‘A New We’: Post-Individualistic Community-Based Initiatives as Social Innovations? Empirical Observations in Intentional Communities

Abstract

Sociologists largely discuss ‘community’ and ‘individual’ as antonyms, arguing that modernity has led to an erosion of community. Indeed, individualisation has been a one-sided development that has not been accompanied by the emergence of a new mode of commonality. Against this sociocultural background, ‘intentional communities’ have been increasingly developed in the past decades in the USA and in Europe as an attempt to revive social values like responsible interaction and binding commonality. However, only about 5% of these initiatives reach the stage of a community with shared property and a communal mode of living. Amongst the reasons for the failure of intentional communities are the negative side effects of individualisation and the individualised socialisation of people in the West. In this chapter, Iris Kunze discusses her research on social innovation initiatives. She interprets these movements as a reinvention of more communal social relations, which aim to ‘heal’ the ‘social poverty’ in industrialised countries. Offering new modes of community that allow for individual freedom, these social innovation initiatives provide laboratories that work as a silent innovation in the process of societal transformation. Based on her empirical research, Kunze outlines patterns, principles, and best practices how to reinvent community.