Abstract
Despite talks of increasing data-saturation and the metric society, there are still many ordinary situations that are neither ‘smart’ nor digitised. Nevertheless, a logic of evidence and measurement can be demonstrated in the mundane spaces of community organisations, raising questions about how such logics travel and are engaged with in the everyday. Taking three everyday spaces, this article uncovers the dynamics of valuation in community organisations. This article argues that field dynamics of evaluation and measurement warp community organisations through creating a funding game (a competition) that values evidenced outcomes over long-term goals, undervaluing and making invisible the community-value of such organisations. It addresses the capacity at a local level to play the game and argues that only limited spaces exist to work against the logics of measurement. Thus, this article highlights what is at stake in the measurement of community organisations.
Introduction
This article uses the everyday life of evidence in the third sector to ask questions about public value, how it is accounted for, and the problems created by systems of funding and organisational culture. The quantification of ‘meals’ in the opening vignette is illustrative here. Meals are a useful shorthand for demonstrating social value in a context that sees, crudely, big numbers and growth as forms of success. Indeed, progress and growth are often closely intertwined, with progress situated as the ‘
This grows out of an increasingly audit-based culture, embedded in a history of professionalisation in the third sector across the Global North (Milbourne and Cushman, 2013; Shaw and Allen, 2006). Shrinking budgets in this context increase competition between charities for funding, with often negative implications for community organisations (McCrea and Finnegan, 2019; St Clair et al., 2020). The purpose of this article is to demonstrate some of the challenges community food organisations face in this context to both demonstrate the impacts of this audit-based culture on organisations and to explore the space of agency left to organisations in navigating it. It does so by exploring the gap between what is measurable and what is measured, what is amenable to ‘projectification’ and the challenges these dynamics raise for community food organisations and the broader social infrastructures of which they form a critical part.
At stake sociologically in such a task is an understanding of the everyday life of measurement and evaluation cultures, where the dominance of managerial logics meets the spaces of children’s play, community eating and growing projects they are purported to contain and describe. Realist evaluation, which has become a critical element of evaluation methodology, has long argued for recognising complexity and context, to understand what works in what context under what circumstances (Pawson and Tilley, 1997); in sympathy with much of this work, this article argues that the limited understanding of the complexity of evidence and the conditions under which evidence is produced, leads to a narrow understanding of community organisations.
As Back (2015) has demonstrated, everyday life can be a prism through which to draw out the navigation of social dynamics at the level of the supposedly mundane. Bringing together understandings of value with literatures around community growing, third sector organisations and urban austerity, this article contributes to sociological debates around the implications of the rise of metricisation. I argue that despite a diffusion of metric logics, they lack coherence at a local scale and face resistance and disruption in the everyday. Addressing this requires a renewed conversation about the role of value(s) in society, how they are perceived and what attempts to measure them does.
Valuation as a Practice
The organisational context that community food organisations navigate is strongly shaped by the need to prove a degree of value – both socially, and in terms of ‘value for money’ to funders, though this varies depending on the type of funding and the funder. To speak of value, however, is always to some extent slippery, plural and polyphonic, with economic value (in the singular economic sense) always haunted by this polyphony of values (Skeggs, 2014). Approaches that centre social practice argue value exists precisely in this tension between the notion of value (as in price) and values (in the relativistic and often incommensurable sense) (Miller, 2008). Here, I utilise de Certeau’s (2011) work on everyday life to elaborate a different approach. De Certeau (2011: 35) notes the space between the calculative hegemony of an ‘established order’ and the everyday ‘surreptitious and guileful “movement”’ of the consumer. Illuminating the space between usage and formalisation is useful for addressing the challenges around discussing the ambivalence of values as they emerge in social life. De Certeau (2011: 35) also offers a way of thinking through the obfuscation that knowledge production (here, evaluation) as a technology of power creates: ‘What is counted is
De Certeau’s work is useful to illuminate not only the hegemonic value systems at play within the broader field of community organisations, but also the tactics – the ‘art of the weak’ – that players within the field can employ to navigate the dynamics of funding and formalisation. It is this
While concerns around increased ‘datafication’ have been considered in third sector (or mission-oriented) organisations, there is no extended attention to this interplay of power within everyday valuation practices, though scholars have pointed to the disempowerment of non-profit organisations in the USA through monitoring (Bopp et al., 2017). Yet although outcome measurement is a dubious means to capture the broader social value of community organisations, these processes – of application, assessment and outcome measurement – developed out of a need to perform accountability (Barman, 2016). As such, I argue there is a need to understand evaluation as a process replete with power that shapes organisations in a specific way. Thus, here this article asks: what values are occluded or crowded out by the pressures to perform certain visions of value and not others? The acute implications in community food have political ramifications for the sector in terms of how it is seen and (arguably mis)understood, and therein what it can claim a right to. This itself is an indictment of a wider focus on outputs and quantifications that limits and corrals discussions around social values more broadly.
