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CHAPTER THREE DISCOURSES INFORMING SOCIAL INCLUSION THROUGH SPORT AND RECREATION OPPORTUNITIES
INTRODUCTION
Chapter two presented the theoretical and analytical framework that informs the study. Two discourses that influence the actions, roles and expectations of change agents providing sport and recreation opportunities in marginalised communities as a vehicle to attain social inclusion were briefly identified and introduced. Research studies evaluating the assumptions that serve as foundation for the strong belief in the power of sport and recreation to affect a variety of both social and health problems at community level are indecisive and fragmented. This chapter explores in more depth the history and creation as well as the maintenance of both the community discourse in marginalised communities and the discourse that promotes sport and recreation as solely beneficial.
MARGINALISED COMMUNITY DISCOURSE
The culmination of the marginalised community as discourse constitutes a number of notions that directly influence the roles and actions of change agents involved in sport and recreation provision that are perceived by society as appropriate. Community, as a collective sociological concept, embraces a variety of definitions, but often has a positive connotation as something that should be regained (Blackshaw & Crawford, 2009). Marginalised community development has a long history that includes a multiplicity of approaches, ranging from top-down approaches to community development and community empowerment initiatives. Two noticeable components of community discourse informing the roles and expectations of change agents in the provision of sport and recreation in marginalised communities are communitarianism and the subsequent promotion of the „active citizen‟. The marginalised community discourse stems from a neo-liberal, functionalist approach that contributes to the maintenance of current practices in sport and recreation provision in marginalised communities due to change agents‟ belief in the responsibility of citizens to include the excluded.
Community defined
The 2010 Healthy People report (Dzewaltowski, Estabrooks, Klesges, Bull, S. & Glasgow, 2004: 236) defines a community as a specific group of people, often living in a defined geographical area, who share a common culture, values and norms, and who are arranged in social structures according to relationships that the community has developed over a period of time. Dzewaltowski et al. (2004) caution that this simplified definition suggests that community-based initiatives can be implemented in the major social structures of society and that these structures will provide channels to reach and influence specified populations. Identified social structures include a variety of public facilities, local government agencies, social and family services, FBOs and civic organisations.
The concept of „community‟ is often ambiguous and used as an umbrella term, as described by Head (2007: 441), who states that community is “often a euphemistic term that glosses over the social, economic and cultural differentiation of localities or peoples. It often implies a false and misleading sense of identity, harmony, cooperation and inclusiveness”. The traditional view, according to Burkett (2001), represents community as a place of warmth, intimacy and social cohesion, which facilitates a misleading „a-political‟ conception of problems and change.
Community is undoubtedly a paradoxical concept that is as much about difference as it is about unity; it embraces conflict and harmony, selfishness and mutuality, separateness and wholeness. By including only one aspect of community in operationalising the concept, the opposite aspect is excluded, thereby denying any possibility of tension between aspects. Burkett (2001) expresses the opinion that for many people community is an understandable dream, as social closeness and mutual identification can be seen as inherently human. Community as a dream state, or heterotopia, is problematic, however, as people motivated to achieve this vision will suppress differences within the identified community in order to meet their goal. Community change and transformation cannot become a reality in a discourse based on fixed, romanticised ideas about community.
Defining community as social unity with shared objects, spaces and characteristics denies the complexity of the concept. Liepins (2000) addresses the issue of simplifying this complex concept by emphasising that the term „community‟ is often used as shorthand to describe and analyse the significance of a social space. Notions of fixity, objectivity and universalism are discernible in modern interpretations, in which community is described as something that can be lost; something that can be created; or something that can be destroyed. It is therefore an object that can be manipulated as a goal or a process. Post-modernist thought, in contrast, encourages an interpretation that represents community as an act of creating meaning, and not as a neutral object. According to this approach community becomes a verb; an activity indicating action, process and change. Approaching community as a verb rather than a noun reflects the notion that community is an ongoing process rather than a fixed description (Burkett, 2001)
Young (1990) cited in Liepins (2000) has also criticised the simplifying notion of the use of „community‟ as a description of complex social systems. According to Young (1990) the use of „community‟ as a fixed concept often signifies an overlooked power relation in which community becomes the subject of human agency and intervention. Change agents actively create and recreate the meanings of community, in which the interpretation of community cannot exist as singular and external frameworks of universal truth. Community must be expressed and interpreted as being continuously constructed in different ways and in different contexts. Burkett (2001) comments on the continuously changing nature of community by stating that the exploration of community should not be merely an academic exercise of examining a sociological construct, but rather an immersion in and practical expression of how people experience living in a particular social reality or realities over a period of time. Community consequently becomes an experience as well as an expression of subjective, everyday practices.
