A Meta-narrative review of conceptualisations and meanings of 'community' within and across research traditions

社区是一个有争议的概念，难以简单分类。我们的目标是系统地收集社区在研究传统内部和跨研究传统中被理解的关键方式。为了做到这一点，我们使用了元叙事方法，试图解开研究的“故事情节”。我们在社会学、人类学和政治理论中发现了一套元叙事。从早期人类学家对遥远的“他者”的研究为例的前现代方法到后现代概念化，这些概念强调全球化和超现代性时代的共性、差异和互动的新形式。我们发现在元叙事中存在相当大的差异，特别是在“真实”和“想象”社区之间，以及在构建社区重要性的个人和集体政治立场之间持续存在的紧张关系。这篇综述的发现提供了一个框架，从中可以更深刻地思考“社区”。这个框架可以用来促进学术界和政策制定者之间的对话，讨论不同的概念如何转化为不同类型的干预措施，还可以帮助指导决策者考虑他们对社区的假设。最后，我们提出了一些关于使用交叉方法研究个体归属于不同社区的未来研究的启示。

Community is a contested concept that defies easy categorisation. We aimed to collect systematically the key ways in which community has been understood within and across research traditions. To do this, we used a meta-narrative methodology which attempts to unravel the 'storylines' of research. We identified a set of meta-narratives in sociology, anthropology and political theory. These ranged from pre-modern approaches to community as exemplified by the study of distant 'others' by early anthropologists to post-modern conceptualisations which emphasise new forms of commonality, difference and interaction in an era of globalisation and hypermodernity. We found considerable variability amongst the set of meta-narratives, particularly between 'real' and 'imagined' communities, and the ongoing tension between individual and collective political positions in framing the importance of communities. The findings from this review provide a framework from which to think more insightfully about 'community'. This framework could be used to facilitate a dialogue between academics and policy-makers on how different conceptualisations might translate into different types of interventions and might also help to guide decision-makers to consider their assumptions about community. Finally, we suggest some implications for future research around the use of an intersectional approach to study individuals' belonging to different communities.