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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Richard Hull
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In early 2005 our local community broadband co-operative was in a severe crisis so I decided to become actively involved to see if I could help. I volunteered for the Management Committee and they quickly elected me as Chair, a position I still hold. We are currently (September 2008) in the process of handing over the 300-member co-op to a much larger national telecoms co-op, and re-focusing our energies on the next generation of telecoms technologies. Unfortunately I have never found the time to write at any length about my experiences, especially from a self-reflective perspective. I have reflected at length upon ‘leadership’, internally and in conversation with friends and colleagues; talked about it in class – I teach a module on Leadership to postgraduate HRM students; and tried to develop research proposals so that I can finally get some recompense (mainly time off teaching) for all this voluntary work. I have delved deep into the literature on what the UK & Europe calls the ‘Third Sector’ – an assemblage that includes charities, community organisations, co-operatives and the voluntary sector as well as these new things called ‘social enterprises’. Other folk also refer to this as the ‘Social Economy’, and there is a wide range of approaches, from Best Practice in managing volunteers, through the political economic geography of local development, to applications of Social Movement research and discussions of Bourdieu’s concept of social capital. A lot to reflect on, and this paper will be my first attempt, so it is absolutely a work-in-progress that welcomes critique and dialogue. The usual temptation would be to write lots of slightly different papers, each focusing on a different aspect of nearly four years of fieldwork. But before I embark on that annoying academic habit of reduction and multiplication I want, and need, to look at it as a whole. Especially because we have not finished, by any means, and the next stages of community organisation will necessarily require much broader, wider and inclusive enrolment of actors (a nod towards Actor Network Theory), and a much larger budget. I will of course talk about ‘organising space and place’ in a variety of ways – one of the key issues for our co-op continues to be the boundaries of ‘community’, with a wonderfully complex and therefore negotiable mix of geographic, legislative, demographic and traditional factors in defining what exactly is the relevant community. This is a semi-rural area in Northern England, formerly alive with textile industries but now littered with factory mills converted to modern apartments. Many fear a descent into dormitory town status, as the area is a reasonable commute to a number of large cities. The scattered small farms on the moors are being converted to highly desirable and expensive residences, stabled horses for leisure riding are replacing sheep and cattle in the fields, and there are many complaints of the loss of the ‘old’ community. So what am I doing organising for ultra high-tech communications? Equally, what have been the effects of our community broadband co-op upon the various senses of community? The history of the co-op is a delightful illustration of creative resistance; resistance which is effective because it actively develops an alternative reality to that being resisted. In this case the resistance was to British Telecom who, in 2003, had an absolute monopoly in the provision of the ADSL broadband physical infrastructure. If they decided your village was too remote to warrant converting to ADSL, you didn’t get broadband. Our community – or rather communities, because there were four towns with a non-ADSL telephone exchange – decided to do more than just pressurise BT for ADSL. Because of our geography there are many residences so far away from the telephone exchange they were never going to get usable ADSL anyway, so the campaign turned itself into a virtual ISP, reselling ADSL connections but also supplying WiFi broadband to those unable to get ADSL. At the time it made the national news, and full credit to all those early volunteers. However, when I became involved emotions were running very high. At the first General Meeting I attended one of the members of the Management Committee became increasingly upset as he was being pilloried by angry co-op members, and eventually broke down crying and left the room. Many people had invested a huge amount of their time but, more importantly, they had invested their selves into this project. Those of us with experience of political activism will know the phenomenon, the subjective aspects of political activity (Knabb, 1974), and others who have read about social movements will recognise the complex interactions between self-identity and collective identity (Polletta & Jasper, 2001). In these sorts of situations the concept of emotional labour should be stretched to include emotional investment, and some forms of organising seem to require and demand such a costly investment that burn-out is almost inevitable. I know a bit about burn-out, it’s happened to me several times so I was on the look-out for tell-tale signs in myself. Shame I didn’t spot them all, but I’m back in the fray. I also know something – but not nearly enough – about what Knabb (1974) calls ‘behindism’, the tendency for leaders to pull along their followers in their tail-wind. At what point does a leader in such a situation move aside, let others lead for a while, how can we best share and distribute the emotional labour of leadership, the guilt about undone tasks and the people we disappoint, as well as the joys of positive achievement? These will be the most personally difficult and intellectually ambivalent elements of my reflections. Onwards and upwards. The co-op survived its crises but it didn’t exactly prosper; instead we all clung on as we drifted through successive storms of economic and technical change. ADSL became stupidly cheap as ISPs enacted the ‘customer-base’ business model – rope in the punters at a low price and then attract further investment on the back of your passive customer base. Except that competition re-regulation encouraged many new firms and the break-up of BT’s stranglehold on infrastructure; telecoms companies struggled for strategy and identity in this new age of media convergence where telephone companies run TV channels; and the minnows in the ocean get swallowed. That’s what’s about to happen to us, but most of us are not sorry, merely relieved. We did the right thing, and now we’re going to try again. New telecom technologies offer the possibility of a community-owned network, combining fibre-optic and WiFi transmission, providing the facilities for genuine community television and radio, video-conferencing, free telephony within the network, and many new possibilities in health, education and social care. We have seen it at work in The Netherlands, and we intend to do the same here. Knabb, Ken (1974) Double-Reflection: Preface to a Phenomenology of the Subjective Aspect of Practical-Critical Activity, San Francisco: Bureau of Public Secrets. Available online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/double.htm Polletta, Francesca and Jasper, James M. (2001) “Collective Identity and Social Movements”, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27, pp 283-305.
Author(s): Hull R
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Submitted
Conference Name: Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry
Year of Conference: 2009
