narratives, community and land use decisions

Narratives, Community and Land Use Decisions

DAVID R. MAINES* Wayne State University

JEFFREY C. BRIDGER Pennsylvania State University

This article explores the narrative character of community, arguing that communities are intrinsically storied. Narratives are conceptualized as social acts and are thereby of inherent importance to social scientific endeavor. Following Weber, narratives also are seen to be entrenched in institutions and in the political economy of communities. State tourism and land use decisions are suggested as ideographic situations in which such entrenchment is found.

Stories and story-telling are ubiquitous. We dream in, rear our children with, and use stories to build solidarity and identify outsiders; we learn about society through myth, folklore, and legend. Stories are central to family lineage, and, in general, we make ourselves and others intelligible in the world through stories.’ Walter Fisher2 calls us “horn0 narrans,” the species that tells stories. As such, it not only seems reasonable to investigate the narrative aspects of human group life, but it is possible and fruitful. Donna Eder has shown how stories contribute to group solidarity, David Maines has shown them to be part of group structure, Norman Denzin has displayed stories as processes of how groups influence identity transformation, Jean Mandler has studied story competence in relation to cognitive development, and Shirley Heath had conducted research on community stories and educational participation, to mention only a few areas.3 All agree that narratives are a primary mechanism for transforming the flux of experience and segmentation in social orders into meaningful wholes.

Despite that attention and consensus, the narrative approach is neither central nor fully developed and utilized within the social sciences. No doubt this state of

*Direct all correspondence to: David R. Makes, Department of Sociology, Wayne State University, Detroit,

MI 48202. Telephone: (313) 577-2930.

The Social Science Journal, Volume 29, Number 4, pages 363-380. Copyright @ 1992 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0362-3319.

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affairs is due to understandable reasons pertaining to the historical establishment and development of separate disciplines which has intellectually and administratively militated against interdisciplinary work. But, we suspect it also pertains in this case to the common view of stories as “mere stories” and therefore not of major significance to the hard work of digging out social facts. In this article, we take the alternative position that narratives are in fact central to social scientific concerns. We will articulate that centrality by first discussing the nature of narratives in which we emphasize their collective and social character. We then will discuss the relevance of narratives to the study of communities. We use the term “community” loosely to allow for breadth of analysis and understanding, but in all cases we will be attentive to its fundamentally local nature.4 We will follow with an application of those discussions to empirical instances of land use decisions in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. That application will open areas of inquiry into the general topic of community studies, with implications for contemporary theorizing regarding human settlements. Throughout our analysis, we recognize narratives as fundamental aspects of the cultural order, and, following Max Weber, regard that order and thus narratives as forever interlinked with political and economic orders.

THE NATURE OF NARRATIVES

Our species is and always has been a storied one, as previously mentioned, and throughout our history, humans have created and employed various forms of narratives such as myth, gossip, ordinary talk, epics, legends, literature, cinema, and even scholarly analysis.5 Narratives are activities that refer to other activities and sometimes to themselves, and, as such, we must from the outset dispense with the extremely specious distinction between discourse and behavior so commonly made in the social sciences. All discourse is behavior, although some behavior is not discursive. Drawing from American Pragmatism, especially the versions articulated by G.H. Mead and John Dewey, this is precisely the realm into which we place narratives-human conduct. We find this aspect of social scientific ontology throughout scholarly analysis of narratives, ranging from folklorists6 to philosophers,’ historians8 psychologists,’ and even Professors of English such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, who writes that narratives should be “regarded not only as structures but as acts, the features of which -like the features of all other acts- are functions of the variable sets of conditions in response to which they are performed.“” Though spoken by individuals, although not always, narratives are inherently transactions, and accordingly, are of inherent interest to and relevance for the social scientist.

Scholarly work concerning the nature of narratives and their place in human affairs displays a healthy heterogeneity. A variety of theoretical approaches can be found in the literature, ranging from structuralism to postmodernism, functionalism, semiotics, pragmatism, cultural analysis, and communication theory. While the core of these approaches is fairly identifiable,” they nonetheless combine in various ways that blur boundaries in the name of opening new spaces for understanding. To take but a few instances, the structuralist approach,

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exemplified by the work of Barthes, Todorov, and Gennette,‘* tends to separate narrative (a story) from discourse (talk conveying a story), while transactional approaches13 combine the two terms (narrative discourse) and theorize narratives as social acts. In still other cases, postmodernism joints with deconstructionist procedures and assumptions and emphasizes local, situated interpretations that cannot be eternally fixed and which contain elements of fiction that are overlayed and glossed by global homogenized versions of western culture which are reproduced through electronic media.14 Here it is the version or interpretation that counts, a view giving the nod to literary criticism over social science. As noted earlier, however, significant social scientific analysis pushes its standard empiricist agendas, and views narratives as actual practices used by individuals and groups to create, maintain, and change social and cultural orders.

In pursuing a modified social scientific approach, that is, one that regards narratives as actual practices that are part of the empirical world, we draw from those scholars who have analyzed story structure for our conceptualization of narratives.15 We utilize two complementary approaches, one keying on Georg Simmel’s interest in the elements of social acts, and the other drawing from the field of rhetorical analysis.

