Community Analysis and Practice

Toward a Grounded Civil Society

Josefina Figueira-McDonough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134942138
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Concentrating on three main themes - environmental complexity, community as the target of intervention, and commitment to social justice - Community Theory and Practice updates and expands the current boundaries of thinking about community organization. This book is an important resource for social work students, educators, and practitioners, as well as those who work in the areas of sociology, urban studies, community organization and development, and criminology, and other areas of social study and policy.

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Community Construction and Social Change

In Search of a Working Definition

In the vocabulary of the social scientist and social worker, there must be few words used with greater frequency and looseness of definition than "community." It is a term thrown about with abandon and at the same time likely to produce expressions of approval. The conceptual amorphousness that permits its adoption in a variety of contexts and with a variety of meanings is disastrous for social analysis.

The task of constructing an exacting definition of community, lending itself to the unambiguous analysis, is not an easy one. It requires an exploration of the roots of the many meanings subsumed under this polymorphous label. To do this, I will review the relatively recent sociological roots of the concept and follow its transformation in the twentieth century. The search for mechanisms of social integration as the structure of social units changes over time has been crucial to this evolution.

My review starts with the concept of the "natural" community understood as the small rural town. The characteristics that make it a community are counterposed against the artificiality of urban settlements. Evidence of attachment to this type of community in the U.S. is interpreted as a function of ideology

Next I consider nonterritorial definitions of community. These ideas were based on the assumption that urban communities could not measure up as "natural." Conceptual revisions were guided by a search for other ways to engender social integration in an urban, complex society. Communication replaced propinquity as a necessary condition for community.

Third, I examine theories that do not accept the dismissal of territorial communities. A more complex view of local communities emerges from a variety of studies of urban places of residence. This perspective revolutionized approaches to territorial community. The search is for "communalism" assessed by multidimensional criteria rather than by fitness to ideal close-to-simplistic models.

In an attempt to present this dynamic as an evolution of concepts tied to societal changes, scholars developed an artificial chronology, placing the "natural" territorial community in the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. They also placed the "personal" community in the decades of the twenties and thirties, the community "as society" between World War II and the fifties, and the community of limited liability thereafter. In fact, concepts do not evolve in neat chronological periods. Nor are their emergence and development connected in clear causal sequences. The constructs of community, which I review, overlapped and different analysts of communities pursued aspects of each theory over time. The evolutionary scheme employed here has the advantage of focusing on the relationship between the historical context of societal characteristics and the efforts to understand that context. It allows for a dialectical sequence that I hope will be useful in understanding the differences and commonalties of various conceptualizations of community.

It is the last of these constructs, "community of limited liability," that will be adopted in this book. The relation and integration of this definition with other community concepts will be the subject of later chapters.

The Rural-Urban Divide

The incentive to investigate how social units hold together and generate the capacity for engaging in collective action grew with urbanization and the related phenomena of industrialization and bureaucratization. Emergent sociological theories of communities have to be understood in this context. The analytic frame tended to be dichotomous, splitting rural and urban localities, and polarized attributing contrasting characteristics to each. Furthermore, as is common in times of transition, the new urban reality was perceived as threatening to social order; superior and irreplaceable qualities were attributed to the old order.

Gemeinschaft: The "Natural" Community

The sociological concept of community is often associated with Tönnies' work (1887) and his elaboration of two types of society, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The dual categorization served to explain differences between rural/peasant/village society and the emerging large cities fueled by industrialization and increasingly regulated by bureaucracy. Tönnies saw life in these two societies as drastically different and based on opposite principles.

Gemeinschaft represented a "natural" order, stable and congruent with human nature. It referred to a settlement of individuals who shared the same traditions, customs, and norms and whose personal relationships were based on trust and reciprocity. In fact, intra-system interaction was assumed to have "primary group" characteristics (holistic, informal, expressive, and nonutilitarian). The social unit also had organic properties. This meant that the group s welfare and the welfare of members were one and the same. Tight internal interdependence was reflected in consensual decision-making and harmonic collective action.

