Community

Community identity in the identity

twenty-first century
A postmodernist evaluation of local
425
government structure
Neil J. Barnett
Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds Business School, Leeds, UK, and
David E.A. Crowther
Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK

The development of local government

Across Europe the twentieth century has seen the development of local
governments as major providers of welfare services. There have been common
pressures to “modernise” structures in order to meet this functional
requirement and to deal with changing socio-geographic factors, the most
important of which are commonly held to be increasing urbanisation,
suburbanisation and the greater mobility afforded by developments in
transportation (Sharpe, 1996). Sharpe distinguishes between two
administrative traditions which have broadly determined how states have
responded to these pressures. Southern European nations which have a
“Napoleonic” administrative tradition, involving a “fused hierarchy” of central
local relations and an intermediate tier of central administration have tended to
retain smaller scale local government units which have preserved to a greater
extent their “traditional community” boundaries. Here, for example in France,
Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, Municipalities remain “primarily
representative institutions”; the presence of other means of sub-national co-
ordination and of central-local linkages has meant that local governments are
“not prisoners of a system which sees local government as essentially a service
provider…functional capacity is largely irrelevant” (Sharpe, 1996, p. 20).
However, generally in Northern Europe, paradoxically the original autonomy of
local governments from the centre has led to their being reorganized into ever
larger units in order to facilitate central control and to accommodate the
provision of services designed to be universally applied. Thus, “In this sense,
reorganization became a method for ‘rescuing’ local government, or, rather,
adapting it to the requirements of the welfare state”.
Britain probably represents the best example of this latter approach towards
local government. Here the historical development of local government can be
said to owe much to the concept of community in that it originated in the rural International Journal of Public
parish. Further, the “golden age” of nineteenth century municipalisation saw Sector Management,
Vol. 11 No. 6, 1998, pp. 425-439,
the larger towns and cities acting independently and out of local initiative to © MCB University Press, 0951-3558
IJPSM provide services within the geographic boundaries of their jurisdiction.
11,6 However, the British pattern since then has been to adopt an instrumental
attitude towards local government (Barnett and Chandler, 1995; Chandler, 1991).
Thus, in keeping with a Benthamite and Chadwickian interpretation of
Liberalism, administration has been centralised and local government
incorporated into the State bureaucracy, particularly being used to administer
426 largely centrally determined welfare programmes. The trend in successive local
government reorganizations has thus been towards the creation of units of
increasing size and uniformity; the overriding considerations have been those
of the technical requirements of service delivery and the ease and convenience
of control by the centre (Chandler, 1989). Thus a peculiarly British Liberalism
required the centralisation and unification of political power in the name of
rationality and uniform natural rights, to create a system in which the state was
intended to be the main point of contact with otherwise separated individuals.
Nisbet (1962) thus argues that Local (Parish) Government was undermined
along with a range of other “intermediate” organizations – in Civil Society,
including Church and the Family as part of the logic of the development of the
nation state, part of the process of the state “caging” all other social relations
(Weiss, 1997).
Local government therefore has come to be justified on instrumental grounds
although it has been argued that the structure has been designed to reflect
changes in patterns of economic interaction between people as well as the
technical requirements of services delivery. In this respect the concept of
community has been used in determining local government structure but the
proposals for local government structure put forward by the Redcliffe-Maud
Commission in 1969 and the review by the local government Commission for
England in the early 1990s both illustrate that the concept of community has
been viewed very much in terms of economic interaction. Both Commissions
have given attention to the concept of “community” and have recognised the
problems caused by its elusive nature. The published reports of each
Commission demonstrate concern both for spiritual, or affective, community
and for effective community, based upon the patterns of social and economic
interaction revealed in, for example, shopping or travel-to-work areas. Each
Commission has, in turn, recognised the difficulty of creating units which
provide an appropriate match between these two broad interpretations of
community. In line with British administrative tradition, however, the
conclusions reached have deferred more to the economic than the spiritual, with
the dominant considerations in both cases being those of economic rationality
and the scale required for the delivery of services. Thus local government
structure has been determined by functional requirement, with the economic
welfare of communities being equated to total welfare.
The idea that local government should be viewed in something other than
instrumental terms persists, however, and continues to be given official
recognition.
 Thus, the Redcliffe-Maud Commission (1966-1969), although not required to Community
by its remit, felt obliged to consider the implications of community identity and identity
community attitudes for its recommended structures. In practice, Redcliffe-
Maud ultimately paid more attention to issues surrounding the strategic co-
ordination of services and the economies of scale required to provide them,
along with an attempt to reconcile structure with new patterns of economic
interaction, most notably commuting and travel-to-work patterns. Thus some 427
attempt was made to take account of new or “modern” patterns of community
while evidence that community identity existed in relatively small geographic
areas was dismissed. The subsequent re-organization in 1972 owed much to a
combination of this kind of thinking together with political expediency, which
required the retention of a two-tier system. The last review saw the Commission
admit at an early stage that Community was an elusive concept and dismiss the
“community index” with which it had been provided by the Government in
favour of opinion polling on particular recommendations. In addition, what
arguments there were during the Review for a return to small-scale local
government did not necessarily emanate from a concern for community; they
were also based on a technical argument; authorities operating in an “enabling”
environment did not require large scale in order to administer services. Of the
resultant recommendations there is only one where it can be argued that
“community” can be said to have overridden concerns for service efficiency –
that of the re-creation of Rutland as a Unitary Authority.
It is argued in this paper that this represents not only a particular view of the
role and purpose of local government, but also the choice of a particular
interpretation of the meaning of community which serves this purpose. This is
one of the underlying problems with local government structure which has
necessitated regular reviews and revisions of the administrative structure.

