Download Stevens, John, (2008), Community

Community :
A Review of the Literature
John Stevens
Abstract
Several social researchers have examined elements of post-industrial communities for
many decades. For Warner, therefore, the clique has the same social significance in
community studies as the informal group had in the Hawthorne factory studies,
Development of social network analysis. Social class is identified as affecting an individual’s
social life. Ray Pahl’s (1965) Hertfordshire villages study and subsequent research
compared urban and rural communities. Pahl (1968) suggests that while location is
important for communities, the community need not be isolated from other
concentrations of people. Indeed, he rejected the notion of a rural/strong community to
urban/weak community continuum.
One view of community is that communication between individuals is at the core of
community with conversation or links between individuals being the glue that brings
individuals together to form a community. Fischer examined how ”personnel networks
differ”, and also how people living in cities developed social networks that differed from
the social networks of people living in small towns (1982: 251). The network view of
community effectively describes how individuals interact within communities, and also
reveals how ICTS play a significant role in the maintenance of communities.
Introduction
Popular mythology holds that rural communities experience high levels of social
exclusion compared with urban communities in the UK. Some have described some
English rural villages and white ghettos. While access to public transport and
entertainment establishments are known to be more restricted in rural settings, these
circumstances are not a guarantee of reduced access to opportunities to develop the
human and social capital resources needed to avoid or escape social exclusion. Indeed,
some believe that rural communities are as rich in social networks as they are poor in
other resources.
The private motor vehicle and the increased mobility of individuals and households have
influenced the degree of social interaction between residents of geographic communities
– especially among younger people. This can be seen looking at data from the British
Household Panel Study (2004), which shows that in the UK as a whole, only 54.9% of
respondents report that their best friends live within five miles of the respondents’ own
homes. This percentage is lower in London - 49.2%, as well as in the rest of the
Southeast - 51.9%. Some have argued that as geographic mobility allows best friends to
move farther apart over time, communities may break down. I argue that degree of
social mobility and physical mobility greatly influences the boundaries of community by
locality.
Dormitory communities have the reputation of both being poor in resources and
characterised by weak social ties. There are also perceived inequalities between
established urban communities, which develop a sense of identity and community, and
urban commuter dormitories, where the media suggest that residents are more likely to
lead isolated lives. This thesis explores issues that explain the degree and nature of
social networks in communities in the East of England. In particular, I compare networks
in different types of communities, some long established, others more transitory, some
more rural, and others more urban. This introduction sets the background for this
research, first by looking at the contemporary debates over social isolation and the
consequences of diminished social networks, then at the meaning of the term
community.
In this paper I review some of the literature on community within the last two
centuries’ including the gradual transitions of researchers view of community from
communities defined by location, to a view of community based on a network of
acquaintances. I investigate in this paper four different views starting with a section on
social isolation that is based on a network view of community. Next I review the
literature on the symbolic view of community, and then finish the paper by investigating
work from early sociologists on the geographic views of community.
The meaning of community
The term “community” covers a very board range of meanings. Most British readers
would likely associate community with the local residential community in which they
live, such as a street, village or town, which is defining community in terms of locality. I
argue that this definition is too narrow.
The German Sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1887) was a major contributor to theory
and field studies in Sociology of Community. He is best remembered for his distinction
between two basic types of social groups. The groups that form around essential will, in
which membership is self-fulfilling, Tonnies called Gemeinschaft (often translated as
community). A group in which membership was sustained by some instrumental goal or
definite end he termed Gesellschaft (often translated as society). Gemeinschaft is
exemplified by the phrase ‘family or neighborhood’, Gesellschaft, by the city or the state.
