Community Studies

An Introduction to the Sociology of the Local Community

Colin Bell, Howard Newby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032101255
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000463859
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1971, this was the first text on community studies which analysed the major empirical work in this field in a comparative perspective. It is concerned both with the sociology of community and the sociology of community studies. It takes both the findings of individual studies and the research process itself as significant sociological data in their own right, and it asks continually: how do we know what we know about communities?

Community Studies is, then, not only a contribution to that particular field but also to our understanding of the interaction between theory and method in sociology. Studies are analysed from North and Latin America, Britain and Western Europe, and India. Two central problems, stratification and power, are considered at greater length.

This book would prove to be an invaluable introduction not only for students of sociology but also for architects, planners and all those who had an interest in the community at the time. Its authors were, and had been, actively engaged in field research in this area.

1

Introduction

‘The poor sociologist’s substitute for the novel’ – that was Ruth Glass’ exasperated verdict on community studies.¹ It is not difficult to see the basis of her accusation. Community studies often exhibit not only a degree of subjectivity, but also downright idiosyncracy and eccentricity. This is partially reflected in the title of this book – ‘Community Studies’ – which echoes the non-cumulative nature of many of the monographs with which we shall deal. We cannot simply concern ourselves with a branch of sociology called ‘the community’ in the way that we can discuss ‘the family’, ‘stratification’, ‘organizations’ and so on. Indeed, one of the problems we shall encounter in this book is the extent to which ‘the community’ can be considered a justifiable object of sociological study at all. But Ruth Glass’ criticisms went further than this. She also castigated community studies for their innumeracy, a simple lack of figures, even, in some cases, such basic ones as population statistics. Accompanying this has been a penchant for a descriptive, narrative style which, while frequently admirable in its clarity, has meant that community studies can often be read like novels and some have, indeed, reached the best-sellers’ lists. This has had two detrimental results. Firstly, the highly descriptive nature of many community studies leads to the danger of their being dismissed as mere pieces of documentary social history, contributing little to our knowledge of social processes. One of the best tests of this is time: in encountering the earlier studies, the reader may indeed consider some of them as historical curiosities, glimpses of social life from a bygone age. Secondly, the lack of numerical data means that many community studies are not comparable, and where numerical data have been collected a lack of definitional consistency has had similar results. Nevertheless, many students continue to be introduced to sociology through the medium of community studies, for they undoubtedly provide, to use a phrase we shall employ frequently in this book, a means of ‘getting to grips with the social and psychological facts in the raw’.²

¹ Ruth Glass, ‘Conflict in Cities’, p. 148 in Conflict in Society, London Churchill, 1966.

The reader may care to turn Ruth Glass’ argument back on her – consider the many novels that are comparable with community studies and decide which contributes the most to our knowledge of society. Many novels provide extremely useful complements to community studies but few, we would maintain, are substitutes for them. We can only give a few examples here. There is far richer material for this exercise in America, as at one time the ‘small-town’ novel was a thriving genre there. Sinclair Lewis on Gopher Prairie and Zenith City in Babbitt and Martin Arrowsmith can be compared to Lloyd Warner on Yankee City and Jonesville. Indeed, Warner analyses the ‘class’ structure of Zenith in his Social Class in America in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish it from Newburyport, for which Yankee City is a pseudonym. Newburyport also appears under another pseudonym, ‘Clyde’, in John Marquand’s Point of No Return. Marquand was a native of Newburyport and, to add to our enjoyment, Warner himself appears in this novel, thinly disguised as ‘Malcolm Bryant’. Marquand’s account of the ‘Confessional Club’³ is paralleled by Warner’s account of ‘Lower-Upper’ clubs and associations. Early in the novel ‘Bryant’ is described as ‘the one who says, “my God, this is a wonderful town” ‘, but later is reported as saying, ‘God, this is a hell of a town’. This change in attitude will strike a familiar chord with anyone who has ever done fieldwork in a community. One further point: Marquands’ hero, Charles Gray, has been socially mobile out of the town and, as will be shown, it is precisely this pattern of social and geographical mobility that Warner overlooks in his analysis of Newburyport in the five large volumes of the ‘Yankee City’ series. Other American Community studies have their fictional counterparts, however. William Faulkner’s novels can be put against Davis and Gardners’ Deep South and Dollard’s Class and Caste in a Southern Town, which are discussed along with Warner’s work in Chapter 4. The situation of the European imigrant in Chicago in the early decades of this century inspired Upton Sinclair’s polemical The Jungle, and this should be read with the monographs of the Chicago school – for example, Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and The Slum. Suburban communities have also inspired a rush of novels, which frequently lack social perception, but David Karp’s Leave Me Alone, with its description of the conflict between the male world of career, the female world of local and domestic sociability and the role of the estate agent in correctly placing families in the suburban social structure, can be put against Seeley, Sim and Loosley’s Crestwood Heights, also discussed in Chapter 4.