The Field of Community Food
The term community food is intended here to capture not only food growing, but to encompass practices of collective food sharing and eating. There are differentiations within this overarching term, but the patterns emerging around grant funding and the broader field of action seem to apply regardless of the emphasis of the space. There are strong similarities across community food organisations in the UK, often constituted as charitable organisations, suggesting a degree of institutional isomorphism, where organisations come to mirror each other in structure and style (although this position has been questioned in social movement scholarship; see, for example, Crossley and Diani, 2019; Ramanath, 2009). I am not addressing emergency food aid directly here, though some of the dynamics may also apply there. However, as Oncini (2023) notes, emergency food aid is a distinct area of charitable food interventions that has its own logics and tensions, thus none of the case studies are food banks.
Utilising a definition from Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 82) of fields as ‘systems of relations independent of the populations defined by those relations’, the field of community food activity that produces this apparent isomorphism can be seen to be constructed
The organisational context of this action matters. Resource dependence has been widely problematised as shaping organisational behaviour across a range of contexts from the third sector (Verschuere and De Corte, 2014; Walker and Hayton, 2017), to social movements (McCarthy et al., 1991) and more generally within organisational theory (a review in Davis and Cobb, 2010). In social movement scholarship in particular this can be seen as problematic in terms of de-radicalising movements (Cress, 1997; McCarthy et al., 1991), though the social movements literature has insisted on the role of strategy and agency beyond simple environmental conditions (Crossley and Diani, 2019; Walker, 2012). This brings tension to what Oncini (2023), drawing on a different but related branch of field theory, notes in the dynamics of competition and collaboration; of working with and against each other, which plague the third sector in charitable food work. It is critical to attend to such structural tensions as a necessary starting point for questions of how metricisation and cultures of evidence come to see (or not) the work of community food.
Organisational Agency in Community Food
Nonetheless, these structural tensions are negotiated by organisations with a degree of agency. In the minority world, community food organisations largely work within an austerity context of reduced public services, though the impacts are often felt unevenly with areas of poverty and disadvantage often hardest hit (Strong, 2020). The assumptions of budgetary cutbacks leading to a greater role for community organisations as Peck’s (2011) ‘little platoons’ may not have played out in all contexts, yet the funding landscape for community organisations has undoubtedly shrunk and competition is an everyday reality, while social needs have often been exacerbated especially in relation to food insecurity (St Clair et al., 2020). In this context, there is a great deal of competition between organisations for small pots of funding that are required to simply continue the work. As Quinn et al. (2022: 371) note, the presumption of non-profit organisations as the ‘last line of defence’ for the marginalised puts huge strains on the organisations involved, as they face service cutbacks and post-pandemic conditions. Building on calls to consider the experiences of the shifting role of the voluntary sector and its impacts on practitioners, there is a clear need to consider how such broader political economic shifts impinge on and are rebutted at the level of everyday community action.
