Working through industrial absence: Scotland’s community business movement and the moral economies of deindustrialisation in the 1980s and 1990s

ABSTRACT Building on scholarship that has sought to trace how moral economies interact and change over time, and their value for understanding Scotland’s experience of deindustrialisation in particular, this article investigates the formative experiences of Scotland’s community business pioneers and how they shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and Thatcherism. The working-class moral economy terms of ‘economic security’ and ‘control of resources’ remained central to this episode of moral economy action. However, a ‘new’ crowd, drawing on the values of co-operation brought community and workplace activist traditions together to protect expectations of justice and fairness. Oral histories recorded with community business pioneers, provide insight into how the skills and built environment of the industrial past were used by the community business movement as community assets to build new futures. Building an ‘ownership consciousness’ around local assets was crucial to community repair, not only materially, but also in terms of their narrative representations of these areas. Just as the transference of the working-class moral economy had political consequences, the history of Scotland’s community business pioneers reveals how the moral economy was finding expression in civil society and driving the shape of Scotland’s social economy in the process.

In 1976, a series of seminars took place considering the 'lesson's learned' from the Community Development Programme (CDP) in Ferguslie Park (Paisley), the only project from the Labour Government's flagship CDP based in Scotland. The Ferguslie Park Cooperative Workshop ran as part of the programme from 1975 to 1977 and, despite being short-lived, was identified as one of the more successful areas of CDP activity. Building on this enthusiasm for community-led job creation, discussions between Ronald Young (Strathclyde Regional Council), Ashok Ohri (Govan Area Resource Centre), and John Pearce (who had been employed on the CDP in West Cumbria) resulted in an Urban Aid grant for the Local Economic Advisory Project (LEAP). Established in 1978, LEAP ran out of Paisley College with initiatives that used a community-development approach to job creation in Inverclyde, Govan (inner-city Glasgow) and Ferguslie Park, propagating Scotland's experimental community business movement. 1 Although there were variations, most community business established in the 1980s and 1990s were companies limited by guarantee, with any profits made redistributed back into the community. Importantly, while grant funding, most notably the UK's largest regeneration fund-Urban Aid, was used to establish many community businesses, they did aim to be selfsupporting. Community Business pioneers positioned the movement as a 'self-help' solution to the economic and social challenges that were the source of rising rates of multiple deprivation in Scotland. 2 In practice, many community businesses required some kind of grant support, or relied on local authority contracts to balance their budgets. 3 Drawing on EP Thompson's writing on the moral economy, this article explores the connection between community action and deindustrialisation, to broaden understandings of the lived experience of deindustrialisation in Scotland.
In his classic essay, 'the moral economy of the English crowd', EP Thompson argued that eighteenth-century bread riots were not sporadic responses to high prices, but 'a highly complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives'. For Thompson, this 'moral economy of the poor' was action taken in defence of social norms and obligations upon which a new political economy was encroaching. 4 Since its first publication in 1971, the concept of the moral economy has been taken up by a myriad of scholars who have used it to examine numerous historical contexts. 5 Considering how Thompson's writing on the moral economy during industrialisation, can be applied to the study of deindustrialisation, Tim Strangleman has suggested: . . . the historical moment that Thompson was concerned with, the experience of communities emerging into an industrial age, can be usefully compared and contrasted with contemporary researchers studying communities experiencing deindustrialisation. These two historically discrete epochs can be thought of as two bookends of what was an industrial era. 6 The conceptual space that Strangleman opens up between industrial and deindustrial society, is one where new 'support structures' needed to be imagined as 'old certainties' disappeared, and provides the scope to value the experience those who have lived through deindustrial change. 7 This is the conceptual space resonates with moves in deindustrialisation studies 'beyond the ruins' and the desire to understand the process as a 'historical transformation that marks not just a quantitative and qualitative change in employment, but a fundamental change in the social fabric on a par with industrialisation itself'. 8 Understanding the community business movement as an attempt by community development professionals and community groups to create new 'support structures' in the era of deindustrialisation as they attempted to regain some control over their livelihoods and neighbourhoods, situates this article within that conceptual space.
As well as using the moral economy to open up a conceptual space for the study of deindustrialisation, historians have also studied how Thompson's moral economy has been re-invented, transgressed, defended, and transferred over time. 9 Thompson himself wrote of the episodic nature of the moral economy and it's potential to linger. 10 This is certainly apparent in recent studies of the 'Clydesider identity' by Philips, Wright and Tomlinson. Clydesiders used the skills they had acquired in the shipyards-mentoring, advocating and organising-throughout their working lives, enabling them to 'assuage the negative effects of deindustrialisation, such as low pay and authoritarian employers'. 11 From the 1940s into the 1970s the working-class moral economy operated dialectically with the 'elite' moral economy of social-democratic policymakers, which generally, ensured that industrial closures were managed in consultation with workers and trade unions and provided employment alternatives. 12 However, transgressing the established dialectic, Thatcher promoted her own moral economy in the late 1970s, which sought to blame rising unemployment on the behaviour of workers and trade unions rather than the Conservative's 'adventurist' monetary policies. 13 In doing so she distanced herself from the obligation to take action and provide employment alternatives in the face of rising unemployment. Thatcher's actions have been described as a 'major assault' on the working-class moral economy. 14 However, her efforts to erode economic security and public services meant that 'the working-class moral economy duly acquired many middleclass adherents in Scotland'. 15 Therefore, this article argues that not only is it possible to study how the terms of the working-class moral economy were transferred as workers moved into new occupations in the era of deindustrialisation, but that a 'new' crowd, to use Thompson's term, in the form of the community business movement shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and later Thatcherism. As Thomson reflected: The moral economy of the crowd took a long time to die: it is picked up by the early cooperative flour mills, by some Owenite socialists, and it lingered on for years somewhere in the bowels of the Co-operative Wholesale Society. 16 Thompson's reflections remind us to look to co-operative and community activist traditions, as well as the workplace activism that has received attention in recent literature when tracing the transference of the moral economy over time. The community business movement provides a lens to trace how community and workplace activist traditions were drawn together in the era of deindustrialisation and how action moved from the workplace and into the community. Of course the community presence within the moral economy has always been important. As discussed in Andrew Perchard's, Aluminiumville, not only workers, but the broader community had a deep understanding of moral economy terms and could intensify pressure on employers to fulfil their obligations to workers and by extension the community. 17 This article provides the opportunity to study how this community dynamic of the moral economy evolved in the era of deindustrialisation.
