• What is a community?
• What is community sustainability?
• What is globalization?
• What is social capital?
• What is human security?

Community may be usefully contrasted with other categories such as a ‘municipality’ or ‘nation-state’. A municipality is, for the most part, an administrative or organizational precinct. Within any one municipality we tend to find different communities. A municipality can thus stretch across and integrate different communities, many of which cross its territorial borders. In saying this, we do not mean that people do not have an attachment to municipalities.

On the contrary, they may feel quite passionately about their municipality—as evidenced, for example, by opposition to municipal amalgamations. Similarly, a nation-state may be defined as a community-polity that at one level is made up of one community—the self-defined nation. However, at other levels it includes many cross-cutting communities, including those that stretch transnationally.

The concept of community was established in the English language with an open definition that derived from the Latin for relations or feelings in common. By the nineteenth century community came to refer to more immediate relationship of commonality as compared to the more abstract concepts of society, polity and state. However, the concept still retained its defining condition as being a category of people with relations in common.

Thus we arrive at the situation where community stands in parallel but distinct from concepts such as polity. In this sense ‘community’ refers to a group or collection of people, while ‘polity’ for example refers to the organizational form that those people either bring into being or is instituted to support them. One of the important implications of this point about ‘people with relations in common’ is that a community can be any size, from a few people living in a local neighbourhood to a nation of millions of people. Sometimes we even talk of a ‘global community’. In the very particular case of the nation-state we have a parallel community-polity — the nation is the pre-eminent community and the state is the polity. Here the community is the public. At the other end of the size spectrum, say in the case of a local neighbourhood, the sense of community depends upon face-to-face proximity rather than a set of relations mediated by an organizing structure. Here the community is a localized group of people who are known to each other. In between these two forms of community — face-to-face and national — there are a whole diverse range of mid-sized community forms that are defined by common interests rather than by institutional arrangements.

In tracking the etymology of the concept of community, the noted cultural theorist, Raymond Williams writes that ‘The complexity of community thus relates to the difficult interaction between the tendencies originally distinguished in the historical development: on the one hand the sense of direct common concern; on the other hand the materialization of various forms of common organization, which may or may not adequately express this’ (Keywords, 1976). In other words, community is often linked to but does not depend upon its one-to-one relation to an organizing body. Just as a nation can exist without a state, a community can be said to exist without a formal organizational structure.

This has obvious implications for ‘community studies’. Community in this sense does not necessarily refer to a formally organized group of people. In most kinds of community it is not possible for an organization that serves the community to name each individual who is a member of that community. Rather the process of relating to a community and as a community involves self-definition with each individual deciding whether or not they actively want to be part of that community and partake of the various services and relations that are available to them. Here the element of possible participation is crucial. The key issue is simply that self-defined members of that community participate whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously in defining the habitus of that community. Taken from the opposite angle, any number of institutions can contribute to the reproduction of a particular community.

Summing up the key points so far, we can say that (1) a community can be of any size; (2) belonging to a community-of-interest involves self-definition; (3) a community, even a national community, does not necessarily have a one-to-one relationship with a given organization form or service provider; (4) a community, any community, cannot be defined in exclusive or absolute terms.

Clarifying the Definition of Community

To define the contemporary meaning of community more precisely we need to break down the concept into its key dimensions. Community is best defined in terms of specifiable characteristics of commonality where this commonality is more immediate than that of attachment to entities such as the public sphere, society or the state.

While community has a more concrete reference point than the more abstract concept of public sphere, the concept of the community sits at the same level of abstraction as the concept of the public. This means, for example, in a modern media society ‘the community’ and ‘the public’ can be the same thing, or alternatively a community can be a section of the public.

The two key distinguishing concepts here—commonality and immediacy—are defined loosely in contemporary parlance, though we can still draw out some defining features.