Competitivity within the sector is stoked by comparisons made possible by commensuration. The quantification of outcomes itself makes it possible for funders to quickly parse organisations in funding exercises, and lends itself to direct comparisons between organisations. Elsewhere, it has been argued that this is a direct consequence of widespread quantification (Mau, 2019), though here it also reflects broader political economic trends including the funding squeeze associated with post-crash austerity and the simultaneous rise of food insecurity and charitable responses to it.
The literature on community gardening, while increasingly sophisticated, has not dealt extensively with organisational dynamics nor the funding landscape in which it is situated. The broader context of neoliberalisation and the politics of community growing have been extensively debated, with the agency of organisations either limited to cooptation into neoliberal governmentality (Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014; Pudup, 2008; Rosol, 2012); seen as central to their autonomous figurations of social relations (whether anarchist or simply agitatory) (Certomà and Tornaghi, 2015; Ginn and Ascensão, 2018); or contextually dependent, and always both (McClintock, 2014). This literature does not often engage with the mechanisms of valuation or organisational action. Notable outliers have attended to the tensions existing around collaboration and competition between community organisations (Oncini, 2023; St Clair et al., 2020). Building on this, I argue the logics of austerity, which can be seen to permeate a broader conversation about value, do more than restrict collaboration, they concretely shape the activities of organisations. Similar challenges are raised in relation to what is often called ‘community resilience’ (Plough, 2021; Wright, 2016, 2021), defined broadly to research participants by Wright (2016: 158) as ‘the capacity of social groups to bounce back from disaster, but also to adapt to or anticipate change’. The latter part of this definition speaks to something more than the capacity to weather adversity, but should community not be more than resilience? Can connection be something in and for itself, and not simply a way to achieve another end? Rather than starting from such a concept, I draw on a broader tradition of sociological thinking that situates communality as an already existing, rich and important social action (Studdert and Walkerdine, 2016); to focus on the breadth of meaning and possibility in communal relations. Explaining how community organisations are undervalued and shaped, especially in relation to their fundamental role in supporting this communality, requires paying attention to the structure of the field occupied by community food organisations and articulations of value in this context.
Methods
This article draws on a key theme from two ethnographic research projects, with data collection carried out between 2015–2016 and 2019–2020, respectively. Combined, this reflects over 400 hours of participant observation and 74 interviews, carried out with organisational staff across four different organisations, volunteers and community food project participants. All interviews were carried out by the author and many (though not all) were carried out in situ, within community food settings. Interviews lasted between 30 and 90 minutes across the projects, and varied in focus, though generally were focused on interviewees’ relationships with the organisations in question, including personal histories of involvement, why and what they valued, what community meant and looked like, and what opportunities and barriers to action often were. The academic projects had significant differences, with the first being concerned more with questions of urban land politics and the role of urban community within such processes (dynamics more fully explored in Traill, 2023). The later project had a stronger emphasis on what the ethics of sustainability in an area of urban deprivation might comprise, and had a more participatory methodology, working alongside a community organisation to build sustainable interventions. Both projects generated a great deal of data around community food from participant observation and interviews that were recorded in fieldnotes at the end of a day or transcribed from an audio recording (respectively), then analysed thematically to generate key findings. Returning in this article to key themes across the projects in conjunction allows for a broader notion of the field of community food organisations in Glasgow to be assembled analytically from common emerging themes across the two projects.
The article draws on three case studies, telling organisational narratives in turn around funding and evidence, before turning to the implications for community food, third sector organisations and the broader trend towards metricisation and the context of neoliberal austerity. In this sense, I am drawing on the ethnographic material somewhat illustratively as case studies in order to make a comparative point about field dynamics. I do so in order to bring the empirical lives of everyday community organising into conversation with concerns raised in sociologies of value; and to reflect on the extent and pervasion of social metrics, and the spaces of engagement that might exist in which to resist.
