Researching Community in the 21st Century: An Annotated Bibliography
By Alice Mah and Graham Crow, Southampton University
August 2011
Introduction
This AHRC-funded Connected Communities annotated bibliography includes 100 annotations of works published since 2000 on the theme 'Conceptualisations and meanings of "community": the theory and operationalisation of a contested concept'. There has been much new thinking on the concept of community and many new empirical studies of community, with emerging themes including virtual communities, participatory methods and communities of practice, and key debates around community cohesion, resilient communities and sustainable communities, amongst many others. In this annotated bibliography, we take stock of developments in community research in the 21st century, limiting our selection of work to the period between 2000 and 2011, particularly works in the latter half of this period, in order to provide scope to trace changes and continuities with previous eras of community research. This new body of literature builds on previous surveys of theoretical and empirical developments in community research (cf. Bauman 2001, Crow 2002, Crow and Allan 1994, Hoggett 1997), and the relationship between new and previous community research will be explored in the accompanying research report.
We aimed to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible in this annotated bibliography, but with hundreds of relevant texts to choose from, we also had to be selective. In choosing texts for inclusion in our list of 100, we outlined several criteria: 1) a wide range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods across the sample[1], reflecting diverse and innovative ways of 'operationalising' community; 2) a wide range of disciplines across the arts and humanities and social sciences ; 3) a wide range of substantive themes and ways of conceptualising and theorising 'community', including the work of scholars who reject the term 'community' in favour of related terms such as 'neighbourhood', 'locality', or 'network'; 4) a strong international and comparative dimension, with a number of contributions focusing specifically on the UK (approximately 2/5) but also a range of other countries represented; and 5) a range of types of publication, including monographs, edited books, journal articles, policy reports and PhD theses[2], with a larger number of books than articles because books tend to have more in-depth discussion of research methods. After identifying a long-list of potential items for inclusion in the study, we narrowed down our final 100 works through consulting with an interdisciplinary advisory board of five experts (including academics and policy practitioners), and also through considering references that were recommended by 15 expert interviewees.
Finally, we aimed to explore interconnections and points of contrast across the research by looking at studies which address similar topics through different methods, use similar methods to address different topics, and/or have very different theoretical approaches to similar topics. Throughout the annotated bibliography, we have identified some of these interconnections through the use of an asterisk (*) next to the name of the author(s).
[1] Most of the studies used a combination of two or more methods, with the following approximate* breakdown of methods covered: 40 interviews, 24 ethnographies (or participant observation), 22 case studies, 23 policy analyses, 15 statistics or surveys, 14 discourse, media or textual analyses, 14 visual methods, 14 historical and archival methods, , 12 participatory methods, 7 focus groups, 6 network analyses, 6 online/virtual, 3 mobile methods, 2 GIS, 1 complexity, 1 ethnology, 1 ethnomethodology. *Given the wide range of methods covered and the different ways that researchers described their methods, more of each of these methods may have been represented across the sample, but this gives a rough idea of the general range and distribution.
[2] We would have liked to include more PhD theses because a great deal of the most interesting empirical work on community is found within in-depth doctoral field studies, but we found that only a limited number of relevant PhD theses were widely accessible in digital format. Two useful databases for locating recent PhD theses are: http://www.theses.com/default.asp and http://ethos.bl.uk/AdvancedSearch.do?new=1.