The many faces of local community: Exploring lay conceptualizations of the Norwegian lokalsamfunn

ABSTRACT

Despite much attention paid to the topic of community in academic literature and policy documents, there is a relative lack of knowledge about what laypersons perceive as a local community. Based on data from a national survey, the authors examine how c.1400 Norwegians conceptualized local community – lokalsamfunn in Norwegian. They reveal some of the linguistic and conceptual aspects of local community as a term, in addition to tendencies and patterns among the survey responses. The respondents’ conceptualizations contained references to lokalsamfunn variously as a geographical area, people and relations, activities and involvement, attachment to place and people, and provider of local goods and services. Their main emphasis was on lokalsamfunn as a spatial unit. However, the responses contained relatively few references to the relational aspects of lokalsamfunn. The authors conclude that a common, lay understanding may be that lokalsamfunn is a vaguely defined but limited geographical unit filled with people who to varying degrees know each other and interact. Concerning policymaking aimed at fostering communal well-being, the authors hold that any community-based programming requires intricate knowledge of the people who form the community, since without community interaction and a degree of social cohesion any envisioned programmes may not succeed.

KEYWORDS:

• lay perceptions
• local community
• survey

Introduction

In many academic disciplines and practical policy arenas, such as natural resource management, conservation and disaster risk reduction, community has become the term-of-choice when referring to people-centric, participatory and bottom-up approaches (Paveglio et al. 2017; Titz et al. 2018). The persistent popularity of the term ‘community’ in contemporary discourses is frequently attributed to a shift in governmentality in many Western societies (Rose 1996; 1999; Amin 2005). With the emergence of advanced liberalism, a lot of responsibility has been placed on people (Rose 1996). Through the instrumentalization of personal allegiances and commitments, people are envisioned as active and capable agents, and communities are seen as fit to address many of today’s societal challenges (Rose 1996; Herbert 2005). Thus, the notion of community has been turned into a flexible tool fit to be deployed in many different policy arenas. However, when deployed, the term ‘community’ is often used loosely defined and as a matter of convenience to draw boundaries around people and to link them to a specific location or territory (Agrawal & Gibson 1999; Flint et al. 2008; Blokland 2017). Through the application of reductionist assumptions, which often implicitly turn a spatially defined community into a homogeneous group of people who share a set of norms and interests (Agrawal & Gibson 1999), the diversity of the target population and the complexity of social relations are on the whole disregarded.

In community resilience research, which investigates the qualities of a community that enhance its ability to deal better with uncertainty, change and surprise (Magis 2010), the community is by default the unit of analysis. However, what actually constitutes a community is often not explicitly defined; a community can range from a small group of people to a large geographical area (Blokland 2017; Räsänen et al. 2020). The ambiguity as to the meaning forms the point of departure for this article. Through research undertaken in the project Climate Change and Natural Hazards: The Geography of Community Resilience in Norway (CLIMRES), we (the co-authors of this article) came to acknowledge that ‘community’ is an elusive concept in research on community resilience. Although much used in writing, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the different interpretations of ‘community’ used in the aforementioned research (for recent exceptions see Paveglio et al. 2017; Räsänen et al. 2020). Even less attention has been paid to the implications of using the English term ‘community’ in research conducted in a Norwegian setting, as the term can be translated into several Norwegian words, such as lokalsamfunn, nærmiljø, and fellesskap, all of which have different sets of connotations.

The term lokalsamfunn (local community), often coupled with the term ‘local knowledge’, is a prominent vernacular and rhetorical term used in many policy fields in Norway (Setten & Lein 2019). Lokalsamfunn has long been central to regional and rural development policies, and more recently to policies targeted at strengthening societal security as a response to current threats and challenges, such as migration, terrorism, natural hazards, and food security. As an example, the long-term plan for research and higher education (Meld. St. 4. (2018–2019)), which states that, by way of social cohesion, local communities are vital tools for meeting a wide range of societal challenges. Also in documents on disaster risk management, national authorities refer to ‘local communities’ as both a means and an end to meet hazards and risks, and to respond to them (Meld. St. 10 (2016–2017); Direktoratet for samfunnssikkerhet og beredskap 2019; Räsänen et al. 2020). However, also in more applied settings such as the aforementioned, there is a lack of conceptual clarity as to what a lokalsamfunn is or should be.

In a social sciences setting, much Norwegian community research has been marked by a rather one-sided and often somewhat romanticized focus on rural communities (e.g. Aarsæther 2016; Kjelstadli 2017) and a relative neglect of the existence of urban communities (for exceptions see Gullestad 1979; Tjora 2018). Also, a lot of work has been conducted under the heading of ‘place research’. Leaning on well-established theories on place (e.g. Massey 2005; J. Anderson 2015), themes covered in such research have included place attachment, place identity, place-making, gendered places, and migration (e.g. Førde et al. 2013; Aure et al. 2015). In place research, ‘local community’ is frequently used synonymously with ‘place’, particularly when the focus is on people–place relationships and local social relations.

