Community Identity and Community Culture

In response to a previously asked question, this week we look at community identity and its relationship with community culture

Photo by Kelly : https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-ivy-plants-2530313/

Some time ago, I wrote about manifestations of community culture and Hofstede’s Onion and there was a question asked under one of my posts…

Apologies that its taken me so long to come up with a decent answer to that question, but to be honest its taken me a long time to come up with a decent answer! At the time I was talking about community culture, and I referred to culture as the things you do and the things you believe. To answer the above question to any degree of satisfaction I think I need to expand on how I would define community culture, but if I were to give you the short version I would say no its not, but they are very tightly intertwined with each other.

Culture is a very big word. It comprises who we are now and who we have been. Its how we were raised and our parents and our grandparents and their grandparents and our grandchildren are raised. It’s a series of rituals that we carry out either alone or together, our heroes and idols that we revere, the symbols we recognise and understand, and the practices that we carry out time and again. Culture is the things that you do and the things you believe. When we come then to thinking about community culture, our definition must be tweaked slightly to be the things that you do as part of the community and the things that you believe about the community.

Identity is slightly different, in that we are thinking about ourselves. We might choose to dress in a certain way because we like what we think others will think about us (my new jacket for example makes me look pretty fly, despite what my wife thinks). We might feel responsibility to make decisions in and for our group because we see ourselves as a leader and that its our role to do so. We might choose to do any number of things – buy particular brands, listen to certain music, watch certain movies or tv programmes, eat particular foods – because others are doing it and we feel left out, and if we do the same we will see ourselves as part of that collective. We might think ourselves better than someone else or less valuable than someone else. We might think ourselves special or think ourselves worthless.

Identity then can be thought of the way we see ourselves and the things we believe about ourselves, and as humans we seek to align ourselves with this ideal state. I’m no psychotherapist but this principle is described by psychologist Carl Rogers who talks about Self Image (how we see ourselves) and the Ideal Self (what we want to look like), and that we are either incongruent when we do not see ourselves as aligning with our ideal self or congruent when we do.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/congruence-1.jpg

Community Identity then should be thought of as how the community see’s itself and what it believes about itself. It will have a view of what it is currently and it will have a view of what the ideal version of itself will look like. That ideal self for the community will usually be a good place to start when attempting to find the community’s goals and mission statement for who it chooses to be. I can give an example of a test engineering workplace community of practice that I used to be part of where our goal was ‘to build the best quality engineering function in the world’ (yes seriously!). As a community we identified our ideal self, we thought about ourselves and where we were now (spoiler alert – we were good but we weren’t the best in the world), and we thought about the type of things we should be doing that would help us achieve that goal and become congruent with our the ideal version of ourselves. This helped to govern the way we behaved – we collectively strived towards getting better at everything we did, knowing that we all had a responsibility to our community members to align with that goal. We took big and bold steps to improve the ways we practiced and the skills we developed. And when there were things that were forced upon us that took us further away from that ideal version of ourselves (an edict from above insisting on 100% test automation, a demand from a new manager for highly documented test scripts, I could go on), then it affected our collective wellbeing and happiness.

To try and summarise then, I said right at the start that community identity and community culture are separate but closely intertwined. A community’s culture is comprised of the things that it does and the things it believes are valuable, whereas its identity is the way that it sees itself and believes about itself. Both are of equal importance and must be respected and maintained, because without its cultural artifacts the community has no sense of what’s valuable, and without its identity it has no sense of whether what its doing is valuable. If you are a community leader, a member of a community, or even someone looking to join/decide whether a community is right for you, you need to be respectful of the community’s established and understood culture and act in a way that protects it, and you need to feel like you align with the community’s identity and what its good looks like as the ideal version of itself.

One last thing….

As I write this for fun, its always exciting for me that people choose to read the nonsense I write voluntarily. Since I last wrote anything this Substack has passed another milestone, reaching and then passing 200 subscribers. Without wishing to sound all YouTubery, thanks ever so much for taking the time to read these posts, it really means a lot 😊

Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee :)