What Is Belonging Anyway?
An introduction to our special series on belonging, by Maria Cury and Mikkel Krenchel
Belonging is both a noun and a verb, but it’s not a human phenomenon we can easily grasp or easily do on our own. It’s given, felt, assessed, affirmed, denied – belonging requires an interaction with other people or with places or things, calling on a social world beyond the individual to come alive. It’s easier to see belonging by noticing its outline – what’s in and what’s out. We recognise belonging mostly in moments when we strongly feel it – singing the chorus line among the crowd at a concert, or standing up for the wave with fellow fans at a stadium.
Or conversely, we recognise belonging when we very much don’t feel it while others do – not being invited to the birthday party, realising everyone else in the room voted for the other candidate, or being told by a stranger to “go back to where you’re from”. And yet we talk about belonging all the time. When we talk about issues like how to make sense of our post-lockdown landscape, how to build inclusive organisations in an increasingly remote world, or how to get communities to come together to tackle problems like climate change, what we are really talking about is belonging, and how to get it right. But what is belonging really, and how is it created? Is all of it good, and what breaks it? How is belonging changing, and what is its future?
Belonging is a topic that comes up again and again across the research we do at ReD. In the last two years, we’ve carried out over 10 studies that centred directly or indirectly on the phenomenon of belonging within communities ranging from the nascent to the well-established, the ephemeral to the long-lasting.
We’ve gathered our collective thinking in this special series that brings together essays, interviews, film, and photography to drive a deeper understanding of belonging across contexts. Our goal is to encourage reflection and curiosity about a topic we believe is crucial to society and to business – because brands, products, services, and spaces physical or digital can all create or break a sense of belonging.
The crisis today
It’s easier than ever to connect with one another today, yet harder to feel like we belong. There has been a fraying of our social fabric, illustrated by growing distrust in traditional institutions like schools and governments, political fragmentation, and the diminishing of local communities and shared physical spaces. We see a rise in loneliness and growing polarisation in our politics. Much of this has been reported for the past couple of decades and made worse by the pandemic. And yet, we can now bridge the gaps of physical space, time, and even aspects of our identities, by connecting with people online who are far away, with whom we can communicate asynchronously, and who might be quite different from the people we’d connect to otherwise. These two contradictory phenomena – the decaying social fabric and the ability to connect more than ever – happen together, and belonging gets caught in the middle, in part because belonging is not just one thing that is unaddressed in some domains of our lives and wholesale replaced by others.
What we mean by belonging
When we say ‘belonging’, we as researchers mean the feeling of acceptance, connection, safety, and reciprocity with a group or community, not just to another individual. Belonging is not the same as acquaintance or membership – we can be a member in a community without feeling like we belong. The group or community can take many forms – inherited, chosen, fleeting, earned, closed or open, digital or IRL, we might know people by name or we might simply feel the presence of others without knowing who they are.
Belonging is not just one thing – there are different types of relationships we have to and within groups and communities in our lives, that provide a sense of belonging. Some ways in which we feel belonging take a lot of time to develop and are quite intimate, while other ways we feel we belong are much more ephemeral, quick to develop, and quick to lose, for example in the weak ties we create with others we encounter in our daily routines. We might feel a sense of belonging because we share the same memories, or because we have cultural practices we do together, whether it’s in a church or school, neighborhood or nation. We might feel we belong because we share a hobby, even though we’ve never met or done that particular hobby together, something we see acutely in the decentralised communities around cryptocurrency and the rapidly expanding Web3 space.
This distinction matters because different types of belonging can provide us with different positive benefits in our lives – whether it’s connections or knowledge to build skills or get ahead, or a space to be vulnerable or experimental or collaborative. Those benefits, when combined, give us a sense of stability in an otherwise volatile and fast-changing world – because belonging is not just a feeling, it has functions in our lives. What happens when we can’t find balance across these different ways to belong, or when we can’t tap into the benefits of belonging? Several titles in our reading list, where we note the best books from landmark sociological studies to classic literature, add depth and wider context to this particular aspect of belonging.
A signal we’ve seen across our research is that it is much easier for us to feel shallow belonging nowadays – sensing the presence of other like-minded people, but not really going beyond that to feel part of a community and also actively contribute to it. While we are given abundant opportunities for passively experiencing shallow belonging with TikTok creators, brand advertisers, and political organisers, deep belonging is increasingly difficult to come by. In the absence of traditional institutions like schools, neighbourhoods, and churches, we see people turning to informal communities tied to their hobbies or areas of interest as a source of belonging and connection in their lives, but also struggling to get the most out of these forms of belonging. In our podcast episode on belonging, we dive into this phenomenon further and ask how an overemphasis on shallow belonging might in fact be contributing to a crisis of loneliness.
