Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations [Hardcover]

Although the way associations and the organization of local social life are intertwined is one of the oldest approaches to community study, the way citizens and residents come together informally to act and solve problems has rarely been a primary focus. Associations are central to important and developing areas of social theory and social action. This handbook takes voluntary associations as the starting point for making sense of communities. It offers a new perspective on voluntary organizations and gives an integrated, yet diverse, theoretical understanding of this important aspect of community life.

This handbook takes voluntary associations as the starting point for making sense of communities. It offers a new perspective on voluntary organizations and gives an integrated, yet diverse, theoretical understanding of this important aspect of community life.

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 scholl¹