Against the above-described background, the primary objective of this article is to contribute to the growing field of community research in Norway and internationally by responding to a persistent problem of ‘the confusion between what a community should be – the normative prescription for it – and how it is in people’s actual experience – its empirical description’ (Blokland 2017, 16–17). Despite much scholarly attention and the proliferation of the term ‘community’ in policy documents, there remains a relative lack of knowledge about what people think of as community or local community. To elicit better insights into people’s understandings, we asked the respondents in a large-scale nationally representative survey on community resilience to formulate their understandings of lokalsamfunn. Hence, this article engages with the voices of people who constitute communities. Based on almost 1400 responses, we examine how the respondents defined lokalsamfunn and how their personal portrayals matched, reinforced, or contrasted with existing scholarly conceptions of community. By considering a great number of people’s views on local community, we were able to reveal some of the linguistically and conceptually complex aspects of the term. However, we are also able to identify tendencies and patterns among the responses, as well as notions and ways of thinking that were frequent, but also, in some cases, somewhat surprisingly infrequent.

Our secondary objective in this article is to reflect upon and discuss some of the challenges that the term lokalsamfunn represents for the prominent focus in current national policymaking to rely increasingly on peoples’ engagements in their local communities in order to promote social cohesion and societal security (Meld. St. 4. (2018–2019)).

Conceptions of community

For more than half a century, the concept of community has been at the forefront of social inquiry. However, as noted in the Introduction, despite its persistent popularity, or perhaps because of it, community remains an amorphous concept. The amorphousness is evident from the multitude of definitions of community developed in recent decades and the resulting terminological debates (e.g. Silk 1999; Panelli & Welch 2005; Bradshaw 2008; Paveglio et al. 2017; Delanty 2018).

In a historical perspective, current perceptions of community are strongly influenced by the works of 19th and early 20th century scholars such as Durkheim, Marx and Engels, Spencer, and Comte, who saw society moving along an evolutionary path away from a traditional society based on kin networks toward a modern progressive society marked by individualism and rationality (Agrawal & Gibson 1999). Another of the most well-known scholars, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), used the analytical categories Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (loosely translated as ‘community’ and ‘society’ respectively) to describe the transition from a pre-industrial to a market-based society (Tönnies 2002 [1887]). Gemeinschaft, or community, describes ‘those natural, involuntary bonds that inevitably grow up between human beings and between groups’, whereas society ‘is an artefact which arises out of those voluntary teleological bonds that are the product of conscious choice and purpose’ (Wirth 1926, 416). Tönnies’ notion of community as a natural organic whole of close-knitted individuals remains highly influential, colouring many contemporary community conceptions (Agrawal & Gibson 1999).

In the following subsections, we present and synthesize four well-established community conceptions that inform our analysis and discussion.

Community as a geographical area

References to location, territory and habitat have been of fundamental importance in conceptualizations of community since at least the early 20th century. Scholars such as Hiller (1941), Hillery (1955) and Parsons (1951) all include references to localized settlements in combination with social, relational and cultural elements in their understandings of community. An archetypal view on community is that of a group of people residing in a specific geographical area, sharing a set of norms and values, interacting regularly (face-to-face), and acting collectively to achieve common goals and address common problems. However, in our interconnected world, this view is now seen as largely antiquated and is contested by many; as examples, see Webber’s notion of ‘community without propinquity’ (Webber 1964) and Silk’s reflections on the ‘stretched-out community’ (Silk 1999). Nonetheless, the place-based community’s core set of attributes has been perpetuated to this day through continued interest and re-evaluation (e.g. see the perspectives on community held by Chaskin 2008; Flora et al. 2016).

Although the ‘community as a geographical area’ approach may accurately represent the physical and administrative boundaries of a territory (e.g. a city or a county), it fails to account for the intricacies of the social and relational fabric that exists within and stretches outside those boundaries. This is illustrated by how many quantitative studies of community resilience have reduced community to an administratively defined location, presupposing that the stresses and shocks that affect the community are often localized and that the people who live there have both an interest in and ability to work together during crises (e.g. Sherrieb et al. 2010; Cutter et al. 2014; Scherzer et al. 2019).

Community as a social and relational entity

There are many strands of community conceptions that focus on the social and relational nature of community. One strand sees community as a local social system, wherein community members interact, formally and informally, to create, secure and maintain important functions and services within the community (Bates & Bacon 1972). This strand also considers the establishment and preservation of shared norms, customs and practices that may serve as means for social control (Blokland 2017), but also as common qualities fostering collective purpose and action (Woods 2011). One approach to studying and developing community that builds on above-described views of community is the community capitals framework (Flora et al. 2016), a framework that has been applied in studies of community resilience (Mayunga 2007; Peacock 2010).

Another strand of community research focuses on the complex social relationships that hold a community together, specifically emotional bonds and attachments that can lead to a shared sense of belonging (Calhoun 1980; Blokland 2017). Scholars who see community as based on and the result of relationships, starting with Ferdinand Tönnies’ notion of Gemeinschaft, stress the importance of affectual ties of feelings of connectedness, solidarity, and mutuality in the formation of community (Bessant 2018).

Focusing on the relational aspects of community highlights the importance of human interaction. Thus, the interactional perspective on community goes beyond the conceptions of community as a geographical area or as collaborative service provision (Winterton et al. 2014; Bessant 2018). According to Bessant (2018, 7), ‘interaction is perhaps the most essential component of community, regardless of whether it takes the form of a territorially localized context of solidary social relationships or a spatially dispersed network of relations’. A growing number of scholars echo Bessant’s statement by arguing that although place-based communities exist, many communities today either have no linkages or have weak linkages to specific locations or territories (e.g. Delanty 2018). Within these non-place communities, social relations can be built around interests, profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; they can also exist entirely online. Given the complexity and fluidity of any person’s social relations, it has become the norm to belong to more than one community at any point in time. Moreover, community memberships are constantly evolving and renegotiated (Bessant 2018).

