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COMMUNITY THE STRUCTURE OF BELONGING Peter Block, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-57675-487-0.
This book explores the structure and creation of "community," which is defined by the author as "the experience of belonging." This is probably the central insight to the book - the notion that community is not a thing, like an organization, business, or municipality, but rather & feeling or experience. It is the creation of community - this sense of interconnectedness and shared purpose amongst a group of individuals - that leads to the effective and healthy entities that we normally think of as being "communities." (The way I simplify this for myself is to think of community as a verb, not a noun.)
Peter Block is a partner in an outfit called Designed Learning, which is a training company devoted to the development of the kinds of skills discussed in this and other works (he has also written Stewardship, The Empowered Manager and The Answer to How is Yes). The purpose of this book, as he describes it, is:
My intent in this book is to give definition to ways of structuring the experience of belonging - that's why the first word in its subtitle is structure. Belonging does not have to be left to chance or be dependent on the welcoming nature of others, (p. xii)
According to Block the need for community building is paramount:
The need to create a structure of belonging grows out of the isolated nature of our lives, our institutions and our communities. The absence of belonging is so widespread that we might say we are living in an age of isolation, imitating...