Studying the closure of the aluminium smelter at Invergordon (in the Scottish Highlands), Perchard has described the need to move beyond Scotland's industrial belt and the 'poster children of decline', arguing that the loss of 'their job for life, and communities' future' were just a palpable on the industrial periphery. 18 Thinking of industrial peripheries not just in terms of geography but in terms of identity, Valerie Wright's study of community development in Ferguslie Park has argued how, despite experiencing the effects of deindustrialisation, the lack of industrial occupational identity made it more difficult to mobilise support packages for employment alternatives on the Fergulsie estate. She, also, therefore argues for the inclusion of perspectives 'beyond the traditional narrative of industrial closure and its consequences' in histories of deindustrialisation. 19 The challenge to historians, therefore, is to find ways to explore the dynamics of deindustrialisation not only in areas recovering from industrial loss, but a much broader swathe of communities grappling with industrial absence; that a future built upon an aligning of geographical community and industrial occupational identity was, from the 1980s, increasingly unlikely. Shifting focus from industrial loss to absence, provides a route into tracing the effects of deindustrialisation beyond the workplace and into to the community. Community business was an approach to local economic development pioneered by a group of community development workers in the late 1970s. Scotland's movement was the largest in the UK and alongside the Community Co-op Scheme initiated by the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) from 1977 marks the origins of the country's modern social economy. The community business movement, is an example of the patchwork of activity that grew in the absence of, as Valerie Wright has argued, a lack of real investment by successive governments to provide a national strategy around unemployment and regeneration. 20 The community development workers who built the community business movement, worked across Scotland within communities of varied industrial heritage to find ways to rebuild their local economies. Examining the history of the community business movement, therefore, provides a valuable route into the comparative study of communities experiencing industrial absence, facilitating a broader perspective on the effects of and responses to deindustrialisation.
This article is based on oral histories recorded with a group of 10 community business pioneers between 2014 and 2016. All the participants either had a background in community development or social work, or were drawn into the movement as community members. They are described here as pioneers, because they were influential in developing the first community businesses in the 1980s and promoting the concept of communityowned business. Together their memories cover how ideas for community business developed out of experimental community development work, and how they established the first community businesses, primarily across Scotland's central belt, in the early 1980s. 21 The first section of the article investigates the formative experiences of the community business movement and their co-operative values in order to examine the 'legitimising notion' of this 'crowd' and how they shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and later Thatcherism. In the second section, oral histories collected from community business pioneers in West Calder (West Lothian), Possil Park (North Glasgow), and Greenock (Inverclyde) discuss the community business approach to job creation in their areas. Their memories provide insight into how the skills and built environment of the industrial past were used by the community business movement as community assets to build new futures. Finally, section three uses examples from Govan Workspace and Possil Community Business to consider how building an 'ownership consciousness' around local assets was crucial to community repair, not only materially, but also in terms of their narrative representations of these areas. Those participating in the community business movement drew from different activist traditions, but their ambitions were recognisable in the terms of the moral economy of the mid-twentieth century.

Community business and the moral economies in Scotland
It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimising notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. 22 This section investigates the formative experiences of the community business pioneers and their co-operative values in order to examine the 'legitimising notions' of the movement and how this 'crowd' shaped a moral economy response to deindustrialisation. It reveals their motivation to support alternative ways of developing local economic activity, controlled by the community. This section also attempts to provide an insight into the scale of community business activity and their relationship with local authorities. Lastly, it reflects on how the movement interacted with Thatcher's moral economy and how this was reflected in the challenges of 'composing' oral history narratives.
