1
Connected Communities
A review of conceptualisations and
meanings of ‘community’ within and
across research traditions: a meta-
narrative approach
Marcello Bertotti, Farah Jamal, Angela Harden
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TRADITIONS: A META-NARRATIVE APPROACH
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A review of conceptualisations and
meanings of ‘community’ within and across
research traditions: a meta-narrative
approach
Marcello Bertotti, Farah Jamal, Angela Harden
Executive Summary
Community is a contested concept that defies easy categorisation. We aimed to collect
systematically the key ways in which community has been understood within and across
research traditions. To do this, we used a meta-narrative methodology which attempts
to unravel the „storylines‟ of research. We identified a set of meta-narratives in
sociology, anthropology and political theory. These ranged from pre-modern approaches
to community as exemplified by the study of distant „others‟ by early anthropologists to
post-modern conceptualisations which emphasise new forms of commonality, difference
and interaction in an era of globalisation and hypermodernity. We found considerable
variability amongst the set of meta-narratives, particularly between „real‟ and „imagined‟
communities, and the ongoing tension between individual and collective political
positions in framing the importance of communities. The findings from this review
provide a framework from which to think more insightfully about „community‟. This
framework could be used to facilitate a dialogue between academics and policy-makers
on how different conceptualisations might translate into different types of interventions
and might also help to guide decision-makers to consider their assumptions about
community. Finally, we suggest some implications for future research around the use of
an intersectional approach to study individuals‟ belonging to different communities.
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Researchers and Project Partners
Marcello Bertotti,1* Farah Jamal,1 Angela Harden,1,2 Kevin Sheridan,1 Gail Barrow-
Guevara,1 Lori Atim1
Project partners:
Sylvia Potter (Information specialist)
1Institute for Health and Human Development, University of East London, Water Lane,
London E15 4LZ. 2Newham University Hospital NHS Trust
* corresponding author: [email protected]
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the academic and policy experts for their contribution to our
consultation events
Key words
Community; meta-narrative review; systematic review; sociology; anthropology;
political theory; theories; concepts.
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Introduction
This paper presents the findings of a review of the ways in which community has been
understood from within and across academic disciplines and research traditions. We took
a meta-narrative approach to the review in order to identify the major ways in which
community has been conceptualised. A meta-narrative review is a new type of
systematic review in which the aim is to identify the „storylines‟ of research and the
shared set of theories, concepts and preferred methods used by groups of scholars over
time (1,2).
We began the review process with systematic searches across a range of bibliographic
databases in the social sciences and related disciplines. Search results were screened
and assessed according to discipline and relevance to the task in hand. In parallel, we
held two consultation meetings, one with academics from different disciplines and one
with policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in community. These meetings
were used to identify further references and to begin charting different understandings
of community. It became clear that the most relevant references appeared within
sociology, anthropology and political theory, and these became our disciplines of focus
for the review. Within each of these disciplines, seminal papers were identified and
subjected to further analysis to examine their historical roots, philosophical
underpinnings and chains of influence. This helped us to map the major storylines of the
ways in which community has been understood across disciplines and over time. A final
mixed policy and academic consultation meeting was held to share findings and check
the robustness of our analysis.
In the sections that follow we outline each of the meta-narratives we identified, compare
and contrast the different ways of understanding community within them, and outline
some implications for future research and policy making.
The meta-narratives
We identified a set of meta-narratives that map how ways of understanding community
have varied across disciplines and over time (table 1). The meta-narratives illustrate
how community came to be understood in anthropology, sociology and political theory
through tracing the key research traditions in these disciplines. The shifts in the meaning
and conceptualisation of community have been shaped largely by the
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Table 1. Ways of understanding community within and across disciplines
Meta-narrative
Focus discipline (of most
relevance)
Roots (historical and/or
academic)
Scope Community conceptualised as Key authors
Commonality Anthrop- ology
Natural; primordial
Human society as a natural phenomenon and the study of human primitives i.e. studying distant „others‟: villages, tribes, nomadic groups
Community formation depends upon homogeneity or commonality. Community was considered the location rather than the object of
research.
