Community Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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“Community” is concerned with people having something in common, although there is much debate about precisely what that thing is. The most conventional approach relates to people sharing a geographical area (typically a neighborhood), an idea captured in references to local communities. Place is central to such an understanding because of the assumption that people are necessarily brought together by the fact of living in close proximity. This view is contested by those who argue that shared place does not always promote social connections between people. It is an established axiom of urban sociology that modern city spaces can be characterized as anonymous and impersonal, devoid of the collective connectedness associated with the idea of ”community”. Indeed, the theme of urbanization and increased geographical mobility leading to a loss of traditional patterns of community has been a very powerful one in sociological thought from the very beginning of the discipline. Against this background, the search for the basis of community has led other writers to highlight the importance of people being brought together by common interests or by common identities, neither of which requires co-presence. Occupational communities such as the academic community provide one example of groups of people whose common interests derived from work-based attachments may hold them together despite their being geographically dispersed, while religious communities illustrate the parallel point that a community of identity does not necessitate members being together in the same place. In this vein, Benedict Anderson has described nations as “imagined communities whose members cannot possibly all have close, face-to-face connections.”

Whether the basis of a community is common residence, common interest, common identity, or some combination of these factors, it is necessarily the case that the relationships that are involved will be exclusive to some degree. Put another way, communities operate by distinguishing those who belong (”insiders”) from those who do not (”outsiders”). Community is an important dimension of social divisions as well as togetherness because inclusion in community relationships promises benefits (such as access to material resources, social support, or raised social status) that set members apart from others. A strong sense of this difference from non-members, of ”us and ”them, is a characteristic of some of the most tightly bonded communities. Conversely, communities to which access is more open are correspondingly looser entities whose members do not have such a marked group identity, loyalty, and solidarity. People s sense of belonging to communities thus varies considerably in its intensity. The same point about variation applies to the degree of commitment that communities require of their members. The contrast between communities that bind members together tightly through similarity and those that have more points of connection with outside groups is captured in the distinction between the two types of social capital, respectively ”bonding and ”bridging, that Robert Putnam develops in Bowling Alone (2000).

Arguably the most enduring challenge facing community researchers relates to the definition and operationalization of the concept of ”community.” The corruption of Ferdinand Tonnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (translated as ”community and ”association”) into the idea that a continuum could be identified between strong rural communities and urban social patterns that lacked depth and durability has rightly been criticized for its geographical determinism: people s ”community relationships are not the simple product of their spatial location. It is quite another thing to acknowledge that local context matters to how people live their everyday lives, and ethnography is a favored tool among researchers who seek to capture the nuances of particular community settings. Immersion in a community allows ethnographers to capture the distinctiveness of its culture and to appreciate how belonging to that community is understood by its members. Other approaches focus less on the symbolic meaning of community and more on the mechanics of its operation. Social network analysis has proved particularly illuminating regarding the nature, purpose, and extent of people s connections to others, and it is more open than ethnography is to quantification. Barry Wellman (Wellman & Berkowitz 1998) has used this approach to argue convincingly that technological developments in communications (including the development of Internet communities) have freed individuals from dependence on others in their vicinity. Nevertheless, network analysis also reveals that many people s community ties continue to have a strong local component, especially if family and kin members are included in that calculation. Overall, research findings point to the continuing importance of communities of all types, both place-based and others. These findings cast doubt on those general theories of social change that anticipate the demise of community.

Bibliography:

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London.
Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon &Schuster, New York.
Tonnies, F. (1955) Community and Association. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Wellman, B. & Berkowitz, S. (eds.) (1988) Social Structures: A Network Approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.