nach oben

Qualitative Sociology

Erschienen in:

01.06.2015

People Like Me: Shared Belief, False Consensus, and the Experience of Community

verfasst von: Melissa Fletcher Pirkey

Erschienen in: Qualitative Sociology | Ausgabe 2/2015

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

Contemporary theory on community suggests that disagreement or conflict over foundational beliefs and values greatly decreases the chance that a successful, sustainable community experience will develop. My findings suggest, however, that feelings of community can develop despite incongruous ideologies through the perception of shared beliefs and values. Using an ethnographic case of a voluntary non-profit organization, I demonstrate how three types of mechanisms operate jointly to maintain a community without shared beliefs: environmental mechanisms related to the division of labor, relational mechanisms associated with selective recruitment and homophily, and a cognitive mechanism that produces the feeling of consensus in the absence of objectively shared beliefs. These mechanisms combine to allow a powerful experience of community to flourish in a context where we might expect, based on previous research, no community experience at all. Implications for the study of community, sociology of organizations, and social psychology are discussed.

Vorheriger Artikel Group-based Microcredit & Emergent Inequality in Social Capital: Why Socio-religious Composition Matters

Nächster Artikel Fighters who Don’t Fight: The Case of Aikido and Somatic Metaphorism

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Brint (2001) describes the eight variables or properties of community relations, identified by sociologists, as 1) dense and demanding social ties; 2) social attachments to and involvements in institutions; 3) ritual occasions, and 4) small group size; 5) perceptions of similarity with the physical characteristics, expressive style, way of life, or historical experience of others; and 6) common beliefs in an idea system, a moral order, an institution, or a group.

Blee (2012) makes the distinction between those who “belong,” meaning individuals who fit the identity of the group, from “members,” as not all who “belong” are also necessarily “members.” The criteria for both belonging and membership are defined by those involved in the organization or group.

Prosumption is the process of both production and consumption, where the consumers are the producers.

A number of working definitions of intersubjectivity exist. The term is used here to communicate a mutual awareness of agreement (or disagreement).

A number of conceptualizations of “social mechanisms” have developed over time. Tilly’s understanding is distinct in its emphasis on the linking of mechanisms into social processes, as well as its attentiveness to the embedded nature of mechanisms and processes. For a comprehensive review of different conceptualizations of social mechanisms, see Hedstrom and Ylikoski (2010). Neil Gross (2009) also offers a cogent review.

Not all organizations provide or enable an experience of community, and not all experiences of community occur within organizations. For example, Pole and Gray (2012) find that many members of CSA organizations do not experience community as a result of membership, nor was achieving a sense of community a reason for joining. In contrast, residents of Buffalo Creek (Erikson 1979) lived in a state of “communality” that meets the conditions for community experience outlined at the start of this paper but are not part of any organization, formal or otherwise.

Katz (2001) argues that while the term analytic induction is commonly used, what researchers who follow this method are actually doing is retroduction, or a “double fitting” process where the observation and explanation shape each other. For this reason, Katz recommends using the term analytic research rather than analytic induction.

For the importance of cognitive boundaries in the creation of community see Zerubavel (1997), in particular the idea of “thought communities” (9). On symbolic and moral boundaries see Lamont and Molnar (2002) and Lamont (1992, 2000)

The content of the email was similar but not identical to an email linking unsubstantiated scientific claims to Johns Hopkins University, which has been in circulation since approximately 2007. http,//www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cancerupdate.asp (accessed February 4, 2013)

The Gerson Therapy is a natural treatment used for a number of illnesses including cancer. Solid foods, including organic yogurt, are permissible while following the Gerson Therapy. For more information, see www.gerson.org

Campbell, Thom M. 2004. The China Study. Dallas: BenBella Books

In her work on social movement groups, Blee (2012) notes that not all who belong are members. She finds that when persons involved with an activist group disagree with the group’s definition of “who we are” and “what we’re doing here”—essentially, who belongs—and display this divergence in action or through word, those who do belong (according to the present agreed upon criteria) may respond negatively, or simply ignore the individual, creating opportunity for tension and conflict to arise.

