Customer Reviews

The Careless Society: Community And Its Counterfeits

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As someone who works in a nonprofit social service agency, I was handed McKnight's book by the executive director of a local foundation. It made for illuminating reading. McKnight explains how agencies isolate and target populations for their own convenience - determining the needs of their "client" rather than helping individuals express their own dreams and desires and working toward solutions. This is a "must read" for agencies whose goal is to build caring communities, allowing people with disabilities to determine their futures for themselves. Of particular interest is the section on grief counseling, describing how the professional grief vampire isolates their "clients" from the circles of support provided by friends and neighbors that have nurtured the grieving for generations.

this book is a brilliant analysis of the struggle users of services face when trying to find help to live a full life. The sentence which I will always remember is 'The problem we face is not one of weak services, but weak communities'. As a disabled person I found the willingness to confront the dependency of able-bodied providers on our manufactured 'needs' refreshing and enlightening. John McKnights thinking about the nature of communities and how to begin to re-build them very stimulating, particularly as his vision includes me as a community builder. Read it!

McKnight, a scholar of social policy working at Northwestern University, throws harsh words at the medical, advocacy, and professional institutions. His observations are not only insightful, but they are well reasoned as well as articulated in a clear way. Although it may seem as though his writings underestimate the professional ethic of modern medicine, it is clear to an understanding reader that his purpose isn't to simply throw mud, but to inspire communities.

Using examples from his home town in Chicago, McKnight illustrates that when a community is faced with challenge, the best "solution" may not really be a "solution," but a habit. Rather than simply looking at communities as a group that needs to have their problems solved, it is more important to focus on the assets inherent in all of its individuals.

McKnight wishes to save communities from the obfuscating languages of medicine and professionalism. His book, "The Careless Society" is a triumph for the common good.

I worked in the mental health-social service industry for many years. From the beginning it was impressed upon me that clients without economic value to the agency get booted out the door. And on numerous occasions I observed how families were broken apart because the government will spend money on professionals but wont spend money for a motel and a few meals or a car repair.

On the other-hand McKnight misses a salient point about people: They often get into trouble because no one is caring for them at home. And when you give cash to irresponsible people they dont suddenly become prudent and wise. They still neglect their kids, dont pay the rent, and get the electric cut-off.

Cogently and beautifully, the author has shined important new light on a rapidly evolving systemic problem: the commodification of care in the industrialized West, particularly and most brutally in the USA. However, as cogent as his arguments are, it seems that they all simply beg the same overriding question pointing ultimately in the same disturbing direction: what is to replace the social destruction capitalism wreaks on the societies that embrace it? And collaterally, does this not simply suggest that we are witnessing another by-product of what happens when capitalism becomes the end of economic history (to steal a systemic metaphor from Francis Fukuyama's book "The End of History," in which it is suggested that democracy is the end of political history)?

It is true (in the most obvious way) that the "professionalization of care" through the commodification of "people services" is occurring at an alarming pace and that this transformation (which, arguably is more evolutionary than revolutionary) leaves a social desert of destruction (arguably, the end of community) in its wake. And moreover, that the process by which this conversion takes place is: by turning what used to be called "normal self-correcting life conditions" (such as aging, crime, health, etc.) into self-defining and self-exploitable mandatory capitalist profit centers - which in the end are all designed to keep the capitalist beast sufficiently stoked and fed - meaning keeping the GNP forever growing.

However there is an important and I believe fallacious subtext to this rather left-leaning discussion (not that I am against left-leaning discussions). It makes the tacit assumption that communities themselves are benign, stable and ultimately static units, all only for the good. Whereas the brutal truth is that communities, (in large measure due to the large-scale effects of the industrial revolution and accompanying population explosion), have been reeling from their own negative evolutionary pressures.

The author in the process of tacitly overly romanticizing the idea of community, (and thereby masking the inherently negative evolutionary downside) it seems has failed to see that for whatever may be its demerits, perhaps "commodification of care" is a last resort alternative to the normal impending death of community? To put it simply, even without the grinding effects of the capitalist GNP machine, communities were (and are) themselves slowing down to a halt.

