Introduction: Creating a Frame for Understanding Local Organizations

In this book, scholars from a number of disciplines present work focused on communities, with particular attention to community organizations. A few scholars have emphasized the importance of the need to map this intellectual territory (Calhoun, 1992). In some ways community study seems to be well-trodden ground; there has been influential work on social capital, for example (Coleman, 1987,1988; Putnam, 1995; Foley and Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Foley, 1998). Yet the rich diversity of communities and community organizations has rarely been studied from a perspective that is both conceptual and descriptive. The growing sense that un-studied local organizations constitute a massive yet little-understood portion of the nonprofit cosmos has led (1997a),(b) to call them the “dark matter of the nonprofit universe.” An interdisciplinary attempt to make community a unit of study has not been previously undertaken, and thus we feel that this Handbook makes a unique contribution to scholarly understanding of both communities and nonprofit organizations that operate at the community level.