Community

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighbourhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms. Durable good relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, TV network, society, or humanity at large.[1] Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.[2]

The English-language word "community" derives from the Old French comuneté (Modern French: communauté), which comes from the Latin communitas "community", "public spirit" (from Latin communis, "common").[3]

Human communities may have intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.[4]

Perspectives of various disciplines

Archaeology

Archaeological studies of social communities use the term "community" in two ways, paralleling usage in other areas. The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient settlement—whether a hamlet, village, town, or city. The second meaning resembles the usage of the term in other social sciences: a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. Social interaction on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities. Archaeologists typically use similarities in material culture—from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This classification method relies on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.

Ecology

In ecology, a community is an assemblage of populations—potentially of different species—interacting with one another. Community ecology is the branch of ecology that studies interactions between and among species. It considers how such interactions, along with interactions between species and the abiotic environment, affect social structure and species richness, diversity and patterns of abundance. Species interact in three ways: competition, predation and mutualism:

Competition typically results in a double negative—that is both species lose in the interaction.
Predation involves a win/lose situation, with one species winning.
Mutualism sees both species co-operating in some way, with both winning.

The two main types of ecological communities are major communities, which are self-sustaining and self-regulating (such as a forest or a lake), and minor communities, which rely on other communities (like fungi decomposing a log) and are the building blocks of major communities. Moreover, we can establish other non-taxonomic subdivisions of biocenosis, such as guilds.

Post Left-Side Content to a Community

Key concepts

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). Tönnies proposed the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy as a way to think about social ties. No group is exclusively one or the other. Gemeinschaft stress personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions. Gesellschaft stress indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions.

Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis[11] identify four elements of "sense of community":

membership: feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness,
influence: mattering, making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members
reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs,
shared emotional connection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community#/media/File:Bigdayout_crowd2.jpg

Post Left-Side Content to a Community

Community development

Community development is often linked with community work or community planning, and may involve stakeholders, foundations, governments, or contracted entities including non-government organisations (NGOs), universities or government agencies to progress the social well-being of local, regional and, sometimes, national communities. More grassroots efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities.[17] These skills often assist in building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community development practitioners must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions. Public administrators, in contrast, need to understand community development in the context of rural and urban development, housing and economic development, and community, organizational and business development.

Formal accredited programs conducted by universities, as part of degree granting institutions, are often used to build a knowledge base to drive curricula in public administration, sociology and community studies. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the Harvard Kennedy School are examples of national community development in the United States. The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York State offers core courses in community and economic development, and in areas ranging from non-profit development to US budgeting (federal to local, community funds). In the United Kingdom, the University of Oxford has led in providing extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal,[18] used worldwide by sociologists and community development practitioners.

At the intersection between community development and community building are a number of programs and organizations with community development tools. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University. The institute makes available downloadable tools[19] to assess community assets and make connections between non-profit groups and other organizations that can help in community building. The Institute focuses on helping communities develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" – building from the inside out rather than the outside in.[20] In the disability field, community building was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s with roots in John McKnight's approaches.

Community building and organizing

In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (1987) Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules.[23] He states that this process goes through four stages:[24]

Pseudocommunity: When people first come together, they try to be "nice" and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.
Chaos: People move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves.
Emptiness: Moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to human beings.
True community: Deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community.

In 1991, Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.[25] An interview with M. Scott Peck by Alan Atkisson. In Context #29, p. 26. The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and "institution-based community organizing", (also called "broad-based community organizing", an example of which is faith-based community organizing, or Congregation-based Community Organizing).

Types of community

A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:

Location-based Communities: range from the local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These are also called communities of place.
Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilisation, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.
Organizationally-based Communities: range from communities organized informally around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated associations, political decision-making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.
Intentional Communities: a mix of all three previous types, these are highly cohesive residential communities with a common social or spiritual purpose, ranging from monasteries and ashrams to modern ecovillages and housing cooperatives.