Community as collective action

A third strand of community conceptions sees community as collective action. Collective action is an intrinsic part of communal life and can be defined as ‘any action that individuals undertake as psychological group members [ … ] with the subjective goal to improve their group’s condition’ (van Zomeren 2013, 378). The action does not need to be big, nor does it have to be collective. An individual acting in the interest of his or her group, or part of his or her group, such as by signing a petition, can be considered a form of collective action. That said, collective action is not only about addressing grave ills and injustices but also about everyday activities that can contribute to the well-being of the group (van Zomeren 2013).

However, when community is conceptualized as collective action, it usually entails an instrumental dimension, turning communities into political units (Chaskin 2008) or convenient groupings for development interventions (Cleaver 1999). Many community-based approaches presuppose that a community has a group identity and that the community members have the capacity to work together for the common good. Such approaches often purposively overlook that, in order to programme for community involvement of any kind, one first needs to construct the community, a process that ultimately leads to ‘logics of inclusion and exclusion, of responsibilization and autonomization’ (Rose 1996, 336). Such approaches also disregard that the individuals comprising the community are embedded within existing power relations and social structures, and may have very different or no motivations (or opportunities) to take part in the externally envisioned collective action (Cleaver 1999; Silk 1999; Herbert 2005).

Community as a symbolic and socially constructed idea

The fourth and final community conception that we present is that of community as socially and symbolically constructed by its members as an idea – a mental construct that is intersubjectively constituted. According to Cohen (2001, 15), community as a boundary-expressing symbol is ‘held in common by its members; but its meaning varies with its members’ unique orientations to it’. That is, the members may all use the same word to describe their community, they may all identify with it and express their membership to it, but they will all use their own experiences and personalities to fill the symbol representing their community with meaning. As such, community has two faces: a public face and a private one. The former is symbolically simplistic, often forming the basis for stereotypes, whereas the latter is symbolically complex, containing great variations and differentiations between members (Cohen 2001).

The process of socially and symbolically constructing community through collective identity formation and identification can be linked to the notion of the imagined community. The term ‘imagined community’ was originally coined by Benedikt Anderson (1991) with regard to the nation. According to Gleicher (2011), an imagined community is formed of a group of people who share an ‘identity sign’ (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation) and a sense of interconnectedness and belonging, even though they may be dispersed over vast areas and know only a small proportion of their fellow community members. Also, the non-place communities mentioned in the section Community as a social and relational entity could be seen as imagined communities.

As focusing on the symbolic nature of community may minimize the role of material and spatial aspects in the social construction of community (Woods 2011), Liepins (2000) presents a framework, applicable to both place-based and imagined communities, that places community within temporal, locational, political, and discursive contexts within which people enact and reproduce community through meanings, practices, structures, and spaces. Liepins’ framework first looks beyond the symbolic construction of community through the ascription of meaning by its members to include also practices, namely the formal and informal activities that people are involved in, such as exchanging goods and services at a local store or health clinic. Liepins (2000, 31) argues that such ‘practices enable us to investigate the dynamic nature of “community” as a set of processes which are “performed” and contested.’ Second, the framework emphasizes the role of structures and spaces, where people gather, such as schools, halls and bridges. According to Liepins (2000, 32), the structures and spaces work as ‘mediums through which a material and metaphorical embodiment of “community” can be read and traced for the meanings, activities and social relations displayed’.

Synthesis

The four conceptions of community should not be seen as competing but rather as partly complementary and partly overlapping dimensions of community. Although there may be a tendency for the world to be thought of as more interconnected than ever and of geographical location as somehow less important, it can be seen in the literature that community as a geographical area is not discarded but rather re-evaluated (Liepins 2000; Chaskin 2008; Berg 2016; Flora et al. 2016). It is also clear that researchers have come to conceptualize community increasingly as a relational entity – socially and culturally (Bates & Bacon 1972; Calhoun 1980; Woods 2011; Winterton et al. 2014; Blokland 2017; Bessant 2018). This shift also means that communities are acknowledged as practised and processual (e.g. produced through collective action) (Liepins 2000; van Zomeren 2013). Lastly, community is a symbolic and socially constructed idea that is collectively constituted and upheld by its members, but the meanings ascribed to it vary from person to person (Cohen 2001; B. Anderson 1991). Taken together, community is undoubtedly conceptually complex. We (the authors) bring this complexity with us when examining peoples’ empirical descriptions, in attempts to see how they match, reinforce or contrast with the above-mentioned conceptualizations.

