Community: "It's the Real Thing"

"It's the Real Thing"

(If you are a fan of "Mad Men" but have not seen the show finale, you probably don't want to read any further right now.)

Public administration is considered a social science, so "community" is a common theme in the discipline.  As a practitioner, community could be interpreted as narrowly as stakeholders and constituents.  

When I think of the textbook definition of community, I think back to the early social studies curricula when I was in elementary school, the textbook cover art lined with people of different ethnicities, ages, genders, and ability, each doing their part to build a "community".  

While some standard public administration textbooks do not address the issue of "community", several scholars do pay attention to its centrality in the discipline.  For example, Deborah Stone's polis model of society is a policy framework that challenges the "rational model" and relies on the concept of community.  She states, "Public policy is about communities trying to achieve something as communities" (p. 18).  Richard Box (2009) discusses community in terms of local governance.  Finally, Robert D. Putnam devoted an entire book, Bowling Alone, to the decline of community in the United States.

I want to shy away from the textbook definition of community in this particular post and think beyond this concept.  I want to consider community in a context that is global and intangible.

In the final episode of "Mad Men" the protagonist and anti-hero, Don Draper, sits meditating by the California coast, seemingly at peace with his past and present, the fate of characters resting in the balance of the future, which is ambiguous and unknown.  We do not know if Don or any of the other characters will get a happy ending.  The camera zooms in on Don with a blissful smile and then cuts to footage of the 1971 McCann-Erickson Coca-Cola commercial "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke."

In this last shot, a community of viewers, the audience, collectively sat in an anxious send off, immediately resorting to the internet to share their perceptions of the ending in Tweets, status updates, blogs, and articles.

That is what is so remarkable about the ending, this juxtaposition between what is real, fiction, and nonfiction, creating this blended community.  We have the fictional Don Draper, who was never real to begin with, an ad man from a fictional agency bought out by a real-life agency, McCann Erickson, a fictional character who dreamed up (or not) a real-life ad about a global community.  The viewing community was able to meet at this apex between real and fiction.  Finally, there is the idea that the entire world is just one community bonding over a "real" product.

This leads me to global communities and how we interact.  As a researcher who studies comparative administration and policy narratives with a topical area is on another continent, I rely on individuals and communities through technology.  Nothing takes the place of on-the-ground field work, but the global community on a digital platform gives me more access to knowledge but also a "real place" to disseminate knowledge.  To illustrate, my topic area is Japan, so I rely on communities of scholars, practitioners, and subjects for my research, but it is also necessary to connect with communities on the West Coast and in other places such as Australia and New Zealand, whose scholarship I have found particularly enriching on my subject given their geopolitical interest in Japan.  I hope to similarly touch these communities as well with the knowledge I generate but also address a pivotal question in public policy scholarship.

CEnR plays directly into an intriguing question that public policy scholars face:
How is this knowledge disseminated to the community, which includes actors, constituents, and stakeholders.

The Den-Den Community

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."  Joan Didion

One of the more fascinating elements of social network platforms is our digital narrative, that is, the stories we tell others, usually about ourselves.  We are the center of plots that we construct and if we hit publish, we make it real.

I started this blog in 2009 with no particular goal in mind other than the private blog I maintained on the now outdated MySpace seemed to suffer some technical glitch.  Perhaps the purpose, as denoted in the title, was to journal my academic journey which I intended to mythologize as an adventure or odyssey of sorts.  The entries were sparse, personal, and rarely academically oriented.  Life was sleepy and I basically lost interest in whimsy blogging on mundane topics with no readership to witness.

I am re-purposing this blog.  In general, I am gun-shy about about social media platforms, mostly because, in the words of St. Vincent (Annie Clark), "The real currency in the future will be privacy."  However, I decided to enroll in a MOOC offered by VCU called "Collaborative Curiousity" which centers on community-engaged research (CEnR).

My approach to the course is exploratory.  I am currently completing my Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy and Administration and writing my dissertation on Japanese labor policy and gender discrimination specifically analyzing implementation structure.  My other research interest is in disaster recovery, gender performance, and government response with a particular focus on post-3/11 Japan.

My other-other area of expertise is in Title IX, Title VII, Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and the Clery Act as it relates to federal compliance in higher education.

I have been labeled a "qualitative person" and admittedly, I really enjoy qualitative research design.  Although public policy and administration is a social science field largely dominated by quantitative methods, caught between whether the field is an art or science,  I prefer alternative methods, methodologies, and epistemologies as a means of studying policy topics.

Finally, I have started and quit more English degrees than I care to admit but finally accepted that while I am unable to cultivate the necessary appreciation of Shakespeare to muddle through the degree requirements, my penchant for literature can be found in my love for studying policy frames, which are little sagas told in symbols, metaphors, and numbers.

On a personal level, I hope the "Collaborative Curiousity" MOOC may challenge and illuminate my research approach and at minimal, on a professional level, bring new insights when I work on various studies and projects.