In the first approach, we propose that three elements must be minimally necessary for a narrative act to exist. First, speakers must select and describe events from the past. An event is any past occurrence that is referenced. In an important sense, the selection of an occurrence for narrative purposes creates and objectifies the event. Second, speakers turn these events into story elements. Narratives involve the imposition of structure and specificity of meaning on events and the lodging of events within given contexts through the use of plot, setting, and characterization (which roughly correspond to the concepts of interaction, situation and actors, respectively). Third, narratives involve the arrangement of events in a temporal order of some sort, thereby allowing descriptions of why and how events happened, which then give events duration, tempo, and pace. Such arrangements of events in a time order allow for the explanation of causal processes according to the interests of storytellers and audiences.

These three elements designate narratives as empirical objects, whether in written or oral form, whose referents are unobservable. There are spatial and temporal dimensions to narratives insofar as the events referred to take place somewhere other than where the story is being told or in the same place but at a previous time. The representation of events and processes in a time/ space configuration rests at the core of narrative activity, and the identification of narrative elements has the virtue of grounding an empirical approach to the study and further understanding of narrative activity.

In addition to the emphasis on narrative elements, recent work in rhetoric also contribute to our conceptualization of narrative. Walter Fisher,16 author of the “narrative paradigm,” focuses on the persuasive aspect of narrative. Fisher’s approach seeks an alternative to older theories of rhetoric holding that persuasion is governed by experts who can assess rational argumentation. In contrast to these theories, he proposes that stories have two properties of “persuasability” that all storytellers use. The first aspect is what he calls “narrative probability,” or story coherence, and the

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second is “narrative fidelity,” or story believability. The former obviously pertains to whether story content is arranged in an internally consistent or logical manner, and the latter refers more directly to the performance phase of storytelling. If a story possesses these properties, Fisher argues, persuasion is likely to occur, and anyone successfully using these properties can produce a rational account.

From these two complementary approaches, it is easy to see that stories are not the same as mere talk and that they are different from many instances of ordinary communication. A simple reference to the past does not constitute a narrative. Nor does merely arranging events in a temporal sequence produce a story-rather, a chronicle is produced. Stories typically have a point; they convey a theme or interpretation that is produced by the element of emplotment. Emplotment keeps us involved in good movies and novels, as well as in the stories we tell and hear, whether intentionally (as in “let me tell you what happened yesterday!“) or unintentionally (as in providing a rationale for a decision) as we go about our everyday work, family, and community lives. In this sense, narratives are collective acts. They are almost always cultural enactments in that they link private and public realms, they link events into temporal arrangements that give people a sense of continuity, and they provide versions of reality that contribute to the flow of meaning that rests at the heart of any society.” Accordingly, and in turning to the next section of this article, we offer the proposition that stories are indispensable to social organization in that they are one class of practices through which such organization is created, maintained, or modified.

NARRATIVE AND COMMUNITY

From the beginning of cities 10,000 years ago, world history has been one of uneven but increasing concern over community organization and change. That concern permeates in a culturally embedded way the consciousness of human mentality. One instance of ongoing community and human drama that social scientists have documented pertains to migration. Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted and WI. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America are two of the classic texts that have described and analyzed the problems and processes of immigrant adjustments to American communities. They have interpreted entire arrays of human endeavor pertaining to urbanization, labor force change, technological transformations, ethnicity, family organization, neighborhoods, but especially human bonds-their strengths and fragility-in the face of massive social and political economic dislocations. These texts have been appropriately read for their insights and understandings into these arenas of human group life, but there is another kind of depth to them that at least in part has rendered them as classics. It is a narrative depth, not in the sense of news narratives, but one that is composed of interlacing tellers, plots, dramas, and audiences. It is that depth in which we are interested in this article; one that rests just below the surface of conventional social scientific interests and framings. More specifically, we are interested in the idea that communities are inherently storied, not merely that community members tell stories or that communities are one context in which stories are told, but in the more fundamental sense that communities cannot exist without stories.


Thomas and Znaniecki devoted enormous attention to letter to and from family members in America and Poland. Those letters were stories from home, about family members, containing news of old neighbors, births, deaths, marriages. They kept a model or conception of family and community alive and in front of the immigrant families that had to find its place in the new world environment. They also provided texts for neighboring, as stories from home were told and retold, generating local community interest or maybe only interest in a small circle of friends. Especially evident in Handlin’s The Uprooted is how stories and photographs from home supported or challenged nostalgia-that the home community, say, was rather smaller and drabber than one remembered or, conversely, it was exactly as small and drab as remembered. Immigrant communities are filled with these kinds of stories; of place, family, home, adjustment, as well as of hope and despair and striving, perhaps of patience and sacrifice.

To remove stories from communities thus is to obliterate communities and their character. Max Weber’s conception of the “true urban community” was one not only of trade, commerce, and political and military autonomy but of personalization. It had the gemeinschaft quality of similarity and routine that resulted in what Emile Durkheim called collective consciousness, but it also possessed at its base a community of stories that were intrinsic to the social bond. That intrinsic nature suggests the hypothesis that the smaller and more homogeneous the community, the more consensual the stories. The social structure of Medieval Europe, which is where Weber found community in cities, was based on localism and rural production, and in that segmented social structure, the social base of personal experience likewise was localized. It was that circumstance that we hypothesize led to consensual stories. Narrative probability and fidelity must have been high for insiders, for community members, that is, as much as it must have been low for outsiders.” But with the 17th and 18th century expansionism that brought increased trade and commerce in the form of pre-industrial capitalism, the community relation to narrative must have changed. Strangers entering and exiting cities became more common, heterogeneity increased with city growth, and thus we also hypothesize that the larger and more heterogeneous the community the less consensual and more conflictual the stories. Coupled with the influence of the printing press in the 16th and 17th century, we begin to see a diversified version of Robert Park’s” characterization of society in general-“one vast whispering gallery.”

