Community

A community is a collection of living things that share an environment. The individual living beings can be plant or animal; any species; any size. Communities are characterized by interaction in many ways.

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."^[1]

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.

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.^[2]

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.

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.^[3]

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.^[4]

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.^[5]

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.^[6]

Community development

Community development is many times formally conducted by universities or government entities 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 used world wide as an acedemic resource for sociologists and community development practitioners.

Types

Communities have been classified in various ways. Three ways to look at community are according to place, interest and communion.^[2]

Place

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.

Interest

A retirement community is a very broad, generic term that covers many varieties of housing 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, in contrast to a number of autonomous households.

Communion

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. There is an evolving research interest in the motivations for contributing to online communities.

Notes

^ Harper, D. 2001. Online Etymology Dictionary.
^ ^a ^b Smith, M. 2001. Community.
^ Putnam, D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, p. 19.
^ Project for Public Spaces. 2006. Ray Oldenburg.
^ University of Florida. 2006. Social Capital in Tampa Bay: An Update Report.
^ Bowling Alone web site

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.

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

[1] Harper, D. 2001. Online Etymology Dictionary.

[Community-2] Smith, M. 2001. Community.

[3] Putnam, D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, p. 19.

[4] Project for Public Spaces. 2006. Ray Oldenburg.

[5] University of Florida. 2006. Social Capital in Tampa Bay: An Update Report.

[6] Bowling Alone web site

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