Introduction

This part introduction presents some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on how communities are constituted through political processes, using poststructuralist insights which reveal how meaning is constructed. Within a poststructuralist perspective, 'community' has no fixed meaning, but makes meaning through the appropriation of the dominant discourses framing public policy. The book focuses on what ethical principles one may appeal to make their claim to inclusiveness; what values they promote; what their objectives are and one need to analyze these in the broader, political context. It describes this context to unravel the welfare state social consensus that provided the political context for debates on social justice during the era by Robert Putnam. Putnam's narrative of community decline resonates with the current mood of community nostalgia which seeks to address the fragmentation of today's social order by resurrecting the traditional 'family values' of the 1950s.