Communal Forms

A Sociological Exploration of Concepts of Community

Aksel Tjora, Graham Scambler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000048285
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a wide range of social theory, as well as empirical inputs from studies of work, neighbourhoods, events, meeting places and online self-help groups, this book suggests that communal forms are constructed on the basis of communicative, material, biographic-cultural, practice-based, and situational layers. The concept of community has long provided an important point of departure for the discipline of sociology, with the conflicting conceptions of community before and into modernity embodied in Ferdinand Tönnies' Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and in Emile Dürkheim's Mechanical and Organic Solidarity, providing the focus for debate. Other contributors have maintained an interest in communities as communions, interactional competencies, symbolic identification, tribal connection, and more recently communication. Drawing on such theoretical contributions, as well as empirical inputs, the authors develop a more nuanced concept of community, based on the notion that it is constructed from several different layers. This concept is then presented as a sociological toolbox with which to fuel approaches to examining societal challenges and change. Providing a fresh approach to a core sociological question that also has a wider societal relevance, Communal Forms will be of interest to scholars and students concerned with social issues, and for those with a more general interest in community, society and its development over time.

1

The phenomenon of community

This text has been germinating for many years and is the product of a series of research projects motivated by our curiosity about various forms of community. We have personally experienced good communities, and also a lack of community, courtesy of living, studying, and working across various sites and in relation to different environments and events. We soon arrive at a sense of community, or note the lack of it, as a natural part of being a human. In many ways, community is a fundamental feature of life; but at the same time, it is difficult to create. Many people search for community – aspire to belong, to feel part of something greater – and occasionally may take initiatives themselves to create or nurture good communities, often with unpredictable results. That community is both important and difficult is perhaps the reason why assorted academic disciplines like sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, psychology, religious studies and many others each have their own approach to this particular phenomenon. And this difficult and unpredictable, yet so immediate, aspect of community holds a deep fascination for us as sociologists – a fascination more than deep enough to fill more than a book.

Our overriding aim in this book is to understand and come to terms with community in a diverse, detailed and nuanced sense, as well to commend it as a tool for more general and wide-ranging social analyses. To achieve this, we draw special inspiration from the domain of sociology and from research across various contexts and settings, such as organisations and work communities, local communities, neighbourhoods and boroughs, public arenas such as cafés, and festivals and media.

In our own research we often study the origin and maintenance of community peripheries. Our fascination lies precisely in boundaries – especially those between insiders and outsiders – and in how such boundaries are created, change or remain static. We have been interested in this question in relation to organisations, urban environments, cafés and festivals, the use of communication media and the definition of the healthy versus the ill. These boundary zones represent borders between what or who are included or excluded from a community. The varying clarity of many of these boundaries is in itself of interest from a sociological perspective: the boundaries are endless, between good and poor working environments, between pleasant and inhospitable parks, between everyday life and festivals, between illness and health, between those who are popular and those who are pushed out, between the bully and the victim. In sociology we often speak of these boundaries as socially constructed, a concept inspired by the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966). This does not mean that they are not real and genuine, but that their significance and our understanding are developed through social processes or through negotiation – during mundane, everyday interpersonal interaction. The boundaries, and thus the communities, are formed by habits, norms, class and social positioning in general, gender, law, bureaucracy, trades and professions, time and place, technologies and so on.

We consider community to be a social fact, of which the community’s various participants will have differing experiences, but also the basis for what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim termed collective consciousness ([1893] 1964). This term includes a shared philosophy of life, aligned ideas and common moral attitudes, a perception of belonging, and unanimity in terms of thoughts and processes without the necessity for debate. When we regard community as a social fact, this means that we notice whether it exists or not as well as whether an individual is inside or outside. People have a feeling of being a part of a specific community and experience this not merely as an individual perception but as relating to something real and objective. Importantly though, this perception and sense of community might be what Benedict Anderson (1991) called an ‘imagined community’. In her study of British expatriates in Spain’s Costa del Sol, Karen O’Reilly (2000) found that the notion of the community that people she spoke to possessed was based largely on a myth: they felt they had been assimilated into the host community whereas in fact they lived largely outside of it, outsiders who had constructed an insider narrative.

Our working definition of community is therefore intrinsically sociological but much more open and fluid than was the case with the traditional, more time and space-bound ‘community studies’ (Crow 2018). We are looking at community and also at inclusion and exclusion, key topics within the disciplines both of sociology and politics and intrinsic to community life. We are particularly interested in how inclusion and exclusion arise as social processes. As pointed out by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959: 8), we need to distinguish between personal troubles and social issues, while examining how individual problems may be reflections of larger-scale structures and historical tendencies. When loneliness, for instance, is seen as an increasing problem in society, this is a challenge for each individual who experiences it but is also a social phenomenon that can be investigated and described more systematically. Moreover, loneliness is often linked with other forms or dimensions of vulnerability, like anomie or alienation, and the social roots of such ‘clusters’ can be clearly discerned in social structures and cultures (Scambler 2019a).