Although speculative, we wish to suggest some ways of framing the study of community as intrinsically storied. Rhetoricians and linguists have approached this kind of study with their concept of “discourse communities.“20 These communities are composed of groups of

P eople “who share a way of talking.. .[and who]. . create

a shared way of talking.“2 That linguistic concept is similar to others found in the social sciences, such as G. H. Mead’s concept of “universe of discourse,” Anselm Strauss’s “social worlds” and Tomatsu Shibutani’s “subcultures.” Each refers to social boundaries made up of language characteristics or of the extent of lines of communication. They establish kinds of membership criteria that, while not always objectified, are recognized by people when faced with them. While “discourse

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communities” is a general concept, to put matters another way, the realities of such communities are noticeable to participants who enact them and detectable to researchers who look for them. The literature on narrative and community provides a few examples of what to look for.

Shirley Heath22 studied two small towns in South Carolina. They were close to one another and very similar economically, culturally, and on the surface, discursively. She found that in some respects, however, they were different discourse communities, and she provided evidence supporting the proposition that variation in community norms can produce differences in storytelling formats. One community socialized children to tell what members called “true stories.“It imposed a consistent frame on experience, and children were rewarded for telling the “correct version” of stories they had heard. The other community, however, rewarded innovation, playfulness with stories, and embellishment. Heath writes that “fact is hard to find there.. Jand]. . .there is truth only in the universals of human strength and persistence praised and illustrated in the tale.“23 Stated a different way, these two communities transacted narrative acts somewhat differently in terms of narrative probability and narrative fidelity, and one can well imagine the possibilities for debate over fact vs fiction were members of each community to engage in a storytelling occasion.

Barbara Johnstone’s study of storytelling in Fort Wayne, Indiana brings out yet another aspect of discourse communities. She sees storytelling norms in this community as follows:

Personal stories in Fort Wayne must be seen as strictly factual, and specific details about places, times, and people help to create an aura of reportage.. . In Fort Wayne, conversational stortytelling is almost always a monologue; the storyteller is the only person who talks. Since Fort Wayne storytellers cannot rely on their audiences to ask questions or contribute suggestions, tellers are responsible for anticipating confusion and misunderstanding, and they carry out this responsibility in part, by means of overspecification of detai1.24

While it is plausible to imagine Fort Wayne as a discourse community on the basis of the above characterization, Johnstone argues further that Fort Wayne stories are “anchored in the local world” and she shows that this anchoring is based on gender roles and gender identities that are interlinked with and mutually reinforcing of storytelling modes.” Men’s and women’s stories tend to have different plots (women’s focus on collective reality and men’s on individual reality); women will tell stories about men’s skills but men will not tell stories of women’s skills; whereas community harmony is generally important to people in Fort Wayne, it is women who tend to emphasize it in their stories.

This link between stories and gender allows us to focus more sharply on communities as storied. Storytellers not only make statements about themselves and their experiences but about their communities and their participation in them. Reciprocally, these tellings are ,g oints of affirmation or disaffirmation of community. In Johnstone’s terms, “stories do not simply describe worlds; stories also create worlds.” Stories in Fort Wayne remind members of what their


community is like, how it is organized, and they create the familiar. Moreover, in some ways, the manner in which men and women tell stories communicates the way things ought to be. The mere act of how a story is told, that is, is in a sense a moral enactment of community conceptions of how people should behave, whom they should be, how they should present themselves, and how they should shoulder their share of the burden of maintaining community solidarity. In its broadest possible terms, these links point us toward the interpenetration of gender stratification, community participation, local culture, and personal life-all of which are enacted in the practice of storytelling occasions.

But there are other areas of the general phenomena of narrative and community where one can look and find productive spaces for new understandings. We briefly mention three of these areas, with the first two-community typifications and community heritage-being closely related to one another, and the third being what Michael McGee2’ has termed ideographs. All, however, can be united under the general rubric of narrative.

Community typifications are those short-hand understandings that serve as summaries of a community’s meaningfulness, or what it stands for. These are closely affiliated with what Celeste Condit calls “characterizations,” or those “universalized descriptions of particular agents, acts, scenes,” purposes, or agencies which, when they become culturally accepted as accurate depictions of a class, can be labeled character types.“28 These typifications and characterizations apply to stories we know or are able to tell about other communities. Some cities, for example, become economically typified. Gerald Suttles provides a list of these typifications, which can be thought of as stories waiting to be told: “...the merchantism of Boston, the financial empires of New York, the corporate giants of Chicago, the dream factories of Los Angeles, and the oil and space men of Houston.7’29 These kinds of community typifications belong to culture in the form of standard plot lines that reduce variation in outsider versions of what cities mean and how they developed. And, so typified, nearly anyone can tell those common stories.