Community development and social work was the dominant training profile among Scotland's community business pioneers, many had experience of workers' co-ops and community co-ops through the revival of the co-operative movement in the 1970s, and were part of experimental community development work that included elements of trading and small business creation. Labour government legislation supported the development of workers' co-ops in the 1970s through the Industrial Common Ownership Act (1976) and the Co-operative Development Agency Act (1978). This enabled the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) to grow the number of workers' co-ops from 300 in 1980 to 900 in 1984. 23 Community business pioneer, John Pearce, directed a CDP in West Cumbria 1972-1976, as part of this work he established an industrial co-operative project. He also chaired ICOM's lending committee, Industrial Common Ownership Finance (ICOF). Moving to Scotland in the late 1970s Pearce was a founding member of the Scottish Cooperative Development Committee, and kept in touch with community co-operatives established in the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the 1970s and 1980s. Reflecting on the first 10 years of community business in 1987, Pearce also cited the importance of the Job Creation Programme and Youth Opportunities Programme, both part of the Labour Government's special measures announced in 1975, in giving 'community organisations the chance to become involved in employment and trading'. For Pearce, this was of crucial importance in overturning the assumption that 'economic affairs were not the concern of community activists' and were 'best left to industry, financiers, government and trade unions'. 24 In a discussion paper on Community Co-operatives and Community Business written in 1986, Pearce argued that the ideals of common ownership and community ownership were very similar, but that using the legal structure of companies limited by guarantee was more flexible, because innovative co-operative structures required amendments to Industrial and Provident society model rules, as had been experienced by the HIDB in initiating their community co-op scheme in the 1970s. 25 Combining these experiences, Pearce was ambitious, but pragmatic on what community business could achieve: It is not claimed that community enterprise is a single, magic way of breaking into the vicious spiral of economic decline and rising long-term unemployment in such areas, arresting both downward and upward tendencies in one fell swoop. But it is claimed that, given time, it can complement other strategies, help make them more effective, and increase the confidence to help themselves and to exercise a measure of control over their local economy and labour market. 26 Attempting to achieve a quantitative handle on the growth of community business in Scotland, LEAP provided the foundations for three community businesses: Greenock Employment Action Group (GEAG), Govan Workspace, and Flagstone Enterprises (Ferguslie Park). By 1986, Ferguslie Park Community Holdings Ltd provided an umbrella organisation for: Flagstone Enterprises (contracted to provide building maintenance on housing estates), a Hairdressers, and a Thrift Shop, and plans for a Workspace and Sports/ Social Club. 27 Together these initiatives employed 12 people, and a further 12 on the YOP Scheme. 28 From the three trading companies established in 1978 that created 20 jobs, by 1987 there were reportedly 126 trading organisations, supporting 3,680 jobs. 29 There was a density of community businesses activity in the Strathclyde Region and in the Highlands and Islands, where 21 community co-ops were established through the HIDB; collectively the co-ops and community businesses were referred to as community enterprises. 30 A survey commissioned in 1997, Valuing the Social Economy attempted to better understand the scale of the social economy in lowland Scotland and set out policy recommendations for the future. On the basis of a wide-ranging survey of lowland Scotland it was estimated that 3,700 organisations were involved in the social economy. Based on a survey of 800 organisations the report estimated 42,000 paid employees and that 60% of those worked full-time, comparable to the number of people working in Scotland's electronics industry at the time. The survey also reported that the social economy engaged 60,000 volunteers and an annual income of £1 billion. 31 The authors of the report defined the social economy as a sector where organisations shared a set of characteristics such as: not motivated by profit, provision of services uneconomic for the private sector, a mixture of paid employees and volunteers, a degree of reliance on charitable or public sector finance, and a voluntary board. Therefore, it's difficult to estimate to what extent the growth in the number of organisations reported represents a rising number of community businesses. What is clear from the report is a growing pull of the idea of the social economy and for a broader range of voluntary and community organisations to engage with forms of trading and/or service provision to fund their activities. 32 John Pearce's papers reveal the evolution of his thinking from experimenting with workers' co-ops during his time at West Cumberland CDP, to the LEAP project and into community business. 33 However, it is important to recognise that although the work of Pearce and his colleagues on the LEAP project was crucial to the development of an infrastructure around community business, establishing Community Business Scotland in 1981 and Strathclyde Community Business in 1984, he was not the only community worker experimenting with self-help and trading for social purposes. The Craigmillar Festival Society, a pioneering community arts organisation based in Craigmillar -a housing estate southeast of Edinburgh's city centre -grew a community business strand to their activities, registering Craigmillar Festival Enterprises Limited in 1978. 34 Regional Councils funded community development in urban 'areas for priority treatment' (ATPs) in Scotland's major cities. 35 During his time, in Wester Hailes (a housing estate on the south western edges of Edinburgh), community worker Laurence Demarco helped build the Wester Hailes Community Workshop. The Workshop was a network of porta-cabins based around an adventure play park that provided space for the development of small businesses. For Demarco this not only provided important spaces for the community to come together, but an insight into the value of community ownership: So these were local people employing local people to do local jobs, they had a tremendous social capital benefit in terms of a feeling of glee. 36 Speaking of this network of small community-run businesses that developed in Wester Hailes Demarco added that this experience: 'gave me a flavour for the power you got when you have your own money'. 37 The early experiments in community business that grew from or were embedded within community development work were inspired by the principle that if the community owned the businesses within their area they could redistribute any profits as they saw fit; whether investing in more businesses to create more jobs, or taking local kids on a day trip to the seaside. Although not directly involved in the community business movement at the time, the shape of Demarco's memories was identifiable amongst the oral narratives of those who were. For example, he discussed how he thought that community businesses or enterprises worked best as a small scale, because then an organisation 'runs its own and knows its own area', which echoes of Ernst FriedrichSchumacher's Small is Beautiful-a popular philosophy in the 1970s-38 and a common reference point in the oral narratives of the community business pioneers that reinforces their lived experience of the failure of 'big business' and a desire to work at a local scale. 39 Writing about the early years of the community business movement, community worker Glen Buchanan, positioned communities like Ferguslie Park as 'neglected' by public and private sectors, thus making a space for alternatives, such as community business, Housing Co-operatives, Workers Co-operatives, Credit Unions and Food Cooperatives. He called for 'new ways of balancing business and social aims' and for communities themselves to receive investment so that they could participate in directing their futures. 40 Although most of the community business pioneers had worked in state sponsored, or local authority community development posts, they were frustrated with the limitations of those posts. For Pearce community business provided an opportunity to push community development in a new direction, by including the ability to create trading organisations within community development initiatives, that would tackle rising unemployment and associated social issues. 41 It was hearing John Pearce speak on these issues at a meeting in Inverclyde towards the end of the 1980s that convinced Jim Bristow to move from his job managing a community centre for the District Council in Greenock and take up a post as an Employment Development Worker for GEAG. 42 Bristow explained his motivations in an oral history recording: We needed good housing, we needed jobs, and people needed to be able to have a good quality of life. And he [John Pearce] saw the community enterprise movement as one way of helping people do that, if the existing macro systems had collapsed, like shipyards and whatever else, then there had to be some form of alternative. And that alternative needed to be rooted in the community. 43 Bristow's reference to the 'quality of life', the dominant measure of wellbeing in community development work in the 1970s, 44 points to the connection he made between his professional background and his support for community business. Community business pioneers felt uneasy at the paternalism of local authorities, as Bristow's shift from his District Council post reflects, and although they relied heavily on the support of sympathetic individuals working within local authorities, they hoped that community business would provide greater independence for communities. The movement therefore had an uneasy relationship with Regional and District Councils. Glen Buchanan, reflected that support was 'spasmodic and partial' and community business pioneers remained unconvinced whether support had grown over the course of the 1980s, or if it was that 'opposition has decreased'. 45 The first experiments of the community business movement took place in the late 1970s before Thatcher took office-as outlined above-in the midst of a supportive legislative and funding environment for co-operative activity. The values of cooperation were discussed throughout the pioneer's oral narratives, where they connected their work to historical examples of co-operation. Referencing the Fenwick Weavers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Rochdale Pioneers, Alan Kay drew parallels between these examples of Victorian co-operation and the efforts of the community business movement to 'create goods and services in equitable and fair ways'. 46 John Pearce, also drew upon historical examples of co-operation. 47 Writing in 1993, he described how the Rochdale Pioneers combined idealism and pragmatism, understanding 'the need to start with a viable practical operation and to build from there'. 48 This interpretation of the Rochdale co-op in the 1840s provides an insight into Pearce's approach to community business in the 1980s. The ambition for communities to take ownership of local trade and services connects the community business pioneers to a desire to the return to the 'local and authentic', aligning them with other 'radical avant-gardes and "alternative" cultures' in the twentieth century. 49 In this sense, the pioneers' initial work was grounded in their experience as community development professionals witnessing the effects of rising levels of unemployment and using the mechanisms provided by the state to support their activities.
