Rethinking Community: Social Capital and Citizenship at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops

The tradition in Australian community studies has been to use the term 'community' as a synonym for 'the social organisation of a limited geographical area.' Likewise, the traditional approach taken by Australian labour historians to this social formation has been to focus on specific localities where the dominant industries have produced extensive union membership and activism. Generally, such studies have favoured coal mining and iron and steel industries and with only a few exceptions, they have tended to subordinate communal dynamics to economic, political and industrial developments.' The problem with this approach is that it fails to deal with the inherent complexities of community and the processes through which communities of interest interpenetrate with communities of action. As Metcalfe puts it, localities are contestable entities with contestable rights, whose existence depends on economic and political processes which reach beyond their borders. They cannot be isolated, mainly because a multiplicity of social processes and networks pass through them 'in different directions and for different distances.