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Conceptualizing Community

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Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations in the 21st Century

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Abstract

The concept of community is a recurring question in social thought and an enduring quest in social life. The purpose of this chapter is to explore classic and contemporary views of community fully recognizing the multiplicity and open-ended evolving meanings of the concept. I refer to this as a “fracturing” of the concept of community. After a very brief look at the nature and fate of community in classical statements (Tönnies, Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Simmel). I begin with the simple but powerful idea that community is both an object, a thing, a unit of social organization, and also a quality, a variable. The framework advanced here sees the concept of community as a multi-dimensional variable where each dimension may vary by degree. It is an empirical question of the degree to which any given specific social entity, that is communities as objects, exhibit this or that dimension of community. As an empirical generalization the “ideal type” community framework (see Park, Wirth, Hillery) consists of the three distinct dimensions defined as ecological (space, time), social structural (networks of institutions and interaction), and symbolic cultural (identity, norms and values). These multiple dimensions of community suggest community has “fractured” into various real-world forms and also varied conceptual meanings not only are these three dimensions theoretically informed and elaborated in much empirical research, they are also a heuristic device, a useful tool, for guiding both policy agendas and research questions focused on local communities; and, they inform not only the remainder of this chapter but are exemplified in chapters throughout the volume. The chapter then looks at a number of the different “fractured” products and processes of community as seen in the rich variety of contemporary theories and empirical research. These include, for example, communities “lost, found and liberated” (Gans, Wellman), “mislaid” and “silenced (Schmallenbach, Hunter) “limited” (Janowitz, Greer), “socially constructed” (Suttles, Hunter), “networked” (Wellman, Castells), “vertically nested” (Warren, Milofsky), and “organized” (Alinsky, Smock), among others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of enduring “dilemmas of community” that include “ambivalence” (costs vs. benefits) of community, and the “ambiguities” (denotative clarity vs. rich connotations) of community.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1812 Chicago Avenue, Room 203, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Albert Hunter

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  1. School of Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Ram A. Cnaan

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA

    Carl Milofsky

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Hunter, A. (2018). Conceptualizing Community. In: Cnaan, R., Milofsky, C. (eds) Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations in the 21st Century . Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77416-9_1

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