Experimentation and Planning in Community Care

The dominant ideology in services for people with learning disabilities is clearly normalisation, or social role valorisation, as it has recently been termed. The emphasis is on the role that a person has within society. However, in Western society, what seems to be valued is power, individualism, enterprise, wealth, beauty and so on. It is not yet clear how we will be able to help people with learning disabilities to achieve such valued social roles. An alternative may be to consider whether we can design communities which value co-operation, affection and interdependence (rather than independence) and I shall describe first a fictional community which has such ideals, and then a real (albeit small) community, in Mexico, where conditions are arranged such that these ideals may be realised. I will then go on to outline some aspects of the philosophy which underpins these communities and which might be relevant to designing co-operative communities. These include the importance of setting objectives; the valuing of human diversity; the importance of viewing a person as a function of her or his social relations; acknowledging the complexity of human behaviour; and the distinction between rule-governed and contingency-shaped behaviour.