Data and methods

Survey

In late 2017, we took part in the development of a large-scale nationally representative survey of community resilience in Norway. The online survey, implemented in January 2018, was intended to capture various aspects related to people’s perceptions of their communities’ resilience, such as local knowledge, place attachment, household preparedness, and trust in institutions, as well as perceived exposure to and previous experience of natural hazards. However, given the ambiguity relating to the meaning of ‘community’ in the term ‘community resilience’, we asked the respondents to define their understanding of local community (‘Hvordan definerer du lokalsamfunn?’ How do you define local community?). Of the 1812 respondents who completed the survey, 1378 provided codable written responses to the open-ended question. The following analysis is predominantly based on the responses but also draws on some background information such as age, gender and geographical setting (urban versus rural). The composition of the respondent group is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Study participants

	Urban	(mean age, years)	Rural	(mean age, years)	Total	(mean age, years)
Male	304	(47.6)	411	(51.2)	715	(49.7)
Female	303	(42.5)	360	(46.8)	663	(44.8)
Totals	607	(45.1)	771	(49.1)	1378	(47.3)

Analysis

To gain an initial impression of the collected material, we undertook a first round of coding using NVivo 12, with the aim of identifying themes within the data. Whenever a new theme emerged in the responses, a new node (i.e. theme heading) was created. Most responses were assigned at least two nodes. For instance, the response ‘my neighbourhood’ (nabolaget mitt) was assigned three nodes: (1) geographical, as it refers to a spatial unit or territory, (2) self, as it draws on personal experience, and (3) neighbourhood, the specific settlement form. As the intention of this first round of coding was not to reduce the data to a manageable number of nodes but rather to gain an overview of the material, more than 300 nodes were created. Some of the nodes were short, as in the examples above, and some were long and descriptive. For instance, one node was ‘That which binds together’ (Det som binder sammen), while another was ‘Where one feels safe’ (Hvor man føler seg trygg).

Following the initial coding, we discussed the resulting nodes and identified overarching themes. The overarching themes and related subthemes were then used to reduce the number of nodes for quantitative coding. Although NVivo proved useful for providing us with an overview of the responses, the large number of nodes and the even larger number of responses made it difficult to identify trends within the material. We therefore undertook a second round of coding using Stata 14. The reduced list of nodes was turned into a set of 62 binary variables (yes = 1 and no = 0). The quantification of the qualitative material made it easier to identify tendencies within the data for the entire sample but also to compare between groups of respondents, such as when we divided the responses by gender, age group, and urban or rural setting.¹ The findings derived from the comparison of groups are discussed as examples in the next section.

Findings: the many faces of local community

During the analysis it became readily apparent that in Norway the use of the concept ‘local community’ (lokalsamfunn) is as divisive and complex as elsewhere. The 1378 respondents in our sample found myriads of ways to describe their understandings of community, while the 300+ NVivo nodes were only indicative of the diversity. Nonetheless, we identified five overarching themes within the material, which are presented in this article under the following five section headings: geography, people and relations, activities and involvement, attachment to place and people, and local goods and services.

Geography

The first and most prominent theme identified in our study was the spatiality of the community. A total of 1285 respondents (93.3%) included some form of geographical reference in their answers. They grounded their community in a location, territory, or a generic ‘there’; they drew boundaries around themselves and highlighted the importance of propinquity. Of the responses, c.600 were solely spatial in nature. The remaining responses had added layers of depth by including references linked to the other overarching themes (for an overview, see Table 2; for a complete overview of the coded response categories by gender, geographical setting, and age group, see Supplementary Appendix 1).

Table 2. Classification of responses: overarching themes

Overarching theme	Description	Totals
Geographical area	contains all generic and specific references to places and areas	1285
People	contains all generic and specific references to people	604
Local goods and services	contains all references to local goods and services, such as shops, schools, public services	237
Attachment	contains all references that express (to some degree) connectedness to a place and/or people	222
Activities and involvement	contains all generic and specific references to activities and community involvement	93

Many of the geographical references explicitly related to settlement forms. They ranged in size from individual houses to smaller rural settlements (bygd – rural area or village; grend, grannelag – hamlet, small village or cluster of farms; landsby – village or hamlet) to more populous urbanized settlements (tettsted – densely populated area; by – town or city; bydel – part of a town or city), and to larger administrational units (kommune – municipality or local authority district; fylke – county). Many of the respondents (510) used the term ‘area’: 132 linked the areal descriptions to themselves (e.g. ‘the area I know’ or ‘the geographical area where I live’), 176 highlighted the importance of physical proximity by defining local community as immediate surroundings (e.g. nærmiljø, nærområde, nærmeste omgivelser – literally local near environment, near local area, nearest surroundings), and 137 mentioned clearly defined boundaries by referring either to given areas, specific areas or limited areas.

Of all respondents who included geographical aspects in their answers, 114 also tried to define their local community’s dimensions by mentioning more practical measures, such as travel time or distance from their place of residence. Their approach highlighted the vast variety of local realities and thus of understandings of the local in local community. The mentioned distances ranged from 100 m to 20 km, and the travel times from 5 minutes on foot to 10 minutes by car. One man, aged 25 years, defined local community as follows: ‘The community around me within which I can orient myself by means of car, bike, or walking. c.10 minutes by car, 20 minutes by bike, and 45 minutes walking’. The quotation shows that the choice of transport and what one is used to in terms of distances, also influences how one perceives local community. A woman aged 27 years, who lived in a sparsely populated area in Southern Norway, stated: ‘what is local is different in all of Norway! Here, where I live, I consider the municipality a local community because we are used to the distances’.

