Towards a post‐foundational understanding of community

Abstract

CommunityCommunity has an important communicative advantage: one can refer to it without feeling compelled to explain what one is talking about. Once a distinction is drawn between community and society, community and the idea it conveys of smooth and harmonious interaction re-enters society with a sense of nostalgia. Not in good taste among social scientists during the 1960s due to a sense of conservative consensualism, nowadays the concept is becoming popular again, whereas a return to community is increasingly seen as the remedy against the impersonal features of modern society. This is the case with those theorists of postmodernity who reckon the concentration on locality as a response to the coercion of the liberal state or with many communitarians who advocate a return to local communities as a resistance to capitalist forces on atomized individuals (Morris, 1996). Yet one may wonder whether the instructions they both provide are sufficiently clear to lead us safely there or whether the dilemma as old as modernity as to how to conceive of community as something worth returning to is glossed over once again (Bauman, 1996).This helps understand why the more one reviews the ways of using the term, the more community appears as a shorthand which makes communication easier but does not serve as concept. All too often, the problem is how to decide whether the reference is to social groups stemming from direct relationship on the basis of a shared identity, or to social categories defined by common external attributes, with the result that one does not even dare to think how it would be like once groupings are taken into account that are both categories and networks (Calhoun, 1991, p. 107). This is why in the daily practice of community studies a community needs first to be postulated in order, then, to ask the people whether they feel part of it, and if not, why. As a result, a basic structural concern has often turned into a quest for local solidarity. Extrinsic mappings of the boundaries of a given locality have therefore been taken as a starting point in order to investigate the extent of communal interaction and sentiment within them. In so doing, the assumption had to be made that a significant portion of interactions is locally based. This prompted an understanding of community solidarity in terms of shared values so that whenever a lack of locally organized solidarity behaviour and attitudes was observed, this was enough to conclude that community was no longer in place (Wellman, 1979(Wellman, , pp. 1202[1].