Such outsider stories, however, have a stratified aspect to them, because insiders or community residents may not agree with the outsider versions. Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman’s Small Town in Mass Society3’ is a classic illustration. In studying a small rural town, which they named Springdale, they reported on local politics, gossip, the clash of vested interests, and various forms of duplicity, all of which varied from the community’s image of itself as the embodiment of rural virtue, friendliness, plain folk, and cooperative relations. Upon publication of the book, Springdale residents were outraged, feeling their community had been invaded and lied about, and as Vidich and Bensman wrote, “On various occasions, Springdalers hanged us in effigy, portrayed us as manure spreaders and as violators of small town codes of etiquette.“31

This case illustrates the ultimate inseparability of community typifications and community heritage-perhaps the former is really only part of the latter-so we ask the reader’s indulgence of our heuristic distinction between the two. Granting us that distinction, however, we can focus on matters of heritage, which we think of here as stories that communities hold of themselves. This is the realm of local culture32 or those selective collective representations of a community’s past that

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feeds and in part is driven by the demands, sentiments, and interests of those in the present. This is the arena of lived history in a hermeneutically constituted social world, as Wilhelm Dilthey conceived it, and more politically, as reconstructed legitimacy as we think of it.33 Scholarly inquiry into the narrative aspects of Israeli and Palestinian Jewish pasts illustrate the point.34 We will focus on one event- the Masada.

All cultures and communities have collective memories, and certain events variously serve as key foci of those memories at different points in time. Barry Schwartz and his colleagues have discussed how the battle of Masada in 73 A.D., which was not a significant event in ancient Jewish history, became one in modern Jewish life, especially among the Palestinian Jews. The Masada was a mountain fortress captured by the defeated population of Jerusalem by the Romans. Facing defeat, the Masada defenders chose mass suicide over the humiliation of captivity. For two thousand years, the story of the Masada went unnoticed, but in 1927, Yitzhak Lamdan published his poem called “Masada” which became greatly popular and which helped mobilize widespread commemoration of the event as central to Jewish history. Although there is not complete consensus on what the story of the Masada symbolizes, it tends to be seen as a heroic affirmation of national dignity, the will of a few against overpowering odds, of strong ideological convictions. Lamdan’s poem became part of the Israeli educational curriculum- routine reading for school children-and thus incorporated into institutions as well as the cultural psyche. In effect, as Schwartz et al. point out, the Masada “is a symbolic equivalent to the American Alamo”35 and is expressed today in the phrase “Never again shall Masada fall” in Israel as a popular “expression of national will [that] continues to be exploited for national demonstrations and observations.“36 The Masada thus serves as a heritage story; it is one that Jews tell to themselves about their past that justifies and gives solidity to present perceptions of the need for political and military preparedness. It is a story embedded in culture, perhaps as a vocabulary of motives but also as a taken-for-granted aspect of cultural and political economic consciousness.

Conceiving the Masada this way, it is possible to see ties between heritage and McGee’s concept of ideographs. Drawing from and attempting to merge rhetoric and ideology, McGee regards ideographs as words and phrases in political discourse that represent commitment to goals, justify the use of power, guide behavior into publically acceptable channels, and as culture-bound, define community membership. Succinctly, ideographs are language devices that link power and consciousness and are an intrinsic part of action-mobilization. Examples include “liberty,” “democracy,” “world peace,” “equality,” and “rule by law.”

A focus on ideographs draws our attention to the persuasive aspects of narratives. As Wayne Booth3’ has pointed out, the incipience of a story contains an invitation to bond with the teller-“Join me, join me,” as Booth writes about what stories seem to say. But the consideration of ideographs demands attention to the terms of the invitation, as narratives no doubt are inherently political. Condit38 nicely links the two for us by stating that rhetorical narratives are accounts of events, real or imagined, that are told in order to persuade.


Examples of such narratives abound, but we choose to illustrate them with David Hummon’s3’ research on state tourism, which is manifestly a matter of state economics. Rather than providing an economic analysis of tourism, however, he provides a cultural analysis which draws attention to advertising and textual representations of states as a form of secular ritual. Involved in these rituals is the significant matter of verbal and visual imageries that states seek to mobilize among potential tourists. We contend that the texts that states use and that Hummon analyzes contain ideographs that are constitutive political elements of stories told about states.

One passage about Minnesota, for example, states that “The people of Minnesota are part of the heartland of America. We’re as real as the land around us. And you’ll find that we’re easy to meet. Perhaps it’s simply because we like where we live. Whatever the reason, we welcome you. We’ll make you feel at home no matter how far you are from home.“40 The narrative element of characterization is used here which focuses on the word “home.” But because of the economic interests of the text’s authors, the word comes closer to that of an ideograph. The intent is to persuade the readers to go to Minnesota and spend their money there. Accordingly, the word “home,” as a culturally-embedded symbolization of safety and acceptance, becomes one also of political economic discourse in a narrative presentation. Hummon’s analysis of the fifty U.S. states reveals an array of such ideographic representations: “plentitude,” “nature,” “romance,” “friendliness,” “enchantment,” “pride.” The readers of the texts are invited to join the authors of the texts in implicit and explicit narratives about the meaningfulness of various states. Such invitations are forms of altercasting, for if readers embrace the narratives, they will end up inducing themselves to become tourists. Such altercasting ritual texts promise a transcendence from the ordinary and routine into the extra-ordinary worlds of narrative reality. The ideographic components are crucial to these processes and they illuminate the social control phases of how place is represented in a political economy of signs.

