Editorial introduction to the Special Issue

In March 2004, a major conference on community development inthe ‘new Europe’ was held in Budapest, Hungary,to mark the accession of a further ten nation states, most ofthem in the east and central European region, to the EuropeanUnion. The conference was sponsored by the International Associationfor Community Development (www.iacdglobal.org), in conjunctionwith the Combined European Bureau for Social Development (www.cebsd.org),the Hungarian Association for Community Development (kofe@kkapcsolat.hu),and the Community Development Journal (www.cdj.oupjournals.org).The initial outcome was the Budapest Declaration, the text ofwhich was included in the CDJ issue of October 2004 (39(4),423–429 – copies     

Voices from the Community

Summary

When community members are allowed to participate in the planning and implementation process of a program, they are empowering themselves and their community. The CHAMP Family Program uses a collaborative programming approach with a focus on building the capacities of community members to deliver a family-based HIV prevention program. The CHAMP Program has a Collaborative Board that oversees all aspects of the research project. Using an empowerment framework, this article explores Community Board members' perspectives on their experience in working on CHAMP. Recommendations to researchers in the form of ten key ingredients for community collaboration are presented. The key points primarily focus on building trust with the community, recognizing community strengths, developing skills, building intragroup relations, and involving the community as partners from the beginning to the end.     

THE IMPACT OF OWI ON BROADCASTING

A MARKED difference between the public opinion situation facinginformation specialists in this war and that in 1917 is thefact that during the last twenty-five years radio has come ofage. Never before have governments had available for use suchan important instrument of propaganda. Has the OWI taken fulladvantage of its potentialities? Mr. Landry was asked to appraiseAmerica's use of this weapon since Pearl Harbor. For ten years the author has been observing American radio fromthe platform of the radio editorship of Variety. He has listenedto and analyzed thousands of radio broadcasts. At present heis director of program writing for CBS and also a member ofthe Writers War Board.     

Rural grass-roots organizing in eastern Europe: the experience from Lithuania

This article examines rural grass-roots organizing in Lithuania.A conceptual scheme is proposed to differentiate among threetypes of activities prevalent in rural community building: theinitiation, voluntary communal activities, and not-for-profitcommunal activities. The model is applied to examine the establishmentof one of the most successful rural non-governmental organizations(NGOs) in Eastern Lithuania – the Community Centre ofBalninkai village (population 496). The strategies that wereused to initiate the Balninkai organization and to engage involuntary communal and not-for-profit activities are identified.Internal and external factors influencing successful organizingare addressed as well as the potential impact of European Unionmembership. While there are numerous obstacles facing ruralactivists in post-socialist Lithuania, there are also significantopportunities for community organizations to contribute to sustainedrural development in Lithuania.     

Editorial

This issue with its focus on contemporary community developmentpractice in Aotearoa New Zealand sees the continuation of ourregular Special Issues. The Journal is very pleased to haveas our Special Guest Editors,     

The Failure of Liberal/Conservative Ideology as a Cognitive Structure

While the American electorate has been found less than fullycapable of choosing among presidential candidates on the basisof their positions on the issues, there has been optimism thatwere that electorate encouraged to conceptualize politics onthe basis of liberal and conservative ideological positions,the quality of vote choice would improve. Using ANES 1980'squestions to assess the electorate's ability to lend correctdefinitions to the terms liberal and conservative, we find littlebasis for optimism that an ideologically sophisticated electoratewould better select candidates reflecting the electorate's positionson the issues.     

