This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Programme, took the form of a review of concepts and meanings used by social science disciplines when thinking about community.
Community is a term which is widely used both within government, the voluntary sector and social science literature. Many initiatives and programmes both within Britain and across the world use the term ´community´ as a key term for understanding and intervening in social policy. But what is community? Are the programmes targeted at strengthening community and social cohesion achieving their purported aims?Are conceptualisations and meanings common across a spectrum of interventions and descriptive studies? Is there a common conception of what a community is? Do government, social policy and other organisations working on community share the same assumptions as the social science academics? What impact do any differences in conception or meaning have on how policy initiatives might work or whether they succeed?
There is a need to think coherently and deeply about community, if these questions are to be answered as community is precisely the arena where these programmes take place. Interventions need to be designed in such a way that they produce the success that they are striving for. Such a process must begin with the question: how do current social science and policy stakeholders conceptualise community and are the concepts adequate to the tasks at hand? Are they coherent across theory, research and practice? What do they have in common and what can they learn from each other? This study undertook such a review as a first step in formulating a deeper understanding of what contemporary community is. The benefits of such a review are deep and potentially herald a better linking of policy, theory and research so that each informs the other, promoting the possibility of more coherent and clearly policy-related formulation of research within the Connected Communities programme and a better understanding by policy-makers about the ways that community is understood within social science. As Studdert (2006) argued, to make effective interventions into communities, we must understand what community is, rather than taking it as a given whose meaning can simply be assumed.
The project produced a comprehensive conceptual review that links theoretical underpinnings with the usage of the concepts of community in empirical research and describes the manner in which these conceptulisations appear in government and non-government sector policies and practices.
The social science disciplines included were: Sociology, social psychology, education, anthropology, geography, criminology, health studies, cultural studies (social science approaches) and community studies.
On this website you can find our review, related papers and documents and a summary document for policy makers and community activists and practitioners. We argue that conceptualising community is very important because of the ways in which interventions are framed in terms of concepts, has an enormous bearing on what is then done in the name of Community.
