Community
Encyclopedia : C : CO : COM : Community
- For other uses, see Community (disambiguation)}}}.
This article focuses on human communities, in which intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a multitude of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the degree of adhesion. The definitive aspect of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common.
Overview
The word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning "common, public, shared by all or many."Harper, D. 2001. [Online Etymology Dictionary.]
People have formed communities from the days of the earliest hunter-gatherers. Communities are distinguished by having enough participants in a group caring for the common good and developing a sense of community, in which they give of themselves. A crucial factor is the balance between self-interest and shared interests.
Whatever drives people to cooperate in the first place is not as important in the context of community as what makes them continue to associate. Lasting ties between and among people are important in the formation of viable communities. Successful efforts by a mix of participants tend to attract the attention of other less-connected individuals, who may seek to join a group that is succeeding. This tendency, akin to herd behavior in animals, is called self-organization in humans.
Over time, some cultures have progressed steadily toward more complex forms of organization and control. Hunter-gatherer tribes settled around seasonal foodstocks to become agrarian villages. Villages grew to become towns and cities. Cities turned into city-states and nation-states. The fact that commerce, industry, government and human institutions become ever larger and more complex suggests that humans, particularly those who are conversant with the rules that drive these complexes are themselves driven toward aggregation and consolidation. When this increase in social capital reaches critical mass, innovations in social networks can begin to work toward a higher context through an inescapable cultural awareness of others. This is often referred to as the emergence of collective consciousness.
Individual and community
During human growth and maturation, people encounter sets of other individuals and experiences. Infants encounter first, their immediate family, then extended family, and then local community (such as school and work). They thus develop individual and group identity through associations that connect them to life-long community experiences.
As people grow, they learn facts and perhaps insights to form perceptions of social structures. During this progression, they form personal and cultural values, a world view and attitudes toward the larger society.
Gaining an understanding of how group dynamics work and how to fit in is part of socialization. Individuals develop interpersonal relationships and begin to make choices about with whom to associate and under what circumstances.
During adolescence and adulthood, people often develop a more sophisticated identity, often becoming capable of a role as a leader or follower. If associated individuals develop the intent to give of themselves to each other, and commit to the collective well-being of the group, they begin to aquire a sense of community.
- For more details on this topic, see Structure and agency.
Socialization
The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge necessary to function within their culture and social environment. For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of 1 and 10. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment, where they must learn a new set of behaviors.
Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Factors also include school, peer groups, mass media, the workplace and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one's willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity and trust are important "habits of the heart," as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual's involvement in community.Smith, M. 2001. [Community].
Sense of community
Continuity of the connections between leaders, between leaders and followers, and among followers is vital to the strength of a community. Members individually hold the collective personality of the whole. With sustained connections and continued conversations, participants in communities develop emotional bonds, intellectual pathways, enhanced linguistic abilities, and even a higher capacity for critical thinking and problem-solving. It could be argued that successive and sustained contact with other people might help to remove some of the tension of isolation, due to alienation, thus opening creative avenues that would have otherwise remained impassable.
Conversely, sustained involvement in tight communities might tend to increase tension in some people. However, in many cases, it is easy enough to distance oneself from the "hive" temporarily to ease this stress. In fact, psychological maturity and effective communication skills may well be a function of this ability. In nearly every context, individual and collective behaviours are required to find a balance between inclusion and exclusion; for the individual — a matter of choice; for the group — a matter of charter. The sum of the creative energy and the strength of the mechanisms that maintain this balance is manifest as an observable and resilient sense of community.
Social perspective
As communities form, a collective consciousness and a set of mores begin to develop. These serve to add cohesion, harmony and continuity to a group, allowing it to grow, sometimes even to a very large size. Once a large mass of people adopts a set of mores and develops a collective consciousness, it becomes a society. Participation is no longer optional for the individual. Behavior is now a function of being required or compelled to conform to the norm rather than choosing to give of oneself. This condition is sometimes thought of as the status quo.
A natural outgrowth of stagnant societies and large organizations is a stronger need in some individuals and factions to deviate from the norm. When enough individuals or factions decide that deviation is a good thing, a new community may form as a subculture within the society. This can be good for the society by creating dynamics that enhance the social experience. A moderate form of this is called a social movement, while a radical form is called a revolution.
Individuals and factions can decide to form alliances intent on repressing deviation, eliminating or containing subcultures, enforcing the status quo or even oppressing or destroying the parts of the society that do not suit them or fit into their idea of what the society as a whole is to represent.
In both tiny communities and large complex societies, difficult conditions give rise to the emergence of leaders. Leadership is a civic phenomenon that may introduce a high level of hierarchy. The structure of this hierarchy plays a key role in determining the characteristics of the whole. The community will effectively present this collective personality to the larger world. Sometimes these factors lead to exclusivism, and, ultimately, totalitarianism. Recently, a similar tendency has emerged in various places in the name of protection of the community from terrorists.
- For more details on this topic, see Collective consciousness.
Social capital
If the sense of community exists, both freedom and security exist as well. The community then takes on a life of its own, as people become free enough to share and secure enough to get along. The sense of connectedness and social networks that form comprise what has become known as social capital.Putnam, D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, p. 19.
Western cultures are losing this spirit of community that once were found in institutions such as churches, community halls and rural/urban centres. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg states in A Great Good Place that we need three places: 1) The home, 2) the workplace, and, 3) the community hangout or gathering place.Project for Public Spaces. 2006. [Ray Oldenburg].
