Community (Sociology)

Introduction

Community is a broad topic within sociology, the social sciences generally, and indeed even in the natural and physical sciences. This bibliography focuses primarily on human communities, and although many different definitions have been offered, most involve a few basic claims. First, a community is a group of people who interact with one another, for example, as friends or neighbors. Second, this interaction is typically viewed as occurring within a bounded geographic territory, such as a neighborhood or city. Third, the community’s members often share common values, beliefs, or behaviors. This bibliography includes sources for general overviews of community, journals publishing research on community, and entries organized under three major headings: Defining Community, Community Processes, and Finding Other Communities. Defining Community lists works that have attempted to define the concept of community, and to locate and characterize specific communities. Community Processes lists works that explore the wide range of social, political, and economic processes that take place within communities and that shape communities as they change over time. Finding Other Communities lists works that consider human communities that exist outside the mainstream, and that seek to explore community as a more abstract notion that goes beyond face-to-face human communities, including Internet-based virtual communities and communities of nonhuman entities, such as dolphins or protein molecules.

General Overviews

Because community is such a broad topic, no single work can provide a comprehensive overview of the concept. These works offer a general introduction and may serve as references sources that point to more specific aspects of community. Christensen and Levinson 2003 and Delanty 2010 provide broad and encyclopedic coverage of several aspects of community. Adopting a different approach, Neal 2013 introduces a social network approach to understanding community, and provides a general overview from this perspective.

Christensen, Karen, and David Levinson. 2003. Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This multivolume encyclopedia includes over five hundred entries on topics ranging from specific communities (e.g., Amana, Amish, Arcosanti) to the problems that contemporary communities face (e.g., vigilantism, xenophobia).
Find this resource:

Delanty, Gerard. 2010. Community. 2d ed. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This textbook briefly summarizes several different conceptions of community, including urban communities, political communities, and virtual communities.
Find this resource:

Neal, Zachary P. 2013. The connected city: How networks are shaping the modern metropolis. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Neal adopts a network-based approach to thinking about urban communities, which are explored at multiple levels ranging from neighborhood communities of people to global communities of multinational corporations.
Find this resource:

Journals

General sociology journals frequently publish articles related to community, but several journals in sociology, such as City & Community and Rural Sociology, focus specifically on contributions in this area. In addition, articles on aspects of community are frequently featured in urban-focused journals such as Urban Studies, development journals such as Community Development Journal, and journals devoted to the relatively new subfield of psychology known as “community psychology,” including American Journal of Community Psychology and Journal of Community Psychology. Finally, community-related research can often been found in journals that highlight specific methodological approaches that are common in the study of community, including the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Social Networks.

American Journal of Community Psychology.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1973, the American Journal of Community Psychology is the official publication of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA), a division of the American Psychological Association (APA). Peer reviewed and published quarterly, it features research primarily conducted within the field of community psychology.
Find this resource:

City & Community.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 2002, City & Community is the official publication of the Community and Urban Sociology Section (CUSS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Peer reviewed and published quarterly, it features theoretical and empirical research on a range of urban and community issues.
Find this resource:

Community Development Journal.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1966, the Community Development Journal is peer reviewed and published quarterly. It publishes research articles as well as papers focused on policy and action in the domain of community development, typically with an international scope.
Find this resource:

Journal of Community Psychology.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1973, Journal of Community Psychology is peer reviewed and published eight times annually. It features research conducted within the field of community psychology, but often with a greater emphasis on international contributions than its sister journal, the American Journal of Community Psychology.
Find this resource:

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1972, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography is peer reviewed and published bimonthly. While it features a broad range of research using ethnographic methodologies, many of these studies present and analyze detailed portraits of communities.
Find this resource:

Rural Sociology.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1937, Rural Sociology is the official publication of the Rural Sociological Society. Peer reviewed and published quarterly, it focuses specifically on issues of rural and agricultural communities, but also includes research on broader theoretical notions of community.
Find this resource:

Social Networks.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1979, Social Networks is peer reviewed and published quarterly. While concerned with the full range of social network research and methods, it frequently publishes empirical and theoretical work on communities from a social network perspective.
Find this resource:

