I am delighted to be co-authoring a book on ‘Communal Forms’ with old friend Aksel Tjora (well, I’m old and he’s a friend). Naturally enough it’s set me thinking about how far we have come from the early days of ‘community studies’. Blogs, as I’ve often said, allow people to think aloud, and this blog is no different. What follows are thoughts off the top of my head while trying to think through possible modes of communal forms.
My first thought is that Habermas once again donates a sensible and useful theoretical frame. I have written and blogged about his work interminably so I will not inflict another exposition, at least a comprehensive one. Suffice it to say:
- The distinction between communicative and strategic action, oriented to rational consensus and outcome respectively, is compelling.
- No less compelling is the distinction between the lifeworld (the mundane everyday world consisting of private and public spheres and characterised by communicative action) and the system (comprising economy and state and characterised by strategic action).
- Despite the undoubted fact that the system has increasingly come to penetrate and colonise the lifeworld, it is rare that any conversation or encounter is purely communicative or purely strategic.
- As Weber would insist, we are dealing with ideal types here, though ones with important philosophical and sociological ramifications.
So this constellation of theories and concepts affords one viable frame – among many I’m sure – for a consideration of communal forms.
A second thought calls to mind a distinction between space or place and networks, and owes a lot Castells. Communities are no longer bounded spaces or places as once they were. Perhaps they have not been as geographically contained as researchers have assumed for a long time. This does not mean that space/place are unimportant, merely that community boundaries are less restrictive, and (far) less salient than hitherto. We should think in terms of networks, and of virtual networks as well as actual networks. Just (re-)imagine people in their teens in their bedrooms and on their computers in constant touch with overseas peers.
Third, I think the concepts of status/role, narrative and bonding are especially salient for studying communal forms. I shall comment briefly on each.
Status/role: status in sociology refers to one’s social position (eg vicar, teacher), and role to the behaviour associated with and expected, even ‘required’, of anyone in that status. Each individual has what Merton long ago called a status- and role-set, in other words a woman might be simultaneously a cleaner, mother, church warden and Maoist revolutionary (not necessarily in that order), and face multiple – sometimes ‘contradictory’ – cultural scripts and demands. Each person’s status- and role-sets might best be contextualised in terms of the dynamics of lifeworld/system and communicative/strategic action. Most people will inevitably be, or at least appear to be, Janus-faced as they negotiate their way from encounter to encounter. The status/role duo would seem still to be the bread and butter of community/communal studies.
Narrative: communal narratives too are no longer bounded or territorialised by space/place. Take commuters in a mid-Surrey village for example. A person can be spatially or ‘actually’ located but ‘vitually’ absent. Moreover the narratives of both self and community that matter most might increasingly be extra-geographic, as with online engagement and commitment. It would be interesting as well as important to research linkages between people’s status- and role-sets and the narratives they construct – or the stories they tell themselves and others – that make sense of their lives. How have people’s reference groups and narratives changed as communal forms have evolved?
Bonding: there are both strong and weak ‘ties’ to consider here, as well as their types and levels of association with people’s status- and role-sets and narratives. What follows is a very provisional typology or octet of forms of bonding which might just carry some weight:
- Status or symbolic bonding: people’s social positioning or standing in a community count across many – although certainly not all – interactional contexts;
- Religious bonding: religion, and more diffusely ‘spirituality’, extend well beyond the bounds of churches and congregations, but such forms of togetherness, recognition and belonging can and do include and exclude;
- Social bonding: this might best be defined in terms of banked reserves of ‘social capital’;
- Political bonding: encompassing local, spatial and other diffuse modes of intervention, either in party politics, in campaigns or in the calculated pursuit of additional cultural capital;
- Friendship bonding: one qualification: friendship comes in different shapes and sizes and is typically conditional rather than unconditional;
- Interest or event bonding: for example, sport, art, wine-tasting or voluntary work;
- Officer or ‘broker’ bonding: most communal forms feature personnel who occupy key positions, are ‘fixers’ who can ‘get things done’, and are therefore significant resources for those with focused agendas;
- Acquaintance bonding: catching in the net all those numerous, informal and multifarious relations that Aksel and I have elsewhere defined as ‘familiarity bonds’, for example, baristas, bar staff and supermarket servers who together comprise a largely unacknowledged protective support network.
This is a typology with obvious limitations, unsurprisingly since it has emerged off the top of my head. It is included here merely to hint at the potential import of bonding in the study of communal forms.
If you want more, or if your curiosity has been aroused, then await the volume I am working on with Aksel, who has himself done significant research in this field.