The Study of the Effects of Intra-Group Competition on Community Development (Case Study: Zarnagh in East Azerbaijan)

Community development is an important part of the ongoing development debate. Now the community development is referred to as a substitute for macro-based approaches to development. This form of development is in contrast with the integrated and homogenizing trends. It suggests that people's participation and engagement in development, encouraging development from the bottom, and exploiting the potential and capacities of the local community are vitally important. Various interpretations of community development and various examples have been presented. For a long time, the notion was that for the sake of development, a form of cultural and social cohesion was inevitable. That is why most policies and plans were implemented to realize the same idea. But over the time, it has become clear that many social differences and inequalities are inseparable, and they must be recognized and accepted in order to organize development plans with these differences. Geography, language, ethnicity, and different experiences of life, constitute a form of unity and social cohesion, which, despite some similarities, should be examined and understood based on the "difference" pattern. In spite of the very powerful flow of social spaces, the "communities" are joined by a an external force and formulated under the international community and based on specific cultural and economic patterns. Therefore, there comes an opposing force in which its specific social and cultural patterns are created to shape a collective life in accordance with a self-imposed pattern. To this end, these divergent social forces justify a concept called " community development”.The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between competition and community development to demonstrate that not only the priori conception of community development as a form of cooperation, participation, integration and trust between the members of the community that led to development, but it is no longer relevant to the present realities of these local communities; rather, this normative viewpoint can be misleading, if we neglect the capacity and potentiality of forces such as competitions, conflicts of local communities, etc. It should be noted that the second dimension of the dichotomy of the current research is cooperation in the form of a social capital indicator, which is a more comprehensive concept.

The present study was carried out by survey method. Survey is a method for obtaining information about the views, beliefs, opinions or actions of members of a statistical society (Babbie, 2006:530). The data gathering tool was a researcher-made questionnaire based on available scales. In order to evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, the viewpoint of scholars and experts were considered and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to determine its reliability. According to official statistics, the population of the citizens over the age of 18 living in the city of Zarnagh is 3285, of whom we collected a sample of 345 individuals based on Cochran formula and simple sampling method.

The findings show that there is a direct correlation between the sense of competition and popular differentiation with the level of objective and subjective developments in the studied region, so the more popular competition, the more community development. But this relationship disappears with the presence of such intermediating variables as trust, solidarity, partnership and social relations. The meaning of this is that moderating variables as independent variables have a direct relationship with community development, but they have been in opposition to competing. In fact, what explains this direct relationship with community development is the degree of strength or weakness of collectivism or grouping among members of the community. study.