On community size

This is what I said recently about the possibility of AAA (American Accounting Association) dumping its AAA Commons. AECM (Accounting Education in Computers & Multimedia) is an AAA listserv:

This should not surprise any one, and neither should we be alarmed.

After detailed study of communities of primates  (including humans), the well-known British anthropologist Robin Dunbar concluded that the neocortex size imposes a limit on the number of social relationships one can have. He hypothesized the number 150, which is nowadays called the Dunbar number (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number).

Here is a quote from Wikipedia that I borrowed for one of my classes:

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"150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size."
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Those who want to know more might like to read his two fascinating works:

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Dunbar, Robin I. M. (2010). How many friends does one person need?: Dunbar's number and other evolutionary quirks. London: Faber and Faber

Dunbar. 1997. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press.

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Whenever the size of a community goes over the number it subdivides. Dunbar gives the example of the anabaptist communities of Hutterites (I guess the same holds for Shakers, Mennonites, Amish,...).  We have seen it even in AAA with sections.

So, AAA as a community is a myth, no more. Any one who has attended the AAA annual meetings and the social interactions there should have observed this; much work, research, and socializing takes place in smaller communities, and AAA as an umbrella organisation is little more than a trade union (with no teeth and wet noodle for a spine) for accounting academics. 

Even with AECM, if you exclude the lurkers, the community size is probably somewhere around 60-150. I can see even AECM fracturing when I notice polemics and discontent with some postings.