Taylor, M. (2011). Public policy in the community, 2nd edition. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
This book explores the challenges involved in community development and empowerment, assessing the lessons for policy and practice based on three decades of community-based approaches to social disadvantage and exclusion. The first chapter explores the changing fortunes of community, the second chapter addresses the policy context of community deficit, government and structural socioeconomic failures, and areas-based initiatives, and the third chapter explores the idea of community in depth, addressing interconnected ideas of community, communitarianism, social capital, mutuality, civil society, networks and informality. The fourth chapter takes up the challenge of 'contradictions of community', exploring its limitations as an oversimplified concept and its 'darker side' as oppressive and exclusive. Subsequent chapters address community in relation to social exclusion and poverty (chapter 5), and the prospects for community empowerment (chapters 6-13), including ideas of community as producers and co-producers and reconciling various difficulties and differences for community building and empowerment. The research is based on policy analysis and participatory community development and community building/empowerment methods.