Concept of community?
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:date: 2005-09-23T23:45:00
:category: research

First of all, this is what I’ve got from a member of my dissertation
committee:

    What you propose so far is quite interesting, but I still do not get
    a clear sense of how you propose to study the Boston Miracle. The
    theories you review are there for explaining crime, but how you link
    them to the kind of response that produced the so called Boston
    Miracle needs to be better delineated. I was disappointed in the
    methodology.  This seems to need considerable work. Your proposal to
    look at newspaper reports is quite sensible. But that doesn’t go far
    enough in telling what exactly you’ll be looking for in those
    reports. You need to expand this section. All I can tell from your
    proposal is that you wish to study newspaper reports and how they
    represented minorities during this time of crisis. If so I would
    think that the data at various points are rather thin. You might
    want to take a sample of what you think might be out there and code
    accordingly to make the better case for what you propose to do and
    how you propose to do it.

    Suggestion:

    Given your interest in bureaucracy and where you were raised why not
    take a critical and deeper look at the concept of community? It is
    so often used and yet it has come to mean so many things to say many
    people. You use it. Others do as well. Community policing, community
    organization, etc. etc.… You could show how the concept of community
    has driven the Boston miracle, and how the term community has been
    used in the media. This I think would allow you to work with a wider
    set of data and enable you to draw on the Boston miracle as just one
    example of how community is used as a concept and as a way of
    explaining social change.  You can even divide this literature into
    that which relates the internal and external attributions of
    community. For instance, you could suggest that the Boston miracle
    is empirically related to newspaper attributions that see the change
    related to internal as opposed to external representations of
    community. External representations I would say link the community
    to the broader political economy, while internal representations
    emphasize the local political economy and the values of those
    directly involved in the community. External would be foundation
    support, federal and state economic aid, etc.…

This is a lot. Basically, if I understand this correctly, he suggests to
throw away most of what I have done so far and begin again. On the other
hand, there is a part of me agreeing with him—it seems that there really
may not be that much explicit about the image of the community. I would
have to interpret even more from the given material—which could lead to
pretty stupid conclusions (given my lack of local knowledge), or to
something really interesting and new.

Which leads me again to the necessity of going through fundamental
conceptual stuff and makes me less certain that I know what I am talking
about. I mean, is it really possible to find out something that’s really
going on out there, or do I just write again my superstitions into the
previously created myth of “The Boston Miracle”? Should I just write how
wonderful it is when people work together, talk about each other nicely,
and kill each other less often? All that could be covered into nice
“scientific” labels of “social capital”, “trust”, or “civic society”?

I am afraid, that after all scientific talking is said and done, it may
come down to the question which story I am willing to take as a base of
my own thinking. Unfortunately, there isn’t just one story to be
told—the one about good pastors raising up the community and empowering
themselves to fight crime. There is also much more sad story about the
Ten-point Coallition which is (according to some spoken and unconfirmed
information) more or less broke, about former co-workers (Rev. Hammond
and Rev. Rivers) who were bashing each other in public (that was couple
of years ago—what is the situation now?). The latter story may be really
about the non-profit organization paid by the federal money which run
out (was it because its own success and thus less need to prevent crime
or because of the general economic downturn and need to save federal
money or maybe even about the cutting down the federal budget?). The
last possible story which comes to my mind is altogether nasty—about
white voters supporting government’s support of the anti-crime
prevention when fearing blacks to kill them (while killing each other),
but hesitant to continue when the situation has turned better. The last
two stories have in common that they understand TPC success as a seed of
its own problems—maybe that is worthy to be investigated.

However, the last story, about fearful voters, can be at least to some
degree verified, because at least some (indirect, self-censored,
politically very correct, to be sure) footprints should be possible to
find in newspapers, if there is at least some level of this discussion
in the readers’ community (whatever such community means, yes).