In this paper I propose that friendship and acquaintance between individuals is the “glue”
that holds a community together. Their discussions of “our crowd” and “our circle” of
acquaintances, Warner and Lunt (1941) develop similar concepts to Tonnies
Gemeinschaft. Warner and Lunt suggest that contemporary communities arise from
people’s social interactions in locations defined by their interests, as opposed to
necessity caused by adversity. In previous research (Stevens 1997), I studied how a
cohort of Asian students in a social science department at the University of Essex
formed friendship networks that served a mutual need to make contact with people
who could assist them with the process of coping with life within a new country.
The concept of community thus encompasses a range of elements. Community emerges
from a range of interactions between individuals that form networks of links that
generate and are reinforced by symbolic understandings of the meaning of these links.
The closeness and density of networks of kinship, friendship, collegial spirit at the
workplace, intra- and inter-community links all make up a part of each individual’s sense
of community. Community also spans other dimensions, from education to local area
and neighborhoods.
In the present world, kinship links often are less important than friendship, and some
other acquaintance links are gaining increasing importance. Acquaintance networks
increasingly are spread over several localities as geographic mobility increases. The
speed at which networks of acquaintances form, increases as people move to new
homes – and even new regions. Frequently links created between individuals at work, I
propose, are more fluid than kinship links, as individuals do not always have a need or
incentive to retain links with old colleagues when they change job. Once people start
working for a new employer, they often have less opportunity to regularly reinforce
those ties that they maintain.
Many social researchers, especially in the UK, approach community research with direct
observation and various qualitative techniques. A few classic examples include Margaret
Stacy’s studies of Banbury (1960,1975), the very readable books by Howard Williamson
and Pip Williamson (1981), and the follow-up study by Howard Williamson (2004) on
social criminology in a council housing estate in Cardiff. These studies relied on
participant observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate small numbers of
individuals. Such methods provide a wealth of detail about the specific communities that
the investigators observed, but only offer anecdotal information on the structure of
communities as a more general concept. Nevertheless, these studies serve as a valuable
backdrop that may help with the explanation of less detailed but larger sample research.
I now turn to debates over social exclusion and inclusion, and consider the importance
of this literature for the understanding of communities and location.
Early Sociological investigations of communities
Several social researchers have examined elements of post-industrial communities for
many decades. Maurice Stein’s (1960) work on sociological investigations by the Chicago
School from the 1920s through 1930s in the USA identified “natural areas” – that is
streets, districts or apartment blocks - around which communities formed. Ronald
Frankenberg’s work on community studies and his summary and analysis of eight studies
conducted from the 1950s (1966) examined the economic systems operating in
communities, as well as the dynamics of social change experienced by residents of these
communities. He identified two different currents governing interactions within
communities: class and status (1966). Put simply, class relates to association with the
means of production (as defined by Marx), and status relates to patterns of consumption
(as defined by Durkhein).
In the United States a study of “Levittown” reported in a paper by Herbert Gasns
(1971) was one of the first community studies. The potato fields located 25 miles east of
Manhattan on Long Island was named Levittown, and the Levitts began to build a huge
suburb. The new development ultimately consisted of 17,400 homes and 82,000 people.
Levittown, NJ consisted of a total of 12,000 homes, divided into ten neighborhoods.
Within Levittown's curvilinear streets were a single citywide high school, a library, city
hall, and grocery shopping center.
To the casual observer the Jews of Canada resemble nothing so much as a slightly
underdeveloped extension of the sprawling Jewish community of the North-eastern
United States, with one difference: they have a dated air about them. Their malaise,
however, goes deeper than that.
...Jewries are so closely identified in social structure that a study of Jews in Forest Hill,
Toronto (John R. Seely's Crestwood Heights) is used as a standard text in U.S. As a
result, while Canadian Jewry does a booming cultural business with guest speakers,
panel discussions, and weekend seminars, intellectually it is a sterile community... In
1924 Robert and Helen Lynd arrive in Muncie, Indiana to study religion in American life.
The Lynds’ pioneered the use of social surveys. They created schedules of questions
that were asked of samples of people in Middletown. Some of the Lynds ’important
findings were that Americans have a unique level of pride in their country with Sunday
changing from the Sabbath to the Sunday holiday. The Lynds also discovered the scandal
of class. That being, business class worked with people and ideas and the working class
worked with things. In 1935 Robert Lynd then returned to Muncie to study the effects
of the Depression on Middletown.
