The term community relates to a wide range of phenomena and has been used as an omnibus word loaded with diverse associations. Hillery (1955) unearthed no fewer than ninety-four definitions of community and its definition has continued to be a thriving intellectual pastime of sociologists.
A preliminary confusion arises between community as a type of collectivity or social unit, and community as a type of social relationship or sentiment. The root of the problem could be traced to Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft, which uses the term to describe both a collectivity and a social relationship. Subsequently, most scholars have used community to connote a form of collectivity (with or without Gemeinschaft ties), but some, such as Nisbet (1953), have kept the community-as-sentiment approach alive in their emphasis on the quest for community and their concern with the loss of community in modern life. These approaches are clearly mixed with some nostalgia for a glorious past in which people were thought to be more secure, less alienated and less atomized. But, as Schmalenbach (1960) pointed out, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft implied a spontaneous, taken-for-granted relationship. Fellowship ties which are consciously sought and are more emotionally laden better fit what he called communion (bund) ties, such as those found in religious sects or ideological groups. Communion ties are often created by precisely those people who are dissatisfied with the routinization (hence loss of meaning and involvement) of the extant community ties.
Community, in the sense of type of collectivity, usually refers to a group sharing a defined physical space or geographical area such as a neighbourhood, city, village or hamlet; a community can also be a group sharing common traits, a sense of belonging and/or maintaining social ties and interactions which shape it into a distinctive social entity, such as an ethnic, religious, academic or professional community. The differences are between what may be called territorial and non-territorial approaches. For some scholars (Hawley 1950; Park 1929) the most important bases of commonality is common territory. While they do not dismiss the essential element of common ties, these ties are not sufficient in themselves to constitute a community. The non-territorial approach stresses the common ties at the expense of territory. Community still denotes a social entity with common ties and not the ties themselves, but territory is not a necessary ingredient of commonality. Common ties and a sense of belonging may derive from beliefs in a common past or a common fate, common values, interests, kinship relations and so on, none of which presuppose living together, as illustrated by ethnic or religious communities whose members might be geographically dispersed. We still do not know, however, what is distinctive about community ties compared to ties of other collectivities. Since locality is not the distinctive feature in this approach, one looks for distinctiveness in the type of ties. This may in turn re-create the confusion between community as a form of collectivity or community as a form of human bond. The non-territorial approach has gained force as a result of modern advances in communication which have reduced the importance or territorial proximity as a bases for human association, increasingly creating what Webber (1964) called ‘community without propinquity’. A related non-territorial approach is found among social network theorists, some of whom also object to treating communities as social entities in their own right, regarding this a legacy of Durkheimian corporationist tendencies as opposed to Simmel’s interactionist approach (Boissevain 1968).
Hillery (1968) and Gottschalk (1975) have made the most systematic attempt to differentiate between formal organization and community (or rather communal organization). The formal organization’s primary orientation towards a specific, defining goal is contrasted with the communal organization’s primarily diffuse goal orientation. Azarya (1984) has added that formal organizations are basically instruments established to attain external goals whereas communities’ goals are mostly inner-oriented: they strive to maintain a set of desired relationships among fellow members and a state of affairs within the collectivity. In their goal-related activities, members of formal organizations relate to one another as specific role-bearers, while relations among members of communal organizations are more diffuse, encompassing a larger aspect of one another’s life. Corporations, schools, churches, armies, political movements and professional associations are all formal organizations, while families, ethnic groups and neighbourhoods are communal organizations. Communal and formal organizations can, of course, include sub-units of the opposite kind, as for example informal community-like friendship groups among workers of an industrial plant, or, by contrast, voluntary associations created within a neighbourhood or an ethnic community.
Delineating the boundaries of communities is one of the greatest difficulties hampering their proper identification. The lack of clear boundaries is indeed one of the major properties of communities as compared to formal organizations (Hillery 1968). In non-territorial communities, clear boundaries and sharp differentiation between members and non-members are signs of association formation within the community, which brings it closer to the formal organization pole. In territorial communities, if no size limitations are set on ‘the people living together’ which the community is said to represent, the concept may be stretched to include an entire nation or even the world at large (Warren 1973). Some scholars (Hawley 1950) prefer to limit community to a size which enables the inhabitants to have a diffuse familiarity with the everyday life of the area. While one knows about special events that occur outside the community, familiarity with one’s own community includes ordinary events which would not draw attention elsewhere. This would exclude global, national and metropolitan areas from being called communities.
However a measure of maximal size may be specified, what would be the minimal size of a territorial community? The smaller the community, the greater its members’ familiarity with routine life, but would that make a single house (or an apartment building) a community? According to Warren, some basic functions have to be performed in each community, including the provision of basic economic needs, socialization, social control, social participation and mutual support (Warren 1973). The community might depend on external organizations in performing these functions, and community members do not have to prefer locally offered services to external ones, but some activity has to take place in the community in each of these spheres. This would exclude an apartment building or a modern nuclear family from being a community in its own right, though not necessarily the pre-modern extended family household. A related feature of community stressed in the literature is its being a microcosm of society. The community, unlike other collectivities, is a social system in itself, including such subsystems as government, economy, education, religion, and family found in a larger society. A certain size has to be attained for these institutional spheres to manifest themselves. It is also possible that the community loses some of its multifaceted characteristics in more developed societies, becoming less differentiated as societies become more so (Elias 1974).
The conceptual disarray of social science regarding community has not prevented an abundance of community studies, some of which are among the best known pieces of social science literature. The various urban studies of the Chicago school in the 1920s and 1930s, Warren and Lunt’s (1941) Yankee City, Redfield’s (1949) Tepotzlan: A Mexican Village, Whyte’s (1961) Street Corner Society, Gans’s (1962) Urban Villagers and (1967) Levittowners are just a few examples of a much longer list. Scholarly interest in community has included units of greatly different size, autonomy, demographic composition, technological, economic or cultural traits. Community characteristics have been used to explain other phenomena—inequality, deviance, transformative capacity. Special attention has focused on the extent to which urban-rural differences can explain variations in community structure and interactions (Wirth 1938). Doubts have been raised about the narrative style and idiosyncratic methodology of most community studies which make them irreproducible and hard to compare. Ruth Glass called them ‘the poor sociologist’s substitute for the novel’ (Bell and Newby 1971), but perhaps this concrete quality and the ‘story’ that they carried has been their greatest advantage.
Victor Azarya
Hebrew University
References
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Boissevain, J. (1968) ‘The place of non-groups in the social sciences’, Man 3.
Elias, N. (1974) ‘Towards a theory of communities’, in C.Bell and H.Newby (eds) The Sociology of Community, London.
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——(1967) The Levittowners, New York.
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——(1968) Communal Organizations, Chicago.
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Webber, M.M. (1964) ‘The urban place and the nonplace urban realm’, in M.M.Webber et al. (eds) Explorations into Urban Structure, Philadelphia, PA.
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