The concept of community

It is, of course, not only local government Commissions who have found the
concept of community to be elusive. Plant (1974, 1978) points to the essentially
evaluative nature of the word – Hillary (1955) listed 94 definitions, whose only
common denominator was that they all dealt with people. Crow and Allen
(1994) report Halsey in 1974 as stating that community had “so many meanings
as to be meaningless”. Plant (1978) thus draws on Bryce Gallis’ criteria to argue
that community is an “essentially contested” concept, used in both an
evaluative and a descriptive way, and incapable of being detached from
normative understandings, stating:
when the term is used in substantive debates about social and public policy it is never used in
a neutral fashion. There is always going to be some normative and ideological engagement
(Plant, 1978, p. 106).
Community thus “tends to be a God word” (Bell and Newby, 1971, p.16), and has
at times escaped intellectual rigour, being perceived either as a lost ideal past or
as a future to be aspired to. Thus:
IJPSM below the surface of many community studies lurk value judgements of varying degrees of
explicitness about what constitutes the good life (Bell and Newby, 1971, p. 16).
11,6
A key interpretation of community, however, sees it as a uniform whole within
a territorially defined boundary. Plato’s Republic and the Aristotelian City State
where unified political entities, small-scale and allowing personal contact and
involvement. Rousseau’s Venetian State was larger but the community
428 remained a unified whole, having a life of its own expressed via the General
Will. Hegel’s “Spirit” saw this unity extended to the modern nation-state. A
central image of community, has been, however, that of the small, homogeneous
entity, rooted in custom and sharing both physical place and commonality of
interest; the ideal model here is that of the pre-modern rural village,
characterised by a spiritual bond to place, friendship, kin and blood
relationships – affective and emotional ties of the kind to be found in Tonnies’
(1957) ideal type, Gemeinschaft. Arguments that community has been lost in
modernity stem from such views and a belief that a concentration on rationality
and individual rights, along with the dislocation caused by urbanisation and
industrialisation have led to the loss of emotive ties. In turn, the search for
community turned to new settings – in the urban centres and workplace – via
sociological investigation. Communities now could for example be identified in
city neighbourhoods.
The logical implication of modernity, however, and its concentration on
individual rights, was to emancipate man from the bonds of traditional
communities. Liberalism implies natural rights and has the moral primacy of
the individual at its centre; there is no one version of the common good. Reason
and self-interested calculation are the determinants of action and the basis of
human interaction is contractual. People may thus decide to be members of
many communities or of none; any necessary link between community and
territory is severed and justification is provided for the “new” communities
which emerged – communities of interest, functional communities, based on the
division of labour, and professional communities. Attention here is less on
spiritual bonding than on contractual association: society, containing many
sub-groups, becomes the focus of attention.
This is, then, an essentially pluralist vision, characterised by Tonnies’
Gesellschaft. Broadly, modernity is held to have brought with it political and
social freedoms which changed perceptions of community from those
emphasising the “wholeness” of specific places to ones which emphasised
“communality” or “social togetherness regardless of physical distance”
(Scherer, 1972, p. 13): communities which “bind man socially while allowing him
to be physically free” (Scherer, 1972, p. 13 – echoing Max Weber’s concept of
“community without propinquity”). Attention is thus focused on sub-units –
groups, organizations and associations – causing Wolin to identify late
modernity as an “Age of organization” and to lament the loss of sense of
belonging to “whole” political communities. Similar arguments about alienation
and the negative effects of rampant individualism have in recent years
resurfaced as major concerns of the “Communitarian” movement.
 In order to consider the problem of structure for local government it is Community
necessary therefore to reconsider the meaning of community as a concept for identity
local administration and to arrive at a more satisfactory definition of
community for this purpose. One of the classic presuppositions of any
definition of community is that the group of people comprising that community
share some commonality of interest and it has been common to see this
applying to a group of people sharing a locality as a place of habitation. 429
Community however can be defined as a commonality of interest among a
group of people but the presumption that this can be defined by the
geographical concept of locality needs to be questioned. Equally the idea that a
community can be defined as a commonality of all interests must be questioned,
as far as the provision of local government is concerned, as it is apparent in