Lloyd Warner's Yankee City study was undoubtedly the most ambitious and sustained
examination of an American community ever undertaken. Ultimately, the study
produced 6 volumes: The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), The Status System of a
Modern Community (1942), The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945), The Social
System of a Modern Factory (1947), The Status System of a Modern Community (1947), and
The Living and the Dead: A Study in the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959). The publication
by Warner, W. Lloyd, (1983) of Interpersonal Configurations and Cliques caused a
Development of social network analysis. With the advice of Warner, the Hawthorne
investigators began an anthropological' study, an observation of work group behaviour in
a natural setting in the factory. The importance of the Hawthorne studies to the
development of social network analysis lies in their use of sociograms to report on
group structure. Just as the kinship structure of a village community might be illustrated
using a genealogical diagram, the Hawthorne team constructed sociograms to illustrate
the structure of informal relations within the work group. This paper includes various
sociograms constructed by the research team. 'The group in front' and 'the group in
back' were identified from observations of group behaviour and from group vocabulary
as the two sub-groups within the bank- wiring group.
Warner's work shows a rich variety of theoretical influences. The social configuration
that comprises a modern community, argued Warner, consists of various sub-groups,
such as the family, the church, classes and associations. A clique is 'an intimate non-kin
group, membership in which may vary in numbers from two to thirty or more people'
(Warner and Lunt, 1941: 110) .8. For Warner, therefore, the clique has the same social
significance in community studies as the informal group had in the Hawthorne factory
studies, Development of social network analysis. The Yankee City researchers claimed that
a large number of these cliques could be identified in the city. Having identified six
classes and 31 types of clique in Yankee City, Warner and Lunt cross-classified class and
clique membership in a data matrix. The environment itself consists of the physical,
technical and social contexts of group behaviour.
In 1932 the American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner travelled with other
anthropologists, Conrad Arensburg and Solon Kimball to county Clare in rural Ireland.
Arensburg (1939) and Kimball (1940) identify small (subsistence farmers) and large (beef
stockman) farmers, as the two classes of farmer who are both, complementary and
antagonistic. The political division has been between two sorts of farmer rather than
between employer and employee. Large farmers use hired labour where as small
farmers use reciprocal cooperation between man and friends. Men lend their tools and
machinery to others and treat the cooperation among farmers and neighbours as an
expression of community. This forms a network of social obligation with debts to
equals treated as debts of honour. The strengths of the strands of this network are seen
as the foundation of the community.
Alwyn Rees (1950) in his study of “life in a welsh village” identifies people related to
their personal communities very positively, recognizing the sense of moral obligation
that bound their individual mix of chosen and given ties. The whole exercise helped to
make implicit personal communities in the mind more solid and 'real'. Of the 60
personal communities in the study 28 had more than two-thirds of their members living
within 20 miles and only 12 personal communities had more than two thirds of their
personal community members living more than twenty miles away.
Ronald Frankenberg (1957). researched a “village on the boarder” between Wales and
England. In this social anthropological study he concentrate on the two villages within a
parish, with a combined population of 1200 people. Others are weekend or permanent
residences for outsiders. These Physical isolated villages are reached by a road peters
out through the valley- purpose a cul-d-sac. The Villages seems isolated and villagers
feel that it is. In reality this isolation is far from absolute. Five or six buses a day leave
the village, covering a small distance between neighboring towns with men traveling to
work. Between 1946-1952 was a rise and fall in population when locally based industry
died with two disused and partly ruined mills and a Slate industry.
