Introduction

In Chapter Six, we began looking at volunteering in communities and noted that ‘community’ can have meanings beyond designating individuals who share a particularly geographical space. In his seminal work Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) highlights how a wide range of communities – the Brightville community (of Chapter Six) being one, but also the Scout community, the iPhone community, the Christian Aid community, the Peterborough United football supporting community and so on – give their members a sense of belonging. These communities are embedded to a greater or lesser extent in some geographic locality, but all share in common a sense of shared experience, shared norms and shared values among their members. Members of such communities may become active within them, give time and effort to support them, just as members of a village, town or suburban community may also do. Community can play a crucial symbolic role in generating people's sense of belonging (Crow and Allan, 1994, p 6); which resonates with Putnam's notion of social capital.

In order to understand these communities that coalesced around interest, we first go back to the work of Hillery, who in 1955 reviewed 94 different definitions of the term ‘community’. In reviewing this, Hillery argued that they could be divided into two main groups: those that saw community as being largely a territorial term and those that saw community as being based on social network relations. In this latter group, we find the genesis of the notion of ‘communities of interest’.