The commonality that pertains to community has the following features, some of which we have already begun to broach:

1. Expressions of commonality increasingly involve self-defined attachment based on various markers of identity. This self-definition of belonging to a community is not ephemeral but neither does it tend to be fixed in time. This means that the interests of a community will inevitably shift and change.
2. There are numerous markers of commonality or identity: ethnicity, sexual preference, age-cohort, self-defined interest, spatial proximity and so on.
3. In modern forms of community the boundaries of these different dimensions of commonality fade off at their edges rather than demarcate fixed groups of people. In tribal or traditional forms of community, the boundaries of commonality are constituted in quite different ways.
4. Modern communities, even localized ones, tend to overlap and overlay each other in the same spatial area. Unlike medieval villages, modern communities, even local ones, tend not to be situated in discrete and separable spatial areas. Tribal or localized traditional communities by contrast tend to be grounded in embodied places.

1. Rather than being defined by embodied presence or intimacy, the immediacy of modern community is defined more against the abstract relation of persons to the state, civil society, and market. By comparison, tribal and localized traditional communities tend to be defined in terms of immediately available face-to-face forms of integration. In other words, the form of immediacy in different kinds of communities can take different ontological forms
2. Modern communities may be increasingly abstract in objective terms, but they still look to some sort of subjective immediacy. As modern-postmodern society has become objectively more mediated, extended and mobile, many groups have become vulnerable to losing the sense of face-to-face immediacy that was available to them through institutions of community-building such as through schools. The literature on community in Western countries indicates that families with children at school tend to be those most bound into local community in a sustained way. For the older generation with children having left home and with the mobility of work lifting them out of the lived neighbourhoods of old, those people without substantial financial and social support are often placed in vulnerable positions of possible isolation.
3. Rather than being defined by size or confined to an immediate locale, the immediacy of a modern community is lived as an imagined relation to others.
4. Different forms of immediacy tend to overlay each other, just as any one community can be characterized by overlaying and different forms of integration.

It is more specific in that it looks at the practices and actions that are needed at the micro-level that either contribute to or hinder sustainability. Yet it is also more expansive in that it potentially moves beyond schematic, instrumental accounts of development which focus narrowly on the economic dimensions of development, to encompass the social and cultural aspects of how communities cohere through time (Lubbers 1999, 3).

However, outside of an ecological or economic framework, little research work exists on the potential of cultural practices in strengthening communities (Hart 1999). Furthermore, even within these frameworks, there is little agreement on what community sustainability entails beyond a very general level. Drawing on the work of Roseland and Fraser, for example, Voth and Moon (1997, 4) identify four broad categories of research literature on community sustainability. The first group called ‘Designers’, including architects and planning professionals, frame community sustainability in terms of planning processes.

The second group, ‘Practitioners’, including politicians, local government officials and community groups and organizations, define community primarily in terms of municipalities or similar administrative units. Their focus of sustainability are ecological issues.

The third group, ‘Visionaries’, including agriculturalists, economists, architects, and planning professionals, are said to be those who define communities in terms of association and interest and focus on issues of economic development, appropriate use of technology and energy conservation.

Finally, ‘Activists’, including environmentalists, people interested in bio-regionalism, social ecologists and others’ are those whose focus is on the social impacts on the natural environment. Despite the burgeoning literature on community sustainability, and nothing many of its positives, including the emphasis on communities as agents of change and sites of participatory decision-making, Voth and Moon (1997, 26) conclude that “the idea of community sustainability per se hardly exists … Vague abstractions like ‘social capital’ are discussed, but few details are provided about what really makes a community sustainable in terms of infrastructure, economics, culture, decision-making processes, and so on”.

Chris Scanlon



What is Globalization?

The terms associated with ‘globalism’ appear to be the easiest set of concepts in the world to define. In one way, globalization is simply the spatial extension of social relations across the globe. It is literally evoked in the picture that we have become accustomed to seeing in satellite photographs. However, that definition leaves us concentrating on the last few decades. A working definition of the cluster of terms around ‘globalism’ begins by relating the various intersecting modes of practice, including the modes of communication, production and exchange, to their extension across world-space.

Across human history, as those practices have at one level become more materially abstract, they have maintained or increased their intensity while becoming more extensive and generalized. Globalization is thus most simply the name given to the matrix of those practices as they extend across world-space. Exemplary contemporary systems of materially powerful but disembodied extension include the stamping presses of finance capital, electronic warfare, or electronic broadcast culture.

