Introduction

In recent times, Professor Susan Kenny called for ‘an unsettled and edgy community development’ that went beyond ‘social maintenance and defensive active citizenship’ (2011: i7). Such edgy community work demands critical, proactive, visionary, cosmopolitan and active citizens who are prepared to challenge existing structures, values and power relations (p i7). But what do workers do when being edgy and being employed are increasingly at odds with one another? Tensions such as this exemplify the deep and uncomfortable ethical questions facing community workers described in this chapter. In this discussion we listen to the reflections of workers who are currently engaged at the front-line of ‘unsettled and edgy’ community work.

Many community workers hold an aspiration for paid employment. A formal role and (albeit modest) income in the field that they have trained in enables people to pursue the work they want to do, seemingly with the luxury of more resources and time. At least in Australia, where our work is located, there is often a real struggle between people's initial vision for the work and the reality of their work context. Workers initially enter the field driven by their desire to work with and support people and find themselves unprepared for a world of competitive tendering, financial and staff management concerns, audit cultures, market-based welfare systems and outcomes evaluation. Such a world is often at odds with a worker's personal values (Rosenman, 2000). As a number of social work commentators have noted, the reconstruction of people as customers, the prioritisation of financial over personal relationships, and the moral authoritarianism reflected in, for example, the scapegoating of young people and asylum seekers, all create dissonance with the motivations that bring people into human services work in the first place to be a potential basis for change (Butler and Drakeford, 2001; Ferguson and Lavalette, 2006). Thus the environments that workers experience can create a strong incongruity between the values found in policy mandates and organisational mission statements, and the values workers find themselves inhabiting through their actions and inactions (Argyris and Schön,1974).

Professional community workers may have different accountabilities to employers, to funders, to professional bodies and accreditors, to the people with whom they are working and to different communitybased interest groups.