We have discussed in an admittedly cursory manner several important issues that can stimulate thought regarding narrative and community. We have argued that communities are inherently storied and that they are basic to an array of conventional community structures and processes. These include neighboring, family, gender, community membership, heritage, and political economy, to name only a few. In the next section, we will take up the issue of land use decisions in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and examine in a more detailed way how narratives are part and parcel of how such decisions are made. Analyses of land use typically are couched in terms of large scale structural factors working themselves out in space or in local political economies, both of which divorce action from discourse. Our analysis differs. We will begin with a basic description of Lancaster County and Manheim Township and then we will show some of the ways in which such a divorce misconstrues the character of actual decision-making processes.4’

THE NARRATIVES OF LAND USE

Media and tourism industry portrayals have traditionally focused on its agricultural heritage and the 15,000 members Amish religious

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sect who call the County home. The image many people have of Lancaster is one of bucolic rural vistas, barn raisings, and Amish buggies and horses clip-clapping down narrow country lanes-a piece of 19th-century America frozen in time. Although these scenes can certainly be found, Lancaster is also a major metropolitan area under intense growth pressure from the Washington-Boston megalopolis that lies just to the east. Between 1980 and 1990 the population increased by nearly 17%, from 362,346 to 420,921. This rapid growth has generated a host of problems ranging from the loss of some of the most productive farmland in the United States to an increasingly overburdened infrastructure. Not surprisingly, growth has also generated a vigorous debate concerning how best to plan for future growth while maintaining a viable agricultural economy and preserving a rural space for the Amish upon whom a thriving tourist industry depends. We will focus on this debate. Rather than dealing with general issues raised at the County level, however, we will attend to a particular locality (Manheim Township) in which growth has resulted in a number of concrete problems and been a frequent topic of public discourse.

Manheim Township lies just north of the county seat, Lancaster City, and is bisected by two major highways. These factors have made it a particularly attractive location for commercial and residential development. Indeed, for most of the 1980s Manheim was consistently the first or second most rapidly growing township in the county. In an attempt to manage the pace and direction of future growth, township officials recently have been experimenting with several innovative growth management techniques. Since space limitations obviously preclude a full discussion of township actions, we will focus on one that was particularly controversial: the imposition of impact fees on new commercial and residential development.

By 1988, rapid growth in Manheim Township had resulted in a situation where roads, bridges, sewers, and schools were extremely overburdened. An engineering firm hired by the township to estimate the cost of repairing the local infrastructure put the price at approximately $150,000,000 over a twelve-year period. Township officials, realizing that a sum of money this large could not be generated solely through increases in property taxes, began searching for alternative revenue sources. After considering a number of options, it was decided that impact fees, a technique that had enjoyed some success in Florida and California, represented the most feasible means of financing infrastructure improvements. The basic idea behind these fees is straightforward: new development places a burden on the local infrastructure. The cost associated with this burden is usually passed on to all taxpayers in a municipality. Impact fees represent an attempt to force new developments to pay their fair share of the costs associated with growth. Based on a series of calculations that determine the extra burden new developments will place on roads, sewers, and the like, a fee per unit is calculated. Ideally, this fee represents the actual cost associated with each new home and must usually be paid before construction can begin.

Township officials knew that impact fees would not be popular with local builders and developers so they kept initial discussions secret. Once it was decided that an impact fee ordinance would be adopted, they effectively placed a 180-day moratorium on the issuance of building permits by invalidating sections of the


zoning ordinance. The moratorium was designed to prevent builders from flooding the township with development plans while the ordinance was being drafted and public hearings held.

Shortly after the building permit moratorium was announced, the Township began recruiting members for a panel that was to write the new ordinance. At this stage in the controversy, Township officials took a rather conciliatory stance toward developers. Three developers were named to the panel and the rhetorical narratives used by township officials to justify the imposition of impact fees rarely mentioned developers as part of the cause of the Township’s current problems. Instead, blame was placed on past officials and, more importantly, locational factors. For instance, in an interview with The Intelligencer Journal, the county’s largest newspaper, John Shirk, Chairman of the Manheim Township Board of Supervisors, described the Township’s development in a way that has become standard in many areas that have experienced rapid growth.42

When I got on the [township commissioners] board we were not acting, we were reacting to problems. We were not looking ahead. I don’t think any municipality could see growth coming. No one could anticipate the very affluent society that exists here today. First, there was our proximity to the city. Route 283 came in, Route 222 came in. We got a lot of growth by dint of our location.43

In this version of the Township’s growth, location is the real cause of growth. Not even municipal officials could really be blamed for poor planning and lack of foresight because there was simply no way they could see what was coming. In fact, it is difficult to blame people at all. Growth takes on a sense of agency and inevitability that stands apart from the actions of people. It is an inevitable process that happens to an area because of its location, not because of actions taken or not taken by people.

What appeared to be a fairly amicable relationship between developers and township officials deteriorated rapidly after the impact fee panel and its consultant began to derive estimates of the fee’s cost per unit. For residential construction the estimates ranged from $2,000 to $10,000 per unit. Even the $2,000 at the low end of the spectrum was a great deal more than the developers on the panel were willing to pay. Township officials, however, were unwilling to compromise. Once the developers on the panel realized this, they and their associates throughout the County hired a Madison Avenue advertising firm and set about fashioning a narrative aimed at deligitimizing both Township officials and the impact fee ordinance. Although elements of this story were presented in a series of letters to the editor during the summer and early fall of 1988, it reached its most complete form in a full page newspaper ad taken out by the Construction and Shelter Industries of Lancaster on Nov. 1, 1988.