Feeding the 15,000
To return first to the organisation from the opening vignette is to turn back to the problems around the figure of 15,000 meals. The adventure playground that feeds all these people has a programme of food growing and eating that focuses on families in an area of urban deprivation, covering food growing, access to a free food pantry, large community meals during holiday periods and weekends, free fruit and ad hoc snack provision, including at times occasional breakfasts handed out to children who turn up at 11 a.m. as yet unfed. For the playground, play comes first but their location in an area of urban poverty meant they expanded into a heavily utilised food programme. In the words of the local FareShare depot manager, ‘no-one does numbers like [the playground]’.
As a headline figure, providing 15,000 meals across the six weeks of school summer holidays seems like a figure to be celebrated, particularly in an area of high urban deprivation. This success in feeding those who may or may not need it requires a level of skill and capacity, as well as a great deal of community trust in the deliverers of the food programme. Yet that figure, which was often parroted in relation to the playground’s successful summer programme in 2019 (they detest though will strategically use the term ‘holiday hunger’), has a dubious element. On closer inspection, a ‘meal’ is not a straightforward metric. This figure includes not only an estimate of hot lunches served at 1.30 every day to a snaking queue of children and their families, embedded researchers and various locals from the neighbouring area who pop in for lunch; it also includes an estimate of boxed up leftovers, of fruit taken in bags and distributed to various family members and of ad hoc snacks and breakfasts.
Thus, a ‘meal’ is a useful shorthand for an amalgam of food provided in different forms. This metric of ‘meals’ is associated with funders and is the preferred metric of FareShare, the food redistribution charity who use guidance from an organisation known as Waste and Resources Action Programme (or WRAP) to designate 420g of any surplus food as a ‘meal’ (see WRAP, 2019). Although this figure is intended as indicative by WRAP and FareShare, it makes an elision that waste food can be easily transformed into filling, nutritious meals – a reality not exactly matched when redistributed food can be an unpredictable source of ingredients.
To complicate things further, the playground prefer to eyeball meals, rather than weigh food going out, and it includes a vague, highly subjective range of estimated items. It is clear then that 15,000 meals is not a literal figure, but an abstraction based on an approximation of the quantity of food given out. It is also, despite the geographic location of the organisation, decidedly not a figure that reflects 15,000 meals to those who would otherwise be experiencing food insecurity, with visitors from across the city of Glasgow (and more widely from Scotland and beyond). Although it is never explicitly situated as meaning this, the shorthand (and the so-called ‘holiday hunger’ funding received by the organisation) often elides this crucial detail. While this in itself might lead to a conclusion that a greater degree of care is required in dealing with such figures, it also, through emphasising scale, underplays a core tension that emerges in the organisation between on the one hand, providing a hearty and vital summer programme, and on the other, providing support, assistance and development opportunities for local children. To understand this requires a broader picture of the organisation.
While the funding often received by the playground is a reflection of their geographic location in an area of high deprivation, many visitors to the site over the summer come from across Glasgow. Indeed, one local reflected that while the year before they had spent the whole summer there, thinking the place was ‘ours’, in 2019 it was rather busier. A growth in numbers, an incursion too of outsiders, becomes problematic for locals in identifying the space of theirs. As such, the feeling of ownership was much diluted by the record numbers of visitors; with growth problematising belonging. The quantitative data gathered by the playground primarily for funders elides this, though it does – through the collection of postcodes – speak to the range of visitors. One founder of the organisation pointed out that they themselves find qualitative data – stories of impact – more valuable for organisational purposes, but noted that funders want numbers.
The record numbers at the playground are both a success and a difficulty then for the organisation. It means that to funders they can ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ on feeding school children, but that they also lose track of their core demographic in amidst the non-local visitors. Some of the local kids with whom I built up a relationship during my time there barely visited over summer, saying it was ‘too busy’. One local grandparent who often brought in her pre-school granddaughter noted, ‘she just gets lost’ in all the people. It creates a difficult dynamic for the organisation, which they are well aware of: that the focus on play and supporting the locals cannot be lost in the streams of visitors. Their efforts are noticed by one nursery practitioner I spoke to, who thought it was important that the local kids still got plenty of attention despite the hundreds of people at the park.