Ray Pahl’s (1965) Hertfordshire villages study and subsequent research compared urban
and rural communities. In particular, Pahl was interested in looking at changes in the
location where people lived and worked taking place during the 1950s and 1960s – with
particular concern for how the rise of commuting to work affected residential
communities. He described six types of individual living in the Hertfordshire commuter
areas, and found that status systems from distant areas played a key role in the
community attachment of three of his six types of individuals.
Margaret Stacey (1960, 1975) investigated the makeup of the community in her later
work on Banbury; Stacy used similar themes to explore inequality and order. She also
argued against the use of the terms “community” and “community studies”, instead
advocating that such research more properly covered “local social systems” (1969).
Stacey contended that social researchers should show interest in identity with local
areas as an “aspect of society” which changes and progresses over time, rather than
simply cataloguing details about communities for the sake of producing community
studies materials.
Stacy describes 31 conditions contributing to the maintenance and dissolution of local
social systems. These include the time any given individual has lived in the geographic
area and the proportion of residents who have grown up and continued to live in the
location. She describes the number of overlapping interest groups, as well as the
number and prominence of “local power points” (that is people who have influence on
those living around them by virtue of another position, such as holding an elected office
or running a local business), and the number of local institutions as indicators of the
strength of local social systems. She also notes that the levels of in- and out- migration
can place stress on a community. Stacy dismissed the importance of social systems not
bounded by location. Stacy’s work has less relevance in the contemporary context than
at the time she conducted her research, as individual mobility has increased and
individuals have easier means of communicating with other persons living in disperse
locations. In consequence, location no longer imposes the same restrictions on
individuals today as it did in the 1950s and 60s. Also, information and communication
technologies now permit the formation and flourishing of interest groups and friendship
communities over long distances.
Colin Bell and Howard Newby (1971/ 75), like Frankenberg, identify class and local
social stratification networks as important elements of communities, though they took
issue with the social class debates of their time. They rejected the work of the Chicago
School, particularly of Lloyd Warner, who used job description as an indicator of social
class. Instead, Newby and Bell contended that class identity had less direct connection
to daily activities than social status. In a paper of a book edited by Bell and Newby,
Robert Burgess (1925) argued that housing proved a better predictor of a family’s social
class than the job description of any given household member.
Bell and Newby also consider that power networks play a central role in
communities. They suggest the links that make up these three networks (class, status
and power) break down as social mobility increases, resulting in the boundaries between
communities becoming more flexible as people identify with looser and more
overlapping networks. Thus, in contrast with Stacy, Newby and Bell emphasis the
decreasing importance of physical location in the sense of community, writing, ”if the
social networks of these groups were collected, it would be shown that their interaction
is rarely bounded by the locality” (1971: 52). While they perceived that location
remained important to communities, they also noted that the telephone and related
technologies as well as the increasing ease of transportation enabled people – especially
younger people – to maintain networks over longer distances. Bell and Newby also
argued that “there would seem to be a limit to the number of individuals who can be in
direct relationship with each other” in any given location, and that the “stability of the
community is an obvious factor” in the number of relationships people form within their
locality (1971: 51).
The communities described in the works discussed thus far shared an element of
isolation, which to a large extent no longer exists. Isolated communities now only tend
to exist in geographically remote locations, like the Falkland Islands or Ascension Island.
In such isolated communities, the prohibitive cost of getting to or leaving these locations
helps to preserve the strength of residents’ sense of community by locality. The length
of time a person lives in a location builds bonds between the members of a community
because each person gains more friends and associates and strengthens ties with those
acquaintances they already know (Stevens 2004).
Pahl (1968) suggests that while location is important for communities, the community
need not be isolated from other concentrations of people. Indeed, he rejected the
notion of a rural/strong community to urban/weak community continuum. He suggested
“urban villages” could arise “in the center of cities in which there is a high level of social
cohesion based on interwoven kinship networks and a high level of primary contact with
familiar faces” (1968: 32). In later work, Pahl contended that urban living changed the
way people developed social networks, but that the extent of an individual’s social
networks in an urban setting neither necessarily served as the basis for building a sense
of community nor necessarily reflected the strength of bonds in the community to
which this person belonged (1970). Thus, for Pahl, friendships cause a community to
bond together rather than arising as a consequence of the presence of the community
(1970).