Residents of Gesellschaft societies were strangers who did not share a common past and related to each other in an impersonal, transitory, and artificial fashion. Urban settlements were made up of immigrants who did not share common roots. Their customs, traditions, and norms differed. Urban life had damaged the family and neighborhood cohesion through the division of labor and individual competition for survival. Both institutions had lost many of their functions, which had been taken over by formal, impersonal bureaucracies (government organizations, schools, hospitals, and the like).

From this perspective, there is no doubt that Gemeinschaft is the true community representing an authentic form of social integration. Communal relations are characterized by feelings of belonging and reciprocity, and collective action is determined by tradition or shared norms. The implication for social integration is clear. Gemeinschaft members would stay united despite separating forces, while Gesellschaft members would remain separated in spite of unifying factors.

The polarized construction of types of social integration persisted through the first half of the twentieth century. Community was defined as an organic unit, with a perfect balance of functions, with members in solidarity. Extensions of this view added the notion that, in order to preserve their balance, communities had to be all-inclusive, autonomous, and therefore protected by stable boundaries.

Social systems theory contributed to this conceptual expansion by defining the functions necessary for the maintenance of autonomous social systems (Hillery, 1969; MacIver, 1937; Wirth, 1933). Not only were these units economically cooperative and self-sufficient, their small size and homogeneity of background and interests permitted direct democratic participation. In the national imagery, this was symbolized by town hall meetings where everyone participated and time was taken to work towards consensual decisions. These refinements reinforced the view of rural villages as the ideal community.

Urbanists, concerned with the problems emerging in large metropoles, contributed to the perspective of Gesellschaft as a city life without community (e.g., Ogburn, 1953; Wirth, 1938). The rapid growth of cities, the heterogeneity of their inhabitants, coming from all parts of the nation and from all corners of Europe with different cultures, customs, and languages, the specialization of industrial occupations, all conspired to create settlements of strangers. Indifference or mistrust among residents made social integration difficult or impossible. Profound changes in the family and economic activity created an order that at best might be held together by solidarity derived from the division of labor (Durkheim, 1933). Normlessness, anxiety, and anomie would inexorably result in a variety of social pathologies.

Redfield's The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941) is probably the last major study in the Gemeinschaft tradition. Redfield's project went beyond idealizing the organic rural community against urban settlements. He studied four communities at different stages of urban penetration, describing the orientations of their inhabitants, their social and economic structure, and relative autonomy of each. He found that as community boundaries were weakened and "natural" systems penetrated by urban ways, social and cultural norms disintegrated along with informal interaction and solidarity. At the same time, heterogeneity, secularity, individualism, and disorganization increased.

In sum, according to sociologists working in the Gemeinschaft tradition, community existed in stable small towns and villages that were self-contained and autonomous. They constituted complete social systems fulfilling all the necessary functions. Social relationships were characterized by informality, solidarity, and reciprocity. Since traditions, norms, and a sense of belonging were shared, consensus in collective action was viable and favored in these settlements.

The Persistence of the Gemeinschaft Ideology

The resilience of the ideal of Gemeinschaft through the first half of the twentieth century might seem rather puzzling. After all, by then, the process of urbanization was well underway in this country. By midcentury there were 962 large cities in the U.S. with an average population of 422,000 inhabitants each (Davis, 1973, pp. 2-4). The gap between sociological theory and the pattern of residential reality is thought to have been affected by ideological factors (Dennis, 1968). Ellwood (1988, pp. 14-44) and Heclo (1986) contend that the "community ethic" is a strong component of American ideology. The roots of this ethic, they argue, can be traced to the origins of the nation and were framed by the freestanding towns and frontier settlements of colonial and republican America.

Representations of such communities in historical and fictional accounts have left definitive marks in the national identity. These depictions dramatize the ability of small settlements to survive in the midst of dangerous environments. They underscore, simultaneously, the merits of strong, independent, individual inhabitants and their capacity to come together to face and conquer the challenges of survival. A multitude of cowboy films and television series' has reinforced the myth across generations: the courageous cowboys defend their town against the Indians, the independent young girl supports her neighbors (Little House on the Prairie), the self-directed compassionate doctor-mother embraces life in a little Colorado town (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman), a rural family copes with the depression thanks to family and community bonds (The Waltons), and so on.

