‘Community’ is a word pervasive within all manner of media and daily conversation, just as it is in the academy. With its discursive presence and its emotional power, it has a major presence in agendas of governments and policy makers and beyond in the daily rhetoric of families, individuals and the academy.
Nor is this a surprise, for as Graham Crow notes (2002), ‘community’ stands as a convenient shorthand term for the broad realm of local social arrangements beyond the private sphere of home and family, but more familiar to us than the impersonal institutions of the wider ‘society’. As such, community is a word with manifold meanings, uses and conceptualisations: an elastic word serving multiple agendas.
Community is a word routinely described both as confused and, equally routinely, by many academics at least, as ‘theoretically worthless’. Fraser (1989, p. 60) observes, “community” is a tricky concept, ambiguous, incapable of agreement, permeated with value judgements, contradictorily, emotionally powerful yet somehow incapable of social science encapsulation’. While Anthony Cohen (1985, p. 11) rather tetchily announces, in terms all social scientists would recognise—‘community is one of those words—like “culture”, “myth”, “ritual”, “symbol”—bandied around in ordinary, everyday speech, apparently readily intelligible to speaker and listener, which when imported into the discourse of social science causes immense problems.’ There are many other academics of the same opinion: Taylor (1987), Mandelbaum (2000), Mason (2000), Keller (2003).
This antipathy attached to the concept was indeed one minor motivating factor in our decision to examine what it was about the word which drew such aversion. It led us to explore why such a concept, one which superficially at least should have been central to any science of the social, might simultaneously be so disliked and ignored.
The first thing that became apparent from our examination, was that these responses were those of the academy, not of the general public nor, indeed, of government—something which confirms Cohen’s observation. Furthermore, commentators and sociologists overcome the discrepancy between the account of the academic uselessness of the term and the public view of community, by labelling the latter ‘emotional’. It is claimed that the popularity of the term is simply an outcome of the emotional investment placed in it by the public (Bauman 2001a)—a lingering and sentimental attachment to the term and the emotions it evokes. It is a feel-good word, an emotional response, a ‘spray-on term’ (Rose 1999).
When academics speak in these terms the insinuation is that emotional equals irrational and confused (Bauman 2001a is a good example) and, further, that this irrational/emotional public faith in the term is ultimately the cause and source of the ongoing confusion. However, when we began our investigation, we discovered that this confusion is almost exclusively an academic concern and that it revolves around the misfit between academic configurations of what community is, set against the popular notion.
It was with this in mind that we began to develop, through two specific interventions, a book (Studdert 2006) and a report (Walkerdine and Studdert 2011), a critique of the failure of social sciences to satisfactorily investigate and conceptualise the topic.
As we did so, we began to see that this ambivalence towards the term, far from being particular to the late twentieth century, had in fact been present historically within the social sciences since their inception, a statement particularly pertinent for Sociology itself. It also became clear that this ‘othering’ of community was present in the work of Comte, the father of Sociology and, further, that the accompanying theoretical denuding of the concept and the ongoing responses of hope and disdain which had accompanied it throughout the discipline’s history, all had their source in the very terms in which the veracity of the discipline as a discipline had been established.
The central contention of both the report and the book was that the academic investigation of community was currently gridlocked, primarily because conceptual tools and modes of thinking about it were inadequate to the task. Further, despite changes of terminology, these almost always represented, as we will go on to demonstrate, new labels on old bottles and that, as such, the terms and mode of thinking about community, at least as academic topic, had remained fundamentally the same throughout the history of the discipline.
This made us quite optimistic about the possibilities afforded by our research for a re-thinking of community. Yet something strange seemed to occur when we discussed our critique with fellow academics. The usual response was a disdainful, ‘we know’ ‘we know’. It rang through many conversations, yet we found no evidence of this claimed prior understanding in texts, nor indeed did there appear to be any serious engagement with the issues we hoped to raise. Between 2002 and 2015, there were a grand total of two books published in British Sociology relating directly to thinking about community as a term (Delanty 2002; Studdert 2006). The term was constantly used in notions of ‘community health’, ‘community policing’ and ‘community education’, but almost without exception, the dedicated chapters in these books concerning the topic were mind-numbingly similar, little more than expositions of what the same books openly described as a term lacking in conceptual usefulness.
