Albert Hunter

The meaning of community in community mental health

This article critically reviews the development of community mental health in both theory and practice and explores new directions and dilemmas for future policy and programs. First, we trace the dialectical development of the ideology of community mental health and the rediscovery of community. Second, we outline the two key transitions: (a) from professionals to natural helpers and (b) from catchment areas to natural networks. Third, we offer alternative conceptions of community from the sociological literature and suggest ways that these can benefit new program planning. We conclude with a series of policy questions that legitimate the expansion of community mental health beyond the parochial confines of the local community.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND LOCAL POWER Notes on the Ethnography of Local Community Elites

The study of elites by definition must be concerned with power, and power also enters into the ethnographers research relationships. The reflexive interplay of knowledge and power in research therefore involves a political act as it affects the differential distribution of knowledge and power in society. The ethnographic study of local community elites specifically requires an understanding of the community context in which elites are embedded, the communal system that is the base and arena of their power. Three dimensions of community—the ecology of the community and its physical setting, the social structure of informal individual and formal institutional relationships, and the cultural symbolic system, “the local patois”—must be explored to come to an understanding of local elites. These three elements are seen to enter into the very conduct of field research itself, and fieldwork can be sensitively and self-reflexively used, in turn, to elucidate the operation of these elements among elites. Selected examples are drawn from the extensive literature of community power studies and from over two decades of different field studies by the author on local community elites.

The Ecology of Chicago: Persistence and Change, 1930-1960

Two sets of factor analyses are performed upon census data for Chicago from 1930 to 1960. The first method explores changes in ecological structure by comparing four separate factor analyses, each done at a different point in time. The second method explores the structure of ecological change and is based upon the factor analysis of differences in variables over three time periods. The first method reveals a marked stability in Chicagos ecological structure, with important changes being a decline in explanatory power of the family-status factor, a rise in explanatory power of the racial-ethnic factor, and the linkage of age and racial-ethnic segregation in the city. These findings are related to propositions in the factorial ecology literature. The second method reveals highly variable factors of change from one decade to the next, which appear to reflect unique societywide changes occurring in each period. The methods are briefly compared. In general, the first method most clearly elucidates stable and persistent ecological structure, while the second method is more sensitive to short-run ecological change taking place within the established structure.

The Symbolic Ecology of Suburbia

Where we live is a statement of who we are. In the exploding modern metropolis fewer and fewer people live in central cities, but people continue to live and find meaning for their lives in local communities. As metropolitan areas continue to grow in size and numbers, the communities people increasingly come to live in lie beyond the bounds of the central city in the fissionable fragments of countless surrounding suburban communities. For the most part, these suburban communities are far removed from the small towns and villages, the pastoral settings of a bygone era depicted in nostalgic Norman Rockwell paintings. The shopping mall has replaced Main Street, the regional high school the two-room schoolhouse, and the suburban split-level the frame farmhouse. The melding of urban and rural, for better or worse, that was attempted in the idealized Utopian setting of suburbia has generated a long list of both apologists and critics. Only within the past few decades, however, has the more neutral eye of the analytical social scientist begun to elicit the crystallized pattern of social and spatial order and the patterns of change apparent in this metropolitan puzzle. No longer is it sufficient to denigrate the conformity and complacency of suburbanites who fled the teeming freedom and anonymity of the cultured city left behind nor to wax bucolic about the spacious greenlands of innocent euphoric childhood on the city’s rim to which people migrated. Rather, the questions have more prosaically come to center upon the realities of how it is people go about the routine business of constructing their everyday lives—of getting a living, making a home, raising a family, and finding meaning to lives lived on the fringe of the modern metropolis.

Communities do act: Neighborhood characteristics, resource mobilization, and political action by local community organizations

Abstract Some communities act, and some do not. By action we refer to political actions that challenge existing authority, and by communities we refer to urban neighborhoods and their local voluntary organizations. By combining recent theories and research on local urban communities and neighborhoods with the resource mobilization perspective of collective political action we develop a synthetic model specifying the characteristics of local neighborhoods that affect their capacity to mobilize resources in local community organizations to engage in collective political action. Structural characteristics of neighborhoods (such as size and heterogeneity) are hypothesized to affect their ability to mobilize resources (funds and members) in local organizations. The degree of external support for local organizations is also hypothesized to affect resource mobilization. These in turn are hypothesized to affect the amount of organized political action engaged in by local urban communities. The model is tested in a secondary analysis of data from a pooled sample of 181 community organizations in neighborhoods in three cities. We conclude that structural characteristics of local neighborhoods do affect political action, but only indirectly through their effects on resource mobilization. Larger, more homogeneous local communities and neighborhoods mobilize more funds, but this in turn reduces the likelihood of political action. Smaller local communities and neighborhoods are more likely to mobilize members, however size of membership does not affect political action. In short, members do not count, and money matters—the more the money, the less the political action.

