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Globally Competent Governance explores promising policies and practices developed by local governments and other community leaders across the United States and beyond in their efforts to build welcoming and inclusive communities and globally competent governments.Cities of the future, be they large, regional metropolitan centers of commerce and political power, regional hubs that service central metropolitan regions, or smaller suburban or rural centers that cater to agriculture or regional commerce, will continue to evolve. Globalization and global mobility have greatly increased the cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in cities and communities around the globe and demand local governments build welcoming and inclusive communities for all residents, particularly newcomers. Leaders, both in and out of government, must be prepared to respond to changing needs and manage any potential challenges this may create. To better understand what local officials are facing and what they are doing to manage change, the author presents data collected through surveys and individual interviews of local officials and other community influencers. Based on these findings, the book analyzes the current state of cities and makes policy recommendations for moving forward.This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the fields of public policy, governance, immigration, community engagement, social welfare, and political science, as well as professionals in government and nongovernmental organizations. It will also interest professionals working with immigrants and in immigration policy.

This book is a critical, transdisciplinary examination of a broad range of philosophical ideas, theoretical concepts, and artistic projects of community in the 20th and 21st century in the context of global/local social and political changes. This volume opens new vitas by focusing on carefully selected instances of multipronged crises in which existing concepts of commonality are questioned, reformulated, or even speculatively designed with a (better) future in view. As many authors of this volume argue, in the face of today's unprecedented global ecological and economic challenges speculative design is of utmost importance as it can foster alternative, unthought-of forms of connectivity that go far beyond progressivist narratives of nation, corporation, and nuclear family. Focusing on the situations of upheaval, both historical and fabulated, the collection not only examines how multipronged crises trigger antagonisms between egalitarian forms of communitas and the normative concept of the nation (and other normative forms of communities) as a community that separates and excludes. It also looks closely at philosophical and artistic projects that strive to go beyond the dichotomies and typically extrapolated utopias, envisaging new political economies, ways of living and alternative relational structures. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies, cultural studies, political studies, media studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, critical anthropology.

Dieses essential gibt einen Überblick über die Bürgerkommune, von den ersten Schritten der Einführung bis hin zu einem Netzwerk mit Bürgern, die freiwillig Aufgaben und Entscheidungen übernehmen. Bürgerkommunen benötigen die Unterstützung der Verwaltungsspitze und der Politik. Der Autor Armin König ist Bürgermeister der Gemeinde Illingen, die am Netzwerkprogramm „Engagierte Stadt“ teilnimmt. Er zeigt anhand von Beispielen wirksame Partizipationsinstrumente und erläutert, wie erfolgreiche Bürgerkommunen entstehen können.

Die Soziologie der Mitgliedschaft behandelt Grundlagenfragen der soziologischen Theorie der Gegenwartsgesellschaft umfassend und tiefgreifend. Sie kommt in ihren Rekonstruktionen und der Begründung des Forschungsprogramms der mitgliedschaftstheoretischen Gesellschafts-, Organisations- und Interaktionstheorie zu Einsichten, die zur Diskussion und Weiterführung motivieren. Dabei wertet sie das überlieferte soziologische Wissen aus und führt es einer Reinterpretation zu. Daraus ergibt sich eine Perspektive, welche die Evolution der Mitgliedschaftsvoraussetzungen sozialer Systeme unter den Bedingungen der veränderten Struktur der Gegenwartsgesellschaft untersucht. Es betrifft dies die Teilnahmebedingungen an den Kommunikationssystemen in allen Funktionssysteme, z. B. die der Wirtschaft, Politik und Wissenschaft. Die Soziologie der Mitgliedschaft leitet eine Neufassung der Theorie der sozialen Integration ein, die den normativ orientierten Ansatz der soziologischen Theorie einer Kritik unterzieht.

Martin Schössler unternimmt eine Neuerschließung des Denkens des französischen Publizisten und Politikers Alexis de Tocqueville. Dessen Interpretation der modernen Demokratie, Über die Demokratie in Amerika, lieferte bereits 1835 eine hellsichtige Vorausschau auf die tief greifenden, oftmals als ambivalent empfundenen Veränderungen der Lebenswirklichkeit in einer freiheitlichen Gesellschaftsordnung marktwirtschaftlicher Prägung. Dabei hat Tocqueville als erster erkannt, dass sich in der Demokratie die Grundlagen repräsentativer Herrschaft stets neu über das Grundverständnis ihrer Bürger herausbilden. Der Autor befasst sich mit der Frage, wie Tocqueville sein Theoriemodell jenseits seines analytischen Talents zu einer systematischen, von einer erkennbaren Methodik gestützten Vorausschau des „demokratischen Zeitalters“ entwickeln konnte.

