The Struggle Between Community and Institution
These associations of the community represent unique social tools that are unlike the social tool represented by a managed institution. For example, the structure of institutions is a design established to create control of people. On the other hand, the structure of associations is the result of people acting through consent. It is critical that we distinguish between these two motivating forces because there are many goals that can be fulfilled only through consent, and these are often goals that will be impossible to achieve through a production system designed to control.

The associations in community are interdependent. To weaken one is to weaken all. If the local newspaper closes, the garden club and the township meeting will each diminish as they lose a voice. If the American Legion disbands, several community fund-raising events and the maintenance of the ballpark will stop. If the Baptist church closes, several self-help groups that meet in the basement will be without a home and folks in the old people’s home will lose their weekly visitors. The interdependence of associations and the dependence of community upon their work is the vital center of an effective society.

The community environment is constructed around the recognition of fallibility rather than the ideal. Most institutions, on the other hand, are designed with a vision imagining a structure where things can be done right, a kind of orderly perfection achieved, and the ablest dominate. In contrast, community structures tend to proliferate until they create a place for everyone, no matter how fallible. They provide vehicles that give voice to diversity and assume that consensual contribution is the primary value.

In the proliferation of community associations, there is room for many leaders and the development of leadership capacity among many. This democratic opportunity structure assumes that the best idea is the sum of the knowledge of the collected fallible people who are citizens. Indeed, it is the marvel of the democratic ideal that people of every fallibility are citizens. Effective associational life incorporates all of those fallibilities and reveals the unique intelligence of community.

Associations have the capacity to respond quickly. They do not need to involve all of the institutional interest in a planning committee, budget office, administrative staff, and so forth. A primary characteristic of people who need help is that their problem is created by the unexpected tragedy, the surprise development, the sudden change. While they will be able to stabilize over the long run, what they often need is immediate help. The rapid response capacity of associations and their interconnectedness allow for the possibility of immediate and comprehensive assistance without first initiating a person in to a system from which he or she may never leave.

Finally, associations and the community they create are the forum within which citizenship can be expressed. Institutions by their managed structure are definitionally unable to act as forums for citizenship. Therefore, the vital center of democracy is the community of associations. Any person without access to that forum is effectively denied citizenship. For those people with unique fallibilities who have been institutionalized, it is not enough that they be deinstitutionalized. In order to be citizens, they must also have the opportunity for recommunalization.

When all of these unique capacities of community are recognized, it is obvious why the social policy map that excludes community life has resulted in increasing failures.

Human Need Is the Raw Material of the Service Economy

The service economy presents a dilemma: the need for need. As a million people each year move from goods to service production, the service industry requires more raw material more need. We can now see that "need" requires us to discover more human deficiencies.

I have recently observed two examples of this discovery of new human need. At a conference on service to the elderly, I met a person being trained as a bereavement counselor. She will receive a master’s degree in order to help people through their grief after they have lost a loved one for a fee.

How may people in the United States are feeling that they have a "need" for that bereavement counselor? Certainly people grieve; it is a hurt that people have suffered for eons. But does that grief constitute a need for service? Or does the bereavement counselor need that hurt more than the person in grief needs her help?

Another example is a person I recently met in a Canadian city: He is a recluse manager. This service was developed when a recluse died and no one found him until fourteen days later. A newspaper photographer took a picture of the room where he lived. People were shocked, and the result was the conversion of this death into a need. The local government created a committee of officials that decided to respond to the need his death created. They recommended that the city create a new service recluse management. The committee also wrote a manual that now guides recluse managers. It tells the mangers how to find recluses, how to observe them without their knowing they are being observed, and when to intervene in their lives.

Does the person in grief or the recluse "need" service? Or does the service economy need grief and recluses? Considering the gross national product as an indicator of the national well-being, the answer is clear. If kin deal with grief, it will never be counted as a product. If a bereavement counselor deal with the grief, our gross national product will increase. If an old man dies and is undiscovered for fourteen days, he is worthless. If a recluse manager controls his death, the service economy will count his death as a product of value.

In the city of Chicago, where I work, the neighborhoods are falling down around us. People need work and a decent income. While there is less and less money for the poor, there are more bereavement counselors and recluse managers more and more servicers who need the poor. We may have reached that point where there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there poor people.

Welfare workers are caught in this dilemma. Do they need the welfare clients more than the clients need their service? In a service economy, the welfare recipient is the raw material for case workers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, mental health workers, drug counselors, youth workers, and police officers. Do the servicers need the recipient more than she needs them?

We are in a struggle against clienthood, against servicing the poor. We must reallocate the power, authority , and legitimacy that have been stolen by the great institutions of our society. We must oppose those interests of governmental, corporate, professional, and managerial America that thrive on dependency. We must commit ourselves to reallocation of power to the people we serve so that we no longer will need to serve. Only then will we have a chance to create, invent, produce, and care.

John McKnight has worked with communities internationally, co-authored Community Building from the Inside Out, wrote The Careless Society; Community and Its Counterfeits, is a professor, and director of the Community Studies Program at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Read Common Ground's book review of The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits by John McKnight