between Time , Space and Relations Multiple Senses of Community in Migration and Commuting : The Interplay

This article explores the relation between multiple senses of communities (M-SOC), time and relationships. Modern communications have weakened the traditional relationship between physical setting and social space, enabling participation in multiple communities simultaneously. Physical presence is no longer necessary or a guarantee for participation. This article is based upon a simple premise, that while as individuals we give meaning to our realities across a complexity of communities, our relations are continuously situated in time and space. Time participating in one community is time not spent participating in another. Additionally we are continuously holding a dialogue with time, both interpreting the past and assessing the future. Emigrating and commuting are social phenomena that are both concerned with the physical movement of individuals between social spaces, with contrasting distributions of time and relations across social spaces. Data obtained from two separate survey populations – immigrants (N = 200) and commuting university students (N = 208) from the same town – provide the empirical basis of the article. UCINET was used to map respondents’ personal networks and calculate relational variables. M-SOC, measured with the Sense of Community Index (SCI), was correlated with (1) the distribution of time, (2) the future expectations of and (3) relational variables across multiple communities. In the case of foreigners, the number of years living in Spain was a significant predictor in three different hierarchical regressions of the sense of community with their neighbourhood in the sending country, their neighbourhood in Spain and the community of expatriate compatriots. For commuters, the average time spent daily in the city of residence, the average degree of their personal networks and the presence of people from the city of residence in their personal networks were all positively associated with the sense of community of the city of residence. keywords: commuting ✦ identification ✦ migration ✦ personal networks ✦ sense of community ✦ time 743 International Sociology ✦ November 2007 ✦ Vol. 22(6): 743–766 © International Sociological Association SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) DOI: 10.1177/0268580907082259 distribution. © 2007 International Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized at Universidad de Sevilla. Biblioteca on October 29, 2007 http://iss.sagepub. com Downloaded from The concept of sense of community is the belonging to a group or a community based upon the perception of similarity among members and where reciprocal relations facilitate the satisfaction of individual needs (Sarason, 1974). McMillan and Chavis’s (1986) conceptualization of a sense of community is constructed from four interdependent components. The first, membership, represents a demarcation of who belongs and who does not in the community; it provides emotional security and a means of identification. It is also characterized by a level of personal investment and the sharing of a symbolic system between fellow members. Influence represents the dialectic interaction between the individual member and the community; where members, through self-expression, are able to influence other members and hence the community; simultaneously members are being influenced by the community they construct together. Integration and fulfilment of needs, the third component, is a realization that individual and community needs are reciprocal; individuals’ needs are fulfilled through membership, not to the detriment of the community’s needs. The final component, shared emotional connection, refers to the fact that members share significant experiences within the community, be they positive or negative, and these experiences are a part of the community’s shared biography that help unite existing members and socialize new ones. The sense of community (SOC) concept was primarily concerned with territorial communities, analysing SOC in specific towns (Prezza et al., 2001; Prezza and Costantini, 1998) and urban neighbourhoods (Chavis and Wandersman, 1990). Research expanded the concept to other arenas such as the workplace (Brodsky and Marx, 2001), schools (Pretty et al., 1996), university campuses (DeNeui, 2003; Lounsbury and DeNeui, 1995, 1996; Royal and Rossi, 1996) and specific relational communities and groups (Sonn, 2002; Sonn and Fisher, 1996; Zaff and Devlin, 1998). The majority of these empirical studies used the 12-item Sense of Community Index (SCI) (Perkins et al., 1990) or contextually-based adaptations in operationalizing McMillan and Chavis’s conceptual model. The literature measuring single communities acknowledges that the amount of time one has resided, worked, studied or participated in a given community and age are variables to consider when analysing sense of community (Buckner, 1988; Chavis et al., 1986; Glynn, 1981; Prezza and Costantini, 1998). Though it has not proven necessary for these studies to contemplate that their respondents, be they residents, employees or students, had alternative social spaces of interaction where time was detracted from the single community of the researchers’ interest. The importance of the SOC concept is based upon two assumptions: that a positive sense of community is believed to be beneficial to individual well-being, facilitating social relations and opposing anonymity and International Sociology Vol. 22 No. 6