Community

In general terms, the concept of community has been used, sociologically, to describe a number of different ideas. A "community", for example, can be defined in terms of such things as:

A particular geographic location (a region or locality) with which people identify (for example, the term "Cockney" may be used to describe a group of people born in the East End of London).

A particular type of social relationship that is characteristic of - and shared by - the members of a given community who may or may not have a common locality (for example, the "Jewish Community" may be a term used to describe a particular ethnic group who are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to share a common sense of identity).

A social system (usually on a local or small-scale) which describes a set of social relationships found amongst a particular group of people (for example, a "village community" may describe the type of social relationships found in a particular locality).

However the term is described, each shares the assumption that a community involves a certain form of social organisation; one in which the members share a relatively clear, fixed, sense of identity (they see themselves, in short, as having a great deal in common with each other).

Ferdinand Tonnies argued that community (or what he termed "Gemeinschaft") type relationships have a number of characteristics that differentiate them from other forms of relationship (in particular what he termed "Gesellschaft" or association-type relationships).

Specifically, communities involve relationships that are relatively close-knit, where "everyone knows everyone else" and people make it their business to know what is going-on in their locality. These types of relationship are, almost by definition, intense and intimate. Community-type relationships give the individual a clear sense of identity (in post-modern terms, the individual is "highly-centred") because they know and understand both their place within the community and their (status) relationship to everyone in that community.

Tonnies argued that gemeinschaft relationships were (and probably still are) highly characteristic of rural areas since close personal relationships necessarily flourished within the confines of a particular locality such as a village.

In terms of pre-modern society, therefore, it is evident that most people's lives were governed by this type of social relationship since rural communities, cemented by a lack of geographic mobility, must have dominated social life. People, by and large, lived, worked and died in a confined geographic area characterised by strong personal relationships and a relatively rigid, if largely informal, sense of social control.

Finally we can also note that, according to Talcott Parsons, pre-modern community-type relationships are characterised by what he termed particular forms of pattern variable.