The discussion in these few pages could not possibly indicate the totality of the vast canvas that Castells paints in his new text. It is a work of some 300,000 words. The methodological appendices, endnotes and bibliography alone cover 100 pages. The substance of the book presents case studies of historical and contemporary urban movements and urban social movements, ranging from the revolution of the Communidades in sixteenth-century Castille, to the 1871 Paris Commune, to the Glasgow Rent Strike in 1915, the protests in the Parisian Grandes Ensembles in the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural movements and gay communities in San Francisco, the Madrid Citizens’ Movement of the 1970s, and much more besides. At the end of all this Castells’s new theoretical perspective is summed up into a ‘cross-cultural theory of urban social change’.

The City and the Grassroots

The New Racism

The 'multi-agency' approach to crime prevention has received considerable attention in recent years. This paper examines both theoretical and practical aspects of multi-agency work, in the light of research conducted over two years in a small number of neighbourhoods in inner London and a Lancashire town. Two contrasting forms of conventional understanding of the multi-agency approach—the 'benevolent as against the 'conspiratorial' thesis—are examined, and each found inadequate. Building on the evidence of research fieldwork, the paper strives for a more socially nuanced understanding which is alive to the complexities of locality-based crime prevention initiatives and of the power differentials running between different state agencies, as well as to the competing sectional interests within existing communities. Multi-agency strategies can undoubtedly have an impact on the lives of people within a locality, but these are not always the outcomes that are intended. This paper offers a preliminary attempt to conceptualise a perspective on the 'multi-agency' approach as it can be seen to operate in a specific number of localities, paying particular attention to the role of the local state. It is based on two years of fieldwork in four localities, three in inner London and one in a northern town, Milltown, which was undertaken as part of an ESRC funded project 'Crime, Community and the Inter-Agency Dimension'.1 The broad argument is that, at base, there is a fundamental set of conflicts between the state agencies we have focused on in our research, namely, the police, social services and the probation service.2 This structural conflict is either exaggerated or mediated by our other clear finding that there are structured power relations between the state agencies. In other words, in locally based crime prevention initiatives, some agencies are consistently more powerful than others. These two propositions form a framework for our arguments in the second part of the paper, which uses fieldwork examples to illustrate how, through multi-agency approaches to crime prevention and crime control, state 1 The paper was originally presented by Alice Sampson to the British Criminology Conference at the University of Sheffield, July 1987. It is based upon a collaborative research project between the University of Lancaster and Middlesex Polytechnic, funded by ESRC grant number EO 6250035. The research team wish to record their thanks to John Friend, who acted as management science consultant to the project. All the localities mentioned in the paper are identified by pseudonyms. 2 The focus of our research was originally state agencies within the criminal justice system, although this was necessarily broadened out during the course of the fieldwork, particularly in view of the prominent role of local authority housing departments in estate-based crime prevention initiatives. The research methodology involved interviews of agency personnel, together with extensive observational studies of police consultative committees, community forums, etc.

Crime, localities and the multi-agency approach

Contributors include: Julie Browne Ann Davis Kathryn Ellis Richard Hugman Charles Husband Geraldine McDonald Mike Nellis Naina Patel Steven Shardlow David Smith Maurice Vanstone Sue Wise.

Ethical Issues in Social Work

Social work purports to be a caring profession aimed at meeting the needs of its clients. But this is not the case for black people.1 Whether they enter the social work arena as clients, employees, or students, black people experience negative treatment. They are under‐represented as users of welfare services, but are over‐represented in penal institutions. The subtle dynamics of personal, institutional and cultural racism permeate the routine minutiae of social work policy and practice and these, combined with the strategies white social workers utilise to avoid the tricky task of confronting racism in their work, mean that black people's needs receive short shrift. White social workers respond to black people's needs in this contradictory manner because their belief that black communities ‘look after their own’ enables them to exclude black people from having access to welfare services whilst their preoccupation with black people's deviancy facilitates their admitting black people to establishm...

An uncaring profession? An examination of racism in social work

sideration of the ways in which black social workers Although the study of social work intervention in the black community has been something of a growth area, the literature has, on the whole, been guilty of two critical omissions. Firstly, it has failed to utilise the concept of racism as a central theoretical category, and secondly, it has failed to address pertinent issues in the functioning of social services departments.* This article, organised around a discussion of the implementation of policies for the employment of black social workers, seeks to address these omissions by posing a number of questions about the reproduction of racism in social services departments. The main question concerns how far black social workers aid the smooth reproduction of racism, or whether they can be a key element in the development of anti-racist strategies and practices. The suggestion is that this is a theoretically and empirically open question. The article seeks to address these issues on the basis’of research carried out between October 1983 and April 1984 in connection with a PhD research project, in the social services departments of two Inner London boroughs which I shall term ’Ayeborough’ and ’Beeborough’. The text includes quotes gathered from taped interviews * See Cheetham et al (eds.) 1981 and Cheetham (ed) 1982 as the two most influential readers; for more critical analyses, see McCulloch and Kornreich 1974, Husband 1980a and 1980b, and ABSWAP 1983.

The employment of black social workers: from 'ethnic sensitivity' to anti-racism?:

A dangerous consensus is emerging on the desirability of a 'multi-agency' approach to community crime problems. In this article, the recent report of an inquiry into the Broadwater Farm Estate is c...

Crime, community and the multi-agency approach: a critical reading of the Broadwater Farm Inquiry Report:

Review Article : Racism and the left: a new opportunity

Book reviews : State Social Work and the Working Class C. Jones Macmillan, 1983, £12.50 hdbk, £4.95 pbk

political pespective shared by liberal Conservatives such as Rhys Williams; but, as the last decade has so graphically demonstrated, there is no guarantee that it will always be shared by others. It is at the level of politics that Parker’s analysis stops; implicitly she is claiming this is an arena where others, with different skills, can take up her work. Unfortunately analysis of social policy reform cannot ignore, or stop short of, the political dimensions of social change for it is politics which is the motor of social change, and it is politics, not technical argument, which will determine its direction and its effect. Parker’s book is in its essence about redistribution of

Paul Stubbs

Papers

The employment of black social workers: from 'ethnic sensitivity' to anti-racism?:

Crime, community and the multi-agency approach: a critical reading of the Broadwater Farm Inquiry Report:

Review Article : Racism and the left: a new opportunity

Book reviews : State Social Work and the Working Class C. Jones Macmillan, 1983, £12.50 hdbk, £4.95 pbk

Book Reviews : Social Work and Local Politics Paul Daniel and John Wheeler MacMillan, 1989, 151 pp. £20.00 hb, £6.95, pbk