National Federations: The Role of Voluntary Organizations in Linking Macro and Micro Orders in Civil Society

The research described in this article represents a preliminary, qualitative, comparative analysis of voluntary national federations of local community organizations and voluntary national federations of local governmental units in the United States and England. The analysis is based on interviews; archival reports, budgets, and newsletters; and participant observation at meetings. These federations force a rethinking of theories of mass society that rely on overly simplistic distinctions between macro and micro, public and private. The research highlights the complex bridging roles that these voluntary national federations play and their essential position at the intersection of macro and micro, state and community.

Why Chicago? The Rise of the Chicago School of Urban Social Science.

questions: Why did urban social sciences emerge in Chicago during the first third of this century, and how have these beginnings influenced the contemporary study of urban social life? In answering the first of these questions we must focus upon what the City of Chicago itself represented as an example of urbanization during this period; to answer the second, we must look to the University of Chicago and its position in relation to the intellectual and social thought of the times. In summarizing the answers to these questions, I suggest that Chicago presented a raw reality of the moment at the high point of industrial urbanization, that social scientists at the University of Chicago attempted to understand that relity though inductive, empirical research, and that one of the goals of the research was to develop policies that would help ameliorate existing social problems. The three elements of this answer, the raw dynamics of industrial urbanization, the empirical emphasis of these social scientists, and their policy orien-

Contemporary Conceptions of Community

The quest for community is a continuing concern in social life and the question of community an enduring enigma in social theory. In both social life and social theory the idea of community has changed and varied over time and space as much as the reality of communities themselves. In this chapter I discuss varying contemporary ideas of community by focusing on the local community as a unit of analysis. [In short, I am following the model of the anthropologist (1955) in The Little Community in contrast to other uses of the concept such as the idea of a “national community” as developed by (1991) in his influential book Imagined Communities that traces the rise of modern nationalism.]

Data Collection: Interviewing

Interviewing is a process of social interaction in which a researcher questions subjects or respondents for the purpose of gaining information or data. Interviewing styles may range from informal conversations to semi-focused topical interviews to more formal standardized questionnaires that reflect different degrees of control over the interview. As social interaction interviewing may be analyzed by different theories of social interaction—specifically role theory, conflict theory, exchange theory and symbolic interaction. Each of these highlights different aspects of the interview that may introduce bias and affect the validity of the data. Research is presented that demonstrates the degree of bias introduced by race, class, gender, age, and various other aspects of the interview situation.

Friends Disappear: The Battle For Racial Equality in Evanston

presents survey data showing a modest recovery in economic status and capacity for remittances that, he argues, shows resilience in spite of continuing financial vulnerability. While these chapters address immigrant responses, Ninna Nyberg Sørensen argues that, as the global economy is restructured, the tension between the free flows of capital imagined by neoliberalism and the tightening control of immigration policies in receiving states has created a regime of transnational governmentality that disciplines mobility and intensifies migrant control policies while also limiting the development opportunities available to undocumented migrants. By linking together current research on the adaptive responses of migrants to the Great Recession and placing it in a comparative context, Aysa-Lastra and Cachón’s book deepens our knowledge while broadening our understanding of the intersectional nexus of employment, migration status, and racialization. Like many thematic edited volumes, their book can become repetitive when read from beginning to end as the empirical reality of migrant vulnerability during the economic crisis is repeatedly reestablished and reiterated in multiple chapters. In some cases, different angles on the theme reveal valuable nuances and variations, but the overall impact at times reinforces the fundamental straightforwardness of the core theme of the vulnerability of migrant workers. Nevertheless, the contributors to this collection do an impressive job with the necessary work of documenting the breadth and depth of that impact. The chapters within offer rich and detailed evidence that illuminates the myriad vulnerabilities and adaptations of immigrant workers in the two countries. Furthermore, the editors provide an effective theoretical framework that situates the contrasting types of immigrant vulnerability in Spain and the United States within the context of state policies and a neoliberal political economy. Rather than taking an economistic approach that oversimplifies the complexity of immigration processes, the contributors portray immigration as a dynamic process in which immigrants exercise their agency within structural constraints by making choices based on their own perceptions, values, and relationships to the networks and communities in which they are embedded. Immigrant Vulnerability and Resilience: Comparative Perspectives on Latin American Immigrants During the Great Recession is a timely contribution to urgent discussions of immigrant vulnerability during times of economic crisis. Beyond Latin American and transatlantic specialists, it should be read by scholars of immigration and incorporation, labor economists, and policy-makers and service providers grappling with the experiences of immigrants in receiving societies. In the contemporary moment, it is critical that we give attention to the interrelated concerns of immigration reform, the deterioration of low-wage work, and the racialization and exclusion of immigrants, undocumented or otherwise.