-national organisations. Much of their work consists of bringing people together around neighbourhood issues, and their methods of working depended on the extent to which residents' groups already existed or not. In more developed circumstances, there were complex issues about the mutual dependence between these professionals and residents' groups, which could often be traced to the extent to which the work of the professionals was seen as a top down or bottom up initiative.

Professionals working in the neighbourhood as part of larger agencies: The main factors influencing the work of these professionals were the extent to which they had flexibility and autonomy to tailor their approaches to specific features of the neighbourhood. Professionals working for major asset holders in the neighbourhood (large, usually public sector landlords or prospective developers) had roles which, in some places, were limited to simply delivering a specific service while elsewhere they encompassed responsibility for managing more general neighbourhood issues. In a number of the neighbourhoods, religious organisations played an important role in community life, and adapted their services to the needs expressed by residents more readily than public sector agencies and major asset holders. By and large, private sector businesses took little interest in the neighbourhoods, although agencies mediating between residents and the job market were more active.

3. Framework setters: The significance of this group of professionals emerged from the research. They are not usually visible in the neighbourhoods but play an important role in

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determining what the visible actors do. They comprise line managers of professionals working in the neighbourhoods, those with responsibility for city wide physical renewal or neighbourhood management initiatives, or managing specially funded regional, national or supra-national programmes. An key issue in all the neighbourhoods was the extent to which framework setters co-ordinated their work among themselves and/or tailored it to the specific features of a neighbourhood.

4. Elected officials: The role of elected politicians varied immensely, partly as a consequence of very different formal electoral systems and partly as a consequence of their own political commitments and ambitions. In several neighbourhoods, they played a strong role, either visibly or behind the scenes. In other neighbourhoods, they were strongly distrusted by residents – or they themselves distrusted organised residents' groups.

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Figure 1 provides a template for identifying the actors involved in the neighbourhoods. The dotted arrows show the less visible relationships. It also shows that many of the key relationships occur outside the neighbourhood itself, as well as showing how many actors' relationships with residents are mediated by relatively junior professionals within public bureaucracies.

Figure 1. Neighbourhood actors

The diagram shows that actors are defined both by their own objectives in relationship to the neighbourhood and by their relationships with other actors.

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MOBILISING NEIGHBOURHOOD ACTORS

For the formal actors, mobilisation means strengthening their orientation towards the neighbourhood, either awakening their interest in the neighbourhood or changing the nature of a pre-existing organisational interest in the neighbourhood. For residents, mobilisation refers to identifying the potential for setting up residents' groups around specific neighbourhood issues or to developing their relationships with a wider range of formal actors.

A number of points were made in almost all neighbourhoods:

Face-to-face interpersonal contact is the basic glue that holds groups of actors together.

The underlying dynamic in the relationships between residents' groups and front-line service delivery workers is shaped by the formal organisational interests of those workers. These were also the strongest relationships in the neighbourhoods.

Where front-line workers are placed within bureaucracies which are strongly divided vertically, this creates a dynamic which obscures or devalues issues which cut across the vertical divisions.

This vertically divided dynamic is reinforced because the relationship between framework setters and residents is mediated, either by community workers or by front-line service delivery workers.

Community work skills are fundamentally different from the skills involved in delivering centrally determined services in a neighbourhood. This often creates tensions between community workers, whose position is legitimated by their relationship with residents, and front-line service delivery workers, whose position is legitimated by their place in a bureaucratic hierarchy.

There are formal organisational biases against identifying non-visible groups of residents or starting new groups among residents.

The nature of the relationship between community workers and residents is important. In at least one case, a highly informalised relationship inhibited community workers from supporting residents in forming relationships with other agencies. At the other end of the spectrum, where community workers saw residents as their main manager, a much wider range of relationships was facilitated.

WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

Working relationships among actors tap into two different ways of organising social relationships: hierarchy and network. Hierarchical relationships characterise the formal large bureaucracies within which most neighbourhood professionals work. Networked

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relationships can rest on a variety of bases: day to day social relationships among residents, the space of the neighbourhood itself, at different levels within vertically structured bureaucracies, and around politicians as members of an elected governmental body. In other words, hierarchies and networks are not independent social phenomena, but different dimensions of the relationships among actors. (Figure 1, for example, can be read vertically or horizontally.) It is the relative strength of the two dimensions, and how they are interwoven, that is important.

There were two situations in which working relationships were absent. They form polar situations, which help to locate the other neighbourhoods. In Portugal and Greece, there were almost no relationships, either among professionals or among residents, at the neighbourhood level. This is almost certainly explained by the strongly vertical political processes and absence of a range of local (social) services which characterise welfare governance systems in these two countries. In Dublin, there were two strong networks operating in the neighbourhood, one of which (a bottom up organisation with strong links with residents) refused to work much with the other (a top down organisation being set up by the central government).

Working relationships among professionals

These were relatively common. Six types of relationship could be identified:

Joined up or transversal working: This occurred in two circumstances. One was where a key mobilising issue was defined in a fuzzy enough way to involve a range of actors. Crime prevention, youth and children were particularly effective ways to bring actors together. The other was where there was a coherent top down broadly conceived neighbourhood renewal strategy designed to bring a wide range of agencies and residents' groups together.

Contract based: In one case, where housing management was provided under contract to the local authority, working relationships were very effective when the contractor could see cost savings associated with it. However, the tight specification of the contract precluded working relationships around fuzzy issues.

Interface determined: In this situation, solidaristic working relationships within the neighbourhood were enhanced by opposition to a strongly vertically divided city-wide administration.

Experimental: Relationships were formed around new ways of working, either with specific client groups (eg families with children) or within fuzzy mobilising issue (eg drugs). These projects usually had a long term perspective oriented towards mainstreaming the innovation.

Ad hoc: These were short term and usually event or task focused, in which a group of professionals sought new ways to reach out to residents.

Capital investment based: Large scale capital investment programmes necessarily require extensive collaboration among a wide range of actors for effective implementation and can generate quite complex structures of relationships among professionals.

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Working relationships among professionals depended on a social infrastructure within the neighbourhood, usually a loose grouping of professionals who were willing to spend time getting to know each other. Such groups provided a pool of expertise which could be tapped by its members either in their routine day to day work or to support ad hoc and experimental initiatives.

Working relationships among residents

The dynamics which bring residents' groups together, or keep groups apart, are very different from those which characterise relationships among professionals. The extent to which residents work together depends on both the motivations which might bring them together and the underlying social relationships among groups of residents. Three types of motivations can bring people together:

Shared social identity: A common ethnic identity was the strongest motivation in the neighbourhoods we studied. A shared occupational history formed a strong common bond among residents in one neighbourhood.

Shared personal interests: In most neighbourhoods, small groups of residents met together frequently and informally, to play football or bingo or pursue other hobbies and leisure interests.

Shared life issues: The most common were children, youth and safety. Groups around these issues were found in all but the Greek neighbourhoods.

Where there was deep mutual hostility and suspicion, residents tended to stay apart from each other. In these circumstances, the neighbourhood's problems are often, but not always, ascribed to other groups of residents rather than being seen as a common situation affecting everybody. This dynamic was particularly marked in the ethnically mixed neighbourhoods. Depending on the size of the group and the history of settlement, it was common for ethnic groups to have separate organisations, especially where religion formed a parallel dimension of difference. Distinctively different housing areas could also form a basis for strong divisions.

Working relationships between professionals and residents

Different types of relationships between professionals and residents can be placed on a spectrum in terms of the balance of power in the relationship between professionals and residents:

Client groups for professionals: Group working characterises a number of social work practices, eg family support or mental health support. Some forms of youth work also fall into this category. In this case, the formation, functioning and termination of the group is determined by professional judgements.

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Groups supported by professionals to meet requirements for "consultation" on service delivery: Examples are residents' groups in the context of neighbourhood renewal programmes or advisory groups established around specific facilities or services. These are usually quite formal, and residents are, as it were, being "invited into" the normal functioning of a formal organisation. The agendas are usually determined by the organisation, while residents participate mainly out of personal interest and acquire power based on "voice".

