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ABSTRACT
Despite a rich history and continued popularity as an idea or term used for various purposes, the community concept remains nebulous and contested. Critics have long claimed that it is an outdated notion typically used in nostalgic fashion. Others, however, assert that the most important social science concepts are often the hardest to define, and that normative and analytically useful are not mutually exclusive. While community endures in the field, the environment is kept largely in the background in sociological applications. In this paper I argue that greater impact can be achieved through an extension of interactional field theory that grounds the concept in landscape and creates a framework built upon material, ideal, and practical elements of community. After delineating the proposed LIFE framework, I utilize illustrative examples to demonstrate its application to local development and society in practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For example, by the European sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and the human ecologists of the Chicago School in the U.S.
2. Though the theory originated with Kaufman in the 1950s and Wilkinson discussed it many other articles, I direct most of my attention to this work because it appears to be the standard-bearing IFT literature and is the focus of this special issue.
3. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for extensive and very helpful feedback, including suggesting a portion of this phrasing and sharing a number of other important insights that have been incorporated throughout.
4. Further, it can be argued that social fields larger than the community social field are abstractions – people do not live in them – which places clear limits on the ability of individuals to effect social change.
5. The point in naming this concept is “to draw attention to what is truly novel, not to create a whole new terminology” (Swedberg, Citation2017, p. 25).
6. This is akin to the concept of a boundary object (Star, Citation2010), and its emphasis on interpretive flexibility and overlap amongst “social worlds,” and aligns with Wilkinson’s (Citation1991) formulation, as it concerns the “borders” of the area, which “are forever in flux, depending upon the movements of people” (p. 23).
7. Wilkinson (Citation1991) also defines community as a “natural disposition among people who interact with one another on various matters that comprise a common life” (p. 17), “a social whole” (p. 27), and “a dynamic field” (p. 35) and more, all of which are logical within his exposition but leave much room for interpretation. He also makes a distinction between “community” (put in quotes by him) as Gemeinschaft and the community – the local community, his focus with IFT – but one I leave behind here. Similarly, one could argue that IFT as laid out in Wilkinson (Citation1991) only applies to rural settings – see the book title, after all. These aspects muddy the waters of community further and support the idea that we should continue to wrestle with the concept.
8. Wilkinson (Citation1991) focuses on rural localities and does not give much attention to urban applications. Particularly given that Wilkinson does stress that all places are rural-urban (consistent with Gans’s (Citation2009) argument about urban sociology) and these ecological elements are merely variables in IFT, this framework should apply to any type of settlement, as suggested by its inclusion in Lyon and Driskell (Citation2012). This opens the framework up to new applications, including around problems often thought to be “urban” in nature, such as racial segregation and environmental justice movements.
9. This approach resonates with Portes’s (Citation1998) and Hipp’s (2016) efforts to transcend conceptual murkiness surrounding related concepts social capital and collective efficacy, respectively, and push theoretical development forward.
10. This generally aligns well with Theodori’s (Citation2005) working definition, though my interpretation of community is that it is not the process itself, but the result of the process of locality-oriented interactions via the intersection of social fields in the landscape.
11. Community formation is possible in such scenarios, though; when the interests of such social fields overlap and locality-oriented interactions occur, the community field can emerge, which Powell (Citation2007) advocates in the vein of sustainability, for suburban anti-sprawl advocates to recognize the direct linkages to concentrated poverty in the inner-city and for such groups to come together to address both problems in the regional landscape.
12. This is commonly called to as “P6,” which refers to cooperation among cooperatives, principle six in the cooperative movement. In both the union and co-op examples, participation in extra-local social fields can and does help build capacity and collective efficacy at the local level, yielding further dividends for community.
13. To Powell, belonging is superior to equity – a ubiquitous term that Wilkinson (Citation1991) includes in the distributive justice outcome discussed under the following dimension – as an aspirational concept because it does not imply a breaking of bonds as people compete over scarce resources. John a. Powell has written and presented extensively on these and related topics, such as powell and Toppin (Citation2021), but for an overview, visit the website of Othering & Belonging Institute at Cal-Berkeley, which he directs.
14. i.e., not as “shams perpetuated by a self-interested elite for the purpose of masking class exploitation and domination” (Wilkinson, Citation1991, p. 4).
15. Coming from an interactional perspective, Sharp (Citation2018) summarizes the interconnections between community and such measures of well-being in arguing that individuals “and communities benefit from highly satisfied and interactive residents because of the residential stability, social support, and community investment they foster, as well as their positive mental and physical health effects” (p. 615). Further, “(s)ociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation (e.g., by gender and race) at the population level” (Umberson & Montez, Citation2010, p. S54).
16. And, of course, outside of sociology, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work in related terrain.
17. Since we were simply reviewing public information posted on organizational websites, with no direct contact with any individuals, institutional review board (IRB) review was not necessary. This vignette shares the results of the first step in a larger project.
18. This definition is found on the website of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the component of the U.S. Department of Justice responsible for advancing such methods throughout the U.S.
19. This project was approved by the IRB at my university. The bulk of the survey respondents were recruited via a postcard sent to a random sample of landowners from the municipalities that surround the lake.
20. This is based upon a public sociology-based interview, one not conducted for a formal research project, so it did not need to be reviewed by IRB. Ms. Williams is quoted and named with her express permission. The first quote from her is cited as personal communication from May 2, 2022 with the remainder attributed simply to Ms. Williams. Thanks to Bailey Tomczak for transcribing the interview.
21. The purpose of the labyrinth is described on the organization’s website as, “(t)hrough walking, connection is realized in one’s deeper self, in community and in the universe.”
22. Of course, Bellah was disregarding the interest in community that does endure, as evidenced by the persistence of the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association and continued publication of articles that treat the concept seriously in journals such as Rural Sociology, Society & Natural Resources, and Local Development & Society. It is largely absent, however, from the legacy, general sociology journals, most introductory textbooks, and likely the majority of sociology instructors’ syllabi.
23. This is one of many community-adjacent terms that have become popular of late and is quite similar to the “local solidarities” that Cope et al. (Citation2016) use as shorthand for community in IFT. Wilkinson (Citation1991) does use the term “local solidarity” in his explication of IFT, but only in his description of one of the three constitute elements of community from this perspective, not as shorthand for the community concept.