ABSTRACT
Any social institution having a life in a larger community has a wide variety of both formal and informal contacts and exchanges with that community. The lodge had the full range of such contacts during the experiment. As an experimental rehabilitative project, it interacted with the grantee university, with the federal hospital, and with private medical institutions. As a business, it related to various official agencies of local government and to the public who were its customers. As a living unit for its members, it came in contact with the friends and relatives of the men who came to the lodge as participants in the experiment. Finally, the lodge related directly to the neighborhood in which it existed. As a unit, and through the individual behavior of its members, it interacted with the local residents and businesses in the immediate vicinity—an area mainly defined in the previous chapter as the “neighborhood,” together with a fringe area of the “local community” which lay closest to the lodge site.
