Manchester Learning Disability Partnership Social Services Office

'The creation of settings ' is a key theme of community psychology. Some of these developments break new ground, pioneering social relationships in advance of those otherwise sanctioned by the existing social order. As such they are 'prefigurative'. However, there is always the threat of their settling, or being forced into forms and ways that increasingly conform to the rules and norms of the dominant society. The interplay between prefigurative and reactionary tendencies tells us about the nature of a society and what will have to be done and what overcome to create social justice. For an innovation to successfully move beyond prefiguration will require a coalition of support extending beyond its immediate context. Ideas from the study of social movements are used to explore the connections between the creation of settings, social change, communities of interest, and ideology. In so doing it argues for an opening of community and applied social psychology theory and action to the societal level, so the 'social ' can reflect more than the interpersonal or intergroup level of analysis. Community and applied social psychology take place within a societal and socio-political context. Despite this, most of the concepts available to the field reflect a social psychology where the social rarely embraces concepts from social theory, so that effectively social psychology means th