Groups using facilities or services provided by formal agencies: This includes, for example, adult and language education groups, youth clubs, etc. In this case, professionals determine who has access to the facility and on what terms, which may be very open. The user group's power rests on the possibility of "exit".

Groups formed by community workers employed by formal organisations: These are usually formed to address a neighbourhood based issue, and the community worker provides a secretariat function. Effectively power is shared between professionals and residents. This type of groups is the most likely to serve as the basis for an umbrella group of other residents' groups.

Groups employing their own workers: These are usually funded by government or other formal agencies. The purposes may be quite general and diffuse, or very specific and local. Examples range from general tenants' or residents' groups through to specialist advice for immigrant groups, legal advice agencies, and independent drug advice agencies. In these cases, the balance of power reflects the position of residents as an employer vis-à-vis the expertise of the employee.

Groups formed by or around religious facilities: The purposes may be religious instruction, organising voluntary community activities, sociability, etc. The balance of power between "professional religious workers" and residents varies with the organisational structure of the religious organisation, but the norms governing the relationship are determined outside the functioning of public agencies.

The dynamics in the working relationships between residents and professionals are shaped by two factors. The first is funding: who pays the professional's salary? The second is whether the group is designed to be permanent or transitory. The dynamics are also shaped by the wider political system within which they are located. For example, in Amsterdam, a political culture which is deeply invested in consultation supports the formation of residents' groups almost "naturally". In Newcastle and in Turin, local political cultures among residents, which were strongly based in trade union traditions, found difficulty operating in an environment governed by public interest norms. In the clientelist political culture of Portugal and Greece, formal residents' groups were interpreted by other residents as only self-interested and, thus, somehow morally questionable.

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THE ROLE OF FRAMEWORK SETTERS IN NEIGHBOURHOOD BASED RELATIONSHIPS

Framework setters are rarely visible in neighbourhoods but have a strong influence on the kinds of working relationships which can be developed within them. There are four ways in which framework setters influence these relationships:

Determining the type of programme to be applied in the neighbourhood: Two types can be distinguished. Neighbourhood management focuses on improving the effectiveness of service delivery. It assumes that if residents are enabled to be more demanding on service providers, then services will meet residents' needs better and the residents will become more socially integrated. The time perspective is typically indefinite. In contrast, neighbourhood renewal programmes are commonly associated with implementing new working relationships among professionals to consult and/or involve residents. These arrangements can be conceived very narrowly, especially if the aim is confined to physical renewal, or very broadly, if the programme spans social and physical renewal. Nevertheless, the perspective of these programmes is typically time limited.

Shaping revenue funding arrangements for neighbourhood initiatives: Two kinds of funding are necessary to support residents' participation in neighbourhood groups. The first is for community workers and the second is for specific projects or additional services identified by residents. Insecure funding inhibits full-throated participation by residents and time-limited funding generally has little continuing effect, although it may have a high impact in the short run. Funding arrangements may divide residents' groups, by forcing them to compete against each other, or help to unite groups by emphasising collective initiatives, such as common facilities. In addition, because most residents' groups tend to be socially closed, the distribution of funding plays a strong role in determining which residents are enabled to become more active.

Activating activists: Framework setting organisations are permanent, but many residents' groups have a natural lifecycle, which ends when activist residents withdraw, when some project or task has been achieved or when they lose funding. A related phenomenon is turnover in community and front-line service delivery staff. Given that interpersonal relationships glue working relationships together, both the lifecycle of residents' groups and staff turnover can lead to the deterioration of arrangements which seek to involve residents. Thus, the extent to which framework setters see activating activists as a continuing, rather than once and for all, investment in the neighbourhood influences the dynamic sustainability of neighbourhood working relationships.

