Community work one / edited by David Jones and Marjorie Mayo

The impetus for launching this collection of essays came originally from within the Association of Community Workers. It was felt that there was a shortage of adequate and up-to-date critical written material on community work theory and practice in Britain and likewise a shortage of outlets for such material through existing academic and professional periodicals, the journals of related disciplines having neither sufficient space nor enough interest. On the other hand it was widely believed that the material did exist in embryo in the minds of numerous practitioners, community activists, teachers, researchers and other professionals. If the outlet could be organised the potential contributors could then be stimulated or goaded into writing.

In practice, this has proved to be the case. With only a little stimulus and very little goading, the contributions began to appear, both from academics already relatively used to writing, but also from hard-pressed practitioners with very limited time at their disposal. It would almost have been possible to produce another volume just from promised contributions which failed to materialise before the dead-line for this volume. This bears out ACW's confidence in the vitality of the field and underlines the importance of creating a forum such as this, where theory can be developed in relation to practice. The intention is to publish further collections annually.