Social Justice and the Politics of Community (Welfare and Society)

There is a broad spectrum of political opinion that agrees on the urgent need for social welfare reform. The academic literature informing these policy debates draws on a diversity of theoretical traditions and discourses concerned with re-making community. However, there has not been an in-depth, coherent political analysis of these various positions. This text provides such an analysis, enabling the diverse discourses informing social policy debates to be identified and understood in broader perspective. The book frames these social policy debates within the context of globalization and the accompanying shift in focus of social policy from the issues of social justice to questions of social order. In these debates the "community" is identified as both the site of today's social problems and the main tool that governments have at their disposal to address these problems. A particular feature of the book is its portrayal of the "community" as a dynamic site of contemporary political struggle - which is both theorized and illustrated with empirical material drawn from the Australian experience of community action.