Navigating Community Work Practices: Boundary Demarcation Strategies in Contexts of Informality

Background and Purpose Community social work is typically focused on realising conviviality, meaning the creation of everyday interactions and shared experiences to create coexistence and social integration in urban diverse contexts (Neal et al., 2019). Despite the fact that studies show that conviviality is often challenged by boundaries created between groups through markers of differences and tendency for homophily (e.g. McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001), few researchers have unearthed the role of symbolic and social boundaries among visitors in community work practices.

This paper helps to fill this research gap by analysing the tensions and challenges involved in the creation of conviviality within community work practices through a boundary work lens. We address how visitors adopt boundary demarcation strategies through everyday encounters, which are particularly challenging in informal settings. More specifically, we investigate 1) How symbolic and social boundaries are created and maintained in community work practices, and 2) What criteria are distinctive in these boundary demarcation strategies.

Methods This research uses a qualitative, multi-methods approach, including participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and in-depth interviews in a case study of a community center in a vulnerable urban neighborhood in Flanders. Over 5 months, 180 hours of participant observations and ethnographic interviews (n = 75) were conducted. From these, 17 participants were selected for semi-structured interviews to explore their experiences, motivations, and opinions in greater detail. All data – fieldnotes, memo’s and transcripts – were transmitted to NVIVO and analyzed according to the principles of grounded theory.

Findings Our findings show that visitors demarcate symbolic and social boundaries based on social categorisation and criteria of deservingness, also known as the CARIN-criteria (van Oorschot et al., 2017). As relations intensify - along a continuum of fleeting encounters, amicable familiarity, exchange and intimacy - boundaries change in substance, as people are able to make more fine-grained demarcations (Blokland, 2017). First, people are distinguished based on social categorisations or noticeable differences, such as the headscarf, bad hygiene and disabilities. Second, neediness and control are considered. Third, criteria of attitude and reciprocity are looked at. At last, social membership or serial reciprocity and identification processes, based on being a regular visitor or volunteer, are taken into account. These boundaries are symbolic, at the intersubjective level, and social when they become materialized in everyday life through visible group formations, avoidance of social contacts and withdrawal from the community centre altogether.

Conclusions Despite the fact that informality creates meaningful opportunities to establish convivial encounters, our findings show that visitors of community work practices use this space to draw boundaries and create in- and outgroups based on relationship intensities. The creation of symbolic and social boundaries sheds light on lived experiences and internal diversity among visitors of community work practices while developing our understanding of how people use boundaries as ways to enhance self-esteem and to exercise agency.