As the movement developed in the 1980s, community business found itself in a less welcoming policy environment and pushed into pragmatic decisions over continuing their work while responding to Thatcherism. The community business movement also faced difficulties on a local level. In Barrowfield and Ferguslie Park, community businesses were accused of accounting fraud and linked with the operations of criminal gangs. 50 This damaged the movements reputation and effected how the community business pioneers remembered their work. These factors combined, posed a difficulty in the composure of the community business pioneers oral narratives. Composure, in oral history refers to 'a comfortable telling' of an individual's 'memory story', which 'coheres with larger cultural understandings. 51 The pioneers, felt they lost the battle in the 'loads-a-money' culture of the 1980s and worried that the importance of their early work had been forgotten. 52 Their citing of historical examples of co-operation can be understood as an attempt to regain 'composure' by distancing themselves from the moral economy of Thatcherism and neoliberal calls to 'self-help' and 'enterprise', and connect themselves to the long tradition of collective self-help. The connections with Victorian co-ops were imagined, in the sense that they did not draw on personal or family histories of community action. However, there was a comparable collective, self-help ethos both to co-operation and community business, and Victorian co-operation did provide concrete examples that it was possible for communities to run businesses for themselves, which in the 1980s the community business sought to promote with slogans like 'whose business is business?'. 53 This 'cooperative imagination' helped community business pioneers make sense of and respond to deindustrialisation. Like Thompson's 'English crowd' and the industrial workers of the 20 th century, community business pioneers did not use the term moral economy themselves, they were reacting to the circumstances they found themselves in the moment, but studying the history of what they did and how they now remember their action, it is possible to identify the common themes and motivations to their work that represent a moral economy in operation, rather than a series of sporadic events. Using the framework of the moral economy, it is possible to view the efforts of community business pioneers and the bubbling up of experimental community development work in the 1980s and 1990s as new 'crowd' developing a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and Thatcherism. The sections that follow trace how the community business crowd interacted with the terms of the working-class moral economy, specifically economic security and the control of resources.

Employment security through community business
As the certainties of large firms providing stable jobs and wages were eroded, the appeal of creating economic stability by investing in small-scale community efforts grew and was taken up by communities with a diverse range of economic backgrounds. This section focuses on memories of community business pioneers in West Calder (West Lothian), Possil Park (North Glasgow), and Greenock (Inverclyde), who recalled the role community business played in creating employment. In the 1950s and 1960s the right to alternative employment had been a staple principle of the working-class moral economy that workers came to expect in the mid-twentieth century. 54 The lack of employment alternatives had also been one of the most visible and harmful effects of Thatcher's policy moves away from economic planning, as she sought to assert her own moral economy based on 'efficiency' and 'self-reliance', and blame rising unemployment on the behaviour of workers and trade unions rather than government policy. 55 In this section, the oral histories collected discuss how community businesses attempted to created community-owned employment in their areas. Their memories provide insight into how the skills and built environment of the industrial past were used by the community business movement as community assets to build new futures. In this way, the community business movement reconnected with the security and stability that industrial workers had prized as part of the working class moral economy of the mid-twentieth century, when they had felt ownership over work and workplaces as community resources.
