As universities, nonprofits, community foundations, and governmental organizations proliferate the language of leadership development and social transformation, it is with an inadequate understanding of what agency is being provoked. With an emphasis on ‘career-focused’ tools and techniques in community development literature and pedagogy, there is too little understanding of the knowledge being drawn upon and created by community workers (CWs). Furthermore, this knowledge is often tacit, bodily, spiritual, and collective, making it even more alien to the empiricism-focused world of social science. Situated meaning-making must be recapitulated in the study of community development in order to better address the complexity and ambiguity of specific practices and the associated construction of identities.

This study suggests an alternative way to understand and analyze community development work. Building on fieldwork in the Kumaoni Himalaya of India, it is argued that community workers make sense of the world in large part through the co-construction of dialectic identity metaphors (DIMs). These DIMs help explain to the workers the way the world works, the way it does not work, and what to do about it. More than formal community development theory, I suggest community workers look to dominant DIMs to structure organizational vision and program creation. Furthermore, ideological fragments within local DIMs contribute to the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and the creation of best practices. For this reason, in situ examination of DIM creation and maintenance is useful for understanding how and why CWs collectively construct their identities and the co-constitutive work.