Of the 1378 participants, just 2 pointed to the expansion of local community through growing national and global networks and improved means of transport. Of the two respondents, one was a woman aged 79 years, who pointed out that the meaning of local community had widened ‘now that cars and roads bring us together’, and the other was a man, aged 48 years, who stated:

Today what is far and what is near is woven together. There are many things in the local community that come from far away. We share a direct destiny with many business connections across the whole world … Our local community is a place on the outskirts of the Milky Way, and we must think of all as neighbours on our small planet.²

People and relations

Although more than half of the respondents did not explicitly mention people in their definitions of local community, communities do not exist without people. Just over 600 respondents included references to people in their answers. Most frequently these referred to inhabitants who lived in a specific location such as the respondent’s local area, neighbourhood or village. In contrast to the respondents who focused only on the geographical aspects in theirs answers, for most of the respondents who included references to people, people were at the centre of their understandings of local community. One woman, aged 51 years, stated: ‘it is the people, known as well as unknown, who live here, the shops, the workplaces, etc., that form the local community’.

Most of the respondents who referred to people did so in an aggregated, generic way. They referred to people as folk (people), mennesker (human beings) and de (they). Only a few respondents included or emphasized specific groups of people, such as children and youths (14), families (23), friends and acquaintances (30), neighbours (31), and employees (17). Not surprisingly, of those who mentioned family and children, almost 40% had children under the age of 18 years and 50% of the respondents had reached an age in life when they could have grown children and potentially grandchildren. The respondents who were under 40 years of age evidently referred more often to value-neutral groups of people, such as inhabitants and employees, whereas those over 40 years of age had a tendency to place emphasis on the more value-laden affectual bonds through family, friends and neighbours.³

Much recent community research has focused on relational aspects of community, with people knowing, interacting with, and trusting each other. However, in our survey only c.10% of the respondents (131) included references to the relational aspects. For the majority of those respondents (79%), such aspects were not necessarily about knowing people well or being able to rely on them, but rather about knowing people on a superficial level, about being able to recognize them and about feeling a degree of familiarity. One man, aged 43 years, described this experience as ‘the people who live in my local environment, who nod [or] say hello. [You] know where they live. [You have] seen them before’. Similarly, another male respondent, aged 80 years, stated that the term local community applied to ‘those who, you know, live close by, even if you don’t know them personally’. Included among this group of respondents (i.e. those who mentioned relational aspects) were those who emphasized the importance of knowing each other. The degree of realism and feasibility of their claim depended on the size of the envisioned local community. Whereas a person in a relatively small rural settlement may know everyone in that settlement, it is very unlikely that a person in a city suburb or neighbourhood would know everyone else in the same city suburb or neighbourhood.

In the survey, it was striking that of the respondents who included relational aspects in their answers, relatively more were based in rural areas (66%) than in urban areas (34%).⁴ This was particularly the case for a small group of respondents (27) who included notions of help, support and responsibility towards each other in their answers. Almost 89% of them (24 out of 27) were living in rural areas. One woman, aged 20 years, described local community as ‘a collection of people in the same geographical area who have a friendly tone toward each other, who take care of each other, and who find together in an emergency’. Additionally, a number of respondents in the same group (i.e. of 27 respondents) highlighted the need to work together for the common good. Although expressions about participation in ‘activities for cohesion and for building positive values in the local community’ (man, aged 34 years), ‘working together to solve common challenges’ (woman, aged 36 years), or being ‘involved in the development of the place’ (woman, aged 67 years) were not very frequent among all responses, they pointed to the collective agency of a community.

Activities and involvement

Further insights into community involvement and collaboration were found when we looked more closely at the responses coded under the overarching theme ‘activities and involvement’. A total of 11 respondents included references to working together through volunteering, sports clubs and other clubs, and school activities in their definitions of local community. Like the group that included notions of people helping each other and working together, most of the aforementioned respondents (9 out of 11) were based in rural municipalities. Overall, relatively more rural respondents (55 out of 93; 59%) than urban ones (38 out of 93; 41%) included references to activities and involvement in their answers.

The rural–urban differences found in the survey responses with regard to knowing each other, interacting through activities and working together are reflected in the following quotation:

At the outset, I belong to the local community where I come from, not where I live today. When I think of local community, I think of cohesion and the will to create a good environment for those who live there. I don’t have the same experience of local community in the city [Oslo] where I live now. (woman, aged 27 years)

The fact that local community is context-specific and has different meanings for people living in rural settings and urban settings was stressed also by another female respondent, aged 31 years, who was living in Oslo. She stated that the meaning of local community depended on the area: ‘In Oslo, there is no “local community” such as there is in the countryside’.

A total of 59 were answers coded as ‘activities’ under the overarching theme ‘activities and involvement’, of which 33 referred to sports and sports clubs, but there were also references to cultural activities, outdoor activities (friluftsliv),⁵ other pastimes, and activities in general. In addition, 17 respondents referred to religious organizations, namely churches. Notably, most of them were aged 40+ years (15 out of 17; 88%) and women (12 out of 17; 71%). A separate small group of respondents (19) included everyday activities in their answers. The group was dominated by people in the age range 40–67 years (14 out of 19; 74%). Involvement in any community activities will result in social connections that bind people together. Many of the respondents were aware of such outcomes, as their responses indicated that meeting places and active community involvement were crucial components of community. For example, one woman, aged 39 years, stated that local community was the ‘area that I live in, which is bound together by school, kindergartens, shop, sports centre, church and council building.’ A man, aged 23 years, placed greater emphasis on interaction and involvement: ‘the general area I live in, the people within it, the shops and all places where people gather, sports meetings and other common activities in which everyone participates.’

