A Working Community – Ellen Goodman

Goodman quotes from her dictionary that geographically a residential district is defined as a body of people who live in one govern and that in the past we were members of precincts or parishes or school districts.Perhaps if people in the past were asked what a community was to them, this would be the definition they would institute. Over the years however, people stick out been increasingly spending to a greater extent time in their place of employment rather than in their home.Goodman points out that in todays societies some(prenominal) of us altogether use the community in which we live our home in site to sleep. Communities are becoming more a group of people who get to know each different and interact regularly. They gather around a concept or common goal or interest. kinda than locomoteing to a community in which we live, we increasingly create a gumption of belonging in the workplace within the community in which we find ourselves most of the time.2. Goodman also points out that not barely has our intellect of community unraveld from office house to office building only that the labels we wear come to us with the members and that we assume we have something in common with them. In modern society this notion of charge labels to oneself and others is becoming more evident.People do this because they want to feel a sense of belonging, a sense that they have things in common with others. A problem not mentioned in Goodmans article however, is that not only do we assign labels in the workplace, but we tend to describe most people by designation labels. These labels most often contain assumptions, which in turn become stereotypes3. According to Goodman, in the same authority that we have replaced our neighborhoods with the workplace, we have replaced our ethnic identity with professional identity.She goes on to state that the most obvious realignment of community is in the mobile professions. In todays society m each professionals are req uired to move from city to city in order to fulfill their work. They are able to put roots overthrow in their profession rather than in their place of residence (residential community). This intensifies the shift from home communities to workplace communities and the sense of identifying oneself in terms of profession rather than self.4. Goodman begins her article by providing a few scenarios of people she knows and how they belong to different communities. Most readers would be able to associate with somebody or some community, so by doing this she is setting the scene for her readers she is appealing to their sense of belonging from the onset and involving them emotionally from the beginning.In fact, she continues to do this throughout the article, particularly by using the first person plural pronoun we. She does however, attempt to rationally appeal to her readers by presenting many scenarios and examples to support her arguments but she provides no real facts or figures in su pport.Her examples need to be extended to give real examples rather than continually referring to issues in general terms. She makes reference to researchers asking Americans what they like best astir(predicate) work but again only in general terms she doesnt provide any real evidence of what Americans say.Ethically, she appears to be knowledgeable and reasonable and she certainly tries to establish common ground with her readers but she falls short in not providing any consideration of opposing views.5. Bi-cultural collision as discussed by Nhu in Becoming American in a Constant Cultural Collision is similar to a loss of community, in that they both refer to a movement of people a realignment from one sense of belonging to another.