Community

The term community is one of the most elusive and vague in sociology and is by now largely without specific meaning. At the minimum it refers to a collection of people in a geographical area. Three other elements may be present in any usage of the term community.

(a) Communities may be thought of as collections of people with a particular social structure; there are, therefore, collections which are not communities. Such a notion often equates community with rural or preindustrial society and may, in addition, treat urban or industrial society as positively destructive.

(b) A sense of belonging or community spirit.

(c) All the daily activities of a community, work and non-work, take place within the geographical area; it is self-contained.

Different accounts of community will contain any or all of these additional elements. Many 19th century sociologists used a concept of community, explicitly or implicitly, in that they operated with dichotomies between preindustrial and industrial, or rural and urban societies. Ferdinand Tonnies, for example, in his distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, treats communities as particular kinds of society which are predominantly rural, united by kinship and a sense of belonging, and self-contained. For many 19th century sociologists, the term community was part of their critique of urban, industrial society. On the one hand, communities were associated with all the good characteristics that were thought to be possessed by rural societies. Urban societies, on the other, represented a destruction of community values. Some of these attitudes persist today. However, it became clear that societies could not be sharply divided into rural or urban, communities or non-communities, and sociologists proposed a rural-urban continuum instead, along which sentiments could be ranged according to various features of their social structure.

There was little agreement about what features differentiated settlements along the continuum, beyond an insistence on the significance of kinship, friendship and self-containment. The community study tradition was also important in its development of techniques of participant observation but has lost favour recently, partly because, as national considerations become important, communities become less self-contained, and partly because urban sociologists have become interested in other problems. Amitai Etzioni in New Golden Rule (1996) points out that community may be defined with reasonable precision. Community has two characteristics:

(a) A web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another (as opposed to one-on-one relationships);

(b) A measure of commitment to a set of shared histories and identities – in short, a particular culture.

David E. Pearson (1995) states: To earn the appellation of “community”, it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily, indeed by definition, coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don‟t. More recently, the term community has been used to indicate a sense of identity or belonging that may or may not be tied to geographical location. In this sense, a community is formed when people have a reasonably clear idea of who has something in common with them and who has not. Communities are, therefore, essentially mental constructs, formed by imagined boundaries between groups (Anderson 2006). An example of this is the nation as a community (for example, „Indianness‟) and thereby different from other nations even when they could not know personally other members of the imagined community. The term community continues to have some practical and normative force. For example, the ideal of the rural community still has some grip and we often see town planners aim at creating a community spirit in these designs.

Source:

NPTEL – Humanities and Social Sciences – Introduction to Sociology

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