title: Where is the Dialectic in the Community-Diversity Dialectic?
abstract: Agent-based modeling has provided some interesting investigations of the hypothesis that there is a dialectical relationship between sense of community and diversity. A close look at those models strongly suggests that only models in which the attributes of agents are fixed completely support that hypothesis. Models which acknowledge that diversity is contextually defined, and thus changeable, suggest that there is no inherent dialectical relationship between the two values. Rather, it is the context of the setting, the way in which the setting is socially constructed, that determines whether a strong sense of community can exist in highly diverse settings.
authors.affiliation: Psychology, New Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, NM, USA.
authors.forename: Jean L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Hill
mesh_terms: D018864:Cultural Diversity; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011057:Politics; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D066269:Social Theory; D014481:United States
keywords: Diversity; Sense of community