The Community Network Lifecycle: A Framework for Research and Action Special Issue: ICTs and Community Networking

Since the publication of Doug Schuler’s influential book New Community Networks: Wired for Change (1996), community networking has gained definition and momentum as a sociotechnical phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere. It has emerged as a research field of enviable vitality as well. This special issue is focused on a neglected but fundamental research question: How do community networks originate, stabilize, and change in their sociohistorical context? I use the term here to refer to systems enabled by information and communications technologies (ICTs) and “intended to help revitalize, strengthen, and expand existing people-based networks” (Schuler, 1996) in locality-based (geographically grounded) human communities. Social activism is an important motif in community networking (Schuler, 1996). I include community technology centers under community networks (the papers in this special issue cover both modes) on the reasoning that, despite differences in emphasis, both modes (see Beamish, 1999) help foster social networking. The framework developed here is grounded in theories of community social organization and is attentive to the social and historical context within which the community network lifecycle—origin, stabilization, and transformation—plays out. Community networks must be analyzed as artifacts shaped within particular systems of social organization (or social structure), and it is here that explanations for variations in technological form and function must be sought. They develop in the “ordered arrangements of relations” (Wellman, 1997) between individuals, groups, and organizations that describe community social structure. They are embedded in these relations; their constitution and ongoing operation are shaped by them. The network may change these relations as it matures as a social object, but the starting point for an adequately historicized and socialized account of the lifecycle would have to be in community social structure. The starting point, in other words, is community (see Calhoun, 1998) or, rather, locality-based community. Community has many meanings. A common sociological focus has been on social organization and activity based in a specific locality. This special issue is concerned with such communities as defined historically, by administrative fiat and/or economic activity. Communities analyzed here range from an urban housing complex (see articles by Pinkett & Hampton in this issue) to a region in south India (Blattman et al., this issue). While community size is important, one may, for a number of reasons, choose to analyze “federated” communities made up of smaller member units. Social life in these units, or even in the larger community as a whole, may evidence the kind of organic unity and intimacy celebrated in Tonnies’ gemeinschaft type. More typically, however, communities are diverse in their social makeup and relations. Community constituents— residents, organizations, groups—may participate in a variety of ties in their daily life. These may be “directly interpersonal . . . and mediated” or indirect (Calhoun, 1998). Some ties may engage a single facet of a constituent (a casual business exchange, for example), while others may involve multiple (see primary and secondary relationships in Calhoun); they may be formal or informal, established or emergent, strong or weak (Granovetter, 1973), intraor extra-local in scope (Warren, 1978). This aggregate, emergent social network describes community social structure. To understand a community is to understand “the interplay of these . . . webs” (Warren, 1999). Arguing their centrality in community life, some (e.g., Laumann, Galazkiewicz, & Marsden, 1978) have characterized community structure more narrowly to refer to inter-organizational relations. The idea of social structure offers the following viewpoints for analyzing locality-based community. First, analytically, structure pre-exists action and both enables and constrains it (Archer, 1995). However, action is not