Community

Concept

Etymology of Community

Bernard Lietaer [1] suggested:

The origin of the word "community" comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other. So community literally means to give among each other. Therefore I define my community as a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.

Kris Roose looked to his schooltime Latin dictionaries, and discovered:

The origin of words as common, community, communication, munition, municipality is munis, a (defence) wall. The verb munire (still used in French) means "to provide the building blocks of that wall". Munition originally meant the weapons used on that wall. A com-munity is the group behind the same munis, and a municipality is the organization or government of that community. Munia are the public duties and office on those defence buildings. Communication is the interaction between the people behind the defence wall. Communist is a member of a commune, a French social and political community. During the French Revolution it was the name of the government of Paris from 1789 until 1795.

The etymology is very suggestive: a community shares a higher level of intimacy and vulnerability, protected by a wall against more primitive (aggressive, military) interactions.

Munus, meaning gift, can't be the etymological origin of community, because the root of munus is muner- (plural munera, hence re-muner-ation), and these letters usually don't disappear in natural etymology.

Critique

"The anthropologist Vered Amit (2002) has reviewed ‘the trouble with community’ as a theoretical concept. Amit argues that the term’s strong emotional resonance makes it an ideal choice in public rhetoric, even though its empirical referent is seldom specified, or indeed specifiable. Amit cautions that expressions of community always ‘require sceptical investigation rather than providing a ready-made social unit upon which to hang analysis’ (2002: 14). Relying on emotionally charged, bounded notions such as community (or diaspora, nation, ethnic group, etc) is unwise, she adds, for there are numerous sets of social relations that cannot be brought under these banners. Such sets include neighbours, co-workers and leisure partners – people who many nevertheless share ‘a sense of contextual fellowship’ that can be ‘partial, ephemeral, specific to and dependent on particular contexts and activities’ (Rapport and Amit 2002: 5). Countering the often heard idea that community remains a valid term because it is a notion dear to millions of people around the world, Amit urges us not to conflate cultural categories with actual social groups." (http://johnpostill.co.uk/articles/postill_localising_net.pdf)

Characteristics

Doundations that define a community, proposed by David de Ugarte:

The set of users of a service does not constitute a community.

For a group of people to form a community, there must be a common identity, a clear definition of who is part of the demos and a mutual knowledge among them (they must form a distributed network). The community may grow afterwards, but what is clear is that human communities are not formed around services, and even less, around webs.

Communities use services, but are not defined by them.

In the same way as there is no community of National Health Service or public transport users, there is no community of feevy, flick, or bloggers users, or of users of any service we can create, even bearing a very specific profile in mind.

Participation is not the same thing as interaction.

Interactivity among its members can be a measurement of the power of a community, or the adequacy of a service for given network, but it has nothing to do with participation. One interacts with others, but participates in the host's offers. Interaction has a distributed logic, participation has a centralised logic. When interacting we are owners, but when participating we are followers. The culture of participation has nothing to do with the interaction way of life. The obsession with polls not only can involve not the artificial generation of scarcity, but can easily generate a perverse logic in which one-off expression replaces deliberation and exchange, which is very far from community logic.

Voting is for solving conflicts and nothing else.

Voting mechanisms are the essence of participation: you participate in what belongs to others, but do not make it your own, you do not interact with others, no common life experience which strengthens your ties to others is generated. If voting is our way of relating to others, those others will never have a face and name of their own for us. Voting alienates from the interpersonal human relationship: it neither generates nor strengthens the community; on the contrary, voting represents the community as something abstract and alien to people. Let us not forget that, in a community, what is essential is not the mechanism for solving conflicts (occasional polls), but the definition of the demos. We are not equal because we take part in the same assembly – rather, we take part in the same assembly because we previously acknowledge each other as equals.

Platforms are a success or a failure in relation to a community, not in the abstract.

If I have a community, a small network of equals who know each other and interact every day, arguing, exchanging messages and links, and I start a service to make what they already do easier for them, it will most likely be a success. But what does success mean in this context? Just that it will be useful for them when it comes to interacting with each other. What is expected is not to have many users, bringing many people into the same framework, creating cattlelike fences: rather, the aim is to aid in the development of a previously existing interaction. If our link website suddenly attracts many new users, people who try it or use it for themselves or to share with their own networks, but it does not work properly or is not used by the members of the original community, the service will fail.