There are, however, earlier or more concrete forms of globalization that need to be incorporated into any definition. There are lines of global connection carried by agents of the early expansionist imperial states, by traders on the silk routes, and by crusading war-makers going off to smash the infidels simply because they were there, living in the same world. These lines of connection were conducted through a quite different matrix of assumptions than those that sit behind contemporary globalization. The crusaders did not draw on ideologies of ideologies of justice or freedom to defend these activities, whereas, by a remarkable reversal of sentiments, George W. Bush began the ‘War on Terror’ by first calling it a crusade.

Thus, in summary, globalization can be defined as the unevenly structured manifold of social relations, materially enacted through one or more of the various dominant modes of practice—exchange, production, communication, organization and enquiry—and extended across world-space, where the notion of ‘world-space’ is itself defined in the historically variable terms that it has been practiced and understood phenomenally through changing world-time. It is thus a process, a matrix of ongoing material practices enacted in the name of historically changing sets of ideological clothing.

The associated concept of ‘globalism’ is defined as the dominant matrix of ideologies and subjectivities associated with different historical formations of global extension. The definition thus implies that there were pre-modern or traditional forms of globalism and globalization long before the driving force of capitalism sought to colonize every corner of the globe, for example, going back to the Roman Empire in the second century A.D., and perhaps to the Greeks of the fifth-century B.C. As the Roman Empire drew lines of practical connection across vast expanses of the known world, Claudius Ptolemaeus (c90-c150) revived the Hellenic belief in the Pythagorean theory of a spherical globe. He wrote systematically about a world-space stretching from Caledonia and Anglia to what became known as Java Minor.

Alongside the secular empire, the Roman Catholic Church, as its name suggests—katholikos universal, kata in respect of, holos the whole—had globalizing pretensions. This does not mean that globalism was the dominant or even a generalized understanding of the world. Sacred universalism is not necessarily the same as globalism. By contrast to the European clerics of globalization, the Chinese form of universalism was inwardly turned. For example, although the Celestial Kingdom had produced printed atlases that date long before the European Ortelius’s supposedly first historical atlas, early maps of China show the world as fading off beyond the ‘natural extent’ of territory. While new evidence suggests that the Chinese may have travelled the world, this does not mean that they acted through a subjectivity of globalism. In other words, the Chinese centred their empire, whereas the Romans globally extended theirs.

If the Roman Peutinger Table is any indication, the Roman worldview was globalizing to the extent that it travelled in geometric lines that stretched as far as the travelling eyes of the agents of Empire could see. In the current context, it does not matter whether or not the United States has the same territorial ambitions as the Romans. Globalizing imperialism can in different historical contexts take the territorialized form of extending embodied or institutional power or, in the present period, the territorializing form of making the world safe for globalizing democracy.

Paul James



What is Social Capital?

"Social capital" refers to informal networks and relations of trust, cooperation, tolerance, mutual support and reciprocity which, in one way or another, work to bind social actors together. Advocates of social capital make distinctions between “informal and formal social capital” (formal being organized by institutions, while informal being within family and friend networks) “thick” (relations with workmates who one spends leisure time with, for example) and “thin” (such as nodding acquaintances) social capital, and ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital. ‘Bonding’ social capital refers to social capital that is focused inward to bind groups together. In some respects, this is necessarily exclusive. Bridging social capital, by contrast, is focused outside of particular groups. These are social relationships that bind different groups together and tend to be horizontally structured; in other words, they are networks between people who are roughly equal in terms of power and status. Other researchers have sought to delineate ‘linking’ social capital, which refers to social relations that link individuals from different social strata together (See Putnam 2002: 9-12 and Woolcock 2001: 13).

