Paper short abstract:

Two dominant ‘moral orientations’ underpin collective organising in community development. These orientations are entangled with dispositions to interact and organise in particular ways. Thus, the negotiation of organising practices is fundamental to debates around how to organise, and why.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on multi-sited ethnographic investigation into a UK-based community development initiative. As part of the initiative, residents in ‘deprived’ areas were invited to form community groups to take charge of the funding awarded to their neighbourhood, and to make decisions about how that funding should be spent. Residents arrived with a wide range of interests, as well as different interpretations of the purpose of the initiative, and how best to organise collectively to achieve that purpose. These interpretations were driven by varied assumptions about what was the right thing to do with the responsibility granted to the groups over collective resources; what ought to happen with the funding. The ‘moral orientations’ presented in this paper were not grounded in conscious beliefs: beliefs do not precede practice (Mahmood, 2012). Rather, they were informed by actors’ dispositions to interact in some ways and not others, and their preference towards certain practices of collective organising, such as how they felt evidence should be processed, procedures developed, and decisions made. The paper therefore shows how these moral orientations were entangled with interactive dispositions and practices of collective organising, thereby contributing to understanding of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Das, 2012) by showing how ethical subjectivities emerge through everyday practice.