The ad begins by characterizing past and present Township officials as incompetent and incapable of intelligent planning:

One problem after another has either gotten the quick fix or an inadequate postponement. Now the future has arrived. Manheim Township’s roads, sewers,


and bridges reveal an overburdened infrastructure. Growth seems out of control because it hasn’t been properly planned and managed. And there are no provisions to raise the money necessary to maintain the township’s quality of life. The current group of township commissioners is attempting to deal with the problems. But once again, the quick fix is in. The proposed impact fee is merely a smokescreen hiding years of inadequate planning by past township officials. A few years ago, these officials lowered real-estate taxes because of a growing real estate boom. Now we’re changing course again.44

Having demonstrated the incompetence and unpredictability of township officials, the ad goes on to tell a tale of woe in which impact fees undermine community and generally threaten the local quality of life. Community, as Williams4’ notes, is a term heavy with ideological overtones. This is certainly the case here. Throughout the ad, community is utilized as an ideograph that stands in opposition to the actions of the township supervisors. Interestingly, however, the term “community” never actually appears. Instead it functions as what might be called an implied ideograph. Various scenarios are put forth which draw their meaning from a particular conception of community that the authors are trying to invoke. For instance, after describing how impact fees will undoubtedly raise property values and, consequently, property taxes, the ad warns of the impact this will have on retired homeowners:46

Since property taxes may well follow the rise in property values, it will become more expensive to live in Manheim Township...If you’re on a fixed income, the tax spiral may be more than you’re willing or able to bear.

A similar fate awaits young homebuyers:

Now we’re being asked to absorb an outrageously stiff fee for each new home. And we have no choice but to pass this artificial tariff on the buyer. It’s a tax that discriminates against most homebuyers because it isn’t graduated in any way. For many affluent two-income families, this will be a minor irritation. For young home buyers, the fee may be an insurmountable obstacle.

Local businesses will also be forced out of the township:

It now costs $40 a square foot to construct a convenience store, for example. But the Manheim Township impact fee would add another $85 per square foot to that construction cost. Or a total of $125 per square foot. Now, where do you think the new stores are going to be built? And how far are you going to have to drive?

In each of these scenarios, the impact fee, and by implication the township supervisors, are depicted as undermining a community that is inclusive and caring- one that is rooted in fairness, that strives to include a wide variety of residents, and one that provides the services that these residents require. In short, an image of community as local society is at stake.


Judging from the many letters to the editor this ad generated, it was a rhetorical failure. To use Fisher’s phrase, it lacked narrative fidelity and narrative probability. Developers attempted to portray an almost inevitable situation. However, they were unable to provide any sort of evidence to convince readers that the dire consequences of which they warned would actually come to pass. There were no data to support the contention that property values on existing properties would rise. Nor was there any clear evidence that even if property values did rise, they would necessarily be accompanied by tax increases that would force retired residents out of the township. Similarly, developers could not point to other communities in which impact fees had put the price of homes beyond the reach of first time buyers or affected the way in which businesses made location decisions. In short, the developers’ story was neither convincing nor coherent. More importantly, the story did not “ring true” to many residents. The developers characterized themselves as friends and allies of township residents. At the close of the ad, in fact, they went so far as to call for concerted developer/citizen action to block the impact fee ordinance. This image of developers was not congruent with the characterizations of developers that were gaining currency among citizen action groups and township residents. The standard story of growth told by John Shirk was rapidly being displaced by one in which Manheim Township’s transition from a rural area to a congested suburb was caused mainly by the actions of developers and realtors. Increasingly, developers were being characterized as greedy rapists looking for a quick profit with little or no concern for those whom their actions affected. As one resident put it:

Well, now I’ve seen everything! The developers, realtors and builders of Lancaster County are running a full-page ad claiming their concern for the residents of Manheim Township. Poppycock! Why don’t these “concerned folks” run an ad describing their legacy of overdevelopment, traffic congestion, water problems, and rape of our farmlands. Don’t be fooled by this ploy. The only thing these people care about is money.47

Even The Intelligencer Journal, a paper not known for a radical no-growth stance, took the Construction and Shelter Industries to task for the impact fee ad: “Many people in Lancaster are becoming concerned over the rape of the land. If, indeed, the land is being raped, Manheim Twp. is the victim of a gang rape.“48

Ironically, much of the impetus for the anti-developer narrative came from newcomers who had benefitted from the construction of new housing stock. Many of these people came to the township armed with stories and typifications of the destruction wreaked by developers in such places as New Jersey, suburban Philadelphia, and Long Island. At a meeting of the Manheim Township Action Group, for instance, Joe Villella, a former resident of Long Island, compared the current situation in Manheim to the development of Long Island: “What is the need to grow and develop? Why does it have to grow like Long Island?” Another relative newcomer to the area, Alan Musselman, raised the prospect that unregulated growth would turn the township into another King of Prussia, a suburb of Philadelphia known for its shopping malls and office parks.

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These newcomer narratives and typifications were only one element at work in forging a vocal anti-growth, anti-developer sentiment in the township. By themselves, it is doubtful that they would have been sufficiently persuasive to convince a significant number of people of the dangers of unregulated growth. However, when these narratives and typifications were joined with the dominant heritage narrative, they painted a rather vivid picture of the direction in which Manheim Township was heading.