In his oral narrative, Alan Tuffs, a volunteer and later manager of West Calder Community Holdings from 1985 to 1993, recalled a range of different ambitions that led people to join the community business. In the 1980s West Calder was suffering from the closure of British Leyland (Bathgate), which had been one of four factories built in 1960s with government aid, to support the recovery of West Calder following the closure of the areas shale mines. 56 Inspired by Govan Workspace, a community business in the Govan area of Glasgow, a small team of community workers sought to convert empty Coop buildings on West Calder High Street into a Workspace, which was completed in 1984. The team supporting this development realised that the local people they were working with required a variety of different kinds of support, and so set up West Calder Employment Opportunities Trust for skills training in 1985, and West Calder Community Enterprises for direct employment opportunities (largely in joinery and building work) in 1987. Tuffs referenced the multiple episodes of redundancy that workers in the area had experienced, how this effected their ambitions for the future, and how the community business responded to these needs: I think the phrase that was most often used was 'dodging away'. A bit of this and a bit of that. People had different ambitions. There is no general set there [at West Calder Community Holdings]. But, I think what they wanted to do was to earn a living and not having to hunt and dodge and dive as they had been led into by the disappointment of work disappearing on so many occasions for them. So some people really wanted to change their skill-set. Some people wanted to just get by, so we had quite a few jannies and handymen. Some people were looking to create opportunities for themselves and their families. Yeah, a whole variety of things. But really, I think it was that basic thing of pride in bringing home a bit of money. It is so simple. It is so straightforward. They wanted to make a living. Yeah. That's the main thing I remember, including me. 57 'Dodging away' resonates with comparable working-class narratives of 'getting by' and the difficulty unemployed workers faced envisaging a secure economic future, especially after experiencing multiple episodes of redundancy, and why it was so important for West Calder Community Holdings to provide a range of support to local people. 58 Studies into the effects of deindustrialisation have highlighted how unemployment disrupted social connections and routines and the detrimental effect this had on the health of people who were long-term unemployed. 59 In Tuff's memories community businesses addressed various needs of the unemployed; a place to go, a sense of routine and a chance to try out new ways of earning a living. For those who had an idea for a new business the West Calder Workspace provided a low cost and flexible rent for these start-ups, which made it 'a good place to fail'. 60 However, Tuffs recognised that for those used to working in largescale industrial workplaces, moving into small-scale operations was a huge leap: . . . their way of organising themselves was very different . . . so we tried to create new opportunities around the skill-sets that they had and new skills that they might be able to employ as well . . . it was engendering enterprising attitudes while recognising that not everyone could be self-employed'. 61 Changing skill-sets could be a fraught issue in the era of deindustrialisation. As has been highlighted by Walkerdine and Jimenez study of former steelmaking communities in South Wales, attitudes to 'new' jobs could be extremely hostile, dismissed by younger and older generations of men because they were perceived as 'feminine and deemed unworthy of a masculine identity'. 62 Creating employment alternatives, and remoulding people's way of organising and social routines was not an easy task. The multi-functional approach meant that in community business need was prioritised over profitability. Tuffs described how in some ways the grant money provided was generous-allowing those employed at West Calder Community Holdings to earn and keep their dole money-but in other ways limiting, because it was difficult to create permanent jobs. These concerns were outlined by Community Business Scotland to the Secretary of State for Scotland: The MSC's [Manpower Services Commission] Special Programmes were never designed to assist in the creation of permanent jobs. Many of the rules of these programmes actively discourage and even prevent that development of potentially self-sustaining jobs. 63 The use of temporary work schemes to massage unemployment figures has been widely discussed. 64 The work of community business, however, suggests there is also a need to understand the diverse applications of these funds, and how they could be applied when they were locally controlled to restore aspects of the social features of the workplace and daily routines for unemployed people, becoming a source of alternative aspirations for community repair. The example of West Calder Community Holdings shows how, in renovating vacated Co-op buildings and re-thinking how to redeploy and enhance workers' skill sets, community business sought to reclaim the spaces and skills of the communities' industrial pasts to build towards new futures.
Learning to labour in deindustrialising Scotland was a challenge for those who found themselves unemployed, but also those who found themselves being drawn into the paid workforce. Narrating her memories of Possil Community Business (PCB), Susan McGinlay, founding member of a community business called Kleencare and, from 1987, commercial manager of PCB, was running a playgroup in Possilpark when a local social worker encouraged her to attend a meeting about setting up a community business. She described her introduction to community business, and why it appealed to her: . . . we were always moaning on about, [being] women you are only seen as this, that and the other. [A local social worker] went: "why you don't go down to one of the meetings and see if it interests you and we will introduce you to Colin Roxburgh?" -who was a [community] worker at the time. So Colin came to see us first and spoke about the ethos of creating employment in your area or running your own business for the benefit of people in the area. For the profits to be dispersed to people in the area, rather than companies taking it, and it really appealed to us. So Phyllis, my friend and I, we went down to the meeting. 65 Possilpark is an inner suburban area of Glasgow established during the inter-war period. The availability of industrial factory work in the area declined in the second-half of the twentieth century and Possilpark was identified as an area of deprivation in the 1971 census, and again in 1981 as deprivation was increasingly concentrated in public-sector housing areas. 66 Possil Community Business, was formed in 1984, and ran out of an empty flat in Possilpark, initially establishing three businesses: a cleaning company (1985), painting and decorating company (1985), and security company (1986). Members of PCB were drawn from a series of existing community groups -an unemployment club, embryonic Housing Co-op, local Tenants Association, and Social Work and Housing Department officials-an indication of the variety of community groups and local authority representatives that could be brought together to form community businesses and create employment alternatives in areas like Possilpark. At the time unemployment ranged from 40% to 70% across the areas neighbourhoods and drug abuse was high. 67 McGinlay described how a laundrette, established as a community business, was a well-used and long-running service for an area where few people could afford washing machines. 68 This local understanding of the socio-economic context of the area meant that enterprises were established that not only provided some jobs, but also services that improved everyday life for the community.