The concept of social capital has been developed and elaborated by a number of authors, including the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984), the US sociologist James Coleman (1988), and theorists and writers like Eva Cox (1995) Francis Fukuyama (1995) and Robert Putnam. Although he was not the first to use the concept, most contemporary discussions of social capital in the United Kingdom, North America and Australia take the work of US sociologist James Coleman as their point of reference. Coleman defines social capital in the following way: "If physical capital is wholly tangible, being embodied in observable material form, and human capital is less tangible, being embodied in the skills and knowledge acquired by an individual, social capital is less tangible yet, for it exists in the relations between people" (Coleman 1988, S100). Advocates of social capital argue that increasing and strengthening bonds social trust and co-operation reduces crime can increase academic, improve health and wellbeing, strengthen and revitalises participation in the institutions of civil society thereby strengthening democracy, and increases economic efficiency. Although most writers on the subject regard social capital in a positive light, most also acknowledge that the kinds of social bonds identified by the concept are not always desirable. For example, terrorist and racist organisations are as dependent on bonds of mutual support, trust and reciprocity to achieve their respective goals as are charter schools and retail co-operatives.

Other commentators are critical of the concept. Ben Fine (2001), for example argues that the prevalence of social capital in policy debates is an expression of the extent to which the social sciences have been "colonised" by the discipline of economics and its concepts. Christopher Scanlon argues that the concept works to naturalise a particular social form, one structured through fleeting, abstract connections to others. The term "capital" suggests a social form that is fluid and mobile, unbounded and
limitless and thus untied to any particular context; disembedded from the particular and the local and the parochial, open, extended in space and time. Where social capital is taken to be a substitute for other ways of thinking and talking about collective social relations, such as community, it works to ideologically naturalise the re-structuring of social life in this the image of this more fluid and unbounded way, as if all social relations can be lived in this way.

Further reading

Proponents of Social Capital

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul

Coleman, J. S. (1988). ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’, American Journal of Sociology 94, Supplement, pp. S95-S120.

Cox, E. and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (1995). A Truly Civil Society. Sydney, NSW, ABC Books.

Fukuyama, F. (1996) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, London, Penguin

Putnam, R. D., Feldstein, L. M. and Cohen, D. (2003). Better Together: Restoring the American Community. New York, Simon & Schuster.

Putnam, R. D. (2002). Democracies in Flux The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society.
New York, Oxford University Press.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival Of American Community, New York, Simon & Schuster

Woolcock, M. (2001). ‘The Place of Social Capital in Understanding Social and Economic Outcomes’, ISUMA Canadian Journal of Policy Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring, pp. 11-17. URL: http://isuma.net/v02n01/woolcock/woolcock_e.pdf Accessed 2 September, 2004.

Critical Discussions

Fine, B. (2001). Social Capital Versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millenium. London, Routledge.

Scanlon, Christopher (2004) ‘What’s Wrong with Social Capital?’, Blue Book no. 8 Australian Fabian Society Pamphlet no. 63, Arena Magazine, no. 69 February–March

What is Human Security?

This entails examining accepted political, social and economic arrangements and forms of organization that either undermine individual welfare (whether it be the structure of the international economy that creates or furthers poverty or the denial of full citizenship rights to minority groups in particular states) or retard the potential to which individual insecurity can be fundamentally redressed.

Clearly, this conception of security (as human security) widens the ambit of what factors should be considered to be security threats, and what agents are capable of redressing these threats. For its part, the UNDP identifies a range of human security ‘sectors’: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. Importantly, these sectors or components are seen as fundamentally inter-dependent, again pointing to the role of the structural bases of security threats. The structural nature of these concerns provides some conceptual clarity to the concept of human security, whilst allowing for a range of actions and actors to be considered.

The study of security and the sources of insecurity must, for proponents of human security, extend beyond the study of the threat or use of force between states in international relations. It must investigate and interrogate the role of a range of (often accepted) forms of organization and practice that serve to undermine individual well-being throughout the world every day.

This conception of security reflects the reality of what security means for the vast majority of individuals throughout the world (who are usually more at risk through hunger, disease and environmental change than armed conflict). It serves as a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of, and approaches to, security that ignore these sources of insecurity at best, and contribute to them at worst.

This approach does not seek to ignore military conflict as a fundamental basis for insecurity, but does seek to point to the various other ways in which we might begin to think about, and practice, security. It is an approach that requires an alteration in our ethical assumptions to consider, more fully, the nature of obligations beyond the borders of the nation-state and towards the most vulnerable both domestically and internationally.

Matt McDonald