Communities of Fate
The English expression “community of fate” is notable for its marginality. True, some scholars of management and the labor process have employed the concept to identify a paternalistic corporate ideology that, to the degree to which it is implanted, enthuses workers with a sense of loyalty and common sacrifice. But this kind of specific, self-conscious and theoretical usage is exceptional. Mostly, social scientists refer to community of fate only in passing—as in the idea of a pan- European sense of active citizenship —or to distinguish between communities of choice (better off neighborhoods able to maximize security and safety) and communities of fate (poor neighborhoods, with fewer resources to defend themselves against crime and other social injuries). Communitarian writers appear to have no place for it in their casuistries. Nor does the master of the sustained, inflected definition, Erving Goffman, who summons “community of fate” only to render it as little more than a synonym for collegiality. Even books that contain the term in their titles avoid fleshing out its meaning. My research seeks to energize and flesh out community of fate as a term that depicts a process of group formation under extreme duress. Community of fate refers to a pattern of temporary social cohesion arising from a mass emergency or “disaster.” Community of fate, in this adumbration, is an outcome-in-process; it only exists to the extent to which, and during the period in which, it is being formed and reproduced. Many sociologists since Durkheim and Mauss have observed that institutions have a tendency to reveal themselves when they are stressed and in crisis. Communities of fate are different: they come into being as a result of stress and crisis, instantiating a mode of life that hitherto was only nascent, and interrupting the doze of routine. They are also capable of being socially productive and consequential, which means capable of collective action for the brief time they are in existence. Quintessentially local, symbolically and materially bounded, community of fate is not to be confused with “risk society” which depicts something chronic rather than acute, general rather than particular, modern rather than trans-temporal, and vaguely recognized by its recipients rather than being viscerally grasped.
Offering a number of examples, but focusing on the SARS emergency in Hong Kong, the research argues that a community of fate requires the following elements to emerge: danger recognition, moral density (a feeling of interconnectedness), duration (trial rather than shock), closure (the experience of crisis as a collective exile), material and organizational resources to resist the menace, be it invasion, disease, tsunami, aerial bombing, axes of convergence (modalities in which people can align on ethnic, national or other bases), and social ritual (as a means of galvanizing social life): in the case of SARS, the main ritual was mask wearing.
References:
Offering a number of examples, but focusing on the SARS emergency in Hong Kong, the research argues that a community of fate requires the following elements to emerge: danger recognition, moral density (a feeling of interconnectedness), duration (trial rather than shock), closure (the experience of crisis as a collective exile), material and organizational resources to resist the menace, be it invasion, disease, tsunami, aerial bombing, axes of convergence (modalities in which people can align on ethnic, national or other bases), and social ritual (as a means of galvanizing social life): in the case of SARS, the main ritual was mask wearing.
References:
- Entry on “Community of Fate” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition (ed. George Ritzer). Oxford: Wiley (forthcoming 2015).
- "Susan Sontag, Battle Language, and the SARS Outbreak in Hong Kong," Economy and Society, 35 (1) 2006, pp. 42-64.
- "Social Extremity, Communities of Fate, and the Sociology of SARS," European Journal of Sociology, 46:2, 2005, pp. 179-211.
- "Fate and Fate Communities" in Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (Author), New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction, 2008, pp. 243.