Irgendwann war es soweit: Die einzige Dorfwirtschaft von Bollschweil wurde geschlossen und somit der Treffpunkt für die Bevölkerung. Doch die Gemeinde im Badischen fand eine Lösung: 2010 eröffnete das genossenschaftliche Dorfgasthaus, ermöglicht durch Freiwilligenarbeit. Heute ist das Gasthaus sehr erfolgreich und beeinflusst die Entwicklung von Gemeindeleben und Gewerbe positiv. Für Alexander Dill ein Musterbeispiel für die gelungene Aktivierung von Sozialkapital. Jenseits wirtschaftlicher Zwänge entstehen Formen von Wohlstand, die sich nicht direkt in Geld messen lassen. Werte wie Vertrauen, Hilfsbereitschaft und Ehrenamt geben Gemeinschaften so die Chance, ihre Probleme mit nichtmateriellen Ressourcen zu lösen. Dill plädiert für eine neue Gemeingüterwirtschaft, beschreibt Erfolgsgeschichten und präsentiert Methoden, das Sozialkapital im eigenen Umfeld zu erkennen und zu verbessern.

Creating a Frame for Understanding Local Organizations RAM CNAAN, CARL MILOFSKY, AND ALBERT HUNTER In this book, scholars from anumber of disciplines present work focused on communities, with particular attention to community organizations. A few scholars have emphasized the imp- tance 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 - studied local organizations constitute a massive yet little understood portion of the nonprofit cosmos has led Smith (1997a,b) to call them the'darkmatter of the nonprofit universe.'An - terdisciplinary attempt to make community a unit ofstudy has not been previously undertaken, and thus we feel that this Handbook makes a unique contribution to scholarly understanding ofboth communities and nonprofit organizations that operate at the community level. A community is a group of people connected by the physical or virtual location (to some extent we can speak of'places'on the World Wide Web, e. g.) in which they dwell or congregate, organizations they form, and cultural values and symbols they share. Communities are affected, and in a sense defined by, forces that affect community members and their space.

Returning (to) Communities offers an innovative collection of examples and case studies into what has become a hotly disputed topic. The chapters present a wide-ranging series of interventions into the new debates over the concepts and practices of “community” and the communal. For this book, scholars have been gathered from across Europe and Australia as well as from the United States, and several contributors are involved in community practice. Returning (to) Communities is essential reading to researchers and students in social policy, sociology, ethnic studies, cultural analysis, media studies, and across all of the social sciences and humanities concerned with the communal and the collective.

In this inter-disciplinary follow-up to Future as Fairness: Ecological Justice and Global Citizenship (edited by Haugestad and Wulfhorst, Rodopi 2004) 14 chapters explore a variety of conceptual and practical pathways to the building of sustainable communities. Five chapters provide different perspectives on sustainable and unsustainable agriculture. Other cases explored are wildlife valuations, distributional effects of environmental policy, the emerging American nuclear power renaissance, regulation of care use, job losses with a raising GDP, cooperation between labour and environmentalists, plant biotechnology, participatory decision making, acoustic ecology, decent competition, and fractality as a key to global citizenship and ecological justice. The introduction sketches a framework for constructive evaluation of the interrelationships between environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, communities, and social interactions.

Many of the deep-rooted human conflicts that seize our attention today are not ready for formal mediation and negotiation. People do not negotiate about identity, fear, historic grievance, and injustice. Sustained dialogue provides a space where citizens outside government can change their conflictual relationships. Governments can negotiate binding agreements and enforce and implement them, but only citizens can change human relationships. Governments have long had their tools of diplomacy - mediation, negotiation, force, and allocation of resources. Harold H. Saunders'A Public Peace Process provides citizens outside government with their own instrument for transforming conflict. Saunders outlines a systematic approach for citizens to use in reducing racial, ethnic, and other deep-rooted tensions in their countries, communities, and organizations.

From gated communities to Heaven's Gate, the idea and practice of community in America have not only declined but mutated. In the process, Americans'longing to be connected to something greater than themselves has intensified. This longing, coupled with an absence of genuine community alternatives, opens the way to counterfeit claims by those promoting economic rather than social agendas. This book examines'counterfeit community'as it has become manifest throughout contemporary American society-in housing, as it shapes our public spaces; in the workplace; in politics; in religion; and most recently, in cyberspace.

A classic political philosophy text, available again The revival of political philosophy has frequently assumed that a theory of human well-being and fulfillment is necessary, preoccupied with questions of epistemology and technical conceptual analysis. In instances where the nature of the human good is considered, the paradigm of autonomous individualism customarily dominates. In Character, Community, and Politics, Cochran moves away from these prevailing ideas to develop a communal theory of political order, helping to redefine a number of fundamental, but often neglected, ideas. Chief among them are commitment, community, responsibility, and character—concepts Cochran develops through discussions of authority, freedom, pluralism, and the common good. Drawing on a wide variety of fields, such as philosophy, ethics, literature, moral theology, and sociology, the author renews these concepts to outline a theory of human life and political order distinct from sclerotic categories such as conservatism, socialism, radicalism, or Marxism.