Creating support structures for neighbourhood working relationships: Relationships among professionals working in neighbourhoods are likely to remain ad hoc and limited unless framework setters create support structures behind the scenes. Four aspects of these structures affected neighbourhood relationships. First, the extent to which support structures spanned divisions in a vertically divided bureaucratic organisations affected which neighbourhood professionals could invest in expanding their working relationships. Second, the extent to which framework setters could accept that one size does not fit all affects the extent to which neighbourhood based working relationships could adapt to the social dynamics of neighbourhoods, both in different neighbourhoods and over time in a single neighbourhood. Third, and a related point, was the extent to which framework setters could tolerate residents' perceptions of proper ways to work together, both among themselves and with professionals, affected which residents could be fitted into the

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system. This was particularly important among minority ethnic populations, who may have views about the proper conduct of collective business which do not fit with indigenous and/or bureaucratised methods of working (Allen and Cars 2001: Temple and Steele 2004). Similarly, immigrants without civil rights, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are frequently reluctant to engage with public authorities, so that involving them requires approaches which recognise their insecurity. Fourth was the extent to which framework setters could provide a clear structure of incentives for developing neighbourhood level working relationships both among professionals and for residents affected their span For example, where local government delivers few services, there is little point in residents engaging with it.

The local associational activities among neighbourhood based actors, residents and professionals, create local networks of relationships. It is the structure of these networks which determines what can be done in any specific neighbourhood, both because they are relatively more stable than the identities of specific actors and because they shape the paths which allow neighbourhood actors to access a variety of different types of material and organisational resources. The next section of the paper looks at how relationships can be represented in terms of networks.

NETWORKS AND NETWORK BUILDERS

Network builders are people who bring groups of people together so that they can pursue common objectives. Figure 2 develops the map of actors in Figure 1 to show the types of networks we found in the neighbourhoods, shown by the circles. The dark arrows indicate organisations that may contribute, sometimes substantially, to network formation but do not fit neatly into the underlying structure of relationships shown on the map. The dashed arrows indicate points of weakness in the structure.

The diagram illustrates key points about the ways networks functioned in the neighbourhoods:

There are two basic types of networks: Those which bring individuals together into a group, and those which span different groups.

Community workers have a key position in linking networks together. This can be a position of great strength, or it can be a position fraught with conflict.

Whether networks of residents link with each other is an open question. In at least two neighbourhoods, there were totally separate networks, within different social groups, which were not linked at all.

In service delivery networks, the relative balance of power between residents and the service delivery workers, is affected by the extent to which the residents are linked to other residents' networks.

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Where separate networks are linked with different service delivery workers, it is common for neither the workers nor "their" networks to be linked with other networks, which limits the range of issues that can be raised in these forums.

The extent to which framework setters are networked among themselves influences the types of issues which can be raised within service delivery based networks.

Similarly, networking between framework setters for neighbourhood management or renewal and the normal service delivery agencies affects the range of issues which can be raised during formal consultation on plans for the area.

The most common network builders "outside the box" were politicians and religious organisations. They occupy a special position which can span a variety of networks, and they are the two main neighbourhood based actors who had institutionalised links outside the neighbourhood.

Network builders have a specific range of skills: Spotting common issues, interesting people in working together with others, supporting the articulation of common aims, mediating differences within the group or network, and negotiating with other networks.

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Figure 2. Neighbourhood networks

The evidence from the neighbourhoods showed how the set of networks functioned:

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The "normal" fragmentation of service delivery within a neighbourhood puts great demands and limits on residents' groups. Either their agenda is limited by the fragmentation, or they must have immense skill and experience to network among themselves and broaden the agenda, or they require professional support from community workers. In two neighbourhoods, we found residents with such skills, experience and support. In these neighbourhoods that there was also a very high level of conflict between the residents, on the one hand, and the municipality and central government on the other hand.

The extent to which relatively junior service delivery workers and community workers are able to mediate between residents' groups and framework setters determines the avenues available for challenging processes of social exclusion. In practice, relying on mediation by these workers tends to reproduce rather than challenge processes of social exclusion.

The key resource for residents is the presence of community workers. The easiest way to contain problems within the private realm and/or within the neighbourhood is to fail to fund such workers.