other domains that people can be considered as a community for one purpose
but not for other purposes. This issue is particularly pertinent in an era where
“localities”, particularly urban spaces, contain people of widely divergent
cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The definition of community as common for
the provision of local services is predicated in the need for administration rather
than a sense of shared purpose and it is therefore necessary to consider whether
this community identity can be better catered for through different local
government structures. It is argued in this paper that the adoption of a
postmodernist perspective shows this to be the case.
Community thus has been seen to exist in the rural village and the urban
city, in groups, associations, universities, schools etc. The breadth of locations
has in turn lead to its association with a state of mind – a “psychological sense
of community” which can exist in any size of collectivity provided members
display certain characteristics of togetherness (see for example, McMillan and
Chavis, 1986). However this very looseness of definition led to questions about
the usefulness of the concept as a subject of investigation. In particular,
attempts to locate community in “modern” urban settings had given rise to a
largely anthropological series of community studies in which place was seen to
be a determinant of patterns of life (for example Redfield, 1955). However,
theoretical approaches developed which sought to link community with wider
social processes (see for example, Warren, 1963). The work of Gans (1952) and
Pahl (1968) amongst others questioned whether it was possible to consider the
specifically local and asked whether patterns of social behaviour could be tied
to geographic locations. Attention turned to wider economic and social
processes and to structural explanations for local variations; such that by 1969
Stacey (1969) was able to wonder whether community referred to a useful
abstraction. During the 1980s attention focused on “locality” as the subject of
investigation – with local variations being viewed as the result of the differential
impact of the uneven development of capitalism (see Massey, 1984).
In turn, however, community has to some extent been rehabilitated in
intellectual thought recently. This has not only arisen out of a concern for the
alienation caused by the atomised individualism of modernity and a desire to
“re-connect” by a return to civic republicanism (broadly, the “communitarian”
IJPSM critique of Bellah, Booth Fowler, Taylor and others). For example, Bulmer (1985)
11,6 pointed to a renewed interest in the study of local social networks, work which
had been pioneered by Barnes (1954) and Bott (1957), and which focused
attention on the interaction of primary groups (family, friends, etc.). Network
analysis could be used to “map” these interactions; the range and spread of each
person’s network would vary according to their differing structural locations –
430 factors including age, employment, gender etc. Community, here then becomes
an extremely fluid concept, without easily recognisable boundaries; Scherer had
in 1972 identified “modern” social relationships to be “fluid and vague” (Scherer,
1972, p. 1), involving overlapping and complex associations community was not
anchored by place or lifestyle and “still life” studies were no longer appropriate,
the emphasis being not on social balance, cohesion and homogeneity, but upon
social exchange. For Scherer this approach allows us to view community as an
essentially “human” construct rather than as an illusory perfect entity. Further
there appeared to remain an area of interaction between people which was not
purely personal but which rested between the world of “primary” relationships
and the larger organizations of state and society. Bulmer (1985) called for a re-
focusing of attention on such “intermediary structures”. Viewed in this way
community “does address an element or level of social experience which cannot
be ignored or done away with” (Crow and Allen, 1994, p. 193) and as such may
be a concept which “if it did not exist … would surely need to be invented”
(Crow and Allen, p.193).
The review of local government structure in the 1990s however had as one of
its legitimating criteria the task of reflecting community identity although this
was combined with an economic rationale of delivering cost effective services.
This was explicit in the guideline given to the Local Government Commission
for England which specifically required the Commission to:
recommend the structure which in its view best combines cost-effectiveness with a reflection
of community identity and interest (DoE, 1992, p. 3)
The review was therefore firmly grounded in legitimacy through economic
benefit with the concept of community being used to legitimate this economic
rationality model (Crowther and Barnett, 1996). The model adopted by the
review considered community in terms of welfare but equated total welfare with
economic welfare and placed this welfare as subservient to the logistical needs
of service delivery. In order to consider the appropriateness of any local
government structure to its purpose in meeting community needs it is first
necessary to reconsider the concept of welfare and how this welfare can
effectively be maximised.

