{"id":1111,"date":"2014-03-19T21:56:42","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T01:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uucsv.org\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2014-03-19T21:56:42","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T01:56:42","slug":"lets-get-organized-or-should-we-form-a-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/?p=1111","title":{"rendered":"Let's Get Organized! Or Should We Form a Community?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Fun Disclaimer about Today’s Columnist: Doug Bennett is my cousin (and\u00a0 President Emeritus, Earlham College). Thought this was an interesting look at Organizations vs Community. I find it fascinating the ways our genes overlap and the ways they don’t! Enjoy. I’m finding snitching friends and loved one’s columns a great way to blog. Thanks all.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What do you think… are we a faith community in these terms?<\/div>\n
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Posted on March 19, 2014<\/a> by Doug Bennett<\/a><\/div>\n

March 19, 2014<\/p>\n

Many people are ambivalent about organizations. We realize that a good deal of what gets done in this world is done in and through organizations, but we also chafe at the ways they hem us in \u2014 their policies and formalities. I used the Google NGram to look at variations over time in when we have spoken of organizations:<\/p>\n

\"association,<\/a>As you can see, I also threw in other terms for ways human beings coordinate their activities: association, institution, even corporation. You can see that \u201cinstitution\u201d was once the commonest of these terms, but\/and it\u2019s the one whose frequency of usage has changed the least. The other three terms all show a striking rise about the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. They rise in common, but then \u201ccorporation\u201d settles into a spiky, up-and-down pattern. \u201cAssociation\u201d and \u201corganization\u201d rise dramatically until about 1920, then rise more slowly, and then begin to decline in the 1970s. (Historians tell us that many of the sturdy organizations we depend upon today were first formed at the beginning of the 20th century.)\u00a0 Over the past hundred years, we seem to have embraced more formal ways of organizing ourselves, but perhaps grown a bit tired of this in recent decades.<\/p>\n

We are less ambivalent, more comfortable with \u201ccommunities,\u201d aren\u2019t we? It is striking to add \u201ccommunity\u201d to that same Goggle NGram:<\/p>\n

\"association,<\/a>It shows the same pattern of rising at the turn of the century and continuing to rise after that. When \u201cassociation\u201d and \u201corganization\u201d begin to drift down around 1970, so does \u201ccommunity,\u201dbut then the use of the term takes another surge up, its use eclipsing all the other terms. It looks very much like \u201ccommunity\u201d grows in parallel with \u201corganization and \u201cassociation\u201d (not in opposition), though parts company from them more recently.<\/p>\n

Also regarding \u201ccommunity,\u201d is this a term we use to often, to embrace too many disparate things? Or is this a sign of something else?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fun Disclaimer about Today’s Columnist: Doug Bennett is my cousin (and\u00a0 President Emeritus, Earlham College). Thought this was an interesting look at Organizations vs Community. I find it fascinating the ways our genes overlap and the ways they don’t! Enjoy. I’m finding snitching friends and loved one’s columns a great way to blog. Thanks all. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uucsv.jordicomas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}