A role for community psychologists: As participant-conceptualizers

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Abstract
There is a powerful body of theory and literature in the social and behavioral sciences that argues our organized communities evolve in ways well out of our control as humans and that we both individually and collectively have little capacity to actually create systems according to our blueprints. If this is correct, it could help explain why we seem so unable to generate the type of psychological sense of community we describe as essential for healthy contemporary living. In this paper I argue we need a whole other way of thinking about the role we might play as co‐actors in the evolutionary processes of human systems, a role community psychology has described as participant‐conceptualization. I focus on the fact that in human systems, the meanings, both individual and shared, that we attach to experience are all important. This paper discusses how meaning is generated, with a primary emphasis on the role of framing and argues that only as we develop capacities in our organized systems to “self‐reflect” will we become meaningful co‐participants in their various evolutionary stages.

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