Perhaps more than most places, Lancaster County has a well developed and well known story of its origins and cultural heritage. Among the various aspects of this narrative, two were of particular importance in citizen attempts to slow growth and exercise some control over developers: A local identity rooted in agriculture and a religious reverence for the land, as exemplified by the Amish. A frequent tactic of those opposed to the township’s pattern of development was to invoke this heritage narrative (usually in a short hand form), point out that it was being undermined by growth, and conclude by linking these “facts” to one of the newcomer narratives or typifications. For instance, shortly before the township adopted impact fees, Dennis Jeff, a member of the township board of supervisors and one of the most vocal proponents of impact fees, called for citizen support with the following message:

Somewhere in the vast middle road is where Lancaster must place itself on the route to real growth management. The alternative, as my return to my childhood in New Jersey will attest, is a thousand Rte. 30s gridlock and hazard on all our roads, a sea of sprawling Levittown developments, the total destruction of agricultural life as we know it today, and the destruction of the Amish culture and with it a piece of Lancaster’s unique heritage.49

Developers found it very difficult to counter arguments like this. After all, no one could reasonably argue in favor of gridlock and congestion. And to denigrate agriculture (by far the County’s largest industry) or the Amish (on whom the County’s second largest industry, tourism, depend) would be tantamount to political suicide. Hence, instead of raising objections to these kinds of statements, developers found themselves in the position of having to issue qualified support for the goals of those who wished to limit growth.

We are not suggesting that narratives were the only factor in shaping the outcome of the struggle over impact fees. However, the changes in the story of Manheim’s rapid growth, the negative characterization of developers, the circulation of newcomer narratives and typifications, and the invocation of the County heritage narrative created a climate which favored the passage of the ordinance. Put another way, these discursive processes and tactics created a new discourse community (although obviously building on a prior existing one), and as this community became more locally institutionalized, it provided township officials with the political will to enact an ordinance in the face of powerful opposition.


CONCLUSIONS

Only a little thought and reflection are needed to imagine the spaces for understanding opened by a narrative approach to the study of communities and urban areas. Perhaps the Weberians or interactionists or communication scholars” will be the most persuaded, but we feel that whatever trained incapacities any of us may have acquired that the relevance of narrative to community is rather obvious. We only need to watch the news or read the local paper or listen to other folks in grocery stores or neighborhood bars to know that politics, economics, community stability, and other aspects of community are storied. The ontological issue, in other words, is settled. The open question is how to conceptualize these matters, and ultimately how to go about creating a narrative social science.5’

Our approach has been premised on the contention of the ubiquity of stories and on our conceptualization of narratives as social acts. This approach places narratives squarely in the realm of collective action and identifies them as empirical instances. This approach, which we believe is ontologically correct, serves to illustrate social science agendas.

It is possible to see how narratives are embedded in patterns of consensus and conflict. The concept of discourse communities is valuable in this regard, as it pertains to the shared base of stories, those realities that are conveyed, and even how stories are told. When this base is not shared, disagreement and potential conflict can emerge, thus perhaps contributing to social change. As importantly for social scientific work, however, it is critical to recognize that narratives become entrenched in institutions. The “Masada,” as we described it earlier, is a classic example, as are the cases of state tourism and local land use decisions. These points echo the views of Lyn Lofland, who advises us to take stories seriously because they “have real consequences for the economic fate of those urban settlements.“52 Intrinsic to those stories are ideographs or those political discourse acts that mobilize one form of action rather than another. Ideographs are situational; that is, upon entering a situation, certain words and phrases wilZ be used and certain narratives will be told for purposive action. But ideographic situations also are sites of struggle. They contain in their nature and structure patterns and processes of opposition, whether actual or potential. “Community” this is not only a form of social organization, as traditionally regarded by social scientists’, but it also is a discursive representation. And when it is involved in rhetorical narratives, it can become part of the process through which futures are created. Martin Krieger’s analysis of planning and policymaking helps us see this:

When we plan we write a narrative that says how things could be otherwise than is given by the usual account. A plan, a narrative that controls time, is a reworking of everyday narratives to find a potentially truer, more comprehensive one that will be more satisfactory as we encompass larger numbers of projects. Planning commands time by taking the narratives we have in mind and refashioning them.53

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The articulation of pasts and futures in narratives demonstrates that they are inherent in social processes, social structures, and situations, and therefore when social scientists study human group life, they must in some way study narratives.

This imperative applies to both the analytical and the practical. Analytically, we

are concerned with theoretical explanation and understanding; practically, we are

concerned with the consequences and value of social action. The field of urban and community studies, which often blends the analytical and practical, is one area that certainly would benefit from the narrative approach.

Acknowledgments: Some friends and colleagues have helped us think through various issues expressed in this article. They include Michael Calvin McGee, Jeffrey Ulmer, Michael McCallion, Monda M. Maines, Anne Warfield Rawls, Judith Levy, Anselm Strauss, and Catherine Pettinari, Don McCloskey, Bruce Gronbeck, and Carl Couch.

4.

5.

6.

I. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

NOTES

Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen, “Narrative and the Self as Relationship,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 21 (1988): 17-55. Walter Fisher, Human Communication as Narration (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987). Donna Eder, “Building Cohesion Through Collaborative Narration” Social Psychology Quarterly, 51 (1988): 225-235; David Maines, “The Storied Nature of Health and Diabetic Self Help Groups, ” in Advances in Medical Sociology, edited by G. Albrecht and J. Levy (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1991), pp. 185-202; Norman Denzin, “The Alcoholic Self: Communication, Ritual, and Identity Transformation,” in Communication and Social Structure, edited by D. Maines and C. Couch (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1988), pp. 59-74; Jean Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of Schemata Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984); Shirley Heath, Ways With Words: Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Kenneth P. Wilkinson, Community in Rural America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Andrew Kirby, “A Sense of Place,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6 (1989): 322-326. For an alternative viewpoint, however, see Joshua Meyerwitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Laurel Richardson, “The Collective Story: Postmodernism and the Writing of Sociology,” Sociological Focus, 21 (1988): 199-208. Sandra Dolby-Stahl, Literary Folkloristies and the Personal Narrative, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Jerome Bruner, op cit. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 231-232 (emphasis in original). Wallace Martin, Recent Theories ofNarrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

13. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, op cit.; Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).

14. Norman Denzin, “The Spaces of Postmodernism: Reading Plummer on Blumer,” Symbolic Interaction, 13 (1990): 145-154.

15. Donald Polkinghorne, op cit., pp. 111-113; Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen, op cit., pp. 20-22; Michel McCall, “Narrative as Representation”Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, Macalester College, 1985; Barbara Johnstone, Stories, Community, and Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 20-33.

16. Walter Fisher, op cit. 17. George S. Howard, “Culture Tales: A Narrative Approach to Thinking, Cross-Cultural

Psychology, and Psychotherapy,” American Psychologist, 36 (1991): 187-197. 18. Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1973); David Maines,

“Further Dialectics: Strangers, Friends, and Historical Transformations,” in Communication Yearbook 12, edited by J. Anderson (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1989), pp. 190-202.

19. Robert E. Park, “The Urban Community as a Spatial and a Moral Order,” in me Urban Community, edited by E.W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), pp. 3-18.

20. Barbara Johnstone, op cit., pp. 1 l-12; Richard C. Freed and Glenn J. Broadhead, “Discourse Communities, Sacred Texts, and Institutional Norms,” College Composition and Communication, 38 (1987): 154-165.

21. Barbara Johnstone, op cit., p. 65. 22. Shirley Heath, op cit., pp. 184-189. 23. Shirley Heath, op cit., p. 186. 24. Barbara Johnstone, op cit., p. 90. 25. Barbara Johnstone, op cit., pp. 66-76. 26. Barbara Johnstone, op cit., p. 76. 27. Michael Calvin McGee, “The ldeograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,”

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66 (1980): 1-l 6. 28. Celeste Michelle Condit, “Democracy and Civil Rights: The Universalizing Influence

of Public Argumentation,” Communication Monographs, 54 (1987): 4. 29. Gerald Suttles, “The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture,” American Journal

of Sociology, 90 (1984): 291. 30. Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1968).


3l.Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman, op cit., p. xiv. 32. Gerald Suttles, op cit. 33.

34.

David Maines and Joseph Palenski, “Reconstructive Legitimacy in Final Reports of Contract Research,” Sociological Review, 34 (1986): 573-589. Tamar Katriel and Aliza Shender, “Towar and Stockade: Dialogic Narration in Israeli Settlement Ethos,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76 (1990): 359-380; Barry Schwartz, Yael Zerubavel, and Bernice M. Barnett, “The Recovery of Masada: A Study in Collective Memory,” The Sociological Quarterly, 27 (1986): 147-164. Barry Schwartz, et al., op cit., p. 151. Barry Schwartz, et al., op cit., p. 159. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 174-175. Celeste Michelle Condit, op cit. David Hummon, “Tourist Worlds: Tourist Advertising, Ritual, and American Culture,” ne Sociological Quarterly, 29 (1988): 179-202.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.


40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 41. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

David Hummon, op cit., p. 195. This section is drawn from Bridger’s doctoral thesis research. See his Power, Discourse, and Community: The Case of Land Use, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, 1992. Jeffrey C. Bridger and Aaron J. Harp, “Ideology and Growth Promotion,” Journal of Rural Studies, 6 (1990): 269-277. lnrelligencer Journal, April 27, 1988, p. B2. Zntelligencer Journal, November 1, 1988, p. 12. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976). Intelligencer Journal, lot cit. Intelligencer Journal, November 4, 1988, p. 8. Intelligencer Journal, November 2, 1988, p. 10. Intelligencer Journal, January 3, 1989, p. A9. In addition to works already cited, see Lyn Lofland “History, The City, and the Interactionist: Anselm Strauss, City Imagery, and Urban Sociology,” Symbolic Interaction, 14 (1990): 204-223; David Hummon, Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture(Albany: SUNY Press, 1990; Albert Hunter, Symbolic Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City (New York: Free Press, 1961); Donald Reitzes and Detrich Reitzes, “Saul D. Alinsky: An Applied Urban Symbolic Interactionist,” Symbolic Interaction, 15 (1991): l-24; David Karp, Gregory Stone, and William Yoels, Being Urban: A Social Psychological View of City Life (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1977): Albert Kreiling, “The Chicago School and Community.” CriticalStudies in Mass Communication, 6 (1989): 317-321; Eric Rothenbuhler “The Process of Community Involvement,” Communication Monographs, 58 (199 1): 63-78. For two such initial attempts, see Laurel Richardson, “Narrative Sociology,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19 (1990): 116-135; and David Maines, “Narrative’s Moment and Sociology’s Phenomena: Toward a Narrative Sociology.” The Sociological Quarterly, 34 (1993): in press. Lyn Lofland, 1990, op cit., p. 212. Martin H. Krieger, Advice and Planning (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 141.

narratives, community and land use decisions

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