Re: Company vs. Community
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
On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Andrew Perrin wrote:
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."
Intellectually and politically speaking, I agree wholeheartedly with Andrew's comment above. But it seems to me that one of the most common (and nefarious depending where you stand on the issue) developments in mainstream cyberculture during, say, 1997 - 2000 has been the commercialization of online communities. Is it just me or does it appear to the rest of you that the folks at Amazon, Yahoo, and fill-in-the-blank.com have been reading Howard Rheingold? For a number of dot.coms (and former dot.coms ... rip), there's a thin line between commerce and community: Online communities are set up and nurtured as portals to e-commerce. I've seen very little critical work on this angle but a good start is Chris Werry's "Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Community in Business Texts" and Janelle Brown's "Three Case Studies," both in Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University, edited by Chris Werry and Miranda Mowbray (Hewlett-Packard Professional Books, 2001). david silver http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver
"D. Silver" wrote:
Is it just me or does it appear to the rest of you that the folks at Amazon, Yahoo, and fill-in-the-blank.com have been reading Howard Rheingold? For a number of dot.coms (and former dot.coms ... rip), there's a thin line between commerce and community: Online communities are set up and nurtured as portals to e-commerce.
Actually, I think they're reading books like Rosen's _The anatomy of buzz_, which argues that word-of-mouth marketing is the wave of the future in marketing. Rosen indicates that setting up "communities" that are attached to commercial sites is a great way to pursue word-of-mouth marketing. --Christian Nelson
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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"john.white" wrote:
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?
It often is. The question is whether it is legitimate to speak of any group, society, culture, community, etc. as "sharing" something, at least as that notion of sharing is often (nearly always?) explicated. Regarding this, I'd particularly recommend looking at Moerman, M. (1968). Being Lue: Uses and abuses of ethnic identification. In J. Helm (Ed.) Essays on the problem of tribe. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. [Reprinted as: Accomplishing ethnicity. In R. Turner (Ed.) (1974). Ethnomethodology (pp. 54-68). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.] as well as Sharrock, W.W., and Anderson, R.J. (1982). On the demise of the native: Some observations on and a proposal for ethnography. Human Studies, 5(2), 119-135. Best, Christian Nelson
participants (4)
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Andrew Perrin -
Christian Nelson -
D. Silver -
john.white