The strongest localised networks in clientelistic political systems were among kin and friends, and service delivery was mediated by a clientelistic exchange between family networks and politicians. In these circumstances, it was very difficult for community workers to insert themselves.

Network building takes considerable time because it is based on interpersonal relationships. In two neighbourhoods, time limited projects designed to build networks among residents were extended because in one neighbourhood there were no pre-existing networks and, in the other neighbourhood, pre-existing political experience had been trade union based in a clientelistic system. In these circumstances, both a long time horizon and quick wins are necessary to persuade residents to engage in neighbourhood based networks.

While network building involves managing and/or resolving conflicts within the network, strong networks can also sustain and promote conflict among different social groups. In some cases, this is a consequence of empowering some groups of residents to raise issues in a public forum while excluding other groups from these forums. In other cases, separate networks cement solidarities within groups who are already hostile to each other.

The overall set of networks can be thought of as depicting a web of networks. Within this web, some networks are more important than others in supporting local associational activities. Two were particularly important: First, those which formed around community workers because they were potentially more open in terms of which residents might become involved and in terms of how issues could be framed; second, those which involved framework setters, because this allowed access to resources. The implications are that the networks which form around service delivery workers generate a kind of stasis. Although resources can be pumped through service delivery agencies, and services improved, these networks rarely have the potential to create movement by reframing neighbourhood issues or challenging localised exclusionary processes.

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CONCLUSIONS

Programmes to combat social exclusion lie within moral-practical debates throughout Europe which link them to the reconstruction of welfare states to adapt to the tertiarisation of the European economy. When these programmes touch on neighbourhoods, they are frequently linked with a Putnamesque concept of social capital while at the same time being detached from the overall political project. The problem then becomes framed as one of a disinterested local state intervening in ways to change social relationships among residents in the neighbourhood. This often rests on an idealised image of democratic neighbourhood governance, in which a neighbourhood-wide umbrella group of residents' associations relates to a range of local agencies and organisations, which, in turn, are strongly oriented towards listening to residents.

More frequently, we found a range of residents' groups, some large and some small, some working together within a larger umbrella organisation, some hostile to other groups but more often simply indifferent, sometimes with overlapping membership among groups but more often separate, some set up formally and others meeting quite informally, some working collaboratively with a range of agencies and some restricting their attention to a single agency, some task and project oriented and others simply engaging in social activities which they enjoyed doing together. In short, it was not always appropriate to measure the neighbourhood against the idealised image. At the same time, we found that policy interventions to promote local social capital based on this image were often short run, resources were only for short periods of time, and ill-judged tactics made problems worse.

The problem with these problems is that when localised programmes come unravelled, there is a tendency to blame the victims, usually residents, low level service delivery professionals, and occasionally, neighbourhood projects and managers.

But all this only raises the question: what kind of image can guide interventions in neighbourhoods? To answer this question, we analysed local associational activities, including state agencies and organisations among the actors we identified. On this basis, we identified how relationships among actors were structured, both by formal organisational relationships and by the web of networks among them.

One important implication of the analysis is that change processes which are designed to combat societal level social exclusion need to be flexible in how they deal with the localised forms of social exclusion which arise out of local social dynamics. At the same time, state based programmes need to see that the state is half-in and half-out of localised social dynamics. It is both a localised actor, well-embedded in local associational activity in specific ways, and a societal actor promoting forms of intervention which have a definitive impact on localised areas, local associational activity and local working relationships. Localised relationships are dynamic for two reasons: One is the underlying social dynamics among residents and the other is that programmes of intervention have dynamic structures

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(short run neighbourhood renewal versus long run neighbourhood management). Promoting social change, through programmes to combat social exclusion, in such a fluid situation requires ‘flexi-structures’. The notion of webs of networks seems useful in this context.

A second implication of the analysis is that the webs of networks which characterise neighbourhoods vary from place to place. This is not so much a matter of complexity as one of differentiation. It is a bit trite to say that local programmes must be adapted to local circumstances. The bigger problem is how to identify the significant differences between places in a systematic way in order to build meso-level concepts which can guide the shape of larger programmes while allowing them to be adapted to specific localities.

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