Ian Goodwin wrote:
...community has always been tied to normative prescription as well as empirical description. Yet the most important point about community is that it pervades everyday life. I'd go so far as to say it seems to be indispensable to social discourse.
That's pretty far.
Thus, as Peter Hamilton put it in his perceptive introduction to Cohen's (1985) classic study (The Symbolic Construction of Community), community would have long ago been "discounted as grist to the scholarly mill were it not for the remarkable hold that the idea of community exerts over both the intellectual and popular mind" (p.7).
The popularity of a notion, within or beyond scholarship, is a poor criteria for the evaluation of its use in describing anything other than its popularity.
It is for this reason we should be careful about discounting community. People manifestly believe in community and use the term in their everyday discourse. In this sense community motivates, sustains, and structures social action.
By what logic does the publicly consequential nature of a term render it having descriptive or explanatory value?
...For example fears of 'community decline', whilst difficult if not impossible to verify from an objective perspective, often motivate residents of localities to become involved in online initiatives (and structure how they then interact online - the topics they deem 'relevant', the goals of the online group etc) - this was certainly the case in the community informatics initiatives I studied in Birmingham (UK).
Fears of goblins do not goblins make. -eg