Urban Studies.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First published in 1964, Urban Studies is peer reviewed and published monthly. As an interdisciplinary and international journal, it features community and urban research from diverse points of view.
Find this resource:

Defining Community

A central concern in the study of community is the definition of “community” itself. Over the past hundred years, scholars have offered many different definitions and conceptions of community. This section traces works that have explored definitions of community, in roughly chronological order, beginning with the earliest definitions, which gave way in the 1920s to ecologically based definitions. As definitions of community evolved and widened, scholars’ assessment of the status of community changed, first viewing it as lost, then found, and most recently as liberated from space and geography.

Early Definitions

Sociologists and others have long struggled with precisely defining the concept of community, which is difficult because communities can exist in many forms and in many places. As a result, the earliest literature on community included a proliferation of definitions and characteristics as scholars sought to describe their object of study. MacIver 1920, Queen 1923, and Sanderson 1932 were all concerned with defining the key features of community, primarily in rural settings, where community was believed to be most robust. Later, Hiller 1941 and Hillery 1955 sought to collect and review the various definitions of community, seeking a more general conception.

Hiller, E. T. 1941. The community as a social group. American Sociological Review 6.2: 189–202.
DOI: 10.2307/2085549Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hiller defines community as a group of people, distinguished by some membership criterion, that have distinctive roles and whose behavior is governed by norms.
Find this resource:

Hillery, George A., Jr. 1955. Definitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural Sociology 20.2: 111–123.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hillery provides a summary and synthesis of ninety-four different definitions of community that had been offered by 1955, in an attempt to identify common themes.
Find this resource:

MacIver, R. M. 1920. Community, a sociological study: Being an attempt to set out the nature and fundamental laws of social life. 2d ed. London: Macmillan.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
MacIver’s study is one of the earliest English-language extended discussions of community from a sociological perspective. It begins with an overview of the concept, including a consideration of the elements and structure of community, then proposes a series of laws that govern community development. This work, first published in 1917, is in the public domain and is available in electronic format via Google Books.
Find this resource:

Queen, Stuart A. 1923. What is a community? Journal of Social Forces 1: 375–382.
DOI: 10.2307/3004942Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper explores the difficulty of defining community by considering whether each of a series of types of human settlement is an example of a community: a communistic settlement, a small town, a suburban town, a company town, a city, and an immigrant colony.
Find this resource:

Sanderson, Dwight. 1932. The rural community: The natural history of a sociological group. Boston: Ginn.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this book, originally a 1921 thesis completed at the University of Chicago, Sanderson provides a detailed portrait of a rural community, which he defines as “the social interaction of the people and their institutions in a local area in which they live on dispersed farmsteads.”
Find this resource:

Community Ecology

The Chicago school of urban sociology, developed at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, borrowed concepts from biological ecology to investigate a range of urban phenomena, including community. The community ecology perspective contends that human communities can be examined in much the same way as a biologist might study a plant or animal community. For example, just as animal communities evolve through various species of animals competing for resources, human communities change as different groups of people compete for space and jobs. Likewise, just as plant communities change over time with the introduction or invasion of nonnative species, human communities change as immigrant groups and other outsiders arrive in a community and displace the native population. McKenzie 1924 and Park 1926 offer seminal statements of this approach, which were later expanded and refined by McKenzie 1933 and Hawley 1950. Human ecology, while it has fallen out of favor in sociology, continues as a central approach in other disciplines (e.g., Morin 2011).

Hawley, Amos Henry. 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A student of McKenzie’s, Hawley extends the ecological approach in this book to offer an abstract theory of communities that is intended to apply to all forms of human community, ranging from neighborhood communities to metropolitan areas and communities of organizations. It laid the foundation for the discipline of human ecology.
Find this resource:

McKenzie, Roderick D. 1924. The ecological approach to the study of the human community. American Journal of Sociology 30.3: 287–301.
DOI: 10.1086/213698Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
McKenzie provides a paradigmatic statement of the Chicago school’s ecological approach, summarizing key concepts borrowed from biological ecology, including competition, interdependence, succession, and growth.
Find this resource:

McKenzie, Roderick D. 1933. The metropolitan community. New York: Russell and Russell.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
McKenzie uses the ecological approach to study community at a higher level of analysis: not communities of people in cities but, rather, communities of cities. Thus, he develops the concept of a metropolitan area as an interdependent set of cities and explores how they compete and interact with one another.
Find this resource:

Morin, Peter J. 2011. Community ecology. 2d ed. Oxford and Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444341966Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This textbook provides an introductory overview of community ecology as it is practiced in the contemporary natural sciences. Although it focuses on nonhuman organisms, many of the concepts it discusses can be applied to the study of human communities.
Find this resource:

Park, Robert E. 1926. The urban community as a spatial pattern and a moral order. In The urban community: Selected proceedings of the American Sociological Society. Edited by Ernest W. Burgess, 3–20. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Originally titled “The Concept of Position in Sociology” and delivered as the 1925 presidential address to the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association), this paper defines community in terms of its members’ position relative to one another, both in geographic and social terms.
Find this resource:

Community Lost

For nearly as long as scholars have been investigating the concept of community, they have been predicting and lamenting its loss. First, they argued that the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the big city would destroy communal ways of life found in rural villages. Next, they argued that the telephone and telegraph would bring an end to face-to-face interaction. Today, the Internet is frequently viewed as an impediment to the formation of community. Tönnies 1940 offers one of the earliest discussions of the loss of community following the rise of cities and industrialization, and it exerted a heavy influence on later works such as Simmel 1950 and Wirth 1938. Researchers have questioned these claims, with many finding limited empirical support (e.g., Hunter 1975; Lee, et al. 1984).

Hunter, Albert. 1975. The loss of community: An empirical test through replication. American Sociological Review 40.5: 537–552.
DOI: 10.2307/2094194Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hunter tests the hypothesized loss of community in one neighborhood in a US city, examining the residents’ use of local facilities, neighboring behaviors, and sense of community, and finding only weak and mixed evidence that community has actually declined.
Find this resource:

Lee, Barrett A., R. S. Oropesa, Barbara J. Metch, and Avery M. Guest. 1984. Testing the decline-of-community thesis: Neighborhood organizations in Seattle, 1929 and 1979. American Journal of Sociology 89.5: 1161–1188.
DOI: 10.1086/227987Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study examines the hypothesized loss of community by examining neighborhoods in Seattle over time. The authors find mixed evidence that community declined from 1929 to 1979, and question whether a strong “gemeinschaft” form of community ever existed.
Find this resource:

Simmel, Georg. 1950. The metropolis and mental life. In The sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 409–424. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Simmel describes the psychological changes necessary to adapt to life in the large cities emerging at the turn of the century, including the development of a reserved and blasé attitude toward one’s neighbors, which limits the formation of community but enhances individual freedom.
Find this resource:

Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1940. Fundamental concepts in sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated by Charles P. Loomis. New York: American Book Co.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tönnies describes the replacement of preindustrial ways of life guided by tradition and family bonds (gemeinschaft) with ways of life in postindustrial society guided by rationality and law (gesellschaft). It is an abstract and theoretical text, translated from German, but the concluding chapter offers an accessible overview. Originally published in 1887.
Find this resource:

Wirth, Louis. 1938. Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology 44.1: 1–24.
DOI: 10.1086/217913Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wirth defines the city in terms of three characteristics—size, density, and heterogeneity—and explores the consequences that they have for life in the city, with a particular focus on how they reduce the opportunity for strong, communal social relationships.
Find this resource:

Community Found

In response to the alleged loss of community, many scholars sought to rediscover traces of community in big cities. These studies typically adopted a field-based ethnographic approach in which the researcher would carefully study a single area or group, often living among the research subjects. This yielded detailed portraits of specific communities, which served as case studies illustrating that community still existed and had not been lost to industrialization, technology, and the growth of cities. Following from earlier claims that community had been lost, these studies suggested that it was alive and well in a wide range of contexts, including small-town middle America (Lynd and Lynd 1929, immigrant slums (Whyte 1943, Gans 1962), impoverished minority neighborhoods (Stack 1974), and the centers of major cities (Jacobs 1961, Duneier 1999).

Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Like Jacobs, Duneier explores community in New York’s Greenwich Village, but focuses on the types of community that form among the area’s “unhoused” residents and the ways that they contribute to the area’s character. Photographs by Ovie Carter; afterword by Hakim Hasan.
Find this resource:

Gans, Herbert. 1962. The urban villagers. New York: Free Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gans describes the working-class Italian West End neighborhood of Boston. The central focus is on the residents’ strong social bonds, and on their displacement from their neighborhood, which was targeted by city officials for clearance as a slum.
Find this resource:

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This landmark work of urban theory and observation discusses several places, but focuses heavily on New York’s Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived. She describes the seemingly trivial features of a neighborhood that facilitate community, including parks, sidewalks, and other open spaces.
Find this resource:

Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A study in contemporary American culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Lynds’ study of Muncie, Indiana (Middletown was a pseudonym) laid the foundation for future ethnographic studies of urban communities. The Lynds documented many aspects of this small community, including the behaviors of its social elite and the organization of its political affairs.
Find this resource:

Stack, Carol B. 1974. All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. New York: Harper & Row.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stack challenges the notion that economically disadvantaged African American neighborhoods lack community. In this book, she explores how members of such neighborhoods form strong communities that can work together to survive difficult conditions, but can also create financial and psychological strains on their members.
Find this resource:

Whyte, William Foote. 1943. Street corner society: The Social structure of an Italian slum. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An ethnographic study of an Italian neighborhood in Boston. Whyte described the formation of communities within the neighborhood composed of various groups, including Paesani, or individuals originating from the same Italian village.
Find this resource:

Beyond Place-Based Definitions

Most definitions of community focus on geographically bounded places, such as neighborhoods. However, some scholars have questioned whether communities are necessarily place-based, and whether place-based definitions of community may be misleading. They instead suggest that community is a type of social interaction, so that while communities can occur in specific places, a geographic territory is not necessary. Kaufman 1959, Webber 1963, and Wilkinson 1970 set the theoretical stage for this view, as they were written at a time when cities were experiencing large-scale suburbanization and as formerly compact neighborhoods expanded outward. More recently, Wellman 1979; Wellman, et al. 1988; and Hipp, et al. 2012 have introduced social networks as a way of understanding how communities can persist without geographical boundaries.

Hipp, John R., Robert W. Faris, and Adam Boessen. 2012. Measuring “neighborhood”: Constructing network neighborhoods. Social Networks 34.1: 128–140.
DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2011.05.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article explores using individuals’ social networks—their actual patterns of interactions with others—to empirically define the boundaries of communities, rather than relying on arbitrary geographic boundaries such as census tracts.
Find this resource:

Kaufman, Harold F. 1959. Toward an interactional conception of community. Social Forces 38.1: 8–17.
DOI: 10.2307/2574010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper calls attention to the role of interaction among a community’s members as one defining feature of community, and perhaps one that is even more important that the community members’ geographic proximity to one another.
Find this resource:

Webber, Melvin W. 1963. Order in diversity: Community without propinquity. In Cities and space: The future use of urban land. Edited by Lowdon Wingo, 23–54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Given the ease of transportation and communication in modern cities, Webber considers whether communities can form even when their members do not live or work near one another, and thus whether urban communities must always be neighborhoods.
Find this resource:

Wellman, Barry. 1979. The community question: The intimate networks of East Yorkers. American Journal of Sociology 84.5: 1201–1231.
DOI: 10.1086/226906Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wellman was among the first to empirically investigate a nonspatial conception of community. Rather than focusing on the interactions individuals had with others in their neighborhood, he asked individuals whom they interacted with, no matter where they lived, and found that many friends and acquaintances lived outside the immediate neighborhood.
Find this resource:

