The Sociology Of Community Connections

Many of our current social problems have been attributed to the breakdown or loss of community as a place and to the fragmentation of connections due to an extreme value of individualism in the Western world, particularly in the United States. Not all scholars and researchers agree that individualism and technology are the primary culprits in the loss of community as it existed in the middle decade of the 20th century. Nonetheless, people exist in groups, and connections are vital to their existence and in the daily performance of activities. The second edition of the Sociology of Community Connections will identify and help students understand community connectedness in the present and future.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

This handbook provides an overview on major developments that occurred in the field of economic sociology after its rebirth since the 1980s in the US. It offers new insights on the uniqueness of European economic sociology compared to US economic sociology which emerged at the end of the 20th century. The handbook presents economic sociology as a developing field which started with certain foundations as new economic sociology, widening the perspective by introducing social factors thereby focusing more on general belief systems, social forms of coordination and the relationships between society and the economy. It offers an outstanding portrait of the research field helping to identify major foundations and trajectories as well as new research perspectives for a globalized economic sociology. This makes the handbook appeal to specialized researchers of the field, researchers from other disciplines interested in economic phenomena, as well as graduate and postgraduate students.

This collection explores sociological analyses of home in Canada, drawing upon studies of family, urban and rural communities, migration and immigration, and other areas to discuss the idea of “home.” This volume, organized across three parts, moves from the micro-level of personal homemaking, to the meso-level of neighbourhood community, to the macro-level of political ecology. The contributors, both new and established scholars, draw upon a plurality of standpoints, including gendered, class-based, racialized, and Indigenous voices. It is the first Canadian collection of readings on the sociology of home.

The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places.Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry.

Networks in the Global Village examines how people live through personal communities: their networks of friends, neighbors, relatives, and coworkers. It is the first book to compare the communities of people around the world. Major social differences between and within the First, Second, and Third Worlds affect the opportunities and insecurities w

Community and Society, or Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, is a study of the spectrum of prototypical social groups as identified by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. First published in 1887, the work explores the relationship between community-based organizations and society-based organizations, and the human will that lies beneath each. Ferdinand Tönnies was born in Schleswig in 1855, then under Danish rule. The third son of a wealthy farmer, Tönnies studied at the universities of Strassburg, Jena, Bonn, Leipzig, and Berlin, before receiving a doctorate in philology (the study of languages) from the University of Tübingnen in 1877. The world around him was experiencing massive upheaval during Tönnies' early years. His own home of Schleswig changed hands from Danish to Prussian rule in 1864. Further, the Industrial Revolution radically altered the nature of city life, country life, and the relationships between the two. Within just 20 years, Prussia and Germany went from two-thirds rural and one-third urban to the complete reverse. By the time of his graduation, he had developed a new interest in political philosophy and sociology. Free from the need to earn a living by his family money, Tönnies wrote extensively for professional journals and political periodicals. He published over 900 works throughout his life. But his best-known contribution is Community and Society, which he began to write at just 21 years old. The work examines the intersections between the two disparate types of groups - Gemeinschaft, or community groups, and Gesellschaft, or social groups. Rather than identifying any one group as entirely Gemeinschaft or entirely Gesellschaft, Tönnies saw all social groups as existing along the spectrum, with community and society each on the opposite side. All social entities are either more Gemeinschaft-like or more Gesellschaft- like, but no group is 100% one or the other. The ties that bind Gemeinschaft-leaning communities include mutual bonds and feelings of togetherness. They exist more strongly in families, neighborhoods, and religious communities. On the other side, Gesellschaft societies are more impersonal, held together by the members to meet individual goals. These connections are often self-interested and may have monetary or political ends, such as corporations, states, or certain social clubs. Beneath each grouping lies the two types of human will, Wesenwille (essential or natural will) and Kürville (arbitrary will). In the expression of natural will, an individual will see himself as a means to serve the goal of the group. The group, and relationships within that group, are the purpose. But in the expression of arbitrary will, the individual's actions within the group are meant to further that person's goals. The group is merely a means to an end. The ultimate conclusion? Man is a social being whose motivations are always a combination of Wesenwille and Kürville. Individuals will live in personal communities of kinship, and will also form new kinds of associations to meet their ends. Although the book wasn't wildly successful in its first edition, a second 1912 edition experienced lasting popularity among students of sociology. Throughout the rest of his career, Tönnies wrote and taught about sociology, social change, public opinion, and technology. He co-founded the German Society for Sociology in 1909 along with eminent sociologists Rudolf Goldscheid, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. Tönnies served as the first president of the group but was ousted and lost his professorship at the University of Kiel in 1933 after criticizing the Nazis. He passed away 3 years later in 1936 at the age of 81.

School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools addresses a fundamental question in education today: How will colleges and universities prepare future teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education professionals to conduct effective programs of family and community involvement that contribute to students' success in school? The work of Joyce L. Epstein has advanced theories, research, policies, and practices of family and community involvement in elementary, middle, and high schools, districts, and states nationwide. In this second edition, she shows that there are new and better ways to organize programs of family and community involvement as essential components of district leadership and school improvement. THE SECOND EDITION OFFERS EDUCATORS AND RESEARCHERS: A framework for helping rising educators to develop comprehensive, goal-linked programs of school, family, andcommunity partnerships. A clear discussion of the theory of overlapping spheres of influence, which asserts that schools, families, and communitiesshare responsibility for student success in school. A historic overview and exploration of research on the nature and effects of parent involvement. Methods for applying the theory, framework, and research on partnerships in college course assignments, classdiscussions, projects and activities, and fi eld experiences. Examples that show how research-based approaches improve policies on partnerships, district leadership, andschool programs of family and community involvement. Definitive and engaging, School, Family, and Community Partnerships can be used as a main or supplementary text in courses on foundations of education methods of teaching, educational administration, family and community relations, contemporary issues in education, sociology of education, sociology of the family, school psychology, social work, education policy, and other courses that prepare professionals to work in schools and with families and students.