How old ideas become new: the ever returning program of “community development”

GRONDONA, ANA LUCIA

Montreal

Conferencia; Social Policies Local Experiments, Travelling Ideas; 2009

RC19 Internationa Sociology Association

The paper I’m presenting emerges from a current research on social policy planning in Argentina. More specifically, I’ve studied the articulations of different discourses in recent Argentinean social programs. Among the discourses that built recent social policy I’ve found two of them are particularly important, what I’ve called neoliberal technocratic discourse and the moral discourse.   Although we’ve constructed a discourse typology that includes other two types (the pragmatic discourse and the right-recognition discourse), the ongoing research has shown that the intertwinement of moral and technocratic discourses in the design and implementation of social policy is very important, although slightly understudied. Therefore, I´ve decided to focus on this issue. In the following pages we analyze the construction of meaning of “community development” both in technocratic and in moral discourse, as well as the particular manner in which they intertwined in the emergence of community development in Argentinean social policy in the 1960s.