Levi-Strauss (3); Turner (4)
The public
sphere and formation of ‘community’
Political
theory
Aristotle;
pre-modernity
Rather than emphasising who constitutes
the state, Aristotle looks to the values and principles (which are formalised in a set of internal arrangements/ constitution) that characterise how people associate. Later scholars reconsider the role of the state and the
influence of non-formal associations in sub-state spheres and civil society.
„Community‟ was first considered to
be formed and sustained by values and principles that characterise associations between people in a state. Later, it was considered that people could come together in non-state domains to cooperate in
common affairs.
Aristotle (5);
Paine (6)
Transitionary
perspectives on community
Sociology;
anthrop- ology
Industrial
revolution
Preoccupation with the transformations
following the industrial revolution and its impact on traditional forms of
association. (e.g. Tönnies: gemeinschaft/community to gesellschaft/society; Durkheim: mechanical to organic solidarity).
Community is moral, localised and
intimate relationships – these no longer hold significance with
emergence of „society‟ (Tönnies); workforce specialisation requires interdependence and new forms of solidarity (Durkheim); industrialisation can negatively impact on traditional ways of life
(Marx).
Tönnies (7);
Durkheim (8);
Marx (9)
Community in urban life
Sociology; anthrop- ology
Human ecology; emergence
of urban
spaces; The Chicago School
Relationships in urban life are not based on proximity because of the nature of individual activity and living (e.g.
transience, diversity). US urban areas
are a problem (alienation, ethnic segregation), but also a solution (dynamism). The focus is on the complex urban space in shaping community rather than the family or village.
The idea of locality challenged with the rise of urban spaces. Community characterised as dense, diverse and
transient. Emerging theories from the
Chicago School include: e.g. urban ecology; concentric and transition zones; social disorganisation theory.
Park (10); Wirth (11); Redfield
(12);
Hannerz (13); Gans (14); Downey & Smith (15)
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Table 1 (cont‟d). Ways of understanding community
Meta-narrative Focus discipline (of most
relevance)
Roots (historical and/or
academic)
Scope Community conceptualised as Key authors
Community Studies
Sociology Tönnies; network analysis;
Chicago
School
Focuses on the relationships between individuals (e.g. kinship, friendship, networks)
in communities, rather than
the household.
Community is primarily networks of solidarity between individuals rather than space or locality.
Crow & Allan (16); Brint (17); Young & Willmott (18);
Arensberg (19);
Bell & Newby (20); Bulmer (21); Frankenberg (22)
Generating or mobilising community
Sociology 1960s; community develop- ment; Marx
Urban development at this time looks to changing physical spaces, often at the expense of the poor. Alternatively, community mobilisation looks to
providing „voice‟ to marginalised people around
common social concerns.
Community is an „ideal‟ to be aspired to through collective action for the fulfilment of common interests. It is not a natural phenomenon, but a social construction.
Brent (23); Marx (24)
Individualist and
communitarian approaches to community
Political theory
John Rawls;
theories of justice
The debate has focused on the critique that
individualist/liberal theory neglects the primacy of social relations.
Communitarians consider community to be a source of identity formation.
Two popular branches of scholars in the communitarian tradition are orthodox and radical, where the former emphasises the necessity of a single community and the latter considers the existence of multiple communities while still looking to
issues of membership, commonality
and solidarity.
Rawls (25); Sandel (26, 27);
MacIntyre (28, 29); Etzioni (30, 31); Jordan (32, 33); Gray (34); Frazer (35, 36)
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Table 1 (cont‟d). Ways of understanding community
Meta-narrative
Focus discipline (of most
relevance)
Roots (historical and/or
academic)
Scope Community conceptualised as Key authors
Symbolic approaches
Sociology; anthrop- ology
Durkheim and Weber; Anderson:
no academic
root
Separates ideas and meanings of community attributed by individuals from community as a form of bodily
interaction. Face to face
communication is not necessary to establish community. Community is a relational concept. It is determined by defining who is in and who is out.
