ABSTRACT
The author came to his first community building workshop in the late 1980s rather skeptical about the whole idea. The workshop was being run by the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE) and its founder, M. Scott Peck. Consciousness—of the self and other—are two cornerstones on which to build community. "Group consciousness" is a third cornerstone of community. It requires paying attention to the parts and the whole. Their workshop group was gaining a new and fluid organization as they attended to their collective dynamics and shared responsibility for building relationships. The final cornerstone of community is to organize in harmony with what William James calls the "unseen order of things". Work itself is being rediscovered as a source of spiritual growth and connection to others. Scholarly papers on work groups usually begin with a discussion of the Hawthorne studies and commentary on how productive norms developed in the bank wiring room once management showed its human face.