Regardless of whether community is described as a geographic location, a social group or an action, the inherent power relationship in the construct cannot be denied. This relationship has however, not been adequately reflected in existing theoretical and educational explorations of community and community development (Burkett, 2001). Liepins (2000) underlines the need to recognise both the political and discursive contexts in which community occurs and suggests that as social construct, community should be reinvestigated as a key social category. The framework suggested by Liepins (2000) includes community contexts; communities of people; exploring meanings of community; identifying practices of community; and mapping spaces and structures of community. The community context is explained as a social construct concerning human connection that involves cultural, material and political dimensions. This construct will have different forms depending on the time and place in which it is created. It is therefore the specific terrains of power and social-cultural discourses that shape any one understanding of community. Communities must be recognised as a social construct, one that is created and enacted by people. Within this framework people are depicted inside the community; yet one must recognise the constitutive capacity of others external to any given community who may nevertheless name and construct notions about community which could either enable or constrain such collectives. Liepins (2000) provides the example of policy-makers who are positioned externally to communities to illustrate how people outside a community may structure the roles and expectations of communities through statements and policies. Traditional notions of community, in which the term „community‟ was used to represent and communicate meanings about widely held beliefs, shared interests and social connections, must be revised in order to reflect the actual diversities, gaps and marginalisation that simultaneously occur even though some communitarians may still believe that a shared set of understandings and relations is held within a community. Romanticised visions of the goodness of community have been reinforced in recent times with the embracing of communitarian and neo-liberal political discourses (Burkett, 2001).
Construction of marginalised community discourse in community development
The construction of the marginalised community discourse and the roles and expectations that accompany this discourse have a long history that originated in response to the needs of marginalised communities. A pilot project funded by the Ford Foundation in October 1948 in the Etawah District of Uttar Pradesh, India, initiated and established the chain of events that brought community practice and community development initiatives into the post-colonial era. The Etawah project achieved impressive results by using a self-help approach. The Indian government adopted the concept provided by the pilot project as the basis of a major national rural development effort; however, it failed to adopt the thorough approach needed to respond to bottom-up initiatives that was vital to the Etawah project‟s success (Korten, 1980).
Similar programmes aimed at empowering citizens were initiated in more than 60 nations spread over Africa, Asia and Latin America during the 1950s. During this period, the traditional top-down approach used in community development was replaced by an approach in which citizens were included in planning and implementing programmes. This decade was labelled the „community development‟s decade of prominence‟. Although promising, some programmes had already started to fail in the early 1960s and most were terminated or drastically reduced by 1965. Proponents of the community development approach were disappointed by an approach that promised much but delivered little. Changes in national governments led to the adoption of more powerful developmental approaches by new leaders, with a specific focus on programmes embracing central economic planning that subsequently contributed to immediate economic growth (Green, 2006). Various factors contributed to the decline of community development initiatives and community practice; one of the main barriers was the unrealistic expectations that change agents involved in the process had of achieving significant results in the reduction of poverty and social exclusion within a short period (Korten, 1980). Power structures characteristic of a top-down management approach came into being and were accepted as a given by both the marginalised community members and the change agents working towards poverty alleviation and social inclusion. Participants aligned themselves according to the benefits offered by programmes. The conflicts of interest inherent in the resulting stratified social structure were not recognised in programmes and initiatives, and the responsibility for implementing community development and social inclusion was shifted from government to administratively separate ministries and agencies that paralleled the established line agencies of government. Attempts at bringing parallel agencies under the control of a unified community development agency to improve coordination failed, as this resulted in bureaucratic conflict that led to the demise of community development efforts (Korten, 1980).
Change agents resorted to implementing centrally mandated activities in which programmes, targets and outcomes were centrally formulated with little regard for the ability of community members to respond. Very little real participation was involved and change agents fell into the easier pattern of directing local-level programmes. Genuine community development initiatives struggled, as they did not deliver short-term results and required the more difficult approach of involving community participants in the empowerment process. The model provided by the successful Etawah pilot project, which stressed the development of organisational processes focused on being responsive to community-identified needs, fell by the wayside as community development initiatives failed to build independent member-controlled local organisations that were able to solve local problems. Marginalised communities were categorised as self-contained development units, resulting in marginalised communities becoming even more excluded from larger, more economically viable regional units (Korten, 1980). Developing communities therefore became a top-down, externally controlled process with solutions imposed on marginalised communities.
A revival of community development emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. Change agents working in marginalised communities realised that a top-down approach without community input could not result in community empowerment and social inclusion, and consequently moved away from the 1960s single-issue approach initiatives (Florin & Wandersman, 1984) to a community practice approach defined by Ohmer and Korr (2006:69) as “an intervention process used by professionals to help individuals, groups and collectives of people around a collective interest or from the same geographic area to deal with social problems and to enhance social well-being through planned collective action”. In the 1990s social phenomena were broadened and social lexicons were adapted to apply to the changes within the community development structure. Community competence and capacity gave way to the term „social inclusion‟, and community participation and development became known as social inclusion (Labonte, 2004).