Communities are constructs built on sentiments and symbols (in the minds or imaginings of members).
Cohen (37); Anderson (38); Barth (39);
Bourdieu (40)
Market economy perspectives on community
Political theory; sociology
Rise of market economies; communit-arianism: political
economy
Links social and economic structures to political discourse on community. A strong trend in this tradition has been to look at the role of communities in establishing trust in society.
Communities are not normative, nor an ideal to be aspired to in their own right but are promoted for the economic advantages that they are supposed to produce (through social capital, trust). On
the other hand, communities are also threatened by the operation
of market economies.
Fukuyama (41, 42); Putnam (43, 44); Gorz (45)
Globally oriented
approaches
Sociology; anthrop-
ology
Hyper-modernity;
globalisation
New forms of interaction and commonality/difference are explored in
an era of globalisation and communication advances.
From local to transnational flows. Community is discussed in the
context of identity, and place and centrality of geography and location are challenged. Concept of „thin‟ communities (e.g. weak ties over the internet) and „thick‟ communities based on strong ties.
Auge (46); Olwig & Hastrup
(47); Appadurai (48); Gupta & Ferguson (49)
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emergence of the state, industrialisation, urbanism and more recently, globalisation and
communication advances. It appears, therefore, that new ways of understanding
community roughly tend to unfold in reaction to historical developments in political,
social, cultural and economic life.
In pre-modernity, early anthropologists emphasised the collective as the setting of social
life. They tended to study villages, tribes and distant „others‟ that were considered to be
culturally and socially homogeneous communities (50). Community was assumed to
exist and was not yet considered a question for investigation. It was only much later that
anthropologists would consider community to be the most important subject matter in
the discipline. In contrast, scholarly work on community in political theory can be traced
to the rise of liberalism, where ideas of freedom, rights and justice and their political and
social context were heavily theorised. Notably, scholars studied the role of the state
(Aristotle), and the role of civil society and non-state domains (e.g. Rousseau, Paine) in
shaping relationships.
The explicit theorisation of community began with advances in industrialisation in the
twentieth century, when the seminal group of scholars, Tönnies, Durkheim and Marx,
began to consider the impact of the modern environment on traditional or rural forms of
life (51). Tönnies, Durkheim and Marx, began to consider the impact of the modern
environment on traditional or rural forms of life. For example, Tönnies suggests that
community is characterized as rural, moral and intimate, while society in the modern era
is individualistic, instrumental and impersonal. For Durkheim, individuals move towards
„organic solidarity‟ in modernity where the specialization of work leads to a necessary
interdependence between people. Marx criticised the alienation that was derived from
production in capitalism.
Increasing modernity gave rise to urbanism in the 1920s/30s, which ignited new
questions about community for anthropologists and sociologists within the „community
and urban life‟ meta-narrative. Cities were considered to represent unique social and
cultural spaces that play a role in the shifting of how human organisation functions.
Community in these urban spaces were considered to be dense, diverse and transient.
Therefore, the idea of locality and the importance of proximity from earlier
conceptualisations of community were strongly challenged in this tradition. The Chicago
School guided research in this area and developed new theories of community in the
context of the modern environment (see table 1).
In the 1960s, the community studies tradition developed by both building on and
critiquing the emphasis that many urban anthropologists/sociologists put on space as the
unit of analysis. This tradition is concerned with studying all types of relationships
outside the household and has a particular focus on researching social issues. The
community studies tradition led to a substantial growth in empirical studies primarily
based on case studies and participant observation, stimulating a more interpretive
approach. Closely related to community studies is the idea of „generating or mobilising
community‟, which developed to some extent in reaction to urban development ignoring
the social concerns of the poor. Community for this tradition is considered to be an ideal
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to be aspired to through collective action for the fulfilment of common interests. It
particularly looks to provide a „voice‟ to marginalised people around social concerns.