Determining community welfare

The economic model adopted in this consideration of local government
structure implicitly equates economic welfare with total welfare but welfare
needs to be viewed in both physiological and in emotional terms. Thus while
economic welfare aims to maximise physiological welfare in terms of the
relationship between material comforts and effort expended this may be at a Community
cost – environmental, social and emotional. Emotional welfare can only be identity
maximised by addressing other needs such as social interaction, self-
actualisation and leisure; thus an economic rationality approach to welfare does
not necessarily determine total welfare. This point was identified by Thoreau
(1849) who claimed that the state did not engage with an individual’s moral
sense. Equally Watson (1960) suggested that the concept of economic welfare is 431
a contrived concept used to identify the public interest and in doing so the
ethical values associated with welfare, such as happiness, freedom and justice,
are eliminated from the concept of welfare. The problem with such values is
that they are not subject to ready quantification and are thus difficult to account
for in any evaluative model of welfare. Nevertheless such values remain
important to an individual and it is not reasonable to assume that as no
economic value can be attached to the concepts they can be eliminated from any
evaluation of welfare.
Classical liberal philosophy places an emphasis upon rationality and reason,
with society being an artificial creation resulting from an aggregation of
individual self interest. Thus Locke viewed societies as existing in order to
protect innate natural private rights while Bentham and J S Mill emphasised the
pursuit of human need. Of paramount importance to all was the freedom of the
individual to pursue his/her own ends. This view however resulted in a dilemma
in reconciling collective needs with individual freedom. De Tocqueville sought
to reconcile these aims by suggesting that government institutions were both
inevitable and necessary in order to allow freedom to individuals and to protect
those freedoms. Thus local governments existed in their own right, regardless
of any need to justify them as service providers.
It is however unrealistic to assume that community welfare can be derived
from an aggregation of the individual welfare constituents of every individual
which that community comprises. Such a concept ignores the value placed by
any individual on the various components of welfare. A postmodern sensibility
however, can be used to demonstrate how different components of welfare can
be considered and addressed for individuals in a welfare maximising model and
at the same time opens up the potential for thinking about structures for local
government which can match these components with the requirements of
service delivery in a new environment.