Editorial

After forty successful years of publishing and supporting otherrelated activities, the Community Development Journal remainsat the forefront within the field of community development.Its coverage of material from the north and south as well aspractice and theory ensures that the Journal continues to commanda unique position among academic journals. The recent introductionof online advance access publishing and e-letters ensures theJournal reflects the best in publishing. This issue begins with an article by Glen Laverack, in whichhe introduces the concept of the ‘domains approach’to community empowerment, which is illustrated by a case studyfrom Kyrgyzstan. Extrapolating from the community developmentliterature, Laverack identifies     

Community development in the west of Ireland: twenty years on in the Killala area

This research returns to a 1986 Community Development Journalarticle, which highlighted the unique and successful locallydriven community development efforts in Killala, western Ireland.Since then, a variety of social, economic, and political changeshave taken place, which have reshaped Ireland and the capacityfor local community action. Twenty years on, this communitywas revisited with the goal of assessing the changes, as wellas to determine community characteristics that have persisted.This article seeks to provide an update on local conditions,presents an in-depth exploration of local grassroots efforts,and builds on the previous case study by providing an empiricalexploration of the factors shaping local community agency –a mixed-method framework consisting of extensive key informantinterviews, focus groups, and household survey data.     

Feminist aesthetic practice of community development: the case of Myths and Mirrors Community Arts

Using Myths and Mirrors Community Arts, a feminist adult educationand development organization, this article argues that payingattention to the aesthetic dimension of politically-orientedpedagogies can add to knowledge and understanding of communitydevelopment and social learning theory and practice. Imaginationand creativity are powerful tools inherent to all human beingsthat enable risk-taking, the reclamation of public space, andthe simultaneous exercising and contesting of power within theneo-conservative landscape. Moreover, feminist aesthetic practiceof community development augments cultural leadership by creatingnew cultural actors and agents of change.     

Joshua A. Fishman 1926–2015

Joshua Fishman died in March this year. He was founder‐editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, one of the early and central journals of sociolinguistics. Alongside this major editorial involvement, which he maintained to the end, he also edited several of the field‐defining book collections which helped shape the growing field in the 1960s and 70s. He might well have viewed the founding of the Journal of Sociolinguistics in 1997 as unfortunate or competitive, the more so since our opening manifesto questioned the role of traditional sociology in our field. But Fishman responded graciously and positively to the invitation from me and Nikolas Coupland to join our inaugural Editorial Board. He remained on the Board, and was warm in his support and advice. The one piece he published with us was in 2000, a very personal obituary for Charles Ferguson which was notable for the respect and warmth it displayed. The editorial team is indebted to Fishman's longtime collaborator, Ofelia García, for this memoir on him and his significance in sociolinguistics. The Editors     

THE DECLINE OF OVER-TIME COMPARABILITY IN THE NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES

The National Election Studies conducted by the University ofMichigan Survey Research Center and Center for Political Studiesprovide the best data set for studying the political attitudesand behavior of the American electorate. The American NationalElection Studies Data Sourcebook, which complies NES surveyresults between 1952 and 1978, demonstrates the extent to whichthese surveys facilitate over-time analysis. This article usesthe Sourcebook as a baseline and shows that there has been asubstantial decline in the over-time comparability of itemsmeasuring public policy preferences and of items measuring supportfor the political system.     

Contesting Communities. The Transformation of Workplace Charity

Contesting Communities has an interesting title and, as such,provided an enticement into the book but what started out asa journey of hope and excitement unfortunately ended in disappointment.While there are some very interesting parts to this book, ultimatelyit failed on a number of different fronts. It appears to bea book about community and therefore of interest to the readershipof the journal. The subtitle, The Transformation of WorkplaceCharity, hints at its real subject matter, that is fundraisingby non-profit organizations     

Errata

In Table A of Werner Cohn's comment (POQ 48:661) on the articleby Himmelfarb, Loar, and Mott ("Sampling by ethnic surnames:the case of American Jews," POQ 47:247–60), there is amissing minus sign: item 15 in the DJN column should read -.18. Harold Himmelfarb points out that in the response to Cohn(POQ 48:664–65), this error makes questionable the interpretationby him and his coauthors (p. 665). In "Taking Note: Bibliographies," in Book Notes (POQ 49:141),the number of pages given for the Guide to the Bureau of AppliedSocial Research, edited by Judith S. Barton, was erroneouslygiven. The book has 202 pages.     

