community-company, and all that
Folks, I've been lecturing computer science audiences for years about the fallacy of Presentism: that there is no need to look to the dark pre-Wired ages for any knowledge. Never thought I'd have to lecture social scientists, even those interested in the Internet. Well over a century ago, Ferdinand Tonnies started the community-company debate going with his book about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Not that I agree with his either/or approach, but a huge amount of theorizing AND scholarship has developed around this issue. At the risk of offending some, here's my quick take: a community is a set of (possibly bounded) extra-household relationships that provide sociability, support and identity. A company is a set of legally defined rights and duties organized around an economic purpose. It's pretty clear that you can have community within a company -- that's what much ofindustrial relations and communities of practice literature is about. But even with that, community doesn't become an identity with company. They are 2 analytically separate things. Could you have "company" within community. To really push things, my sense is that's what the 'wages for housework' folks a decade+ ago tried to do, and that's why it failed. Happy Whatever Holiday You're Celebrating Barry (who's celebrating cleaning his office) ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman@chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________ On Sun, 23 Dec 2001 air-l-request@aoir.org wrote:
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 12:01:00 -0500 (EST) From: air-l-request@aoir.org Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #248 - 1 msg
Today's Topics:
1. Re: Community versus Company (John Daly)
--__--__--
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 14:55:01 -0500 From: John Daly <dalyj@erols.com> Organization: self employed To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Re: Community versus Company Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org
This discussion has been informative. I am interested in groups of people interacting over the Internet the way we are interacting via this listserve. So let me ask some questions about terminology.
Are we who are subscribed to the AoIR listserve a "community".? If so, what are characteristics that allow us to be so categorized? If, as I suspect, we would be better described be a term other than "community", what collective noun would you suggest?
Does the fact that there is an "Association of Internet Researchers" make a difference"? What would be the correct collective noun for a similar group subscribed to a listserve if subscribers did not link also through a formal organization?
Communities seem to involve institutionalized relationships and practices among community members. What, if any are the key institutional relationships and practices involved in our group (other than the formalized ones of the AoIR)?
Finally, what are the institutional factors that make participation in this listserve more (or less) valuable to our professional work?
-- John Daly
--__--__--
_______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
End of Air-l Digest
HI all, it is christmas and I had the chance to read through all post on this interesting thread... I hope I get it all in the mail, which was going through my mind while reading the posts....... 1. On commuity and commerce..... while most posts treated the two as separate issues, that overlap sometimes, few if any saw them as integral parts of each other.... and I thought more of economics than of commerce anyway.... so while reading the french anthrpologist Louis Dumont came to my mind.... he wrote a lot about communalism, esp. in India, comparing the individual ideology of the West with the communal of the east, ie. India... the castes etc..... and he talked about embedded and diesembedded economies..... where the economy and also commerce are part of a community/society......... where I run into the problem of defining a community......Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft ..... 2. I found myself agreeing with Jonathan.... on why research what is a community at all, why bother..... well... bein g in Northern Ireland for the past year I came to the point where I was sick of the work community... it is everywhere and everything..... but never really defined.... having different references and sizes.... the c. of NI, the catholic c. and soforth..... but it is sometimes important to say this is a community according to this or that theory and set of rules or it isn't .... for example..... acknowledging a certain status to a given group (identified by language, ethnicity, (sub-) cultural feature, you name it...) is important... which group is acknowledged which one isn't.. you gets the money, state, territory, representational space (esp. in Cyberspace, David Silver's article in Race in Cyberspace edited by Nakamura et al.... made this pretty clear and is a good example)... so definition and ackknwoledgment are forms of distributing power......., that is why it sometimes is important to see if some entity is a community in the abstract sense of us researchers...... 3. Communalism, communitarianism, community has been mentioned.... they have to do with belonging, boundaries... but also with control, control of you is in them and how thy behave, what they do and are made to do..... social control, and we should not forget this part.... offline or online.....it is about the control of discourses, behavior, power and also money... and in comes the ecomomy or commerce.... This would be my take on community for now.... we certainly could evoke the discussion we had on the air-meet list about ethnicity or race here... which would establish a community and why under which circumstances... but I want you to enjoy christmas and not read posts that are too long anyway...... Best to all of you enjoy the rest of the remaining year and talk to you next year. I will go sort of offline until then..... nilz
participants (2)
-
Barry Wellman -
Nils Zurawski