Community practice interventions have multiplied since the early 1990s in response to an increase in concentrations of poverty in marginalised communities (Ohmer & Korr, 2006). New variants of community programmes and community engagement approaches continue to multiply (Head, 2007), with the community discourse fuelled by government, politicians, policy-makers, tertiary education institutions and social organisations working at grassroots level including FBOs, NPOs, NGOs and volunteers (Tomison & Wise, 1999). Head (2007) emphasises this shift away from a managerial, top-down approach towards a revitalised emphasis on building institutional bridges between governmental leaders and citizens, which includes participatory approaches over which citizens have more control. In analysing community engagement, it is apparent that it is also a well-disguised tactic used by government to shift the responsibility for complex social issues such as social inclusion onto organisations such as NGOs, NPOs, FBOs, volunteers and the marginalised or excluded citizens of a country. Burkett (2001) also warns against being over-optimistic about possible positive outcomes, as the contemporary context of community practice and community development initiatives remains theoretically under-developed. Developed societies were the model to be followed, which – coupled with a strong emphasis on the ideology of progress – determined the aspirations and goals of development interventions (Campbell & Jovchelovitch, 2000). Differences in the conceptualisation of community and community development are apparent in the way that both community and community problems are defined and approached, and also in how programme and initiative success is determined (Shiell & Hawe, 1996). The divide between individual and social, and system, approaches to community development still exists, for example when a large-scale intervention adopts the rhetoric of community development but remains firmly invested in the individual as the focus of analysis.
1. INTRODUCTION, AIM AND METHODOLOGY OF RESEARCH
1.1. INTRODUCTION
1.2. CLARIFICATION OF TERMINOLOGY
1.3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
1.4. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
1.5. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1.6. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY SUMMARY
1.6.1. Research design
1.6.2. Research population
1.6.3. Research sample
1.6.4. Data collection
1.6.4.1. Semi-structured interviews
1.6.4.2. Critical participant observation
1.6.4.3. Documentation
1.6.5. Data analysis
1.7. FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY
1.8. CHAPTER CONLUSION
2. A POST-STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO DISCOURSE
2.1. INTRODUCTION
2.2. DISCOURSE DEFINED
2.3. A POST-STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO DISCOURSE
2.4. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
2.4.1. Critical discourse analysis
2.5. DISCOURSES INFORMING PROVISION OF SPORT AND RECREATION OPPORTUNITIES AS SOCIAL INUSION
2.5.1. Community discourse in marginalised communities
2.5.2. Discourse promoting sport and recreation as beneficial
2.6. CHAPTER CONCLUSION
3. DISCOURSES INFORMING SOCIAL INCLUSION PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES
3.1. INTRODUCTION
3.2. MARGINALISED COMMUNITY DISCOURSE
3.2.1. Community defined
3.2.2. Construction of community discourse
3.2.3. Community discourse informing sport and recreation provision in marginalised communities
3.2.3.1. Communitarianism
3.2.3.2. Active citizens as component in the community discourse
3.2.4. Power relationships within the marginalised community discourse
3.2.4.1. Power of discourse
3.2.4.2. Power of order
3.2.4.3. Power of objectification
3.3. DISCOURSE PROMOTING SPORT AND RECREATION AS BENEFICIAL
3.3.1. History of sport and recreation as beneficial discourse
3.3.1.1. Playground history
3.3.1.2. Sport as human right
3.3.1.3. International Year of Sport and Physical Education (IYSPE 2005)
3.3.2. Perceived benefits of sport and recreation
3.3.3. Construction and maintenance of discourse promoting sport and recreation as beneficial
3.4. SOCIAL INCLUSION AS RESULT OF SPORT AND RECREATION PROVISION IN MARGINALISED COMMUNITIES
3.4.1. Social capital
3.4.2. Social cohesion and collective identity
3.4.3. Social networking and community capacity
3.5. CHAPTER CONCLUSION
4. ROLES AND EXPECTATIONS OF CHANGE AGENTS PROVIDING SPORT AND RECREATION AS VEHICLE TO SOCIAL INCLUSION
4.1. INTRODUCTION
4.2. CHANGE AGENTS UTILISING SPORT AND RECREATION PROVISION TOWARDS ATTAINING SOCIAL INCLUSION
4.3. ROLES AND EXPECTATIONS OF CHANGE AGENTS INVOLVED IN SPORT AND RECREATION IN MARGINALISED COMMUNITIES
4.4. BARRIERS TO THE ATTAINMENT OF SOCIAL INCLUSION ATTAINMENT THROUGH SPORT AND RECREATION PROVISION
4.5. CHAPTER CONCLUSION
5. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
5.1. INTRODUCTION
5.2. RESEARCH DESIGN
5.3. DATA COLLECTION
5.4. DATA ANALYSIS
5.5. CHAPTER CONCLUSION
6. ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF RESULTS
6.1. INTRODUCTION
6.2. RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION
6.3. CHAPTER CONCLUSION
7. CONCLUSION, RECOMMENDATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
7.1. INTRODUCTION
7.2. CONCLUSIONS
7.3. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONTRIBUTION TO SOCIAL POLICY RELATING TO SOCIAL INCLUSION
7.4. IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
7.5. FINAL STUDY CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
LIST OF FIGURE
LIST OF TABLES
SUMMARY
