Revisiting the quest for community

This chapter proposes ways that social scientists can help facilitate community sustainability and reduction of inter-community conflicts. This requires broadening the traditional sociological approach to community by incorporating the role of formal institutions and individual incentives to approach community issues as public goods concerns for the larger society and embraces the need to directly engage the political process to deal with them. This approach will be more successful in gaining larger public support for troubled communities than either the view that community attachments can be treated primarily in terms of non-rational bonds or the view that community structure can be viewed simply as a reflection of economic relationships. Specific proposals include expanding the role of cooperatives and unions, bringing community sustainability into educational reform, creating institutional designs that generate incentives that improve multi-disciplinary research and reciprocal relationships between researchers and community development practitioners, and revising the tax code.