Culture, too, is a hotly-debated question. Older sociological takes tended to see it as below: a pattern of beliefs, or (in Parsonian terms) "values". In the past 20 years or so, sociologists of culture have moved away from this, partially for theoretical reasons but (IMHO) more because it proved impossible to actually locate these hypothesized shared values. (Every once in a while, we try to make theory conform to empirical observation instead of vice versa :).) More recent sociology of culture (Bourdieu, Swidler, Boltanski & Thevenot, Sewell, etc.) has tended to see culture(s) as overlapping, strategic, and discursive. That is, rather than providing shared values they provide resources for interpreting and approaching problems; they provide different such resources and in different ways to different sub-cultures; and these resources are (often) encapsulated in forms of discourse (talk, media, writing, etc.). I suppose one could argue that communities are those things that have cultures, which might address the fact that the study of both is so muddled right now. ap ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin@unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
This may be a silly question, but I've been wondering what the difference between community and culture might be. Culture, particularly organizational culture, can be defined as a shared pattern of beliefs (see Schein 1985 and others). It seems to me that community, at least from what I've seen here, is similarly defined?
--JW
Andrew Perrin wrote:
Hmmm - well, the concept of 'community' certainly is a very hot one, and one for which no widely-accepted definition exists. "Communitarians" (e.g., Amitai Etzioni and others, probably including Robert Putnam) would probably exclude companies from their idea of "community," but it's never clear exactly why; they seem to see community as being a sort of nostalgic, small-town thing. There are of course lots of other uses of the word: "community" as physical social space (as in "Welcome to the community of Chapel Hill"), "community" as social-but-not-physical space (online communities), "community" as identity-based interaction (the Catholic community, the African-American community), and "community" as an opt-in, opt-out sort of group (as in administrators' references to "the college community" or "utopian communities").
All of these do seem to belong to the "third sector" (non-market, non-state), and that does suggest that there's something about community that separates it from companies. But then you have to wonder whether company towns (e.g., Levittown) can't really be "communities."
All of this, I suppose, is just to suggest that your student probably won't find many pat answers in the research on "community".
ap
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin@unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
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