Attachment to place and people

Attachment and belonging feature strongly in current community research. In our survey, 222 respondents mentioned some notion of connectedness to place and people in their answers. Overall, the group comprised relatively more women (54%) and respondents under that age of 40 years (48%).⁶ A very prevalent notion (128 answers) among the respondents was the need to have something in common, such as frequenting the same places, using the same services or sharing the same interests and challenges. A woman in her mid-sixties defined local community as follows:

a community where people are bound together by a common [sense of] belonging, through living in the same municipality, belonging to the same schools, health services, voluntary organizations, shopping in the same shops, etc., and knowing each other to a larger or smaller degree.

The definition was widened by a small group of respondents (12) who pointed to common interests, values and world views. For instance, a man, aged 71 years, saw local community as ‘the part of the town/area with people who are similar to oneself [ … ][in terms of] cultural background, understanding of community and a united wish for the development of the local community’. Others referred to ‘A place [where] I want to live. With my type of people’ (man, aged 70 years), sharing ‘a common culture’ (woman, aged 36 years), and ‘sharing to a large degree the same understanding of reality’ (man, aged 30 years). A further 10 respondents referred to a common identity through place, either as being from a specific place or living in it. One woman, aged 24 years, regarded local community as a ‘place, independent of size, where residents share a common [sense of] belonging, identity, and pride linked to being from [or] living there.’

Understandings of community can be emotionally charged and 29 respondents’ included explicit references to feelings in their answers. Often the respondents’ feelings were expressed as belonging, closeness, togetherness, or fellowship, but also as feeling at home. For instance, one woman, aged 28 years, wrote ‘a group of people who have a perceived feeling of closeness and fellowship over time linked to a limited geographical area’. By contrast, a man aged 18 years wrote ‘the area where I know people and feel at home.’ Although not necessarily linked to the respondents’ feelings, there were 18 references to ‘home’ and 76 references to ‘belonging’, ‘attachment’ or ‘connection’ among all responses. In the latter group of references (i.e. the 76), most responses referred to belonging or being connected to the community, the place or focal points such as schools or sports clubs. One woman, aged 41 years, described her understanding of local community as follows: ‘all who live close by and have a connection to, for example, a local shop, school, or possibly the sports centre’. By contrast, a man aged 70 years had a slightly different understanding, as his definition was personal: ‘[a] geographical area where I feel a certain belonging to nature, people [and] business life, and where I can participate in small talk’.

In addition, seven respondents placed emphasis on samhold (hold together, cohesion). In Norwegian, samhold means more than merely ‘sticking together’. The term has connotations of solidarity, togetherness, like-mindedness, agreement, and partnership. Thus, it is reasonable to use only the word samhold to describe local community, as was done by one male respondent, aged 75 years, and by a female respondent, aged 39 years, who referred to samhold in connection with ‘good solutions for the community’. Interestingly, the word the woman used for community was fellesskap (fellowship; community), which in common with samhold is a hard-to-translate term. Although fellesskap can be translated as community, that meaning is different from the term used in the survey question (i.e. lokalsamfunn meaning local community). Etymologically, the word fellesskap is related to the German word Gemeinschaft and has similar connotations, including solidarity, togetherness, and connectedness through various forms of social bonding. A total of 13 respondents referred to fellesskap in their definitions of local community. For example, a woman aged 38 years defined local community as ‘a smaller area where people live in a community (fellesskap), for which they willingly take some responsibility’.

Local goods and services

The respondents’ answers contained 237 references to local goods and services. Overall, relatively more women (141 references out of 237; 59%) had thought of the aforementioned practical aspects of life than men (96 references out of 237; 41%). Also, a larger percentage of people over the age of 40 years (69%) stressed the importance of adequate service provision in their answers. The most frequently mentioned service institutions were schools (128 mentions). Not surprisingly, 41% of the respondents who mentioned schools in their answers had children under the age of 18, while of those without children under 18 years, 83% were aged 40 years or older (76% were aged 50 years or older). Throughout the responses, references to schools were usually made in three different ways: listed among other types of services (e.g. shops and health care), highlighted as focal points where people met and got to know each other, and/or used to define an area, namely a school district (skolekrets). A combination of the first two aforementioned ways of referring to schools occurred in the following response from a woman aged 64 years: ‘A limited geographical area where persons have some common meeting places: school, kindergarten, local shops, sports club, church/parish hall (menighetshus), outdoor recreational areas’. The third way of referring to schools was through the use of the word skolekrets (school district), either as a single-word definition of local community or occasionally as a defining attribute in a longer response, such as ‘those who belong to my school district’ (woman, aged 52 years).

Other references to local goods and services mentioned in the responses were shops (102), public services (56, frequently health services), the business sector (31), infrastructure (22), and workplaces (11). Of all 1378 respondents, only 15 made specific reference to the outdoors and nature. As an example of a response that focused on local goods and services, a man aged 37 years described local community as ‘a place with all municipal and private businesses in place, organized offers for all age groups, accessible outdoor recreational areas, and sports grounds, elementary schools, plus [a] nursing home’.

Discussion

In the section ‘Conceptions of community’, we have identified and discussed four established approaches to community in academic (social science) disciplines: community as a geographical area, as a social and relational entity; as collective action, and as a symbolic and socially constructed idea. In the following subsections we discuss the relevance of those approaches and connections between them, as well as the five overarching themes that emerged through our analysis of the survey responses.