Confronting these responses, we came to understand that there were four conflated reasons why the social sciences, as a general field, baulked at engagement with the topic of community or the issues it raised. These were as follows:
- 1.The theoretical apparatus through which social sciences investigates and discusses community is simply insufficient or incapable of conceptualising the topic in a sophisticated or in-depth form (Studdert 2006). ‘Social Science thinking about community, was often little more than a series of descriptors’—location, interest, (Aull Davies and Jones 2003, p. 5). Superficial and reductionist, these bare descriptors function as much to curtail investigation of community, as they do to provoke it. They are simply unsuitable for the task. Crucially, while this fact was recognised, the re-configuring of the existing mode of thinking about community brought into question fundamental tenets of the discipline itself, as we will demonstrate.
- 2.Academics of course exist in the world outside of the academy, and in that world not only are notions of community powerful, but community is a term that still is of vital interest to funding bodies and governments. This is a dilemma largely responsible for the situation in which, as Charlotte Aull Davis and Stephanie Jones (ibid) note, the continued presence of the term within the academy itself is maintained not by academic interest, but rather by a recognition ‘that it is an idea with empirical meanings for our informants and one which is useful for policy makers’. Thus, in this very post-modern formulation, community is of interest not as a theoretical concept, but rather because of its usage in the popular imagination and its status among government and funding bodies.
- 3.Coupled with the two issues mentioned above is the general disinterest among academics, over the last 30 years, in actually studying communal being-ness in a micro sense. The reasons for this will be examined in due course. What is important to acknowledge here, is the veracity of Gordon Hughes’ claim (Hughes 2007) that the investigation of the social at a micro level is regarded within the social sciences as a modernist quirk.
- 4.Finally, on a simple level, academics themselves contribute to this confusion by routinely continuing to use the term throughout their texts, even though, in the same text, they equally routinely say that the term lacks clarity and theoretical value. Thus, the term serves an immediate need even while it was concurrently being stripped of meaning.
These four reasons taken together account for the confusion surrounding the term and establish this is an academic problem, not a public one.
Nor, as was mentioned earlier, is this current gridlock and this attitude of ambiguity towards the term community a new thing. Indeed, it is one which has bedevilled the discipline since its inception. To fully understand why requires a brief discussion of the history of the sociology itself.
The Theoretical Deadlock Regarding the Notion of Community
By the mid to late nineteenth century, the industrialisation and state-building process known as modernity, with its resultant social displacements and its worldwide destruction of rural communities, was in full swing, bringing in its wake a developing need to theorise and justify the process. It was in this context that Sociology developed—hesitantly it must be said—as a discipline attuned to the calculation and measurement of society: a society, it should be noted, already positioned as co-terminious with the state.
From the very first, therefore, Sociology was positioned to explain and rationalise what contemporaries referred to as ‘the social question’. Its role has been described by some as akin to ‘the ideology of modernism’ (Bauman 2001b).
In relation to community, the need for rationalisation and justification stemmed from the act of industrialisation itself, precisely because—beginning with the enclosure movement in Britain—the entire process was constructed out of the destruction of existing communities and existing communal traditions (Bauman 2001, p. 35).
Community, with its ‘medieval’ linkages of clan, religion, guild and location thus constituted precisely the target of modernisation and therefore the target of the discipline whose task was to justify the terms of modernisation. From the very first, therefore, the relation of the discipline to the notion of community was shot through with problematising ambiguities precisely because community represented the things modernism sort to overcome.
Crucially, as one reads sociologists like Comte, Marx and Durkheim, one is immediately struck by the absolute consensus regarding the destruction of these communities. Uniformly across the political spectrum, from ‘radicals’ like Marx to ‘conservatives’ like Comte, we find identical descriptions concerning this process. There never seems to be a doubt that this process is both necessary and irreversible. No one, even the champion of the proletariat, is prepared to contest the necessity for the wholesale destruction of long-standing communities.
Indeed, the only issue uniting Marx and Liberalism (apart from their underlying humanism) is their conjoint notion that these communities are bastions of superstition and barriers to progress. Naturally, justifications vary: Marx sees them as barriers to the historical mission of a conscious working class and Liberalism views them as obstacles to the march of progress, rationality, and the free individual, yet the conclusions are the same.
In hindsight, the similarities between them are probably more striking than their differences. Both are fuelled by an almost blind faith in progress; all accounts are underwritten by the primacy ascribed to abstraction, mechanistic theory and process. All call on sociality and community to adjust to the objective world out there, an adjustment of course, validated by the abstraction of hidden laws.
Indeed, it is beneath the banner of these hidden laws that the ‘disembedding of the traditional order’ (Beck 1998, p. 24) is inaugurated, a process begun with the French revolution and continued by the industrial revolution itself. The world that emerges from this upheaval, however, is always an incomplete one, for the terms of ...