Week 10 reading: Communication constitutes community!

Community tends to be usually defined in contrastable ways like geographical vs. non-geographical or normative vs. instrumental. Lauman et al have something common with Monge and Contractor’s assumption of organizational coevolution for their explanation of community structure. Lauman et al try to understand community as interorganizational concept, rather than traditional concept. In other words, communities work as subsystems. Thus, community needs to transform or coevolute as the environment changes. Many social network theories such as resource dependency, public goods and social capital explain that how community as interorganizational entity tries to adjust itself to the environment.

On the other hand, Kim and Ball-Rokeach, and Friedland demonstrate that communication, or communicative action, is the key element to construct community. In fact, social structure can be analyzed in terms of the types of human communication and communication media. Even though Habermas’ theory of communicative action is quite normative, the concept of communicative action serves as a critical tool to analyze community structure as interogranizational entity. As Kim and Ball-Rokeach point out, communicative action is rationale discourse. However, community formation necessarily involves in emotional and affectional aspects of human actions and interactions. Therefore, the question is how we can incorporate human beings’ non-rational, emotional, affectional aspect of action and interaction into the formation processes of “communicatively integrated community.”