The concept of “we”: A community social psychology myth?

Abstract

This paper questions the conceptions of community found in the literature on community psychology, as well as those employed in everyday life, which reflect the notion of community as a “we”. This notion is understood as a compact and homogenous group, assuming that their members feel, think, and behave in similar and predictable ways, as corresponds to their belonging to the community. It implies a set of processes such as membership, inclusion, identity, feeling of belonging, and an emotional bond or sense of community which do not seem to vary across time and within members of the community. Thus, this meaning of “we” appeals to an idealized vision of the community, and as we shall argue in this paper, it is rather a dialectic and dynamic process, in which shared needs and group processes built across time afford intragroup diversity, disagreements, and fluctuations in dimensions such as participation in collective actions, among others. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.