² C. Arensberg and S. Kimball, Community and Culture, New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1967, p. 30.

³ J. Marquand, Point of No Return, New York, Grosset and Dunlop, 1949, pp. 271-81.

Britain is less well served with community novels. However, there are a few that can be read along with British community studies. The emphasis on the men’s world in mining communities which is to be found in Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter’s Coal Is Our Life, is also exemplified by, for instance, Clancy Sigal’s Weekend in Dinlock and David Storey’s This Sporting Life. Thomas Hinde’s The Village, set within commuting distance of London, can be put alongside the work of Pahl considered in Chapter 6 as can Margharita Laski’s of the same title. Hinde’s ‘villagers’ have precisely the limited view of the village community that would be expected from those who, in Pahl’s terms, have ‘a village in the mind’. The early part of George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air describes a native’s return to ‘Lower Binfield’ in terms that could well have been those of a Banburian returning to Banbury in the late 1930s after the aluminium factory had been built. Margaret Stacey’s Tradition and Change: a Study of Banbury is discussed in Chapter 5. Anthony Burgess was a schoolmaster in Banbury when Stacey was doing her fieldwork and his book, The Worm and the Ring is a very thinly disguised portrait of some aspects of the town in 1950 from the point of view of a somewhat alienated outsider – a ‘non-traditionalist’ in Stacey’s terms. It has the shrill tone of a deeply-felt resentment against the oligarchy of builders’ and undertakers’ resolutely philistinistic running of the town. The novel was the subject of a libel suit. Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield has been a huge commercial success and is well worth the attention of the sociologist. His portrait of a south Suffolk village brilliantly handles the experiences of individuals in the community, but is less successful in considering the social structure of the community as a whole. Whilst it is deeply perceptive and finely wrought, it remains more art than science, though this should be no reason for totally rejecting it.

But what is community? In Chapter 2 it will be seen that over ninety definitions of community have been analysed and that the one common element in them all was man! In a recent introductory collection of readings the editors point out that ‘community tends to be a God word. In many circumstances, when it is mentioned, we are expected to abase ourselves before it rather than attempt to define it.’ They do, however, offer the following suggestions when they write that ‘(community) contains some or all of the following: a territorial area, a complex of institutions within an area, and a sense of belonging’.⁴ Though these seem to be the key aspects of community as it is normally used, there is also a certain lack of specificity. The same is true of the two other recently published readers on community. Minar and Greer, for example, write the following: ‘At the roots of the human community lie the brute facts of social life: organization⁵ . . . organization of a human aggregate requires . . . shared perspectives . . . culture.⁶ By customary usage community often means place....’ They do, however, consider displacing ‘this notion with a broader view of community as a set of social identifications and interactions’. However, ‘most of the social systems to which we would apply the concept are geographic entities of one sort or another. ...’ They refer to the ‘mere fact that they live together’ and the ‘geography of the local living and working situation’.⁷ We are told that ‘what finally binds a community together is a state of mind on the part of its members ... a sense of inter-dependence and loyalty’.⁸ Similarly Warren wrote in the introduction to his reader that ‘all of these basic approaches, in some way or another come to grips with the inescapable fact that the clustering of people for residence and sustenance involves a relationship of social interaction within a geographic locality’.⁹ Community usually gains perspective when it is contrasted with non-community. This dichotomous approach to the concept will be one of the themes of the second chapter where it will be argued that Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomies, or continua as they are frequently known, revolve less around place than around the degree of involvement of the human being. Below the surface of many community studies lurk value judgements, of varying degrees of explicitness, about what is the good life.

Community study is also a method. This will be discussed in Chapter 3. The problem to be faced is, how can the reader of a community monograph check the validity of the data when many leading p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theories of Community
• 3. Community Study as a Method of Empirical Investigation
• 4. The American Community Studies
• 5. The European Studies
• 6. Local Social Stratification
• 7. Community Studies, Community Power and Community Conflict
• 8. Conclusions
• Further Reading
• Subject Index
• Author Index