ABSTRACT
By and large, scholars (and, in a slightly different way, practitioners) are apt to conceptualize community in an idealized fashion: They tend to see it as a positive, voluntary, static, cohesive, and clearly identifiable and definable entity. Despite repeated efforts by academics, researchers, and planners to draw concrete group borders and then proceed as if those reified borders are real and stable, real-life groups are remarkably uncooperative in such ventures. So-called group members stubbornly refuse to comply with group definitions and borders that are laid out for them.