Aldrich, H.E., and M. Ruef. 2006. Organizations evolving. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Astley, W.G. 1985. The two ecologies: Population and community perspectives on organizational evolution. Administrative Science Quarterly 30: 224–241.CrossRef

Bellah, R., R. Madsen, W.M. Sullivan, A. Swidler, and S.M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the heart, individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blee, K. 2012. Democracy in the making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef

Bosveld, W., W. Koomen, and J. Vander-Pligt. 1994. Selective exposure and the false consensus effect: The availability of similar and dissimilar others. British Journal of Social Psychology 33: 457–66.CrossRef

Brint, S. 2001. Gemeinschaft revisited: A critique and reconstruction of the community concept. Sociological Theory 19: 1–23.CrossRef

Brown, C., and S. Miller. 2008. The impacts of local markets: A review of research on farmers markets and community supported agriculture. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 90: 1296–1302.CrossRef

Brown-Saracino, J. 2004. Social preservationists and the quest for authentic community. City & Community 3: 135–156.CrossRef

Calhoun, C. 1980. Community: Toward a variable reconceptualization for comparative research. Social History 5: 105–29.CrossRef

Choi, K., and B. Cho. 2010. Competing hypotheses analyses of the associations between group task conflict and group relationship conflict. Journal of Organizational Behavior 32: 1106–1126.CrossRef

Cohen, J.M. 1977. Sources of peer group homogeneity. Sociology of Education 50: 227–241.CrossRef

Cooley, J., and D.A. Lass. 1998. Consumer benefits from community supported agriculture membership. Review of Agricultural Economics 20: 227–237.CrossRef

Cummings, J.N., L. Sproull, and S.B. Kiesler. 2002. Beyond hearing: Where real-world and online support meet. Group Dynamics, Theory, Research, and Practice 6: 78–88.CrossRef

Deutsch, F.M. 1988. When friends lead us astray: Evidence for the selective exposure hypothesis. Journal of Social Psychology 128: 271–73.CrossRef

Donmoyer, R. 1990. Generalizability and the single case study. In Qualitative inquiry in education, the continuing debate, ed. E. Eisner and A. Peshkin, 175–99. New York: Teachers College Press.

Erikson, K.T. 1979. Everything in its path. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Etzioni, A. 2001. Is bowling together sociologically lite? Contemporary Sociology 30: 223–24.CrossRef

Fine, G.A. 1987. Community and boundary: Personal experience stories of mushroom collectors. Journal of Folklore Research 24: 223–240.

Firestone, W.A. 1993. Alternative arguments for generalizing from data as applied to qualitative research. Educational Researcher 22: 16–23.CrossRef

Gross, N. 2009. A pragmatist theory of social mechanisms. American Sociological Review 74: 358–379.CrossRef

Hedstrom, P., and P. Ylikoski. 2010. Causal mechanisms in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 36: 49–67.CrossRef

Hillery, G.A. 1955. Definitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural Sociology 20: 111–123.

Hinrichs, C.C. 2000. Embeddedness and local food systems: Notes on two types of direct agricultural market. Journal of Rural Studies 16: 295–303.CrossRef

Jehn, K.A. 1995. A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly 40: 256–282.CrossRef

Jehn, K.A., and E.A. Mannix. 2001. The dynamic nature of conflict: A longitudinal study of intergroup conflict and group performance. Academy of Management Journal 44: 238–251.CrossRef

Jehn, K.A., G.B. Northcraft, and M.A. Neale. 1999. Why differences make a difference: A field study of diversity, conflict, and performance in workgroups. Administrative Science Quarterly 44: 741–763.CrossRef

Jindra, M. 1994. Star Trek fandom as a religious phenomenon. Sociology of Religion 55: 27–51.CrossRef

Jussim, L., and D. Wayne Osgood. 1989. Influence and similarity among friends: An integrative model applied to incarcerated adolescents. Social Psychology Quarterly 52: 98–112.CrossRef

Kandel, D.B. 1978. Homophily, selection, and socialization in adolescent friendships. American Journal of Sociology 84: 427–436.

Kanter, R.M. 1972. Commitment and community, communes and utopias in sociological perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kanter, R.M. 1977. Men and women of the corporation. New York: Basic Books.

Katz, J. 2001a. From how to why: On luminous description and causal inference in ethnography, part 1. Ethnography 2: 443–73.CrossRef

Keller, S. 2003. Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kitts, J.A. 2003. Egocentric bias or information management? selective disclosure and the social roots of norm misperception. Social Psychology Quarterly 66: 222–37.CrossRef

Lamont, M. 1992. Money, morals, and manners, the culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRef

Lamont, M. 2000. The dignity of working men. New York: Russell Sage.