Sentimentalized visions of community virtues are not manifest solely in the nostalgic folklore of the media. Contemporary commentary reinforces the ideal as well. Public admiration and respect are expressed when a town comes together to deal with a natural disaster (e.g., floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes), when they unite around the plight of one of their own (e.g., victim of crime or bad luck), or when they organize to fight bad conditions in their residential area (e.g., crime, decaying vacant lots). In fact, evidence of such feats has commonly been used in the rhetoric supporting government decentralization, restitution of local autonomy, and undoing an inefficient welfare bureaucracy—all evils brought on by urbanization.

The belief that urban problems can be solved by exposing individuals to the virtues of the countryside is another expression of the same ideology. Programs that take children from city slums to the country or delinquent teenagers to boot camps in rural areas share this assumption. It is also reflected by well-off city residents' pattern of mobility to relatively close small towns (e.g., from New York to villages in Connecticut), or to simulations of small towns built to recreate the ideal community environment (e.g., from Phoenix to Carefree).

Alternative Conceptions of Community

The longstanding belief in the superiority of villages and small towns is based on an ideal, not research. It disregards evidence of violence, cruelty, intolerance, fear, and distrust in interpersonal relations in such settings. When Lewis (1951) replicated the study of Redfield in Yucatan (1941), he found evidence of realities that had been glossed over by Redfield in his desire to distinguish "good" folk from "bad" urban settlements.

The impetus of industrialization and massive immigrations created large urban centers, with high residential concentration, populated by strangers. The incoming population came from diverse traditions, spoke diverse languages, and was under high competitive pressures for survival. Simmel (1950) described life in the metropolis as characterized by impersonality and the absence of solidarity as an inhuman environment. This environment, in turn, was thought to produce a variety of social pathologies.

Nonetheless, the cities, which from this perspective were doomed to self-destruction, kept growing. A few sociologists, rather than trying to restore the rural order, searched for new sources of social integration that might be at work in the urban environment.

Personal Communities as Pseudo-Gemeinschaft

Henry (1958), Phillips (1969), Reisman (1950), and Weber (1964), among others, argued that a different type of community had emerged in the context of greater personal freedom and easier communication enjoyed by urbanites. The American propensity to form volunteer organizations, noted by de Tocqueville (1899), flourished in the urban environment. Given the ease of transportation and communication, they contended that propinquity was not a necessary condition to the formation of communities. Individuals who shared values and interests could readily join together without being constrained by their place of residence or the interests and values of their neighbors.

Religious groups and associations, political brotherhoods, unions, business and professional associations crowded the urban scene. The associations were by definition segmental, addressing special areas of individual interest. However, as people pursued different interests, a network of interdependencies would be established, linking each individual to various segmented groups with distinct memberships. It was the solidarity derived from a multiplicity of personal communities that achieved the social integration necessary to the maintenance of the social system. For example, an urban dweller of Irish descent could join a Catholic group, police association, democratic coalition, an organization promoting folk dance, football club, an anti-British newsletter, a drinking society. Even if all these associations fit the stereotype of groups that descendants of Irish immigrants might favor, the point is that each association does not represent exclusively Irish interests and goals. The expectation is that individuals with different cultural backgrounds would join them. Furthermore, each affiliation group is likely to appeal to a different constituency, thereby linking Irish American city dwellers to a larger, interethnic network.

The notion of pluralism (Dahl, 1961), which came to replace the concept of direct democracy, was founded on a similar interpretation. Individu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Community Construction and Social Change: In Search of a Working Definition
• 2 Dimensions of Communalism: A Structural Framework
• 3 Heuristic Applications of the Population-Organization Framework
• 4 Focusing on Community as the Unit of Analysis: Varieties of Research
• 5 The Growing Impact of Environment: Community as Dependent Variable
• 6 Knowledge from Praxis
• 7 Professional Models of Community Organization
• 8 In Search of the New Civil Society
• References
• Index
• About the Author