Let us at the outset examine the word ‘community’. There are several words with meanings that overlap somewhat, such as belonging, togetherness and social intercourse. Each point towards a different aspect of community: belonging together, holding together and acting together. In terms of the everyday understanding of community, these three elements cover much of the core substance of community. We speak of belonging to express the notion of identifying with each other, for instance in a local community. We speak of togetherness in terms of standing together in solidarity, for instance after some of us have been affected by a crisis. We speak of social intercourse as the process of acting and being together, of being involved with each other. In addition, we speak of (local) community for a geographically defined group of people.

The word community entails an everyday understanding of a group of individuals who share something in common and which distinguishes them from other possible groups. The colloquial use of the word community to refer to a local district widens the concept, which can be a problem in an academic sense. While the British researchers Anthony P. Cohen (1985) and Gerard Delanty (2003) use the term in their books on community as an umbrella term, developing anthropological and sociological analyses respectively, the term ‘community studies’ is used to refer to studies of local societies, which is something else entirely. The term ‘community work’ generally refers to local (generally voluntary) work, usually with a far more specific meaning than the sociological concepts of ‘community’. Nevertheless, it is relevant for all of these meanings to relate community to borders or boundary zones, as described above. Borders can often be physical, such as city walls, mountain chains or lakes, which in a historical perspective have provided an opportunity for some people to meet, but not for others. They can be legal-administrative, as is the case with national or regional boundaries, which in some cases create powerful obstacles to contact. Related to these are symbolic boundaries, according to which people live in separation on the basis of, for instance, language and culture. In this book we are also concerned with what we can regard as interaction boundaries, where a variety of factors – based on interests as well as technical factors – limit where communication flows and where relationships arise.

Even though the word ‘community’, as we have seen, covers a wide range of meanings, we understand what it is referring to in everyday language from the context in which it is used. The ambition of this book, however, has been to develop a systematic and nuanced rehabilitation of community as an academically useful term. A more careful, precise and contemporary or topical explication of the concept of community will be useful both for research towards a better understanding of society and in providing a better tool for reflection and engagement leading towards a more inclusive society.

Community repaired?

There has been a tendency, especially within structural and critical approaches to sociology and social anthropology, to claim that community is vanishing; something that is associated among other things with increasing individualisation. This, as Lawrence (2019: 1) has recently pointed with reference to post-war English society, is more than misleading: ‘community hasn’t died, but it has changed.’ Community is being maintained even in our western society, which has been the predominant source of the hypothesis of the age of the individual and the loss of community. Public belief in community was particularly strong in a Norwegian context after the dramatic terrorist action at Utøya and in Oslo on 22 July 2011. That was also the reason why work on this manuscript was intensified in July 2012, in order to carry out a broader analysis of community in a more generic sense. A year had by then passed since the tragic event. The reactions and the public after-effects had made a more nuanced investigation of community seem timely. The badly-affected Norwegian Labour Party’s youth organisation, the authorities (represented not least by the then prime minister Jens Stoltenberg) and many other public figures all pointed out that an action of this kind was unable to break the national community – rather the opposite: the action demonstrated, they argued, that community itself needed to be strengthened in order that such events could not happen again in future, or in the worst-case scenario that it would be able to cope as well as possible with such events through what was described as a more robust community.

The enormous processions with roses and the formidable turnout at each event in villages and towns in connection with 22 July 2011 suggests that the post-event rhetoric connected with taking care of each other communally was effective, at least initially and among those individuals who already regarded themselves as a part of a Norwegian community. When we examined the use of the term ‘community’ in Norwegian printed media, there were about 15,000 occurrences of the word during the 365 days preceding 22 July 2011, compared with some 20,000 during the following 365 days; occurrences dropped off again in the following year. In other words, talking and writing about community was significantly boosted in the period directly after the event.

Even though Norwegians, representing a more-or-less united nation, have embraced the community argument – or this variant of ‘repair’ – this approach is not without its problems. Because there was a consensus about the tragic nature of the event, and because there has been such solidarity and support, the critics have been cautious; but after a while, audible rumblings were heard. Was this sense of community something people genuinely felt, or was it the product of a more-or-less superficial ‘performance’ constituting a kind of collective strait-jacket? Was the notion of a national community a transitory accomplishment of the collective imagination, a romantic exhibition, rather than something that the whole of the Norwegian people perceived to reflect a social reality?

It becomes a relevant question whether it is possible to decide to have a community, for instance using the rhetorical power of speeches. In this book we would veer towards answering ‘yes’ to this question – that it is possible to generate community through rhetoric – but we would also indicate a form of sociological theory to explain how this takes place (and why it often fails to do so). The community – as a romantic exhibition – also contains in itself a potential for change: if people believe in the community they will act towards each other in a manner that cultivates community, an effect suggested in the Thomas theorem: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 572). A sense of security that is anchored in, for instance, a presumed common set of values, will form a basis for inter-personal trust.

