研究生英语一1 A Working Community

1 A Working Community 1 I have a friend who is a member of the medical community. It does not say that, of course, on the stationery that bears her home address. This membership comes from her hospital work. 2 I have another friend who is a member of the computer community. This is a fairly new subdivision of our economy, and yet he finds his sense of place in it. 3 Other friends and acquaintances of mine are members of the academic community, or the business community, or the journalistic community. 4 Though you cannot find these on any map, we know where we belong. 5 None of us, mind you, was born into these communities. Nor did we move into them, U-Hauling our possessions along with us. None has papers to prove we are card-carrying members of one such group or another. Yet it seems that more and more of us are identified by work these days, rather than by street. 6 In the past, most Americans lived in neighborhoods. We were members of precincts or parishes or school districts. My dictionary still defines community, first of all in geographic terms, as “a body of people who live in one place.” 7 But today fewer of us do our living in that one place; more of us just use it for sleeping. Now we call our towns “bedroom suburbs,” and many of us, without small children as icebreakers, would have trouble naming all the people on our street. 8 It’s not that we are more isolated today. It’s that many of us have transferred a chunk of our friendships, a major portion of our everyday social lives, from home to office. As more of our neighbors work away from home, the workplace becomes our neighborhood. 9 The kaffeeklatsch of the fifties is the coffee break of the eighties. The water cooler, the hall, the elevator, and the parking lot are the back fences of these neighborhoods. The people we have lunch with day after day are those who know the running saga of our mother’s operations, our child’s math grades, our frozen pipes, and faulty transmissions. 10 We may be strangers at the supermarket that replaced the corner grocer, but we are known at the coffee shop in the lobby. We share with each other a cast of characters from the boss in the corner office to the crazy lady in Shipping, to the lovers in Marketing. It’s not surprising that when researchers ask Americans what they like best about work, they say it is “the shmoose factor.” When they ask young mothers at home what they miss most about work, it is the people. 11 Not all the neighborhoods are empty, nor is every workplace a friendly playground. Most of us have had mixed experiences in these environments. Yet as one woman told me recently, she knows more about the people she passes on the way to her desk than on her way around the block. Our new sense of community hasn't just moved from house to office building. The labels that we wear connect us with members from distant companies, cities, and states. We assume that we have something "in common" with other teachers, nurses, city planners. 12 It’s not unlike the experience of our immigrant grandparents. Many who came to this country still identified themselves as members of the Italian community, the Irish community, the Polish community. They sought out and assumed connections with people from the old country. Many of us have updated that experience. We have replaced ethnic identity with professional identity, the way we replaced neighborhoods with the workplace. This whole realignment of community is surely most obvious among the mobile professions. People who move from city to city seem to put roots down into their professions. In an age of specialists, they may have to search harder to find people who speak the same language. 13 I don’t think that there is anything massively disruptive about this shifting sense of community. The continuing search for connection and shared enterprise is very human. But I do feel uncomfortable with our shifting identity. The balance has tipped, and we seem increasingly dependent on work for our sense of self. 14 If our offices are our new neighborhoods, if our professional titles are our new ethnic tags, then how do we separate ourselves from our jobs? Selfworth isn’t just something to measure in the marketplace. But in these new communities, it becomes harder to tell who we are without saying what we do.