Consequently, the link between a community and a specific geographic space has
weakened with time. With the advent of motorised transport and information and
communication technologies (ICTS), all communities reach beyond an individual’s
locality to a greater or lesser extent. As I now consider in the next section, some
Sociologists have long contemplated the loose association of sense of community with
territory.
The symbolic view of community
Location is not the only boundary that may define a possible community. In an
anthropological spirit, Benedict Anderson (1983, 1991) proposes the following definition
of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them
encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries,
beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.
He identifies a different set of community boundaries, which include a common
language, nationalism, patriotism and culture. Anderson treats communities as entities in
and of themselves rather than as mere collections of individuals. Anderson’s conception
of community does not fit into the three-network model of Bell and Newby (1974), and
does not even hold locality to be a central feature that holds a community together. He
argues that conflict and status are the central features of communities
The Afro-Caribbean and Islamic communities in the UK are examples of communities
that share cultural ties and also are brought together by the adversity. Each of these
communities has faced prejudice on account of their skin colour and dress patterns.
These communities have had to draw together both for protection and out of necessity
caused by their exclusion from the mainstream of British life. Consequently, members of
these communities have often clustered into geographic communities such as the
London districts of Brixton, Camden and Tottenham. The Islamic community in
particular faces increasing adversity as the level of public paranoia with fundamentalist
Islamic terrorism has lead to a more general suspicion of anyone perceived to be
associated with the Muslim faith. Consequently, members of Islamic communities have a
stronger incentive than people from other British communities to identify with their
faith-bounded social links, though other religious groups have experienced similar
adversity in different periods. Identifying with religious beliefs frowned upon by the
mainstream of British society can generate camaraderie in the face of oppression and
can be described as the pursuit of a common aim. This type of religious network is an
example of a network that over laps with individual other identities, as may arise from a
job or local neighborhood, where few people any one individual knows will belong to
more than one of her or his networks of contacts.
According to Anthony Cohen (1985), when we use the word 'community', we are
establishing a loose symbolic boundary around a group of people. He suggests that the
word is used loosely to imply that a community is a category of people who have
something in common with each other, distinguishing them in a significant way from
other putative groups. Community simultaneously implies similarity and difference, both
commonality and exclusion. Thus, community implies and creates a boundary between
those people on the outside and those on the inside. This boundary is marked in
symbolic ways. For Cohen (1985), 'community' is a symbol that expresses boundaries.
As a symbol it is held in common by all the members, but its meaning varies according
to each member’s unique orientation to it. People construct community symbolically,
making community a resource and a repository of meaning, and a point of reference for
their social identity.
Crow and Graham Allan (1994: 84) give “one of the dominant meanings of the concept
of community that being, those who are members of it and those who belong to it, have
something in common which marks them off from outsiders who do not belong and/or
are not allowed to belong.” Crow and Allan identify such communities as the “black
community … student community … legal community and scientific community” as
examples of groups that have “common membership, a sense of belonging and a shared
identity”, all suggest that “populations are embedded into local social and economic
structures” (1994: 186-7) where “people are entrenched in local relationships to
different degrees and in different ways” (1994: 186), showing an individual’s “emotional
attachment” to a community. They also comment, “Some individuals and households
were ‘trapped’ more completely than others into these localities” and state that “as
importantly this varies over time” (Crow and Allan 1994: 186-7). As an example, they
note that contemporary rural communities in the UK have increasingly less contact with
farming and other economic activities traditionally associated with rural life.