McGinlay's experience reveals the diversity of experience in the creation of employment through the community business movement, as she discussed, it provoked her to rethink her capabilities 'as a woman', which resonated with the movement's wider aims to challenge who 'business' was for and who should control them. 69 Many of the community business that women were involved in were based on commercialising aspects of 'house work'; cleaning, laundry, knitting. While it may be easy to dismiss these endeavours as low skilled and low paid, this would miss the crucial nature of these services to their local communities and that the community business structure allowed the women involved to take ownership of their work, which was the transformative element of their community business membership. This resonates with studies that have sought to rethink women's relationship with paid employment in women's history, which has often focused on women professionals, and women in male-dominated areas of employment, without recognising the crucial nature of paid work to the self-hood of cleaners, secretaries and nurses and other female dominated areas of employment. 70 As Phillips, Wright and Tomlinson have argued more often deindustrialisation was a slow process, rather than a shock event. 71 The experience of Possilpark resonates with the concept of a community dealing with industrial absence during the era of deindustrialisation, a gradual slow-down of economic activity and job opportunities in the area, rather than a spike in unemployment resulting from industrial closure and a sudden loss of jobs. Comparing the experience of West Calder and Possilpark, acknowledges the different entry points and timeframes that communities experienced during deindustrialisation. By the mid-1980s Possilpark's long disconnection from the routines and social life of an industrial community, meant social workers and community business pioneers worked through playgroups and tenant's associations, rather than groups of recently redundant workers, to find organised groups of people from which to spark local economic development. However, as will be further illustrated with reference to Inverclyde below, regardless of their starting points, the moral economy terms of economic security and control of resources, remained crucial points of motivation for community recovery.
Control of resources was a recurring theme in Jim Bristow's oral narrative, and in his view the first step in creating employment alternatives as communities in Inverclyde lived through the re-shaping of the local economy: [T]he first project we carried out -and this was funded by Strathclyde Community Businesstaking anything of value out of Scott Lithgow's, which was the largest of our shipyards. And we managed to put together a 13-week programme that was around training people to do various skills, manual skills, but while they were doing that they were removing anything of community value from the shipyards. And we got additional funding for that from . . . the Scottish Development Agency . . . we embarrassed them into giving us money to strip out our shipyards. 72 Bristow's description of Inverclyde shipyards is comparable to descriptions of 'ownership' within the moral economy of industrial workplaces. For example, just as workers at Caterpillar Tractors claimed that capital equipment was the property of the community, 73 Bristow's oral narrative strongly asserted the view that the Inverclyde's shipyards belonged to the community and remained so after closure. His narrative also points to the difficult relationship the community business had with government agencies in convincing them that the movement's activities were worthy of investment. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) were extremely cautious about working with community groups with no track record of successful business ventures. 74 Reflecting the moves away from industrial jobs, community ownership was taking on new dimensions in Inverclyde. Community businesses took advantage of the relatively low cost of entry into the expanding service sector in the 1980s, and Bristow, described how he helped establish Wonderland Nursery, the first community-owned nursery in Scotland, which ran for 12 years. For him, this aligned with the 'raison d'être' of the community business movement because it was 'about communities owning assets': Our nurseries, I think, gave us the opportunity to do a number of things, first create jobs, second, provide training that tied to the College. Thirdly, challenged stereotypes, we employed the first male nursery worker in Inverclyde, and that was interesting. I think it also allowed us then to provide care in a patchwork which worked for low earners, particularly women returners and so on. 75 Bristow's discussion offers insight into how community business responded to shifting employment opportunities by establishing services to help communities adjust to changing patterns of employment. Shipyards were not Inverclyde's only industrial employer, hundreds of women had also been employed in the textile industry. Andy Clark's study of women's experiences of deindustrialisation in Greenock has highlighted the sense of loss to their industrial identity that these women felt as they found themselves adjusting to new forms of labour and work patterns in the late twentieth century. 76 Despite organising a work-in, the eventual loss of their jobs in the textile industry meant women were finding new employment in new areas of work, often in the service sector. 77 In this context access to good quality, low-cost, and flexible childcare provided a valuable service in this period of economic transition. The example of the community nurseries in Greenock reveals a practical element of support provided by community business within that recovery, that reached beyond those who were directly employed or members of the community business movement. As a commercial entity Wonderland nursery provided affordable childcare in Inverclyde. As a social entity it provided training and jobs. The community could not control the macroeconomic forces at play, but they could help each other adjust and recover. As in West Calder and Possil Park, community business couldn't provide jobs at scale, but looking beyond the head count community businesses worked to repair the social fabric of communities during deindustrialisation.
The memories of employment creation gathered above resonate with the workingclass moral economy of the mid-twentieth century in the way the oral narratives positioned workers' skills and the local built environment as community resources that could be used to create stable and sustainable futures for people in the area. In the oral histories recalling industrial working lives between the years of 1945 and 1975, expressions of loss and nostalgia frequently focused on 'a sense of stability and a degree of security' that provided 'an unprecedented degree of autonomy and control over their economic lives'. 78 Strangleman has argued that rather than dismiss the nostalgic elements of industrial memory, historians should work harder on their interpretation, because: [N]ostalgia is hardly ever "simple" in form but is more often a vehicle for reflection or critique rather than uncritical celebration. 79 The complex dynamics of 'critical nostalgia' has also been highlighted by Ewan Gibbs in oral histories with coal miners. Gibbs describes how his interviewees acknowledged that mining was a dangerous form of employment and that mining communities could be deeply hierarchical, nevertheless, echoing Stangleman's findings, there was a deep sense of loss over the solidary and control that workers had held in industrial workplaces in the mid-twentieth century. 80 'Critical nostalgia' was also present in the oral history recordings of community business pioneers. This included admitting that they had at times been the victim of their own rhetoric, claiming they could achieve more that was actually feasible. 81 Likewise, in these reflective moments, interviewees were troubled by some of the developments in present-day social enterprise and worried that some of the grass-roots community work had been eroded. 82 The memories of community business pioneers critiqued not only the need for a new future, but ways of maintaining control of that future. Their memories recall a time where they felt that rebuilding a sense of security and stability in collective ways was within their grasp, and therefore resonate with the moral economy terms of the mid-twentieth century. The movement facilitated a working through of some of the 'cultural scars' 83 of deindustrialisation and industrial absence in the ways that it connected people and places to the industrial past and routes to maintaining a collective experience of community in the future. The dynamics of this transition from workplace action to community action are explored in the next section with reference to Govan Workspace and Possil Community Business.