People do not constitute community

- People don't exist. Things are not done for people, there is no such demos as "people". If we open up a space for people or invite people to vote or decide on a given topic, we will really be inviting any previously organised group or network to present their own interests or viewpoints as those of the whole of society, if not to break the limits of a community which really exists. This is the usual trap of scarcity generation. Not defining the demos is the most typical way of passing as communitarian and democratic what in reality is their complete opposite. For example: making polls on the future Monopoly game or the Eurovision representative open to people yields paradoxical results because what we are doing is precisely breaking the limits of the demos of Monopoly players or Eurovision fans.

A community is not an interest.

Offering services or contents for a specific interest profile does not generate a community. At the very most, it will attract one, or, with luck, several already existing communities, although it probably won't integrate them.

Communities do not spring artificially just because we had the idea of providing a platform for them.

If we want to create a community, it is useless to start creating services, because it won't work. Services serve a community, they don't generate it. To create a community is to create an identity. It has to do with shared values and experiences, something which develops and grows through interaction. Only then are services useful, not before. Want to create a community? Then go offline again and find a specific cause so powerful that after a virtual campaign those taking part in it feel so emotionally and intellectually linked to each other as to want to keep on doing things together every day." (http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf)

Source: Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century. by David de Ugarte

Typology

From the book, Digital Habitats:

"In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. By looking at orientations, we posit, you are in a better position to understand how to support them with tools and processes. They give you a lens to reflect on how your community is doing and where you might want it to be headed.

Here is a brief glimpse of the orientations:

• Meetings – in person or online gatherings with an agenda (i.e. monthly topic calls)
• Projects – interrelated tasks with specific outcomes or products (i.e. Identifying a new practice and refining it.)
• Access to expertise – learning from experienced practitioners (i.e. access to subject matter experts)
• Relationship – getting to know each other (i.e. the annual potluck dinner!)
• Context – private, internally-focused or serving an organization, or the wider world (i.e. what is kept within the community, what is shared with the wider world)
• Community cultivation – Recruiting, orienting and supporting members, growing the community (i.e. who made sure you’re the new person was invited in and met others?)
• Individual participation – enabling members to craft their own experience of the community (i.e. access material when and how you want it.)
• Content – a focus on capturing and publishing what the community learns and knows (i.e. a newsletter, publishing an article, etc.)
• Open ended conversation – conversations that continue to rise and fall over time without a specific goal (i.e. listserv or web forum, Twitter, etc.)"

(http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2009/03/26/red-tails-in-love-birdwatchers-as-a-community-of-practice/)

Typology of Collaborative Community within the firm

Essay: Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher. Towards Collaborative Community / (Book: The Corporation as a Collaborative Community)

URL = http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/research/01-Heckscher-chap01%20copy-1.pdf

Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher:

Three organizing principles and three forms of community:

"Abstractly speaking, we can identify three primary principles of social organization. Hierarchy uses authority to create and coordinate a horizontal and vertical division of labor—a bureaucracy in Weber’s ideal-type form. Market relies on the price mechanism to coordinate competing and anonymous suppliers and buyers. Community relies on shared values and norms.

Real collectivities embody variable mixes of these principles.

Moreover, real collectivities may best be mapped using the principles as three orthogonal dimensions rather than as three apexes of a two-dimensional triangle:

the fact that oneprinciple is a powerful factor shaping a particular collectivity does not preclude one or both of the other principles fromalso being powerful factors. However neither hierarchy nor market can actually function without at least some underpinning of community. Neither can function without a stable set of expectations shared by its members—that, for example, contracts will be honored and doing one’s duties will be rewarded. The form of community differs depending on its relation to the other two principles of social organization. When the dominant principle of social organization is hierarchy, community takes the form of Gemeinschaft. When the dominant principle shifts to market, community mutates from Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft.We postulate that when community itself becomes the dominant organizing principle, it will take a form quite different from either Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft. Aspects of this new form of community can be discerned in the organization of science and the professions. Today, we argue, this new form is also emerging in the heart of the corporate realm.

To summarize the argument below, we can contrast the new form of community with the two earlier ones on three fundamental dimensions:

1. Values: Community is first a set of value orientations shared (more or less) by all members of a group. Everyone can assume that the others will orient to those values and can therefore predict their actions and responses. This forms the basis for trust among individuals and order in social interaction. Collaborative community is distinctive in its reliance on value-rationality—participants coordinate their activity through their commitment to common, ultimate goals. Its highest value is interdependent contribution, as distinct from loyalty or individual integrity.

2. Organization: Community is also a social structure, specifying the boundaries of reference groups, the appropriate forms of authority, and the division of labor. Collaborative community is distinctive in social structures that support interdependent process management through formal and informal social structures.

