Are social science definitions of community adequate? Or do community members have anything to say about that? Mary Parker Follett (the relevant work is her The new state, 1918) suggests that understanding community is a key to resolving the problem of political participation.
Taking the reader through a conscious protocol of asking people about their idea of community, the author seeks to show that the so called "subjects" do have something to say to experts in concept formulation. The case of the community concept is used to challenge a basic assumption of social science, the fallacy that all social experience can be reduced by a methodological individualism.
The Public Administration literature at large looks at community from the outside in, in a static way as if it were an object, an immutable entity. My interest lies in the lived process of participating in community as a foundation for democratic politics. This seems to require searching out the meanings that people attach to community when they use it to describe their experiences of living with one another in a way that shapes their civic engagement experiences.
The research question guiding this study is: What does community mean to the people who live in one? It presents a seldom visited epistemological approach, that of phenomenology (Husserl 1970, Heidegger 1962, Schutz 1962), which finds its roots in people's experiences.
My motivation leads my investigation; that is, my own experience of political unfreedom in Argentina is the trigger that has led me to inquire into the nature of the relationship between community and democracy. This dissertation seeks to make a case for practice illuminating theory (Hummel 1998) along with the plausibility of broadening the dialogue about community from the ground up.
A substantive contribution of this dissertation to the understanding of community is the discovery that community as a process, far from being an abstraction, constitutes an everyday practice in neighborhood group dynamics, the political community that the ancient Greeks praised as true democratic governance.