Community-Based Service Delivery

This book takes up the challenge of the failure of most initiatives in community-based service delivery to address the significant philosophical shift that is necessary to create, implement, and evaluate appropriately these sorts of projects. Challenging the tendency to focus entirely on practicalities, the authors emphasize the centrality of philosophy to any successful community-based undertaking. While fully acknowledging the importance of local knowledge and the guidance of projects by local people, this volume shows that these principles are often at odds with the ‘Cartesian’ mindset that underpins much project planning, with its emphasis on objectivity in science and knowledge. Since all knowledge is mediated by human activity and embedded in language and other modes of expression, this dualist approach must be reconsidered. A thorough rethinking of traditional service delivery, which takes into account issues of data, methodology, and bias together with questions of generalizability, community, power, and communication, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, social policy, and social work with interests in community-based service delivery.

Jung Min Choi is Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University, USA. He is the co-author of The Politics and Philosophy of Political Correctness, The Politics of Culture: Race, Violence and Democracy, Postmodernism, Unraveling Racism, and Democratic Institutions and the co-editor of Globalization and the Prospects for Critical Reflection and Globalization with a Human Face. He is also the recipient of over 40 Excellence in Teaching Awards.

John W. Murphy is Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami, USA. He is author of Community-based Interventions: Philosophy and Action and co-author of Narrative Medicine and Community-Based Health Care Planning. He is co-editor of Dimensions of Community-based Projects in Health Care, Community-Based Health Interventions in an Institutional Context, and The Symbolism of Globalization, Development, and Aging.