Collective action, locality and community

Social work has always been concerned with people’s relationships in groups and communities. In this sense it might be seen to be ahead of mainstream social and economic policy, which has traditionally been preoccupied with quantifiable issues - employment levels, rates of taxation and benefit provision, expenditures on education, health and social care and so on - and to have found the concepts of community and association somewhat nebulous. Social work has been in some ways better positioned to take up the challenge of a new concern for well-being (Kahneman et al., 1999; Layard, 2005) since the start of this century, because it is aware of and deals in qualitative aspects of these relationships Gordan, 2007).