As such, the difficulties of measuring success within grant-funded community organisations where the valued metrics are quantitative become apparent. The staff at the organisation have a sceptical approach to their own figures, which they accept are largely an artefact of the funding environment, gathered in order to evidence their successes and provide numbers to back up their claims to need the money. Yet testimonials also collected by the playground tell a more nuanced story of transformation; that sits uncomfortably against the narratives of scale so easily told. Testimonials illustrate the capacity of the organisation as a place where families come to feel supported – often practically, with food and space for their children, as well as emotionally, in the sense of free of judgement (see Traill et al., 2024 for a fuller account of these dynamics). Much of the sense of mission in a space like the playground stems from interaction and play, attention for the local kids, support for the local families; but the push for crude quantifications from funders (and their vaunted success in feeding thousands) creates a whole workstream of evidence-making and counting. This echoes work that figures funding as a relationship that shapes organisations and their capacities (Barman, 2016; McCrea and Finnegan, 2019), but points to something closer to de Certeau’s (2011) sense of what becomes invisible. In all the counting and dynamics of power and resource, there is much that is valuable and important for local people that is unrepresented within a field that rewards the organisation for its capacity to ‘do numbers’.
Funding as a Strategic Game
A similar sense of the field as demanding and shaping the actions of community organisations emerges across town on the edge of the more affluent area of Glasgow known as the West End, though with a slightly different inflection. A community development trust (CDT) there offer a thriving community growing site and also run a number of local development projects, including offering community meeting spaces, community meals, mindfulness sessions, growing and local litter picks. The garden, at 10 years old, is the longest standing project. The CDT have been highly successful in attracting funding, and their approach is strategic: the manager (one of the only full-time members of staff) primarily fundraises, takes a few meetings and has learned over the years the value of gathering testimonials and personal stories from those engaged by the Trust. These latter are crucial to telling a compelling narrative of transformation – whether from social isolation through the community cafe or learning about growing in the garden.
The manager, Jeff, talked of the learning curve associated with the early days of fundraising. They relied on larger grants with quite specific requirements, including eco-driving lessons, which detracted in some ways from building and maintaining the community garden. While these activities helped to keep the space open and pay staff, they were not the focus of what the Trust wanted to be doing. The eco-driving lessons came up often with something of an eye-roll, as a naive faux pas – a marker of what the CDT had now moved beyond, to a more savvy relationship with funding. As such, while teaching a course to other community organisations in 2016, one of Jeff’s main takeaways was that funders who do not match your aims are not worth pursuing.
A major challenge for funding is that the main activities of the community garden – cyclical seasons of growing, training gardeners and community events – are not easily wrapped up in the neat ‘projects’ that funders like, which fit neatly within a financial year. As one member of gardening staff put it: ‘Funding is usually project kind of orientated so things get badged up as projects.’ Imagining an alternative future where there was less need to jump from project to project, she added:
I think it would give a bit of breathing space to really get to the root of what people are interested in and what they need and how to go around solving that, without having the pressure of having to get something finished in a year.
This temporal pressure of a constant stream of packaged up projects belies the actual social life of the community garden as an ongoing communal endeavour without predefined goals or outcomes.