Classic texts

In the last Classic texts series, the reviewer reflected ontwo books from the USA experience which had strongly influencedcommunity development practice in the UK and other industrializedcountries. Here, the compliment is returned as the text chosenby one of our International Editorial Advisory Board members,Professor Barry Checkoway, reflects on the Settlement Housemovement in the USA, a movement which was directly informedby a similar movement within the UK and within which Jane Addams,the reviewed author, had     

A scale to assess board member motivations in nonprofit organizations

The purpose of this study was to develop a framework for identifying the motivations of board members in nonprofit organizations. Building on previous work of board member motivations (Searle, 1989; Inglis, 1994) and motivations of direct service volunteers (Clary and others, 1998), the results of the current study support a framework consisting of six components: Enhancement of Self‐Worth, Learning Through Community, Helping the Community, Developing Individual Relationships, Unique Contributions to the Board, and Self‐Healing. We discuss contributions by the panel of experts who reviewed the instrument and by the respondents who offered additional reasons for joining the board in view of how they can add validity to scale development. Frameworks such as the one reported in this article are valuable for understanding the complex involvement of attitudes and motivations as they relate to individuals' decisions to join boards. These insights may be applied in areas such as board member recruitment, training and development, and retention.     

Testing the Permanence of the Permanent Campaign: An Analysis of Presidential Polling Expenditures, 1977 2002

Many presidential observers argue that the modern White Houseis the site of more-or-less permanent campaigning. In a recentPOQ piece, Murray and Howard (2002) [Public Opinion Quarterly66:527–558] explore one indicator of the "permanent campaign,"the extent to which Presidents Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush,and Clinton commissioned independent opinion polls and focusgroups to assist in policymaking and political maneuvering.Murray and Howard suggest that while a sophisticated pollingoperation has been institutionalized in the White House, thereis substantial variation in how much a president uses this operation.In this article, we model presidential polling expendituresover time using monthly figures. We find that presidents donot vary significantly in the average amount spent per monthon polls. There are, however, two recurring patterns of variationwithin presidential administrations: Presidents tend to spendsignificantly more on internal polling during the most intensemonths of a presidential reelection campaign; and polling expendituresincrease over the course of each presidential term. These findingssuggest that there are common forces (e.g., elections, naturaldecline in support) that have driven all presidents since Fordto poll.     

Improving Coding Reliability for Open-Ended Questions

One of the basic measurement problems in survey research isthe reliable coding of open-ended questions. A posteriori methodsfor improving coding reliability are distinguished from a priorimethods. An a posteriori method has been shown to be of limitedvalue for improving reliability for certain coding tasks. Thisarticle proposes and illustrates a multi-step, a priori procedurefor generating coding categories for open-ended items. Preliminaryevidence is presented indicating that this method may yieldreliability levels far superior to those typically obtainedin coding open-ended questions     

New Labour's appropriation of the concept of community: a critique

This article analyses the ways in which ‘community’,one of the most important yet ill-defined concepts in SocialSciences, has been ‘appropriated’ in the discourseof the UK's New Labour government. It argues that the highlystrategic ways in which the term is used leads to associatedmeanings that neglect the intrinsically complex nature of theconcept and risk essentializing group identities, thus adverselyaffecting the most deprived sections of society.     

OWI AND MOTION PICTURES

Is the Office of War Information making fullest use of our motionpicture facilities? Mr. Wanger says no, and presents hereina forthright and vigorous criticism of the policies, personnel,and methods of the Motion Picture Bureau of the OWI. The author is president of the Academy of Motion Picture Artsand Sciences and has produced a wide variety of entertainmentfilms from Algiers and Foreign Correspondentto Eagle Squadronand Arabian Nights. Many of his productions have been attemptsto advance the motion picture as a serious medium of expression,notably in the case of Gabriel Over the White House, PrivateWorlds, The President Vanishes, and Blockade. Mr. Wanger isalso president of the Motion Picture Society for the Americaswhich is the Hollywood collaborator with the Office of the Coordinatorof Inter-American Affairs.