3. Identify: Community cannot be effective as an organizing principle if it is merely an external constraint on people or a socially sanctioned set of values: it must become internalized in personalities and motivational systems. Collaborative community is distinctive especially in its reliance on interactive social character and interdependent selfconstruals: rather than orienting to a single source of morality and authority, the personality must reconcile multiple conflicting identities and construct a sense of wholeness from competing attachments and interactions."

Gemeinschaft: traditional community

"In its traditional (Gemeinschaft) form, community itself had a sacred quality. As To¨nnies (1887) argued, Gemeinschaft had a hierarchical structure, in which individuals and subunits are related in clear chains of subordination to the superordinate leader whose authority derives from tradition or charisma (per Weber). The core values are therefore those of loyalty and deference.

In such a social structure, horizontal relations, such as the relations of husband and wife, of doctor and patient, even of merchant and client, are defined indirectly, in terms of status obligations and their ‘fit’ within the larger system rather than through direct interaction or negotiation. In effect, the proper relationship between two parties can be read directly from their respective social roles. Challenges to status or violations of obligations of deference are a deeply feared threat to order. Those who are honorable, in other words, are trustworthy. A large system of sanctions, especially the force of reputation in the community, centers on the performance of these obligations.

This form of community is necessarily closed and particularistic, and this closure is reflected in the nature of social identities. Identities under Gemeinschaft typically trace a sharp differentiation between insiders and outsiders. They are conformist, because conformity defines insider status. They have hierarchy built in. Friendships and romantic relationships do exist in traditional societies, but if they cross the boundaries of the status system they are seen as grave threats to order.

Clearly such a form of community leaves little room for modern markets, let alone systematic innovation. Under Gemeinschaft conditions, these processes must be organized informally and in the interstices of the system."

Gesellshaft

"The development of individualism was an upheaval that shook apart the traditional order. It ‘took degree away,’ freeing people from the strictures of status and therefore destroying the basis of trust in the status order. In its place it put as the basis of trust the integrity of the individual; trust became based on the consistency—generally the rational consistency—of action. It led to the necessity of forming an independently coherent sense of the self, distinct from social roles and institutions.

One core insight in both Weber and Durkheim is that the move to individualism did not mean the elimination of the shared moral beliefs, or even a relaxation of them. It involved rather the development of a new content to the moral order. Both associated this change with Protestantism, which created a moral imperative for individualism. Both stressed that individualism in this sense was not a matter of the expression of an essential ‘human nature,’ but quite the contrary, a socially determined obligation which created heavy burdens on personality: an obligation to be rational, self-interested, and consistent. It is in this sense that Gesellschaft is not the negation of community but a form of it. The individualism in Protestantism produced enormous pressures for the rationalization of motivation and the acceptance of individual responsibility, and (as Durkheim noted) the overload could easily lead to pathologies such as suicide. On the one hand, this value system—of which Protestantism is only one manifestation—supported and framed a market economy by freeing action from the constraints of status and by requiring a consistent moral person who can be responsible for promises and contracts.14 On the other hand, the second insight we take from Durkheim and Weber, as well as from Marx and other critics of modernity, is that this modern value is inherently incomplete and contradictory because it disconnects values from relationships. It breaks the communal ties of traditional society by separating people from each other. It does not provide a framework for lateral relationships of colleagueship and collaboration; indeed, it radically separates individuals from each other and connects them (in the Protestant version) directly to God or (in secular versions) to their own private grounding of values. Values aside from individualism itself thus become personal and private rather than ways of connecting to others. Gesellschaft is thus inevitably associated with subjective alienation. The communal dimension cannot be removed from human relationships without a loss of sense of self and of meaning. It is not surprising, then, that traditional community has continued to flourish in the interstices of the larger, cooler set of Gesellschaft associations, nor surprising that the two remain in tension. National and local communities draw people together, but they also limit the scope of markets and are essentially contradictory to the ethic of individualism.

The main solution in modern times has been to wall off community, especially the family, in a ‘private’ sphere, where it can provide comfort and solidarity without threatening the larger system.15 But this way of dealing with social interaction—through the separation of public from private and the reliance on informal links for community—is adequate only when the density of interaction is low enough that people can distinguish a large realm in which their actions do not affect others, and when there is no need for intensive collaboration. As these conditions change—as the intensity of interdependence and the needs for collaborative effort increase—the separation breaks down. Then there is a need for a socially ordered form of lateral, cooperative relationships. That change has been visible both at the societal level and within the economic sphere."

