Howard W. Beers

Motivation for Community Organization

Is “community motivation” merely a figure of speech? The individual person is always the motivated unit. Each person, in his role as community member may have some degree, varying from weak to keen, of interest in community &airs; hence theories of motivation for community organization are the same as any other theories of motivation. It is useful, however, to speak as though communities and other groups (for communities are sociological groups), like persons have or lack motivation. Without positing any group mind, one can see that this is so. There is community motivation in the same sense that there is public opinion. There are patterns and configurations in the distribution of motivation among the members of a community. A pattern of strong community motivation is one in which many or most members are strongly disposed to achieve similar or common goals. This may be revealed to some extent in public opinion, but may be inferred even more accurately from events which occur. Consider, for example, three communities: A, B, and C. Each raises the money for its Chest goal. A does it with a few big donors; B does it with payroll deductions, of which workers are hardly conscious; C does it with proffered contributions from nearly all community members. Is it not useful to see three different kinds or degrees of community motivation in this contrast? This is definitely a Twentieth Century topic. There may have been some Nineteenth Century discussions of it, but from knowledge of society and culture in those days, one may doubt that they were extensive. The problems of community organization come from the rapidly changing structure of contemporary society, which puts new stresses and strains on our systems of citizen participation and our traditions of popular local control of social, economic, and political events and arrangements. It is always exciting to recount the marvels that make up this turmoil of recent and present change. There is the formation of a mass society which is the product of mass production and mass communication; there are the rapidly expanded vastness of human knowledge and the emergence of bigness on every hand: big populations, big metropolitan communities, gigantic units of business, bigness in government; there are the multiplication of specializations, special interest organizations, and the interdependence on a worldwide scale; centralization; complexity in the time schedules and activity patterns of persons. These things have forced the delegation of responsibilities by the many to the few; the making of decisions by representatives, often socially as well as physically, distant from those whom they represent. Thus the