Community business and community ownership
Ewan Gibbs has written about how deindustrialisation 'disrupted' the 'imagined communities' of the Scottish coalfields, 84 using examples from Govan Workspace and Possil Community Business, this section considers the community as a site of moral economy action, but still redolent with the terms of collective ownership and community control present in working-class moral economy of twentieth century. Illuminating a developing an 'ownership consciousness' around local assets was crucial to community repair, not only materially, but also in terms of narrative representations of these areas. In Possil Park community business created new networks to support the community through industrial absence. Likewise, in Govan, it is possible to identify how an 'ownership consciousness' of the workplace as a community resource was translated into community-based action within the community business movement. Although, Govan represents a far more iconic industrial community than Possilpark and their experiences of deindustrialisation were very different, in both cases community business supported community action that facilitated a reimagining of community to protect quality of life in the future.
Susan McGinlay talked extensively about community ownership during her oral history recording. The model of governance advocated by Community Business Scotland, allowed community members to secure ownership in a community business through a nominal fee (£1). Any surplus was directed back into the community through projects and events of the membership's choosing. McGinlay recalled this very clearly: It was a great feeling, the sense of ownership. You just bought for £1 and local people were buying it because they felt like they were investing in themselves. That was the thing. They weren't investing in a big company. They were getting it back into their own community and I think that is the thing that stays with me still. 85 The sense of ownership provided by the feeling of 'investing in themselves' was what McGinlay connected with long-term change: 'it stays with me'. The community business model also provided a mechanism for the membership to decide what the area needed and how any profits were distributed. McGinaly described the network of community businesses she worked within as a 'support group' that gave her the confidence to keep going in her new venture, Kleencare. The ability to talk over shared challenges was especially valuable to McGinlay, because 'you were thinking then: "it is not just us"'. 86 McGinlay's words were echoed by Rosalind Echlin in discussing her home-knitwear community business. 87 Thus, running her cleaning company as part of Possil Community Business within the federated structure of Community Business in Scotland allowed Susan and others like her to forge new relationships that she may not have made otherwise. McGinlay acknowledged that not all the businesses succeeded, but they provided opportunities that were otherwise lacking in Possilpark: It was really [great], to see it blossom and we were creating employment and the rest of the community business was doing the same . . . it did feel like a team, although we were all in our wee nucleus, our own companies . . . People were looking for opportunities, but couldn't get them and via the community business, they did. They weren't all totally successful, but it got people established again. 88 The values of co-operation, taking control and running businesses and services for themselves, provided an important foundation for community action in Possil Park, where there the skills and identity of industrial life had been eroded to a greater extent than in West Calder, Inverclyde, or Govan. Stressing the importance of networks and opportunities, McGinlay's description of what it felt like to be part of a community business resonates with Andrew Perchard's research on the recovery of Invergordon and Alness following the closure of the BACo smelter. Perchard found that, 'shared networks and values' were crucial sources of strength in the aftermath and longer term following the closure of the smelter. 89 Her involvement in PCB and the networks it created allowed McGinlay to tell a different story about her local area, one that was about 'good people . . . who are trying hard' 90 to make positive contributions to the area, rather than one based on deprivation statistics and negative media headlines.
A comparable discussion was also evident in the oral narratives of community business pioneers working in Govan (inner-city Glasgow). In 2002, Govan Workspace spearheaded a campaign to oppose a waste-reprocessing operation that was being relocated from the north bank of the river Clyde to Govan. Managing Director, Pat Cassidy explained why they got involved: We believed the issue struck at the very heart of the community's interest and well-being, and that every possible effort had to be made to defeat it.
. . . most crucial of all was the determination of local people to insist that enough is enough, and to resist any further threats to their quality of life. 91 The ability for Govan Workspace to intervene in this campaign was, in 2002, the product of over 20 years work to gain credibility within the Govan community. Once the heart of Scotland's shipbuilding industry on the banks of the river Clyde, from 1977 a community group in Govan, pioneered the concept of the community business workspace in Scotland, refurbishing St Anthony's Primary School on Harmony Row in 1981 and Lyons' Linden Bakery, which became Elderpark Workspace in 1984 92 ; both remain in operation today. The model developed started with the renovation of vacant buildings to provide flexible, affordable rent space for small businesses and start-ups, and provide these businesses with training and administrative support. This model was later replicated in West Calder as described above, and across Scotland. By 2002, Govan Workspace had started to invest the surplus back into the community, thus funding and supporting the successful campaign against the waste-reprocessing site. Reflecting on the politics of Govan's recovery from deindustrialisation, Pat Cassidy and Rosemary Swords, founding members of Govan Workspace, argued that gaining the right kind of support for communities remained a challenge. Cassidy and Swords criticised the short-termism of the 'poverty industry', commenting wryly: We've seen them come, we'll see them go, and they're full of bright ideas! 93 Cassidy and Swords made a strong connection between their work, which has focused on creating jobs in Govan following the decimation of the ship-building industry, with addressing the areas 'image problem'. 94 Their oral narratives gave insight into how the ability to 'own' the narrative around the reputation of a neighbourhood was not only of value to communities recovering from unemployment and deindustrialisation, but also a powerful political tool. For example, Cassidy and Swords argued that as Govan gained a reputation for an area that was 'turning around' a variety of agencies began to 'exaggerate their own role' in that process. Thus, the intangible aspects of recovery (restoring a community's reputation) were crucial, but because of their nature difficult to ascribe to the actions of any one intervention and therefore contested. Nevertheless, Govan Workspace had become a community-owned asset both materially and as a vehicle for the voice of the population. The timeline of this action reinforces the need to view investment in initiatives like community business as part of the development and long-term maintenance of a community. In the mid-twentieth century 'collective consultancy' during negotiations of workplace closure, was an important feature within established moral economy terms. 95 The contribution of Govan Workspace to the campaign against the waste-processing plant demonstrates not only how community businesses could effectively redistribute profits with good effect, but how they could coordinate a form of collective consultancy within a community context and galvanise community voice.