In his book National Identity, Smith (1991) considers the role of location in sense of
community. Smith identifies five inter-related elements, which contribute to sense of
community, gender, socio-economic status (or social class), religion, ethnicity, and
territory (1991: 4-7). Human societies construct the constraints imposed by each of
these element, and of the five, territory has the least fixed and most flexible boundaries
(Smith 1991: 4). Smith argues that the sense of community need not necessarily involve
people actually living in the territory to which they feel attached – merely to be able to
identify with a place is enough (1991: 95-98). The territory serves the purpose of
providing a place to lay down “roots” from which the other largely socially constructed
or mediated elements of the sense of community can grow (1991: 98). While the
symbolic view of community is important for understanding this field, once again, this
perspective does not cover the full story.
Communities as social networks
One view of community is that communication between individuals is at the core of
community with conversation or links between individuals being the glue that brings
individuals together to form a community. The Manchester School drew on the Talcot
Parsons (1951) approach to sociology to examine communities by placing “emphasis on
seeing structures as networks of relations” (Scott 1991: pg 27). John Barns wrote, “The
image I have is of a set of points some of which are joined by lines. The points of the
image are people, or sometimes groups, and the lines indicate which people interact
with each other.” (Barns 1954: 43). Elizabeth Bott (1957) identifies that local social
systems are best represented as a network of the social relationships that can reach
beyond the boundaries of a local area.
Crow and Allan (1994: 97) state community can be described as an “inter-locking social
networks of neighborhood, kinship and friendship … not dependent on any notion of
locality or place” in their analysis of several community studies in the 20th century. They
draw extensively on Wellman’s work in his 1979 article put forward the view that
community can be viewed as a network of ties. These ties can be with family and kin,
friends, or neighbourhood. The strength of these ties varies, as does this network
structure with the amount of contact and locality and distance to individuals. In 1990,
Wellman concentrated on the amount of support people received from these ties. The
time spent in the community, the size of the community, density of its support ties, the
length of these friendship chains all have an effect on a persons feeling of community
more than the physical boundary of that community (Wellman 1990).
The 1970’s group of researchers at Harvard University, including Harrison White,
established social network analysis as a method of structural analysis. The mixing of
mathematical graph theory with sociological and anthropology methods was key to the
work of this group. Some of the methods of analysis developed by this group distinguish
egocentric from socio-centric networks, and assess the density of nets (Freeman 1979).
These concepts will be developed further and used later in this thesis.
Communication can take many forms, including talking face-to-face, sending voice or
text messages over the telephone, or writing (letters and more recently email). The
network view of community effectively describes how individuals interact within
communities, and also reveals how ICTS play a significant role in the maintenance of
communities. Nonetheless, feelings of community held by individuals, and the focus of
the network connections within the community are also as important, as we shall see in
the next section.
Summary.
Following on from the work by Anthony Cohen on symbolic communities and the work
conducted by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined communities, developed over a
period of time the concept of community not being a single community but a collection
of communities, for example residential communities, dispersed friendship communities,
work-based communities and intellectual communities. Further examples of intellectual
communities, is shown in work by Diana Crane's (1972) “Invisible Colleges” and in the
collection by Norbert Elias, Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley (1982) on Scientific
Establishments and Hierarchies.
This section finishes on the idea of how network analysis have been used to map
communities which was first detailed by Elizabeth Bott (1957) and John Barnes (1954)
and then by J. C. Mitchell (1969), who concentrated specifically on Social Networks in
Urban Situations. More recently Barry Wellman (1997) and Claude Fischer (1982) have
used individuals friendship networks to investigate urban communities of small town
American and East York in Vancouver respectively.
This review of community looks at the evolving debate over ‘community’ and the way
that it has become detached from ‘place’ and seen as ‘imagined’ or ‘symbolic’. This leads
to considering the variety of communities: residential communities, dispersed friendship
communities, work-based communities, intellectual communities, and so on. The paper
finishes on the idea of how network analysis has been used to map communities.
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