Funding programmes can also have a lasting effect on the direction projects take, creating path dependencies as organisational reputations and records develop. In 2015 there was an interest from the Scottish Government in funding projects geared towards having a therapeutic effect, improving mental health. An interview with Mona, a member of staff, illustrated the competing priorities involved in applying to such funds. Partly, the garden itself simply needs funding. In this case, seeking funding was also about developing what Mona called a ‘therapeutic space’. Although the wild area with its strawberries, overhanging trees and small pond is often thought of as peaceful, this was going beyond this passive peacefulness to actively developing this aspect of the space, or attempting to, through soliciting suggestions and running training. The eventual aim was, through this, to make the space inclusive for more people. But there was also a path dependency: Mona noted that last year’s funding wanted projects to include a mental health aspect, so now mental health was a ‘thing’ for the organisation. Mindfulness and meditation remain part of what the organisation do in the current day. Thus, something that began in 2015 as criteria for the Scottish Government funding has become something that the CDT continued actively after funding ran out.
As such, the dynamics of funding for community organisations have clearly shaped the organisation, even as it aims to navigate strategically between the aims of funders and their own goals as an organisation. Discussing a fellow community growing organisation elsewhere in Glasgow that he had critiqued for building a new garden, Jeff said, they are ‘chasing the money’. But he was also sympathetic, adding: ‘That’s what you have to do, you set up a new garden and you can maybe find some of that money to put back into the original garden.’ A greater focus of funders on novelty over maintenance makes long-term thinking hard, especially given the precarity of even well-established organisations like the CDT, who when I was working with them had no job stability beyond the nine-month horizon. This long-term precarity continues as a dynamic highlighted by staff on return visits in more recent years. Thus, processes of valuation in this context involve trying to navigate a game that requires you prove, constantly, that you have achieved what you set out to do in your, often artificially bounded, projects. The CDT are adept at navigating this, but it clearly shapes and constrains action.
‘Directly Doing Things’
The view from beyond the scope of mainstream funders offers a third case from which to consider field dynamics. The third organisation considered here is an outlier, as at the time of the research they were in contestation with the local authority, who are both landowner and a funder themselves. As an urban meadow with food growing on site that was mostly disorganised, but constituted a small community orchard, mini allotments and some communal beds, it was closer in ethic to the play organisation discussed above in that it was primarily a leisure space rather than a dedicated growing site. Informality and their conflict with the city council isolated them from the more pronounced dynamics of producing vacuous statistics and shaping themselves into funding calls in order to continue work. As one volunteer pointed out:
I know with having been involved with community gardens, with [my partner] having been involved in a lot, and I’ve been involved in a few a while ago, it’s a bit different because they’re very funding reliant and they have to then do things in order to appease the funders which might not have gone in line with the original principles. I think because this place wouldn’t be eligible for any of that funding anyway, it’s only private funders that would ever fund this place because of it being disputed land, then yeah we’re just outside of that bracket. But maybe down the line that will change, but with the Scottish Climate Challenge things and stuff like that, you’ve got quite strict criteria which almost stops it from being able to be quite radical in some ways, or just more direct. Just like directly doing things.
The notion of ‘just . . . doing things’ was commonly associated with the space, as a semi-anarchic space where locals had taken over pitches long neglected by the council and tended it, planting fruit trees, wildflower seeds and vegetables, and curating a programme of outdoor events and playgroups. This space was seen as highly political because they were locked in a dispute that ran from 2008 until 2016 over the planning permission for the site, involving a great deal of highly formalised political action such as lobbying, protesting and registering dissent through the planning process. As such, they sat outside of many funding streams, including the Climate Challenge Fund alluded to by the respondent, which is notorious among community garden workers for being restrictive in its funding and exacting in its monitoring.
Yet even in this dynamic of contestation and getting on with things, pressures towards respectability and organisational competence were important. On the one hand, the organisations had to appeal to private funders, as the volunteer above noted, but it was also campaigning to save the space. Part of the latter created the need to position themselves as respectable community actors who could take care of the space, thus they had to resemble something legible to funders, the council and Scottish Government, who have ultimate authority on planning disputes.