With this philosophy in mind, many grassroots initiatives such as The Project for Public Spaces and others are being started to create this "Third Place" in our communities. They are taking form in our independent bookstores, corner cafes, local pubs and via many innovative means to create the social capital necessary to foster the sense and spirit of community. University of Florida. 2006. [Social Capital in Tampa Bay: An Update Report].
Social capital is defined by Robert D. Putnam as "the collective value of all social networks (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other (norms of reciprocity)." Social capital in action can be seen in groups of varying formality, including neighbors keeping an eye on each others' homes. However, as Putnam notes in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), social capital has been falling in the United States. Putnam found that over the past 25 years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 33 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 45 percent.[Bowling Alone web site]
Community development and improvement
Community development is often formally conducted by universities or government agencies to improve the social well-being of local, regional and sometimes even national communities. Less formal efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing these groups with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often concentrated around building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers, sometimes called community development practitioners, must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.
Formal studies conducted by universities are often used to build a knowlege base to drive curricula in sociology or community development practice. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are examples of national community development in the United States. In The United Kingdom, Oxford University has taken a lead role as a provider of extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal, [Community Development Journal] used world wide as an academic resource for sociologists and community development practitioners.
At the intersection between community development and community building, there are a number of initiatives and organizations providing tools for communities to develop. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University. The institute makes available downloadable toolsABCD Institute, in cooperation with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. 2006. [Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organization's Capacity]. to assess community assets and make connections between non-profits and other organizations that can assist in community building. The focus of the Institute is on helping communities to develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" — building from the inside-out rather than the outside-in.ABCD Institute. 2006. [Welcome to ABCD].
Community building
Community building, can use a wide variety of practices, ranging from simple events like potlucks and small book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.
Activists engaged in community building efforts in industrialized nations see the apparent loss of community in these societies as a key cause of social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to increase social justice, individual well-being and reduce negative impacts of otherwise disconnected individuals.
Community organizing
Organized community groups seek accountability from elected officials and increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. Where good-faith negotiations fail, these constituency-led organizations seek to pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics.
Community organizing is usually focused on more than just resolving specific issues. Organizing is the business of building a power structure that involves all community members, often with the end goal of distributing power equally throughout the community.
Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are democratic in governance, open and accessible to community members, and concerned with the general health of the community rather than a specific interest group.
There are three basic types of community organizing, grassroots organizing, faith based community organizing (also called institution based community organizing, broad-based community organizing or congregation based community organizing), and coalition building.
Community service
Community service is usually performed in connection with a nonprofit organization, but may also be undertaken under the auspices of governement, one or more businesses, or alone.
It is typically unpaid and voluntary. But it can include alternative sentencing technique in a justice system and it can be required by educational institutions.
Types of community
Communities have been classified in various ways. Three ways to look at community are according to place, interest and communion.Place
A territorial or place community is one in which the shared element is geography:
- A municipality is an administrative local area generally composed of a clearly defined territory and commonly referring to town, or village. While they are also municipalities, large cities, due to their diversity, are often thought of as an collection of communities.
- A neighborhood is a geographically localized community, often within a larger city or suburb.
- A planned community is one that was designed from scratch and grew up more or less following the |plan. Several of the world's capital cities are planned cities, notably Washington, D.C. in the United States, Canberra in Australia and Brasília in Brazil. It was also common in the European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Amerindian cities.
In communities of interest (or "elective" communities) members share common attributes other than place.
- A professional community, such as a professional society, has members who share a common interest related to their work.
- A community of practice is a group of people who choose to collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations:
- A community of action is a group of people organized to support a cause or bring about social change.
In its strongest sense, "communion" connotes a profound meeting or encounter:
- A faith community is based on a spiritual union between members and their god or among practitioners of a particular faith.
- A virtual community is a group of people primarily or initially communicating or interacting with each other by means of information technologies, typically over the Internet, rather than in person. These may be either communities of interest or communion. Research interest is evolving in the motivations for contributing to online communities.
- A retirement community is designated and at least usually designed for retirees and seniors – often restricted to those over a certain age. It differs from a retirement home, which is a single building or small complex, by having a number of autonomous households.
- An intentional community is a deliberate residential community with a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political or spiritual vision and share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include cohousing, residential land trusts, ecovillages, communes, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.
Ecovillages and other forms of intentional community
An Ecovillage is a kind of intentional community that combines place, interest and communion. These communities form primarily around shared interest in ecology and sustainability and practice innovative styles of governance such as consensus decision-making. Because of their goal of building "full-featured" settlements (i.e., where all aspects of life — housing, work, recreation — are integrated), ecovillages have a structure that builds community. Other forms of intentional community have similar effects to varying degrees. For example, cohousing, i.e., communities planned to foster community sharing and interaction (though not necessarily work), are also examples of settlements that emphasize building community spirit.
Notes
References
- Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge: New York.
- Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté désœuvrée (philosophical questioning of the concept of community and the possibility of encountering a non-subjective concept of it).
- Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster
- Smith, M. K. 2001. [Community]. Encyclopedia of informal education. Last updated: January 28, 2005. Retrieved: 2006-07-15.
See also
|
- List of community topics
- Communitarianism
- Communitas
- Community informatics
- Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
- Historian Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities
- Holism
- Nationalism
- Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's the Inoperative Community (1983)
- Sense of community
External links
General -- entries in other encycopledias Miscellaneous- [Community Organization Fundraising] Resources and strategies for community fundraisers.
- [Community Perspective in Quran]
- [Definition, articles, essays from Edge Life]
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