People’s perspectives and academic conceptions

With regard to community as a symbol that needs to be filled with meaning by its members (Cohen 2001), the diverse answers to our single survey question reflected the experiences and personalities of a broad set of people. All of the respondents expressed their personal impressions of local community (lokalsamfunn) in writing; some used only one or two words, while others were more elaborate. In doing so, they provided us with an intricate and complex picture of the Norwegian lokalsamfunn. We are able to identify five overarching themes in the responses: lokalsamfunn as (1) a geographical area, (2) people, (3) attachment to place and people, (4) activities and involvement, and (5) a provider of local goods and services. The five themes are clearly related, overlap to a great extent, and in many ways converge in the dominant theme, namely lokalsamfunn as a geographical area, which includes location or place. This might not be unexpected, given the history of community studies with the predominant, but possibly antiquated, emphasis on location, territory and habitat. However, the prominence of geographical aspects in the responses may to some extent also reflect the wording of the question we asked. By asking our respondents to define lokalsamfunn, we inadvertently placed emphasis on the element ‘local’, but we cannot be certain as to whether this emphasis affected the respondents, as lokalsamfunn is a very common vernacular term in Norway. We do not know whether the respondents consciously or unconsciously emphasized the prefix ‘lokal’ in lokalsamfunn or whether they based their response on a more holistic understanding of community.

Ultimately, more than 93% of the respondents included geographical references in their answers by mentioning different settlement types, specifying areal dimensions or referring to proximity. However, we cannot infer from the focus on the geographical or spatial aspect of community that the residents in a specific location also saw themselves as members of a group with a shared set of norms and values, and that acted collectively to achieve common goals. However, they did follow in the footsteps of many before them by basing their understandings of community in a physical place. They also demonstrated that drawing borders can be understood as a way to safeguard a sense of who and where people are. In this respect, borders can provide a sense of belonging (J. Anderson 2015). Thus, they can also be seen as conveying a message about who does and does not belong in a community. According to Blokland (2017, 137), ‘community implies the performance of boundary work’. It follows that community spatially defined in many ways is community imagined and socially constructed (B. Anderson 1991).

The social and relational fabric formed through connection and interaction of people is often portrayed as the most essential component of community (e.g. Bessant 2018). Among our respondents’ answers, references to people formed the second most prominent theme. Although many of the 604 respondents who included people in their answers regarded community as constituted by people who live in a given area or place, there were also some hints in our material that non-place communities are formed around interests, professions, or religion, such as from respondents’ references to team members, colleagues or people met at church. However, it was particularly noteworthy that relatively few of the respondents (131) explicitly mentioned social and relational aspects in their definitions, such as knowing, interacting with, or trusting each other. Even more remarkable was that of those who explicitly mentioned social and relational aspects, the majority were located in rural areas. This plays into the often-romanticized depiction of rural communities as more close-knit, harmonious and socially cohesive than their urban counterparts (e.g. Woods 2011). The rural–urban dimension also speaks to the normative prescription for community (Blokland 2017) that has been prominent in much community research within a Norwegian context (e.g. Kjelstadli 2017).

Although rarely explicitly mentioned in the respondents’ answers, the social and relational aspects of community were implicitly abundant in the material. They fell under the overarching theme of lokalsamfunn as people, as well as under the remaining three themes of lokalsamfunn as attachment to place and people, activities and involvement, and a provider of local goods and services. In our study, the overarching theme of attachment to place and people is closely related to the notion of belonging. For Woods (2011, 169), belonging is ‘part of the adhesive that holds the various elements of community together’. He goes on to argue that belonging is

[first] exhibited in the sense of belonging that members of a community feel towards each other – that they share a common identity, participate in the same practices, support one another, and thus belong to the community. Second, belonging is also articulated in terms of a sense of belonging to place – that is the association of a particular community with a particular territorial expression. (Woods 2011, 169)

Both aspects of belonging were found in the survey responses. Some were direct expressions of being or feeling connected to a certain place or group of people. Others highlighted the need to have something in common, such as having a similar mindset or background, engaging in the same practices or sharing the same spaces (on the importance of practices and spaces for community formation, see Liepins 2000). By focusing on attributes that are held in common by community members, the respondents inadvertently emphasized the notion that community is constituted collectively and intersubjectively, thus community members together create a shared space or the idea of a shared space. In this regard too, we see connections to Benedikt Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (B. Anderson 1991), yet not in a non-material sense but rather in how location plays into peoples’ senses of belonging (on belonging to place in the Norwegian context see Berg 2016).

The overarching theme activities and involvement captured references to actions that bring and potentially bind people together, whether through participation in a sports club or volunteering at a school or church event. Through actions and active community involvement, ‘natural, involuntary bonds’ grow, which sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies associated with Gemeinschaft (Wirth 1926). Collective action for the common good can only emerge through community participation, even if it is through everyday activities that, perhaps unintentionally, contribute to the communal well-being (van Zomeren 2013). Although our respondents rarely explicitly mentioned working for the common good or working toward a common goal, the notions of doing or achieving something collectively were nonetheless present in their answers. In line with Jon Anderson (2015, 73), who notes that ‘Through our everyday actions [ … ] we leave traces that take and make place’, our findings show that people and place are co-constituted. When incorporating Liepins’ view on the role of practices (Liepins 2000), we found that the traces of our everyday actions not only make place but also shape community. In short, and echoing Blokland (2017), community is also a process that forms around peoples’ localized practices.