Making, breaking, and questioning belonging
The feeling of belonging happens in interactions, rather than in individuals – in experiences that reveal, re-emphasise, and even expand what we have in common with one another. Sometimes we need help initially noticing the commonalities, to feel the possibility of belonging. Once we start to feel we belong, we need experiences that reinforce what we have in common – whether it’s through a shared struggle or achievement, or savouring the past together. We’ve observed that the more people feel empowered to shape the collective identity of a group, or to have a role within the group, the more we feel we belong. Connecting more intimately with new individuals within a community sometimes affirms that we belong to the community as a whole. And interestingly, we’ve seen belonging thrives when commonalities between people evolve rather than stay the same, whether it’s through new experiences or skill-building, or discovering more commonalities. When experiences like all the ones mentioned here don’t happen – or don’t happen often enough – belonging doesn’t deepen.
On the flip side, belonging breaks when we don’t feel acceptance, reciprocity, or commonalities through the experiences we have together. When these experiences reveal a mismatch in what we expected were our shared values, beliefs, identities, or norms, we might not feel we belong, as the documentary One Day We Arrived in Japan that we feature – a story of three families who migrate from Brazil to Japan – poignantly captures. When aspects of ourselves (our identities, our personalities, our personal histories) aren’t accepted, or when we give without others at some point giving back, we might not feel we belong.
But not all endings to belonging are bad – sometimes we stop feeling belonging because we’ve got what we needed from a group or community, it’s served its purpose and now we move on to belonging elsewhere. Sometimes we develop a deeper belonging with a subset of the group, or a relationship with an individual in the group, and break away together having gained something we needed more. And not all belonging is good – the force of belonging has the potential to create groupthink, the feeling of exclusion, or the pressure to assimilate. It can perpetuate misinformation or conspiracies that contribute to the decaying of our social fabric. Belonging is often a key ingredient in cults, religious warfare, racism, and terrorism.
Indeed, maybe we don’t always need belonging. Since the rise of remote and hybrid work with COVID-19, people are questioning whether we need belonging at work, for example – if so, in what ways? For employers, it’s a crisis: how do we create a sense of belonging to an office or a company, in an era of remote, hybrid, and gig work? For employees, maybe it’s a revelation or a revolution: do we need to feel belonging to do good and meaningful work, or does belonging at work exploit us to do more work for less? How much should we derive belonging from work versus other domains in our lives?
Belonging for business
Belonging matters for companies and organisations. We’ve observed that when businesses get belonging right, their brands, services, products, and spaces are more relevant to people. But while belonging increases engagement, it also requires engagement. Delivering on the feeling of belonging is not enough – there are different kinds of belonging with different functions for people and specific experiences or points of interaction that make people feel a deeper sense of belonging around commonalities. We unpack this further in our piece “Can Hermès Be Your Friend?” that provides tools for brands to consider using to deepen their consumers’ sense of belonging.
Understanding the kinds of belonging, benefits, and experiences to deliver on, is crucial for getting belonging right. Belonging, done wrong, can feel frivolous or beside-the-point – what is the role of belonging in an organisation’s core vision or mission? It can feel exclusionary or intolerant – who is the organisation or company for, and who might not be currently considered? We put precisely these sorts of business-critical questions to executives and business leaders in our “How I Built Belonging” interview series – featuring Nikki Neuburger of lululemon, Jean Chatzky of HerMoney, Lynda Hammes of Tertulia, and Kim Foulds and Scott Cameron of Sesame Workshop – where we discuss the different ways organisations approach creating a sense of belonging both internally and among their consumer base.
Understanding how to best deliver on belonging for a particular brand, product, service, or space is also crucial. For instance, while there’s an abundance of online ways to create belonging, the deepest belonging has the potential of taking place IRL – it often can’t just live online. And perhaps counterintuitively, sometimes belonging can be transactional – we see people using marketplaces and micropayments to foster a sense of belonging. In a quickly changing landscape of how we connect and make meaning in our lives, it’s important for businesses to go beyond the trends and understand how belonging is happening in people’s day-to-day.
We hope that the following observations, ideas, voices, and images provide a starting point, a provocation, for anyone interested in the difficult work of building the invisible fabric of belonging that turns individuals into collectives. Let’s find ways to gather, further explore, and build community around belonging – our connection can begin here.