Thus, even amidst conflicting relationship with major funders and landowners, expectations about what a community organisation looks like and the rules of the game shape what occurs there. This impact of the field on organisational form and action affects what is valued and centred within the meadow’s organising. Conservation activities and the more anarchic elements of the meadow (the impulsive fires, the illicit uses by youthful drinkers, creating BMX tracks, the semi-guerrilla seed and tree planting) became marginalised in favour of play-focused activities. After years of running on volunteer labour, they managed in 2016 to employ a few part-time staff, which helped with the dynamics of activist burnout that the long-burning conflict produced. This not only functionally shaped the organisations towards professionalisation but also reinforced the focus on children and families, as the charity that secured funding was focused on outdoor education.
What gets lost in this is the work to increase what one central campaigner called ‘the value of the space’ for all its users, whether there to entertain kids, walk dogs or appreciate the wild orchids or bats. As Naomi, a campaigner, put it:
it’s going to be quite difficult for the council to build on somewhere that children and schools use and it’s very, the message has been much clearer and stronger for children and families using the land, which politically is better.
Thus, the campaign to save the space is subject to negotiations around what values become paramount, which are elevated as politically expedient, and what are rendered invisible. Community, and the value of green spaces for everyone, are often then represented as secondary to educational values – to those which are most likely to gain traction within the value structure of the council and the Scottish Government. As such, again, a certain invisibility of social connection as a
Value, Values and Reactivity in the Field of Community Food
The case studies demonstrate how tensions emerge around value in community organisations creating dilemmas for the organisations. To some extent this is a problem of simplifying, condensing and making understandable a complex phenomenon for a swift transmission of the importance of the work to councils, funders and local people more broadly. Borrowing from de Certeau (2011) illuminates this as the elisions of counting as a practice, the blind spots of power. In each case it becomes clear that valuation as a process is rife with moral decisions, hierarchies and tactics that end up weighing what is easy to understand, what is palatable and what may be effective practically, over and above what may be understood as the mission or even the everyday use-value of the case studies in question. Valuation is also wrapped up in a set of field dynamics that shape things into ‘projects’ in community organisations. Therefore, this article argues that practices of valuation, inasmuch as they are selective, often undervalue core social elements of projects, particularly those that are hard to measure or unfashionable in the contemporary funding and political climate: principally maintaining community spaces for their value to those who use them. This creates practical barriers for organisations in demonstrating their main functions. It also limits our capacity to talk about a whole range of values that are socially important but elided in conversations about policy and urban spaces, because it cannot see or measure them – values such as community itself, social connection and a connection to the ecosystems around us.
These cases, taken together, make it clear that organisations within the field of community gardening are pressured towards brute quantification (the 15,000 meals) over more complex narratives of social value, raising questions for organisations such as the adventure playground whose scale, while celebrated, creates issues for their work supporting disadvantaged youth in an area of high deprivation. Even those putatively outside of the field, such as the meadow organisation, were shaped by the gravitational pull of legitimacy and possible future funding. Indeed, they are shaped by the rules of the game even while they consider themselves to be largely outside of it. A kind of reactivity (Espeland and Sauder, 2007) emerges here, with behaviour directed not just towards measurement, but to the broader landscape of rules and legitimacy structures within the field of community organisations. It bears comparisons with the concerns in social movement theory around the influence of elites (e.g. McCarthy et al., 1991) and what has been recognised as a tendency towards institutional isomorphism (AbouAssi and Bies, 2018). These cases thus suggest there is a need for a stronger theorisation of reactivity – to recognise this dynamic as sitting within a broader field of power relations. That dynamic relation between power and effect is what this article has aimed to demonstrate, particularly as it is present in the influence of funders, the local council and their conceptions of value, producing concrete effects on community organisations.
