Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   • Ram Cnaan, Carl Milofsky, Albert Hunter

   Pages 1-19

3. Contemporary Conceptions of Community

   • Albert Hunter

   Pages 20-33

4. Symbolism, Tradition, Ritual, and the Deep Structure of Communities

   • Peter Dobkin Hall

   Pages 34-59

5. Small Towns and Mass Society

   • Carl Milofsky

   Pages 60-73

6. Small Nonprofits and Civil Society: Civic Engagement and Social Capital

   • Jo Anne Schneider

   Pages 74-88

7. Community Elites and Power Structure

   • Rikki Abzug

   Pages 89-101

8. The Political-Economic Gradient and the Organization of Urban Space

   • Robert P. Fairbanks II

   Pages 102-117

9. Public and Private Space in Urban Areas: House, Neighborhood, and City

   • Eugenie L. Birch

   Pages 118-128

10. The Development of Community Information Systems to Support Neighborhood Change

    • Dennis Culhane, Bradley Breuer

    Pages 129-145

11. Describing the Community in Thorough Detail

    • Sonya Salamon

    Pages 146-162

12. Communities as “Big Small Groups”: Culture and Social Capital

    • Michael Reisch, Dana Guyet

    Pages 163-178

13. Sense of Community and Community Building

    • Mary Hyde, David Chavis

    Pages 179-192

14. Friendship and Community Organization

    • Rebecca G. Adams, Koji Ueno

    Pages 193-210

15. Self-Help Groups as Participatory Action

    • Thomasina Borkman

    Pages 211-226

16. Online Communities

    • Gustavo S. Mesch

    Pages 227-242

17. Alternative or Intentional? Towards a Definition of “Unusual” Communities

    • Ayala Cnaan, Steve Breyman

    Pages 243-256

18. Frayed Community: The Gated Community Movement

    • Edward J. Blakely

    Pages 257-266

19. Congregations and Communities

    • Joy Charlton

    Pages 267-280

20. Ethnicity and Race as Resource Mobilization in American Community Civic Life and Participation: Traditional and Emerging Concerns

    • John H. Stanfield II

    Pages 281-294

Creating a Frame for Understanding Local Organizations RAM CNAAN, CARL MILOFSKY, AND ALBERT HUNTER In this book, scholars from anumber of disciplines present work focused on communities, with particular attention to community organizations. A few scholars have emphasized the imp- tance of the need to map this intellectual territory (Calhoun, 1992). In some ways community study seems to be well trodden ground; there has been influential work on social capital, for example (Coleman, 1987,1988; Putnam, 1995; Foley and Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Foley, 1998). Yet the rich diversity of communities and community organizations has rarely been studied from a perspective that is both conceptual and descriptive. The growing sense that - studied local organizations constitute a massive yet little understood portion of the nonprofit cosmos has led Smith (1997a,b) to call them the "darkmatter of the nonprofit universe. " An - terdisciplinary attempt to make community a unit ofstudy has not been previously undertaken, and thus we feel that this Handbook makes a unique contribution to scholarly understanding ofboth communities and nonprofit organizations that operate at the community level. A community is a group of people connected by the physical or virtual location (to some extent we can speak of "places" on the World Wide Web, e. g. ) in which they dwell or congregate, organizations they form, and cultural values and symbols they share. Communities are affected, and in a sense defined by, forces that affect community members and their space.

• Community Groups
• Nation
• Nonprofit
• Policy
• Volunteer

• School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

  Ram A. Cnaan

• Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, USA

  Carl Milofsky

Policies and ethics