Lamont, M., and V. Molnar. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–195.CrossRef

Lass, Daniel, G.W. Stevenson, John Hendrickson, Kathy Ruhf. 2003a. CSA across the nation, findings from the 1999 CSA survey. Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lass, Daniel, Ashley Bevis, G.W. Stevenson, John Hendrickson, and Kathy Ruhf. 2003b. Community supported agriculture entering the 21^st century, results from the 2001 national survey. Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Lawler, E.J., S.R. Thye, and J. Yoon. 2000. Emotion and group cohesion in productive exchange. American Journal of Sociology 106: 616–657.CrossRef

Lazarsfeld, P., and R.K. Merton. 1954. Friendship as social process: A substantive and methodological analysis. In Freedom and control in modern society, ed. M. Berger, T. Abel, and C. Page, 18–66. New York: Octagon Books.

Marks, G., and N. Miller. 1987. Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect, an empirical and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin 102: 72–90.CrossRef

McPherson, J.M., and L. Smith-Lovin. 1987. Homophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups. American Sociological Review 52: 370–379.CrossRef

McPherson, J.M., L. Smith-Lovin, and J.M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415–44.CrossRef

Mitchell, J.C. 1983. Case and situation analysis. Sociological Review 31: 187–211.CrossRef

O’Mahony, S., and K.R. Lakhani. 2011. Organizations in the shadow of communities. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 33: 3–36.CrossRef

Pole, A., and M. Gray. 2012. Farming alone? what’s up with the “C” in community supported agriculture? Agriculture and Human Values 30: 85–100.CrossRef

Putnam, R.D. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster.CrossRef

Reuf, M., H.E. Aldrich, and N.M. Carter. 2003. The structure of founding teams: Homophily, strong ties, and isolation among U.S. entrepreneurs. American Sociological Review 68: 195–222.CrossRef

Ritzer, G., and N. Jurgenson. 2010. Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital “prosumer”. Journal of Consume Culture 10: 13–37.CrossRef

Ross, L., D. Greene, and P. House. 1977. The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13: 279–301.CrossRef

Rothschild, J., and J. Allen Whitt. 1986. The cooperative workplace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schnell, S.M. 2007. Food with a farmer’s face: Community-supported agriculture in the United States.”. The Geographical Review 97: 530–564.

Seidel, M.-D.L., and K.J. Stewart. 2011. An initial description of the C-form. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 33: 37–72.CrossRef

Selznick, P. 1992. The moral commonwealth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Small, M.L. 2009. How many case studies do i need? on science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography 10: 5–38.CrossRef

Stroope, S. 2011. How culture shapes community: Bible belief, theological unity, and a sense of belonging in religious congregations. The Sociological Quarterly 52: 568–592.CrossRef

Thompson, J.D. 1967. Organizations in action. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Thornton, P.H., W. Ocasio, and M. Lounsbury. 2012. The institutional logics perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef

Tilly, C. 2001. Mechanisms in political process. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21–41.CrossRef

Tönnies, F. 2001. Community and civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef

U.S. Department of Agriculture. National Agricultural Statistics Service. 2009. 2007 Census of Agriculture. Washington, D.C.

Vaisey, S. 2007. Structure, culture, and community: The search for belonging in 50 urban communes. American Sociological Review 72: 851–873.CrossRef

Wilkins, A.L., and W.G. Ouchi. 1983. Efficient cultures: Exploring the relationship between culture and organizational performance. Administrative Science Quarterly 28: 468–481.CrossRef

Zerubavel, E. 1997. Social mindscapes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Titel: People Like Me: Shared Belief, False Consensus, and the Experience of Community
verfasst von: Melissa Fletcher Pirkey
Publikationsdatum: 01.06.2015
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Qualitative Sociology / Ausgabe 2/2015
Print ISSN: 0162-0436
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7837
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-015-9303-6

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 2/2015

Group-based Microcredit & Emergent Inequality in Social Capital: Why Socio-religious Composition Matters

When Less is More: On Time Work in Long-Distance Relationships

Sexual Selves and Sexual Lives

Organizing Documents: Standard Forms, Person Production and Organizational Action

Fighters who Don’t Fight: The Case of Aikido and Somatic Metaphorism