Postmodernity, community and welfare

Postmodernity has been considered as being either epochal, in replacing
modernity as the current time frame, or epistemological, in its relativity to other
interpretations of social structures, and Newton (1996) considers the
implications of both uses of the concept for the study of organizations. The
concept of postmodernity is however considered most fully by Lyotard (1984)
who questions the use of modernist metanarratives which legitimate society as
existing for the good of its members with the consequent presumption that the
whole unites the parts as an expression of the common good. Furthermore this
IJPSM weakening of the macroculture of society is accompanied by the rise of an
11,6 increasingly robust set of subcultures, and these subcultures are operating both
at a local level geographically and at a local level in terms of common interest
and identity even when geographically disparate. One conclusion to be drawn
from this is that rather than a politics based upon universalising concepts of
liberal citizenship and of the nation state, local or regional politics becomes
432 paramount. Thus the dominance of community as the agent of local need
assumes priority as the expression of societal organization and local
government structures are needed which recognise this. A postmodernist
stance also leads to a redefinition of community and divorces it from
geographical proximity. Indeed Harvey (1990) argues that one of the significant
features of the postmodern era is the compression of space and time, brought
about through development in technological and informational architecture of
society. This compression of space and time has the effect of removing
territorial boundaries from any community and this has the effect of providing
an opportunity for the redefinition of community in terms of organizing local
societal structures for the provision of local services. The implication of this is
that local government structures need no longer be dictated by the need for the
usual transaction cost minimising models of service provision and the ability to
define afresh community for the provision of individual services becomes
possible.
This redefinition of community contains within itself one of the inherent
contradictions of a postmodernist view of the world, namely the contradiction
between the borderlessness of any community organization and the extreme
nationalistic inclusion/exclusion criterion. This criterion has the effect of
polarising community away from the nation as a nation state and to expand the
concept to inclusion in an expanded state for some purposes while at the same
time shrinking the concept of community to a local level for other purposes
(Radhakrishnan, 1994). Thus postmodernity suggests that different spaces are
needed for different histories and purposes and that a dominant model of
society has no rational meaning. When considering the question of community
identity therefore and its relationship with government structure this suggests
that the local government structure has dominant importance to the individual
and that his/her sense of community is defined circumstantially. Indeed Lash
and Urry (1994, p. 3) observe that people now have an ever increasing choice of
communities to “throw themselves into”. Thus an individual considers
him/herself to be a member of a community for a particular purpose and a
member of a different community for different purposes with community
identity being defined in terms of commonality of interest for specific purposes
rather than being an overriding part of a definition of self.
This redefinition of the relationship between self and community shares
common ground with the concept of liberal democratic pluralism which
requires a separation of social spheres in order to maximise individual welfare
(du Gay, 1994). It is also consistent with the concept of communitarianism (Fox
and Miller, 1995) which regards the self as atomistic and aiming to maximise
value (in the liberal sense of welfare) to the lonely self through acting in a Community
community for any specific purpose. identity
A postmodernist view of organizations, such as local government
institutions, is that they are sustained by the rules governing their existence
and by the resource appropriation mechanisms which apply to them rather than
by any real need from the people who they purport to serve. Thus the
legitimation of their very existence is not founded on this redefinition of 433
community identity and community need. Rather this redefinition of
community suggests that a very different type of local government structure is
needed in order to cater for the needs of the individuals who aggregate for one
common purpose while atomising (or aggregating with different individuals)
for others. Such a structure has been defined by Heckscher (1994) as “post-
bureaucratic” with its rationale for continuing existence not being through self-
referential normalising mechanisms but rather through the maintenance of an
interactive dialogue, based on consensus, with the individual members of the
community which the organization exists to serve. This organization structure
can be extended to exclude a territorial basis for existence (Nohria and Berkley,
1994) whereby the organization, through the use of informational and
communicational technology, need be little more than a virtual organization
existing in a virtual environment as the need arises. Thus the continuing
existence, either temporally or geographically, of any local government
organization, as a unit of service provision, has no meaning in its own right, as
the organization has no purpose other than the provision of the services
mandated to it by the community it serves.
Such an instrumental view of local government would be radically different
from existing local government structures but this would be fully consistent
with any postmodernist definition of community. It would also be fully
consistent with a liberal democratic concept of society and civilisation. In this
respect it is worth recognising that this view of societal progress is not a new
concept from postmodernist theory but that Kidd (1902) argued that the
controlling centre of evolutionary progress is in the future when stating:
It is the meaning, not the relation of the present to the past, but of the relation of the present to
the future, to which all other meanings are subordinate (p. 8).
Such a view of historical development is in accordance with scientific
rationality as well as with postmodernity insofar as it is matched by Popper’s
(1945)[39] concept of the poverty of historicism by which he argues that present
trends do not necessarily continue into the future and that any amount of
empirical evidence and economic or sociological analysis does not change this
lack of predictive power of past data.
Postmodern analysis of society and its organizations is fully coincidental
with this view and Baudrillard (1988) claims that there is a need to break with
all forms of enlightened conceptual critiques and that truth in the postmodern
era is obsolete, while Fish (1985) claims that truth and belief are synonymous
for all practical purposes. It is thus clear that there is a need to consider local
IJPSM government structure from a postmodernist standpoint separately from the
11,6 prevailing dominant hegemony. In order to do so this requires a reconsideration
of the purpose of local government within the context of this redefinition of
community identity.