The fifth and final overarching theme, lokalsamfunn as a provider of local goods and services, refers to a conglomeration of all locations where daily hands-on actions occur (e.g. schools, shops, health services). In the locations (i.e. public spaces) where we meet and interact with others, we become part of a local community. Liepins (2000, 32) sees them as spaces in which ‘a material and metaphorical embodiment of “community”’ manifests through activities and social relations. Hence, for a community to function, there is a need for spaces in which it is possible for people to interact.

People’s perspectives and policymaking

The insights presented in the preceding section regarding people’s perspectives on Norwegian lokalsamfunn prove useful with regard to the second purpose of this article, namely to identify challenges that the term lokalsamfunn represents for current national policymaking. In many policies, the focus lies on encouraging people to engage in their local communities in order to promote their collective well-being, whether that takes the form of programmes targeting social cohesion, community safety, health, or resilience.

There are two interrelated findings from our study that we would like to draw attention to within the context of community-based policymaking more broadly and within the context of social cohesion more specifically. The first is the predominant, yet not surprising, focus on community as localized. Although the respondents’ geographical references often coincided with administrative boundaries used in policy documents, their feelings about belonging, or not, through boundary-making were also in focus. Hence, they conveyed a message regarding inclusion and exclusion. We do not know enough about who are seen as not belonging or are excluded from a community. For that reason, we argue that programmes targeting social cohesion and community involvement require intimate understanding of people, places and their interactions. However, many policy documents target generic communities, frequently equating them with administrative units. By doing so, they ignore the diversity within communities and obfuscate processes of exclusion. Also, through their set-up, the envisioned community programmes are likely to fall short of their objectives, namely to involve the community and to enhance collective well-being.

The second of our two interrelated findings is that somewhat surprisingly only 10% of the respondents’ answers included explicit references to relational aspects. This finding could be subject to critical reflection, not only because the relational aspects are very much emphasized in the academic literature, but also because social cohesion is essentially relational. Hence, there is a political challenge folded into this finding. Community programming cannot be fruitful without community interaction and a degree of social cohesion. However, we acknowledge that a reason for the lack of relationality might rest with the format of the survey question but the lack may also reflect a rather direct and material understanding of the concept. A common lay interpretation may simply be that people see lokalsamfunn as a vaguely defined but limited geographical unit filled with people who more or less know each other and interact to varying degrees. To devise any community-based programme on the basis of such an interpretation of what a lokalsamfunn is may be a challenging undertaking. The use of community in policymaking presupposes that community members feel a sense of responsibility and mutual obligation toward each other. However, the findings from our study indicate that the extent of such relational aspects may be rather weak and probably varies between communities, thus making lokalsamfunn a somewhat unreliable partner in efforts to enhance social cohesion and community well-being.

Conclusions

In conclusion, it is apparent that local community (lokalsamfunn) is a multifaceted construct. We analysed 1378 responses to one survey question (‘How do you define local community?’) and reflected upon them by drawing on four different community conceptions. Although the conceptions are by no means all-encompassing, they nonetheless provided us with different perspectives from which to view the emerging themes within the empirical material. The conception of community as a symbolic and socially constructed idea helped us to appreciate the individuality of each survey response. Although the idea of community as a whole is brought forth by a group of people, it is shaped by individual thoughts, beliefs and experiences set within a material reality. When the respondents put their personal understanding of the term lokalsamfunn into words, they provided us with an intricate, diverse and complex picture of what a Norwegian lokalsamfunn might be. Contrastingly, the other three conceptions of community, as a geographical area, as a social and relational entity, and as collective action, helped us interpret the content of their responses. Largely oversimplified, we hold that the Norwegian lokalsamfunn as described by our respondents is first and foremost (1) a geographical area or place, filled with (2) people who seek to (3) belong, (4) interact, and (5) go about their daily lives.

However, the relative lack of explicit references to relational aspects of community may be a fair warning for community-based programming, as such programmes presuppose the existence of active community members, social interaction, and feelings of mutual obligation and responsibility, yet what happens if these key elements do not exist or are less prevalent in the minds of the people who form the communities? Conveniently drawing boundaries around people for the purpose of policymaking and planning will not suffice if the aim is to improve communal well-being. That is why we argue that community-based programmes require intricate knowledge of the social dynamics within the communities.

Notes

1 Respondents living in municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants were assigned to the urban group, whereas respondents living in municipalities with less than 50,000 inhabitants were assigned to the rural group.

2 All translations into English were made by co-author Sabrina Scherzer and checked for accuracy by the other co-authors.

3 Although the observations were valid, it should be noted that they were based only on a limited number of responses and therefore caution should be exercised when drawing any inferences from them.

4 For all 1378 respondents, the overall urban–rural distribution was 44–56%.

5 In sociocultural terms, friluftsliv has been tied to the building of the Norwegian nation and the related national identity. Thus, as practice and ideology, friluftsliv is both an ideal and image of the country and makes up a big part of many peoples’ lives (Flemsæter et al. 2015).

6 The gender distribution for all respondents was 52% male to 48% female, and the relative sizes of the age groups were 37% (18–39 years), 49% (40–69 years) and 14% (70+ years).