Salutogenic community building

This paper explores a new approach to community building. It is based on the concept of salutogenesis; a proactive approach to community health which seeks preventative measures instead of the traditional reactionary corrective and curative culture of public health care. Increasingly organizations are concerned with sustainable healthy work forces but they often lack a coherent mechanism for doing so. Salutogenesis focuses on the ability of coping, social cohesion and community development by increasing health and social capital. This critical-interpretive research is based on data collected in a 9 month ethnographic study of social workers, health professionals and information technologists of a Norwegian-based non-government organization involved in community health promotion. The main aim was to develop a well-formed understanding of the three salutogenic criteria; comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness in terms of community building processes. It was found that collaborating, planning (and organizing), and defining (a vision for) the community were the key areas of salutogenic community building. The other incentive was the adaptation of process philosophy into a coherent conceptual framework for modeling practices. It is an action-based world view and focuses on the context of change and action. As such, my contributions are two-fold; the identification of generic salutogenic practices in community building, and a research framework founded on process ontology. This paper offers an explanatory account of salutogenic community building at a fundamental level and a non-compositional, nonsubstance semantico-ontological framework is put to use.