The oral histories collected from Govan and Possil begin to reveal the patina of networks generated by community business. Owning the narrative of their areas reputation, gave the community business pioneers the ability to tell a different story of their community. The new networks created by the work of community business provided a route to 'ownership consciousness' that had pervaded the moral economy of industrial workplaces, where: [I]n the workers' moral economy register the factory was a social resource which had been nurtured by the employees and the communities that had developed around it. 96 Like the factories and industrial workplaces of the mid-twentieth century, community business supported the development of an ownership consciousness, over community resources and action to protect the communities' quality of life. Exploring how community businesses built upon existing associations and networks in communities provides insight into the mingling of community and workplace activist traditions within the movement, apparent in the diverse backgrounds members of community business boards. For example, the original board of Govan  97 The mixture of activist traditions in the board from shop stewards to Councillors and community activists provides further evidence of how community business assembled a 'new' crowd to animate a moral economy response to deindustrialisation within Scotland's civil society. Community business could provide communities with a certain amount of protection during deindustrialisation over a longer term, and begin to support the community to advocate in their own interests. Developing into crucial institutions on the social economy landscape, community businesses could replicate some of the social functions that workplaces and the routines of industrial society had formerly fulfilled. 98 In the forwards to the fourth edition of No Gods and Precious Few Heroes, Christopher Harvie quotes Scotland's former chief medical officer Harry Burns who stated that deindustrialisation 'destroyed' the balance of work and life on which a true 'common weal' depended. 99 Comparing the experiences of West Calder, Possil Park, Greenock and Govan provides insight into the complexities of remoulding industrial routines, and begins to uncover the stories of those who worked to restore the 'common weal' during Scotland's era of deindustrialisation.

Conclusion
Building on scholarship that has sought to trace how moral economies interact and change over time, and their value for understanding Scotland's experience of deindustrialisation in particular, this article has provided a community-based perspective on this historical experience. Just as the transference of the working-class moral economy had political consequences, growing support for devolution and Scottish independence, 100 the history of Scotland's community business pioneers reveals how the moral economy was finding expression in civil society, creating the organisations that shaped the development of Scotland's social economy in the process. The use of oral history to elucidate this process, reveals how community business pioneers began to build their response to deindustrialisation within a policy framework supported by the moral economy of social democratic policymakers. However, the 'composure' of their response was disturbed by Thatcher's initiation of a moral economy based on efficiency and self-reliance. Paying attention to how their oral narratives drew upon the values and heritage of co-operation and developed a 'critical nostalgia' for the heyday of community business, reveals the movement as a 'new' crowd that provided a moral economy response to deindustrialisation and Thatcherism. The ability of the movement to draw in community activism and workplace activism, underpinned by the values of co-operation meant that the community business pioneers were able to establish community businesses in communities recovering from varying degrees of industrial loss and absence.
This article has outlined how community business was part of how Scotland grappled with industrial absence in the age of deindustrialisation. As in previous studies of the transference of the moral economy, in places with strong industrial heritage the skills and built environment of the industrial past were drawn upon to transform these industrial assets into community assets. Furthermore, as illustrated with the case of Govan Workspace, trade unionist skills were put to use on the boards of these community organisations, where they joined local councillors and community activists to work on ways to develop their local economy. The working-class moral economy terms of 'employment security' and 'control of resources' remained remarkably resilient through the era of deindustrialisation, however, because community business pioneers drew upon the values of co-operation their approach to local economic development could also take root in places like Possilpark, where there had been a greater erosion of industrial identity over a longer period of time. The focus of the community business movement on community control repaired networks broken by the absence of the routines of industrial life and forged new networks and social connections. By reassembling a crowd drawn from both co-operative and industrial activist traditions it was possible for communities to (re)develop an ownership consciousness over their assets and their futures, and tell new stories about their area and the people that lived there.
Usually, a footnote in studies of regeneration, affording the community business movement more sustained and nuanced attention, disrupts the chronology of industrial loss and recovery as sequential events. Rather than understanding regeneration as a distinctive phase of action that happened following industrial loss, we need to understand how communities and professionals were reacting and mobilising to the changing contours of work and social life within the era deindustrialisation. The community business movement coincided chronologically with work-ins and workers' co-ops that attempted to save industrial workplaces. Community business was part of the working through of deindustrialisation, processing what communities needed to adapt and change, and what needed to be preserved. As historians unravel the chronology of deindustrialisation and increasingly view it as a process rather than an event, stories of recovery need to be written into this history, the moral economy, as a framework that draws attention to acts in defence of justice and fairness, facilitates this.
In the 21 st century, COVID-19 as a collective experience has once more fuelled the co-operative imagination, with a range of commentators calling for a degrowth economy, a caring economy, a well-being economy, 101 in ways resonant of community business pioneers response to deindustrialisation and their desire for community-led economies. There is much still to examine about the movement, how it rubbed up against neoliberal funding strategies and how the work of the movement related to community development and regeneration work in local authorities. In this way studying the history of community business can provide a valuable contribution in unpacking 'the historical relationship between deindustrialisation and the rise of neoliberalism'. 102 In his study of individualism and community in post-war England, Jon Lawrence has argued that although a 'healthy balance between self and society' has 'probably become harder to achieve since the 1970s' his detailed analysis of social surveys and interviews repeatedly show 'yearning for meaningful social connection with others', and that in making such connections the 'atomizing pressures of modern society' can be resisted. 103 This article argues that, just as 'popular individualism' requires nuanced historical interpretation, 104 the uses of 'enterprise' in the context of the social economy, at times represented a challenged to rather than an acceptance of neoliberal celebrations of 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurialism'.