In any case, certainly we are not to take too seriously the author's rather confusing (mostly discursive) suggestions at the end of the book on how to "reinvigorate community associations" as the systemic solution to this rather serious overarching problem. I for one remained unconvinced by this sweet community oriented elevator music offered up as a trial balloon at the end. It exists in its own kind of Saul Alinsky transcendental reality, untouched by the brutal evolutionary pressures that, with or without the capitalism machinery, the future tells us is in store for our old comfortable notions of community. It seems that we all must grow up and recognize that our only salvation is not to fight the capitalist beast (as much as we all would like to), but rather to try to restrain, reform and humanize it.

Still for its many insights this book is revolutionary and a five star effort.

This book tests our conventional wisdom about "care." As a Registered Nurse with a Masters in Health Admin., I applaud McKnight's truthful look into the world of health care - or rather "disease care." Our lives have become over dependent on professionals, less dependent on ourseleves and our communities. We have forgotten that care begins with us - and we can never really pay anyone to care for us. Quick, insightful read - hope for more from McKnight on this critical topic.

McKnight's concerns about communities' dependency on professional assistance are legitimate, but disturbingly overstated in this book.

In the end I felt McKnight's trashing of the already well-trodden government provision of social services may not be altogether helpful to distressed communities. He sidesteps concerns of capital mobility, exploitation and the pernicious effects wrought by years of discrimination. Neoliberal ideologues may find themselves quite comfortable with McKnight's case for what's wrong with communities, since any discussion of when and where and how social programs can be instrumental is effectively cast aside. In McKnight's picture, social programs and the professional service providers are, in fact, the villains and culprits for most of what ails society.

One of the damaging fallacies perpetuated in this book is that service professionals are not able to be both professional and caring - the two are deemed mutually incompatible. McKnight's views resonate with employers' rhetoric about care work - a rhetoric conveniently invoked every time a healthcare worker tries to claim she does care about patients but is still entitled to a living wage or, perhaps, health insurance for herself.

McKnight foresees that communities will readily and ably take up the reign of providing for themselves and their members once denied more institutionalized professional services. Implicit in this idea is the notion that communities had no problems at all before the social programs to solve them came into being.

Here, I think McKnight is invoking an idealized notion of society from an earlier time; maybe this image would have seemed more reasonable in a time when families were less geographically mobile and may have constituted an economic unit, when the elderly were less numerous and had more children to care for them, and when the local economic activities were more functionally interdependent.

While McKnight's model for community-based solution may not fit today's conditions, his solutions may be the only ones available in a society where budget cuts and reduction of social services are the prevailing trend.

While McKnight has some interesting ideas, his defensive, polemical tone makes the book feel repetetive and constrained. Additionally, despite his desire to recreate past decades' community-based caretaking, he at no point talks about the costs this shift would likely impose on women, who traditionally were responsible for much of that unpaid work. His romanticization of the past, and complete and utter silence on this issue is troubling, and greatly limits the book's ability to speak to what can happen _next_.

Finally, he exhorts the benefits of community organizations while ignoring and sometimes erasing their flaws, particularly around issues of diversity. Community organizations aren't inherently representative (men's only social groups, Christian churches, etc.) - while those groups often accomplish great work within their communities, they represent their members, not the entire community. After detailed and lengthy critiques of professional 'care'-takers, his uncritical and comparatively simplistic championing of community organizations as The Answer makes the book a rather disappointing read.

This book was a little out dated, but many of the inisghts in the service industry were still relevant and thought provoking. McKnight's writing style lacks authority and comes off sounding paranoid, or possibly opportunising of people's distrust. In place of quality arguments, quotation marks were placed around terms to discount thier worth and catchy phrases were repeated every chapter. All in all, it has value to those working in the service industry as a counterpoint for self-reflection.

The recognition that the caring professions are destroying communities was eye-opening, but each chapter seemed almost the same as the chapter before. Read a couple, and you'll get the idea.