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Being well together: individual subjective and community wellbeing

Atkinson, S.; Bagnall, A-M.; Corcoran, R.; South, J.; Curtis, S.

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Authors

A-M. Bagnall

R. Corcoran

J. South



Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which community wellbeing is, and could be, related to individual subjective wellbeing by mapping current practice, teasing out the assumptions underlying a dominant approach and flagging neglected issues. The notion of community is widely understood as about something more than the sum of the parts. Capturing subjective aspects of local life that are not simply individual but reflect the ways in which people feel and are well together is a challenging undertaking. Most existing frameworks for assessing community wellbeing are premised on a theory of the self as an autonomous, rational and independently acting or feeling individual, and the primary interest is on how community aspects of life impact on individual subjective wellbeing. This dominant approach consistently neglects spatial and social inequalities, multiple settings and scales and temporal choices and legacies, all of which constitute important political dimensions to community wellbeing. Social theories of the self as relational put relations as prior to subjectivity and as such afford ways to conceptualise community wellbeing in terms of being well together. A relational approach can also offer routes to tackling the complex interactions of inequality, scale and time. Such an approach is not, however, easily translated into quantitative measures or simple policy interventions. The approach taken to community wellbeing is not a technological issue but a political choice.

Citation

Atkinson, S., Bagnall, A., Corcoran, R., South, J., & Curtis, S. (2020). Being well together: individual subjective and community wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 21(5), 1903-1921. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00146-2

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 21, 2019
Online Publication Date Jul 13, 2019
Publication Date Jun 30, 2020
Deposit Date Jun 24, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Happiness Studies
Print ISSN 1389-4978
Electronic ISSN 1573-7780
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 21
Issue 5
Pages 1903-1921
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00146-2

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.






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