Tuesday, 29 December 2009

Neighbourhood encounter

A friend told me she was out for a run the other day and saw someone she knew also running. Waited for him, greeted, and was told 'Sorry, I'm a solitary runner'. And on he went. She noticed he had his ears stuffed with, what are they, earpieces of some kind, music let's suppose. The next evening he phoned to apologise for seeming rude.

This was someone who would be classed as an acquaintance, neither friend nor stranger. I'll be posting a review here shortly of a book about acquaintances, by David Morgan.

29 Dec 2009 21:48:39 | Neighbourhood relations, Vignettes

2 Comments

Its the loneliness of the long distance runner isn't it?

Posted by: Martin Dudley | Wednesday, 30 December 2009 at 09:30

Hi, Andy here from www.neighboursunited.co.uk

We set the site up over 12 months ago in Harrogate and now over 1,200 households are spreading neighbourism..

We had our first get-together at Christmas and it was a great success and shows that you can use the internet to try and connect people physically as well as virtually.

We are looking for Neighbour Champions in other areas if anyone is interested in trying to reconnect local communities across the UK..

Please check out the site and register

Happy New Year to everyone..

Cheers
Andy
one of the original neighbours

Posted by: Andy Lamb | Wednesday, 30 December 2009 at 12:26

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Ho ho ho In a Connected Communities newsletter, the RSA has announced that it is working on the “RSA Civic Certificate" - 'We are in the process of designing a new community development qualification with the aim of recognising, encouraging and supporting civic action.' This'll look good in the field - an imperiously-bestowed qualification emanating from a London-based organisation made up of wealthy well-intentioned professionals, with the word ‘Royal' in its name, and one hell of a track record in community development. How have we coped without it all these years? I could be wrong, but I reckon the anti-professional ethos of CD practice should just about remain intact.
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Acquaintances: book review Morgan, D. (2009). Acquaintances: the space between intimates and strangers. Maidenhead, Open University Press. Reviewed by Kevin Harris. Some years ago I published an article in which I raised the need for a typology of encounters, because I couldn't find quite what I wanted. I was after some way of helpfully distinguishing relationships by such features as familiarity (close ties - first name - knowing ties etc) and the degree of freedom of the relationship (coerced - kin - coincidental – voluntary – spontaneous - pragmatic and so on). I found a few bits and pieces to draw on, such as some 1996 Scandinavian research which distinguished ‘acknowledge-contact’, ‘greeting contact’, and ‘helping contact’ as forms of weak tie. But no developed typology. I thought it would be handy to think more systematically about different kinds of encounters or ‘occasions’ - not just whether contact is face-to-face or remote, synchronous or asynchronous; but also the degree of contrivance, covering for instance coincidence, serendipity, whether predictable or explicable, scheduled or contrived and so on. At the time I wasn't aware of Lyn Lofland's marvellous work on the public realm, which would have helped. And David Morgan had not yet written Acquaintances, which I think it's fair to describe as a preliminary study of people who occupy the space between intimates and strangers. Morgan approaches the subject mainly at the individual rather than the community or social level. Fundamental to his definition is an appreciation of the knowledge that people have of others, which distinguishes acquaintance from stranger. When it comes to thinking about neighbouring, it's interesting to have the phenomenon of noise defined as 'unwelcome acaquaintanceship knowledge'. Giving acquaintanceship due recognition seems to have had to wait for the relatively recent development of a sociology of the everyday, and the author explains how acquaintances 'are part of the process of building up a sense of the everyday in time, space, practices and orientations to the world'. He's concerned to get us thinking more positively about the role that acquaintances play in our lives, especially in the cosmopolitan context; and to assert that they are necessary for social life to exist at all. 'It would be difficult,' he writes, 'to describe or account for social life without them.' He also suggests (in an introductory discussion, from R4's Thinking allowed programme a couple of months ago [thanks Martin for the headsup] which is still available here at about 13 minutes) that the tendency to romanticise acquaintances as intimates-in-waiting devalues their social significance. Although the book is not based on any fresh research, the objectives are fully achieved in what is a very readable text, refreshingly illustrated with personal anecdote in an easy-going style. This book will take its place in the literature of social relations because it draws attention to the fact that acquaintanceship encounters take place regularly and unspectacularly, and it is that which is significant. The settings covered include neighbourhoods, the workplace, and relations between professionals. Further chapters cover passing acquaintances, fleeting...

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