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Introduction

Creating a Frame for Understanding Local Organizations

  • Chapter
Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

In this book, scholars from a number of disciplines present work focused on communities, with particular attention to community organizations. A few scholars have emphasized the importance of the need to map this intellectual territory (Calhoun, 1992). In some ways community study seems to be well-trodden ground; there has been influential work on social capital, for example (Coleman, 1987,1988; Putnam, 1995; Foley and Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Foley, 1998). Yet the rich diversity of communities and community organizations has rarely been studied from a perspective that is both conceptual and descriptive. The growing sense that un-studied local organizations constitute a massive yet little-understood portion of the nonprofit cosmos has led (1997a),(b) to call them the “dark matter of the nonprofit universe.” An interdisciplinary attempt to make community a unit of study has not been previously undertaken, and thus we feel that this Handbook makes a unique contribution to scholarly understanding of both communities and nonprofit organizations that operate at the community level.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania

    Ram Cnaan

  2. Bucknell University, Bucknell

    Carl Milofsky

  3. Northwestern University, Northwestern

    Albert Hunter

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  1. Ram Cnaan
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  2. Carl Milofsky
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  3. Albert Hunter
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania, 3701 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Ram A. Cnaan

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, 17837, USA

    Carl Milofsky

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Cnaan, R., Milofsky, C., Hunter, A. (2008). Introduction. In: Cnaan, R.A., Milofsky, C. (eds) Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-32933-8_1

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