Collaborative Community

"Neither the traditional nor modern forms of community are adequate for groups that seek high levels of adaptiveness and complex interdependence. In such situations trust is particularly important, because people depend a great deal on others whose skills and expertise they cannot check; autonomy and ‘rugged individualism’ give way to an increasingly dense web of interdependence, and there is a growing need for stable cooperative relations among highly differentiated actors. But in such situations trust is also particularly difficult to achieve, because it can no longer be based on tradition or on personal acquaintance and experience. 16 We believe that close scrutiny of contemporary firms reveals the emergence of a new type of community that can square this circle. Collaborative community forms when people work together to create shared value. This increasingly characterizes societies in which the generation of knowledge, often involving many specialists, has become central to economic production. In this it is fundamentally unlike the two forms we have described above: the traditional, where values are assumed to be eternally embodied in the existing community, without the need for shared ‘work’ to achieve them; and the modern, where values are removed from the public realm and left to individuals, with community being merely a place where individuals can pursue their own ends by participating in a shared game. In a collaborative community, values are not individual beliefs, but the object of shared activity; they have to be discussed and understood in similar ways by everyone. The basis of trust is the degree to which members of the community believe that others have contributions to make towards this shared creation.17 Adler’s chapter invokes this idea under the label ‘object’: a collaborative community emerges when a collectivity engages cooperative, interdependent activity towards a common object.

The institutions of celaborative community are centered on defining the core purposes and regulating interactions so that the right people can contribute at the right time to advance the process of value-creation. In a dynamic environment purpose must be distinguished from eternal ‘values,’ which are timeless statements of what the group is. Purpose is a relatively pragmatic view of what the group is trying to achieve, given the environmental challenges, in the foreseeable future. Agreement on purpose or strategy is crucial: members of the community need to both understand it in depth and be committed to its achievement. This means that rather than being left to a small cadre of leaders, the purpose must become a matter for widespread discussion. One can see this result clearly in corporations: in the last few decades strategy has often moved from a confidential preserve of top management to a key desideratum for all employees.

When value and purpose are discussed, they may also be contested. This is possibly the most difficult aspect of the difficult move to collaboration: finding ways to debate core orientations while still working together. Whereas in the Gesellschaft community working together is a more or less accidental by-product of an interplay of individual interests— coordination achieved by an invisible hand of the market or by a nexus of employment contracts—in the collaborative community it involves a deliberate and deliberated commitment to shared ends. But deliberation at this level is hard to manage. Even in voluntary organizations, it can easily slide into polarization or factionalism which shuts off discussion.

Moreover, in the capitalist firm, there are deep structural challenges to collaborative community. First, the power asymmetry between managers and employees generates anxiety, deference, and resentment. Second, the external goals of the firm are deeply contradictory—to produce useful products and services (‘use-value’ in the parlance of classical political economy) and to create monetary profit (‘exchange-value’). In capitalist firms, collective purpose is therefore contradictory in its very nature. Nevertheless, there has been a slow elaboration of mechanisms for

deliberation—forums in which employees are invited to ‘push back’ against their superiors, and where the contradictory nature of the firms’ goals is acknowledged and confronted."

The Three Constitutive Communities of the Self

Dave Pollard:

"Who we are, our self-ishness, is, I've concluded, merely the composite expression of our communities, the three communities that are telling us, all the time, what to do and who to be:

1. Our Visceral Community: the organs inside our bodies, that trust our instincts and senses, and tell us to fall in love, to make love, to fight or flee when we're threatened or overcrowded or struggling with unnatural scarcity.

2. Our Social Community: the people and other creatures we love and/or trust, that tell us to communicate, to express ourselves, to band together, to compete and to collaborate.

3. Our Natural Community: the collective organism of all-life-on-Earth, that tells us to adapt, to welcome, to commune, to live in grace, to make the place where we live sustainable and joyful for all.

Each of these Communities (from the Latin meaning sharing) is also an Organism (from the Latin meaning instrument). So each of these Communities both (a) uses the process of sharing to express us (from the Latin meaning to present or show outside of itself), and (b) is an instrument or tool of that expression. Our Communities make us what we are. Our sense of ourselves as individuals, as something 'apart' is a fiction, what Cohen and Stewart in their book of the same name call figments of reality. We seem to be individuals, apart, but that is because the movie, the story that is 'our' life is so cleverly constructed, and re-presented in what appears to us to be linear time, that it looks coherent." (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/08/13.html#a2423)

Key Book to Read

• Community - the book

More Information

1. Book: Amit, V. and N. Rapport (2002) The Trouble with Community. London: Pluto.