However, while field dynamics have a descriptive capacity here, it is also notable across the case studies that despite grand narratives around socio-metrics and the rise of the metric society (e.g. Mau, 2019), in these mundane spaces of everyday community life there are not only unmeasurable aspects of projects but also space to refute, rebut and reimagine what is valuable. This recalls James Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’ that Walkerdine (2016) used effectively to reflect on what is unsayable to a researcher. What Walkerdine found in the field, so too emerges to the funder – there are things that go unmeasured, unsaid and unseen. In this, there is, however small, a residue of agency at the local level. This is perhaps best understood in the space between what de Certeau calls strategy and tactics, which is to say again it is about social power. As Darby (2016) notes, there is space and capacity in the third sector to centre self-defined values against externally imposed neoliberalisation. Yet such moves usually do not attempt to do more than survive and thrive within the game, rather than having a role in changing the rules. To go beyond this narrow gauge of action to genuinely reimagine the landscape of values would require action in a much more coordinated way across the sector, and a broader social conversation about what matters.
As de Certeau (2011: 35) notes, the ‘very activity of “making do” is elided in processes of measurement, meaning that when statistical methods or quantifications are employed they at best measure the
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated the impacts of practices of valuation and perceptions of the field on the everyday lives of community food organisations. Extending literatures around community food organisations through engaging with valuation as a social practice, I have foregrounded the extent and power of evaluation in shaping community organisations, noting how warping such logics become in the everyday. Without overstating the possibilities for resistance, this acknowledges the space for ‘an art of the weak’ (de Certeau, 2011: 37) and the agency of community organisations, whose activities and actions still compose everyday futures with the tools furnished by the field. It is possible to see the space for manoeuvre, including tactical uses of funding and a centring of values that remain obscure to funding and feedback processes (Darby, 2016). Nonetheless, such action remains for the large part obscured in official representations that cannot officially see community as a value. This has troubling implications for our capacity to enact otherwise progressive policies around community wealth building, if such enterprises remain indebted to a logic of measurement and indicators.
Thus, the field in which community organisations operate is replete with tensions between actualising the values they are founded on, such as social connection and/or providing food with dignity, and accessing funding and legitimacy to make their everyday work possible. There are conflicts between what is valued in this field, and what may be
Emerging practices of valuation are challenging some of these dynamics in the field. Some participants were aware of Evaluation Support Scotland, for example, who present a variety of different modes of valuation data methods – including drawing on qualitative and story-telling methods. Equally, approaches like Values-Based Learning offer ways of orienting evaluation towards value-claims that go beyond simplistic impact assessments and value-for-money. A broader trend could be emerging, particularly in the Scottish context at a governance level in relation to Community Wealth Building where alternative metrics are sought to centre values beyond the economic (though usually still alongside measures such as gross domestic product (GDP)). Attempts to think beyond simplistic valuations may be promising, though they still, through an emphasis on finding new metrics, retain the problematic of measurement itself as a product of power (de Certeau, 2011). What might be needed to overcome this issue, or perhaps simply to mitigate some of its more troubling effects, is both a greater democratisation of the values at the heart of such processes and centring such values in evaluations, rather than relying on easy metrics or the exemplary stories of testimonials. There is a clear need to think about reactivity in evaluation and the values that sit at the heart of evaluation cultures, as well as the partiality of the evidence that can be collected at any moment in time (Pawson and Tilley, 1997). This would take such practices beyond simply measuring better (see Espeland and Sauder, 2007), to think more critically about how the process itself ought to be unpacked.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge my deep debt to the community organisations I write about here, whose generosity and time were invaluable in developing these ideas. This article would also not have existed without the collaborative efforts and guidance on the Scottish Government/EU SIF grant in 2019, with Deirdre Shaw (PI), Andrew Cumbers, Robert McMaster and Stephanie Anderson; though all mistakes here are rightfully mine.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: this work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council doctoral studentship [grant number 1510541] and by funding from the EU/Scottish Government Social Innovation Fund Stage 2 [grant number: SIF-R2-S2-LUPS-013].
Ethics statement
The research drawn on in this article was subject to ethical review. The initial community gardening project was given ethical approval by the Research Ethics Committee at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The project with the community food hub at the playground was given ethical approval by the College of Social Sciences Ethics Committee at the University of Glasgow.