Community in political theory returned as a central question with the rise of debates
between individualists and communitarians. Individualists are concerned with moral
worth and the importance of the individual. Communitarians emphasise human
associations as the source of identity formation, and thus the idea of a community
becomes important for human organisation and behaviour. More „radical‟ strands of
communitarianism consider the existence of multiple forms of community, attaching
importance to ideas of membership and solidarity while still accounting for changing
socio-economic factors. The increasing impact of market economies on modern
environments evoked another tradition that linked political economy with communitarian
relations. A strong trend in this tradition has been the examination of the role of
communities in establishing trust and from that, „social capital‟ in societies.
Communities, for these scholars, are promoted for the economic and political advantages
that they can produce.
More recently, the importance of embodied interaction as an important requisite for
community was challenged by scholars, who were instead focussed on the way in which
„world of meaning‟, imaginings and sentiments function in modern societies to construct
ideas of community and cooperation, thus separating the idea of community from
interaction. Whilst previous traditions focussed their analysis on groups and interactions
between individuals, this meta-narrative is more interested in what occurs inside the
individual. This is evident in symbolic, imagined communities but also in more recent
work on belonging, attachment and affect which appear to combine sociology and
psychology to study community.
Arguably, we have now entered an era of post-modernity characterised by super-
diversity, globalisation and new ways of communication. In this context, researchers
across disciplines have challenged the centrality of geography in the research on
community. Scholars look to issues of identity in the context of technology, mass
migration and diversity and how this, if at all, relates to place in the study of community
(52).
Implications for future research This review has highlighted the multi-faceted nature of community across disciplines
over time. Several implications for research and policy emerge from our review and from
the feedback from the consultation meetings we held with academic and policy experts.
We found a fundamental gap between the conceptualisations of community in the
academic literature and the way in which community is used in policy and practice. In
the latter, the notion of community is often taken for granted and associated with
geographical space. In contrast, in the theoretical literature, community is often
expressed in an abstract manner, making it difficult to apply concepts practically. Our set
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of meta-narratives could be used to facilitate a dialogue between academics and policy-
makers on how different ways of conceptualising communities might translate into
different ways of implementing, for example, interventions to build community
resilience. It could also be used to help decision-makers to think about what
assumptions they are making about communities and expose them to alternative ways
of understanding communities.
In this context, a useful extension of our review would be to develop a toolkit for the
identification of the different characteristics of a community that could be used in
assisting the design of policies and practical interventions. However, prior to this, the
empirical literature on communities would need to be drawn upon and combined with the
findings of the current review, which focused mainly on the conceptual literature. This
could include, for instance, the empirical work on social capital in crime, health and other
domains of public policy; research on social support and social networks from within
community and health psychology (53); and research which examines the perspectives
of members of communities themselves on how they define and value communities.
Our set of meta-narratives also suggest that individuals can be conceptualised as
belonging to a variety of communities at the same time, thanks to a range of embodied
and imagined connections with other individuals. These multiple forms of belonging raise
interesting research questions, such as, „How do individuals belonging to different types
of community influence each other?‟ and „What happens at the intersection of belonging
to different communities?‟ Intersectional analysis from within feminist theory exposes
what happens at the intersection between class, gender, age and other characteristics of
women‟s identities (54). Methodological and conceptual work from this tradition could be
applied more generally to answer the questions above and thus provide a useful new
way of understanding communities.
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External links
For further information about the following:
�Methodology (meta-narrative approach to systematic review);
�Diagram flow of the development of meta-narratives over time.
�Fuller version of each meta-narrative
please click on the following link:
http://www.uel.ac.uk/ihhd/projects/Meaningsofcommunity.htm
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The Connected Communities
Connected Communities is a cross-Council Programme being led by the AHRC in partnership
with the EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and NERC and a range of external partners. The current vision for
the Programme is:
“to mobilise the potential for increasingly inter-connected, culturally diverse,
communities to enhance participation, prosperity, sustainability, health & well-being by
better connecting research, stakeholders and communities.”
Further details about the Programme can be found on the AHRC‟s Connected Communities web
pages at:
www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectedcommunities.aspx