query: community reproduction

[colist-admin at comm-org.utoledo.edu]

[ed:  please copy COMM-ORG with your responses.  I will have a couple of 
thoughts below.]

From: Adrienne Falcon <afalcon at midway.uchicago.edu>

Greetings,

After lurking on this list for quite a while, I have finally been moved
to raise a question.  Does anyone have favorite or simply some
recommendation of studies which look at community reproduction or how
communities seek to reproduce themselves.  To provide a bit of context,
I am a graduate student at the University of Chicago in sociology
writing my proposal.  At the same time I have spent two years as a
community organizer in a neighborhood of Chicago working primarily on
youth programs and youth organizing.  Now I am trying to craft the
research proposal based upon these two years and several more where I
have done ethnographic field work in this community.  As I have sought
to develop an analytic question out of the lived experience, I have
decided to think through the issue of community reproduction, namely
how a community seeks to persist in a given place and with a vision of
society over time.

Thanks in advance for thoughts or reactions.

Adrienne Falcon

[ed:  I have written some stuff on this (1992 Perspectives on Social 
Problems), and Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier have written some stuff both 
separately and together on this general topic.  And for me the most famous 
example of this was Fred Engels' "The Condition of the Working Class in 
England" available online at 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/index.htm ]