Internet communities

In general, virtual communities value knowledge and information as currency or social resource.[33][34][35][36] What differentiates virtual communities from their physical counterparts is the extent and impact of "weak ties", which are the relationships acquaintances or strangers form to acquire information through online networks.[37] Relationships among members in a virtual community tend to focus on information exchange about specific topics.[38][39] A survey conducted by Pew Internet and The American Life Project in 2001 found those involved in entertainment, professional, and sports virtual-groups focused their activities on obtaining information.[40]

An epidemic of bullying and harassment has arisen from the exchange of information between strangers, especially among teenagers,[41] in virtual communities. Despite attempts to implement anti-bullying policies, Sheri Bauman, professor of counselling at the University of Arizona, claims the "most effective strategies to prevent bullying" may cost companies revenue.[42]

Virtual Internet-mediated communities can interact with offline real-life activity, potentially forming strong and tight-knit groups such as QAnon.

Notes

James, Paul; Nadarajah, Yaso; Haive, Karen; Stead, Victoria (2012). Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. p. 14. [...] we define community very broadly as a group or network of persons who are connected (objectively) to each other by relatively durable social relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties and who mutually define that relationship (subjectively) as important to their social identity and social practice.
^ See also: James, Paul (2006). Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In – Volume 2 of Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage Publications.
^ "community" Oxford Dictionaries. 2014. Oxford Dictionaries
^ Melih, Bulu (2011). City Competitiveness and Improving Urban Subsystems: Technologies and Applications: Technologies and Applications. IGI Global. ISBN 978-1-61350-175-7.
^ Canuto, Marcello A. and Jason Yaeger (editors) (2000) The Archaeology of Communities. Routledge, New York. Hegmon, Michelle (2002) Concepts of Community in Archaeological Research. In Seeking the Center: Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region, edited by Mark D. Varien and Richard H. Wilshusen, pp. 263–279. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
^ Wilson, Alexander, ed. (1968). Advertising and the Community. Reprints of economic classes (reprint ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0719003363. Retrieved 6 June 2021. In Britain, by far the more fashionable concern is that for advertising's value to the community.
^ Everingham, Christine (2003). Social Justice and the Politics of Community. Welfare and society : studies in welfare policy, practice and theory (reprint ed.). Aldershot: Ashgate. p. 21. ISBN 978-0754633983. Retrieved 6 June 2021. Community is a very troublesome word then, having a wide range of meanings and connotations but little in the way of specific content. It is particularly useful as a rhetorical device because of its democratic and populist connotations, being associated with 'the people', as distinct from 'the government'.
^ For example: Basu, Mohana (13 March 2020). "What is community transmission — how one can contract COVID-19 without travelling". ThePrint. Printline Media Pvt Ltd. Retrieved 6 June 2021. [...] when the source of transmission for a large number of people is not traceable it is called a community transmission. [...]Most types of influenza and bird flu outbreaks in the past were known to have spread through community transmission. The outbreak of H1N1 in 2009, commonly known as swine flu, was primarily through community transmission. [...] In the case of community transmission, contact tracing is inadequate in containing the disease. [...] This is particularly worrisome for health officials because that means the virus is in the community but no one knows where it has come from or track its origins. This also means the virus can be widespread in a community.
^ Feinberg, Joel (1988). The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Harmless wrongdoing. Volume 4 of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 103. ISBN 978-0-19-504253-5. Retrieved 6 June 2021. There is, as I have said, a law enforcement community but not a criminal community. Why should that be?
^ Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Fues's Verlag. An English translation of the 8th edition 1935 by Charles P. Loomis appeared in 1940 as Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), New York: American Book Co.; in 1955 as Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft[sic]), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; and in 1957 as Community and Society, East Lansing: Michigan State U.P. Loomis includes as an Introduction, representing Tönnies' "most recent thinking", his 1931 article "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft" in Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (Stuttgart, Enke V.).

References

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