Book Review: Does ‘Community’ Exist?

Transnational Communities: Shaping Global Economic Governance.
Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack, eds. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. 422 pp. $110.00, hardback.

Read the review by Kelly Thomson of York University, published in Administrative Science Quarterly:

Community is a deceptively simple concept. We all think we know what it is; however, capturing the phenomenon of community empirically has been much more challenging. Theoretical clarity has also been fraught with challenges. What are the differences among community, field, network, market, social movement, profession, or industry? How can the seemingly old-fashioned concept of community be reconceptualized to respond to social constructivist sensibilities? Critics of community, particularly positivist critics, have challenged whether there is any “there, there” (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein).

To their credit, the editors of this collection of primarily qualitative, empirical work confront these questions directly in their introduction, offering definitions and delineating the historical trajectory and debates regarding the concept of community.

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