The use of the concept of community – along with the narrative about the strong Norwegian community – as a method of repair after the 22 July 2011 attack has been possible because the concept is so accommodating; it has room for almost everything and nothing. Each Norwegian has been able to associate so much with it; in that Stoltenberg and others have not given close definitions of it, as few people as possible are excluded from being able to experience such speeches as having a personal relevance to them. On the other hand, this very diversity of understanding of the concept can render it almost empty of concrete content; it becomes mere froth. In this book we attempt to confront the woolly and ambivalent nature of the concept, not by presenting a narrow definition of community and its implications but by identifying the diversity covered by the term. Hopefully this is a way of rehabilitating the word ‘community’.

Even though community was a core concept in early sociology, it is possibly the word’s very normative and romantic connotations that render it suspect academically. However, precisely because the word ‘community’ draws our attention to something fundamental, namely, the ‘quality of lived human life’ (Giddens and Sutton 2017: 119), it should retain a central place in sociological analysis. Our intention in this book is thus to contribute to this project by affording the word ‘community’ concrete meaning.

With this in mind, the book builds on both established theories of community and newer research in order to lay a foundation for new insights. There is no reason why the word ‘community’ should be reserved for the use of sociologists, but there are good reasons for explicating the nuances of the term and for making more explicit its sociological potential. While the normative concept of community is appropriate for everyday language and lifeworld interaction, the term has far greater analytical potential for the systematic, theoretical, and empirical investigation of society. The goal of the book is thus to develop the term ‘community’ – a form of community theory – as a tool for future studies of society’s multifarious communal forms.

The book’s content and structure

The book is structured on the basis of various theoretical approaches to community as a social phenomenon. We examine community as solidarity, as integration, as interaction, as identification, as communication, as work and as physical proximity (Chapters 2–8). Through these chapters we develop and convey multifaceted conceptual ‘mapping’ of community, drawing on different sociological traditions and schools. We also make use of a number of insights from our own research in many of these chapters, especially in relation to interaction (festivals), communication (internet-based self-help groups, text messaging, band practices), work (at a hospital and in so-called co-working spaces) and physical proximity (living collectives, cafés). In the final chapter we pull the threads together and offer a summary account of types of community and a critical reflection on the sociological promise they represent and contain. The goal is to give the reader an understanding of community’s many nuances (theoretical and empirical), as well as identifying some significant, topic and relevant issues.

There is no doubt that the idea of community is slippery and fragile. It needs continuous appreciation, care and renewal. On the basis of what we might term a constructivist-interactionist position, according to which perceptions of reality are created in social situations and are heavily reliant on action and negotiation, we create both community and perceptions of community via various types of social interaction. This perspective builds on contributions from sociologists like Georg Simmel, Harold Blumer, Erving Goffman, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Harold Garfinkel, Anselm Strauss, Norbert Elias, Jurgen Habermas and Anne Rawls, who have each shown in subtle and nuanced ways how action and social interaction become routinised or standardised to such a degree that they appear as constants – as structures or institutions.

Different actors will contribute in diverse ways, often over a long period of time, before different forms of community attain such an objective or uncontroversial character that most people perceive their existence as factual for all that they are socially constructed. Entire populations can be unified in their perceptions of certain local communities as safe and lively and others as cold, empty, or unsafe. Such local-community characteristics, myths or prejudices are developed on the basis of social interaction over time, in which certain actors may play a central role, whether these be property agents or local politicians or enthusiasts. These are facts in the sense that they become established as a form of objective description that is subsequently taken for granted, both by those who live in the local community in question and by those who live outside it, notwithstanding that insider and outsider perceptions may be quite different. Such social facts can have concrete material consequences, such as differentiated property prices in different boroughs. The connection between subjective aspects like perceived qualities, inter-subjective aspects such as community relations and narratives about the ‘good local atmosphere’, and objective aspects such as property prices and violent-crime statistics, form an important basis for the constructivist-interactionist position that we adopt. This position is not relativistic, as we shall see; but it regards social and intersubjective processes as important starting points in the development of institutions and structures.

This book is unashamedly an academic text, which focuses on reconciling community as an analytical and practically-applicable tool. It is however also a personal text, in which we refer to research conducted on a number of different topics over several decades. Even though our research has been connected to the analysis of various forms of social interaction in specific cases, the constant ambition has been to develop a more generic understanding of the connection between social interaction and societal development. A key issue is thus to understand various aspects of the fairly diffuse but nevertheless universally sought phenomenon of community.

2

Community as solidarity

Much of sociology has arisen from the question of how society is constructed, particularly in relation to the growth of the industrial society and the emergence of ever-larger cities. The fear of the disintegration of society, with a consequent loss of social roots and morality, can be seen as a clear motivation for a number of early studies of society and social change. In this chapter we sketch out some of the most central approaches to the question of what it is that holds society together in a more-or-less stable com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1. The phenomenon of community
• 2. Community as solidarity
• 3. Community as integration
• 4. Community as interaction
• 5. Community as identification
• 6. Community as communication
• 7. Community as work
• 8. Community as proximity
• 9. Community as possibility
• References
• Index