This book presents an ethnography of a community empowerment programme called Big Local. Following three community groups as they navigated the Covid-19 pandemic, it offers timely insights into how groups change when crisis hits and explores implications for our collective capacity to address society’s most pressing problems.

The book introduces the concept of ‘group habitus’ for interpreting group life, showing how societally dominant ‘cultures of organising’ shape spaces of collective deliberation and action. A close-up examination of how people work together, this book offers a new way of understanding sociopolitical inequalities.