Observing community : an inquiry into the meaning of community based on Luhmann's general theory of society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBSERVING COMMUNITY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY BASED ON LUHMANN’S GENERAL THEORY OF SOCIETY David John Connell Advisor: University of Guelph, 2003 Prof. Anthony M. Fuller This inquiry examines the meaning of community as a response to the disparity between the increasing use and rising importance of community and an apparent inability to explain this phenomenon. This disparity appears in the form of closure. Within rural studies, community theorists presume that community is too elusive to define and too complex to understand. Consequently, ambiguity is accepted as a normal condition of inquiry. When we ask about the meaning of community, this closure (i.e., community is ambiguous because it is ambiguous) becomes problematic: community theorists cannot see beyond the limitations of their approaches. To ‘see’ the problem of closure this inquiry takes leave of the normal assumptions, methods, definitions, and approaches of rural studies. I adopt a ‘post’ normal foundation of inquiry by replacing a presupposition of an orderly existence with a presupposition of complexity. I work from the philosophical implications of complexity and reach forward to the possibility of community. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to address the limitations of the normal science of community theory within rural studies and, in so doing, propose a comprehensive foundation for a theory of community as a social system. I focus upon the dominant semantics of community within rural studies and, in particular, upon the emerging semantics of community within the field of sustainable rural communities. The framework used for this inquiry into the meaning of community is based on Niklas Luhmann’s general theory of society, which is based on a post-humanist conception of the social as self-referential systems of communication. To reach forward to the possibility of community means to understand the semantics of community as an emergent, improbable form of social stability. Methodologically, a systems-theoretical approach observes the co-evolution of semantics and social structures. Accordingly, complexity is not an ontological constraint but an innovative point of departure for an inquiry into the meaning of community. We gain not only a clear (non-ambiguous) understanding of the residual, dominant, and emerging semantics of community, but also important insights as to why people are increasingly using community as a significant societal value.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".