Subservience of structure to purpose

434 A redefinition of community to mean an aggregation of individualities with a
commonality of interest for a particular purpose and at a particular time
suggests that an individual can be a member of a variety of different
communities at the same time but for different purposes. It also suggests that
any such community to which an individual belongs is not defined in any
mutually exclusive geographical terms and that communities for different
purposes can overlap geographically without any necessary conflict. At the
same time it is apparent that any community need not have any discrete
geographical existence but may exist as a virtual community having sporadic
temporal existence and no territorial existence. The information architecture of
the Internet means that examples of such communities abound but such
communities have existed for a considerable period of time in such areas as
academic life and social life. One essential feature of postmodernity however is
the changing informational architecture of society and this both makes virtual
communities more prevalent and also provides one possible infrastructure for
service delivery by local government organizations.
Thus both the territorial and temporal constituents of community disappear,
or at least assume diminished significance, in a postmodern environment. The
concept of welfare for an individual does not however disappear but assumes a
changed form to include spiritual and psychological welfare as well as
economic welfare and the interpretation of an individual as a welfare
maximising creature is completely consistent with the interpretation of
community postulated in this paper. This view does however change the nature
of organizations which exist to foster welfare maximisation among the
members of any particular community. Thus welfare can no longer be viewed as
being maximised by a simple aggregation of individual welfares, measurable
solely in economic and quantifiable terms.
This changing nature of transaction costs in the present environment means
that there is no longer any argument that the local organization of service
delivery needs to be organized in structural units which are uniform in size, at
least as far as population and geographical dynamics permit. The origins of
local government were based on units of size which matched the then current
definitions of community and little regard was given to any concept of
uniformity as a vehicle for minimising transaction costs insofar as service
delivery was concerned. Present structures are likewise able to be shaped by the
needs of community for any particular purpose and uniformity need be no
longer a pertinent factor in structural organization. (In this respect, this
analysis shares common ground in terms of structural outcome with the
fragmented and multi-tier system of local government in the USA, as advocated
by the public choice school of thought (Boyne, 1993). This redefinition of Community
community means that service delivery need no longer be vested in a single identity
local governmental organization but that different services can be delivered by
different local organizations. This concept can be extended to all services which
are delivered by the state to local community groupings. Thus different local
government groupings can exist for different purposes and there is no reason
why any grouping for the purpose of delivery of one particular service need be 435
on the basis of similar sized organizations throughout the country for the
uniform delivery of this one particular service. The relationship between size of
organization delivering a service, demographic constituents of the service
delivery area and transactions costs have never been demonstrated to
significantly correlate.
Just as uniformity of size for any local structure of government has provided
no demonstrably justifiable basis for local government organization, so too is
there no longer any reason why any local government structure need have any
permanent temporal existence any more than it need have any discrete
territorial existence. Thus the justification for continuing existence of a local
governmental organization as providing an embedding of moral order into a
community (March, 1995) can be seen to be unjustifiable in the unstable and
fluctuating system of postmodern community and therefore the existence of
disposable organization which come into and out of existence as needs demand
is a much more legitimate form of structure for local government in this
postmodern environment. Such organizations also have the further legitimation
that transactions costs are minimised when any organizational structure does
not need to maintain any temporal continuity of existence.

