ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the sources of adaptation and flexibility that allow a community to heighten its dominant and positive role in workers' lives as the world around them changes. She explores a dynamic, positive community during a time of dramatic transformation. The author reveals three factors that underlie the strengthening of a positive community when it is confronted with external change: shared history, a densely connected structure of interaction, and regular communication across members. Through shared history, shared structure, and shared communication practices, positive communities of workers endow the group and its individual members with identity, a lens for interpretation, and a channel of external influence in a changing world. A positive community enhances the "quality of character of human relationship" across its members. Among San Pedro's longshoremen, face-to-face communication in the hiring hall allows the development of a common language supporting the goals and ideals of the community of workers.
