Abstract
In May 2010, Britain’s new coalition government took office, committed to introducing the ‘Big Society’. It was an idea that David Cameron had chosen to make his defining offer to the British people, since being elected leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005. The phrase was a self-conscious neologism, an attempt to distinguish Cameron’s Conservative Party both from what was characterised as New Labour’s statism, and from the Conservative Party’s own hitherto unsympathetic public image. As a concept, the Big Society was embraced and derided, adopted and rejected in equal measure across party lines: it raised the suspicions of many more traditional Conservatives, while the left were divided between those who saw it as a cover for cuts to public spending, and those who wished to embrace community activism as a long-term way of revitalising their political fortunes. And yet, the novelty of the phrasing and the mixed reaction to the idea notwithstanding, the Big Society is in many ways a contemporary expression of longstanding ideas, embedded within much older debates over the respective roles of voluntarism and the state in British society.
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Further reading
An overview of the changing nature of voluntarism in the twentieth century can be found in Matthew Hilton and James McKay (eds), The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (London, 2011).
Other key texts include Jose Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003)
and Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (London, 1982).
David Cameron’s 2009 Hugo Young Memorial Lecture provides an excellent overview of the Big Society concept, available at: www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/11/David_Cameron_The_Big_Society.aspx. The conservative critique of the state’s impact on voluntarism and association has been most elegantly put by Frank Prochaska: see The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London, 1988), and Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit (Oxford, 2000). An excellent introduction to Conservative thought on civil society can be found in Ewen H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002).
On associational life in liberal democracies, the starting point remains Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (London, 1946 [1835, 1840]).
See also Gabriel A. Almond, and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ, 1963).
The key contribution to the contemporary social capital debate is Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000).
For a British perspective, see Peter Hall, ‘Social Capital in Britain’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), pp. 417–62.
Accounts of the new politics can be found in Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester, 1968)
Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ, 1977)
and Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (New York, 2002).
The literature on apathy and disengagement is diverse, but useful starting points include Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge, 2007)
Kevin Jefferys, Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918 (London, 2007)
and Grant Jordan and William Maloney, The Protest Business: Mobilizing Campaign Groups (Manchester, 1997).
On secularisation, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001)
and Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1989, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997).
Of the many datasets that exist covering volunteering and associational life, particularly useful are Social Trends (London, published annually since 1970); NCVO Almanacs (published since 1996, initially every two years and then annually since 2006); see in particular NCVO’s Participation: Trends, Facts and Figures, An NCVO Almanac, March 2011, available at: www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sites/default/files/participation_trends_facts_figures.pdf; Helping Out: A National Survey of Volunteering and Charitable Giving (London, 2007); the 1981, 1991 and 1997 National Survey of Volunteering — the results of these have been reported in Julia Field and Barry Hedges, A National Survey of Volunteering (London, 1984)
and Stephen Humble, Voluntary Action in the 1980s: A Summary of the Findings of a National Survey (London, 1982)
Peter Lynn and Justin Davis Smith, The 1991 National Survey of Voluntary Activity in the UK (Berkhamsted, 1991)
and Justin Davis Smith, The 1997 National Survey of Volunteering (Berkhamsted, 1998). There are also specific data relating to volunteering in the Citizenship Surveys, conducted since 2001 and available at: www.communities.gov.uk/communities/research/citizenshipsurvey/.
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© 2012 Matthew Hilton, Nicholas Crowson, Jean-François Mouhot & James McKay
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Hilton, M., Crowson, N., Mouhot, JF., McKay, J. (2012). Membership and Volunteering. In: A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_6
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