Democracy and the local structure of government

Postmodernist concepts therefore suggest that any structure of local
government need not be uniform in organization and need not have any
continuity of existence either territorially or temporally in order to meet the
needs of the community which it seeks to serve. Serving these needs provides a
sufficient legitimating criterion for the existence of any structure and the
economic concerns of transaction costs minimisation no longer need to dictate
any particular type of structure. One further legitimation of local government
structure is needed however and this is concerned with the fulfilling of the
democratic function of government in allowing all members of a community to
have a stake in the organizing and functioning of the structure in the delivery of
services for the community of which an individual is a member.
Any definition of democracy in context however is problematical and Popper
(1945) argues that any attempt to define a concept such as democracy leads only
to confusion and vagueness as such a concept can only be defined through the
use of the outcomes of the definition. Similarly criticism of such a concept as
democracy can only be made according to Derrida (1978) through the use of the
language defining the concept. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) on the other
hand identify a dichotomy which is inherent in any concept of democracy in
IJPSM that in any society unity is dependent upon agreement but at the same time any
11,6 society is inherently hierarchical and that this is ultimately dependent on force.
Similarly Fukuyama (1992) argues that liberal democracy is not in itself
sufficient for continuity and that traditional communities have a tendency to
atomise. He argues that liberal economic principles provide no support for the
traditional concept of community which is only sustainable if individuals
436 within any community give up some of their rights to the community as an
entity and accept a certain degree of intolerance. On the other hand Fukuyama
considers the triumph of liberal democracy as the final state of history.
Thus, postmodernist concepts suggest that local government structure need
not be uniform or have any continuity of existence. This may suggest ad hoc
organizations which change according to purpose, and at least points to a large
variety of local authority sizes, with overlapping jurisdictions. A multi-tiered
structure is implied; perhaps a structure with the outward appearance of the
highly complex system which makes up US local government. However, in turn,
problems remain about identifying scope for collective action and for collective
civic involvement. Is a local government without territory or boundary
possible? Political community requires some sense of the general interest; what
will be, for example, the mechanism for determining that resources will be
allocated to one group at the expense of another, or that one service should be
curtailed in order to promote another? Is it possible to generate both the
flexibility required by postmodernism and the cohesiveness required to
maintain a political community? If it is indeed impossible to define a general
interest then is the case for local political units lost? Could we continue to argue,
for example, for minimum standards, or guarantees of equitable treatment? A
classic defence of local government is that it has the capacity to co-ordinate
services and provide a mechanism by which collective decisions can be made
about resource allocation (see for example, Sharpe, 1970).
One possible approach is to recognise that people will live in a multiplicity of
political units, and to turn attention away from single sovereign units to
political systems which contain collections of interacting units, none of which is
sovereign, thus focusing upon “cosmopolitan democracy” (Held, 1995). The call
here is for a complex, federated polity, containing “an indefinite number of units
without permanently fixed boundaries, a system capable … of ready and
indefinite adaptability” (Dahl and Tufte, 1973, p. 141). Such an approach, it
could be argued is not new, echoing, for example De Tocqueville’s arguments in
favour of the maximum amount of diversity in a political system in order to
protect against tyranny.
The question remains however of how such adaptability can be built into a
system of local government. One approach is that of Gyford (1991), who argues
that local government developed out of civil society rather than the state, before
being incorporated into the state machine. It is argued however that locality has
again become an important arena for civil society as the focus of attention
moves from the politics of production to the politics of consumption and
reproduction. Local government’s role should, therefore, be that of supporting
civil society and of providing support for local groups and associations etc. The Community
language here, then, is that of enabling and empowerment, and for Gyford local identity
government stands very much at the level of an “intermediate body” – “local
government now stands at potentially at the frontiers of civil society and the
state and perhaps, therefore, on the threshold of a new conception of its role”
(Gyford, 1991, p. 27).
Civil society will, however, contain many groups, often conflicting over 437
various issues. Burns et al. (1994) point out that such a society lacks the
capacity to transcend its own fragmentation, and that it is not enough to
empower some groups at the expense of others; instead, the aim should be for a
collective empowerment by the creation of a local public forum within which
conflicts and hostilities can be resolved. The call is for an extension and
development of the democratic capacity of civil society. There is some
recognition of the “general good”, but this is not equated with the majority; it is
concerned more with the capacity to recognise and contain difference.
It has been argued in this paper that a postmodernist structure for local
government would promote a structure which is not purely instrumental, as is
the case in the UK, but would also promote ownership and involvement in such
community government. As such these insights are also useful for a redefinition
of the basis of local government in those “Napoleonic” states where there
remains an adherence to “traditional” community as historically defined and
enshrined in municipalities. As such it could be argued that such structures
would be essentially democratic in nature and that such local government is
fully consistent with a view that sees local government as an essential
democratic element in society. Indeed postmodernist interpretations view the
localisation of governmental structures within integral communities as an
inevitable development of societal organization and in this respect such
governmental structures are fully consistent with liberal democratic ideals.
Equally existing local government structures have proved to be unsatisfactory
and ephemeral in nature and consequently subject to continual review, thereby
demonstrating their failure to address the needs of locality for which local
government originated. It is argued therefore that while a postmodernist view
of society defines it as essentially unstable, such insights allow us to open up a
debate about the possible democratic and effective local governmental forms
needed amidst this complexity.

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