Wellman, Barry, Peter J. Carrington, and Alan Hall. 1988. Networks as personal communities. In Social structures: A network approach. Edited by Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, 130–184. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The personal community is developed as a more individualized conception of community in which each person has his or her own community, which is defined by the person’s social network, or the set of people with whom he or she interacts.
Find this resource:

Wilkinson, Kenneth P. 1970. The community as a social field. Social Forces 48.3: 311–322.
DOI: 10.2307/2574650Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wilkinson draws on notions of fields from physics and biology, suggesting that the community should be defined broadly as the entire set (or field) of people, organizations, and other elements that interact with and are mutually interdependent upon one another.
Find this resource:

Community Processes

Communities are the sites of a wide range of social processes. As a focal point for residents’ daily lives, they serve as a source of identity, around which individuals form a sense of place and attachment to the community. Communities can also change over time, in some cases attracting more affluent residents through gentrification, and in other cases by losing population and resources, which can give rise to forms of physical (e.g., litter, graffiti) and social (e.g., crime) disorder. Community responses to these changes often depend on the presence of social capital, upon which community members can draw to facilitate collective social action through community organizing. However, the success of such actions frequently depends on the distribution and structure of political power in the community. Although each of these processes is related and lacks clearly defined boundaries, the works in this section highlight major approaches to thinking about them.

Change

One defining feature of a community is its continuity: a community has a recognizable identity and set of members that give it a unique character. However, communities are also dynamic and can change over time. A community’s identity and membership may change for many different reasons. The departure of affluent whites from inner-city neighborhoods has led to the formation of predominantly minority communities in many cities. More recently, however, affluent individuals have returned to inner-city neighborhoods in search of real estate values and a more urban lifestyle, displacing minority residents through a process known as gentrification. These works explore the various mechanisms through which community composition and character change over time, and the consequences of these changes for both the community’s long-time residents and newcomers. Smith 1996 and Peck 2005 offer more pessimistic views of these changes, while Anderson 1990, Freeman 2006, Brown-Saracino 2009, and Brown-Saracino 2010 take a more agnostic stance, seeking to describe the changes from the perspective of residents.

Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Anderson explores the challenges that arise in Philadelphia as a racially mixed, middle-class neighborhood begins encroaching on the space of an adjacent, predominantly black and poor neighborhood.
Find this resource:

Brown-Saracino, Japonica. 2009. A neighborhood that never changes: Gentrification, social preservation, and the search for authenticity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Brown-Saracino compares gentrification in two urban neighborhoods (Andersonville and Argyle in Chicago) and two rural neighborhoods (Provincetown, New Hampshire, and Dresden, Maine), finding that gentrifiers come in many different forms, ranging from the pioneer seeking to conquer a new community to the preservationist seeking to integrate into the community.
Find this resource:

Brown-Saracino, Japonica, ed. 2010. The gentrification debates: A reader. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This reader provides an introduction to the topic of gentrification and community change, collecting key readings paired with original essays that synthesize the contributions.
Find this resource:

Freeman, Lance. 2006. There goes the ’hood: Views of gentrification from the ground up. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focusing on two New York neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Harlem, Freeman documents the process of gentrification from the perspective of current residents. Contrary to traditional assumptions, he finds that the residents do not universally see gentrification in a negative light, and that they acknowledge its potential to benefit themselves and the community.
Find this resource:

Peck, Jamie. 2005. Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4: 740–770.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00620.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Peck develops a critique of Richard Florida’s theory of the creative class, which held that the in-migration of members of the creative class (e.g., professionals) was the key to vibrant and prosperous communities. He argues that the supposed cultural changes that the creative class signals are, in fact, simply a repackaged reinforcement of traditional neoliberal ideology.
Find this resource:

Smith, Neil. 1996. The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. New York and London: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this book, Smith aims to develop a general theory of gentrification that is focused on processes of land value and driven by cycles of (dis)investment. When a community experiences out-migration and disinvestment, land values are depressed, which creates an attractive opportunity for entrepreneurial investors to move in. Smith explores this process in Philadelphia, New York, and a series of European cities.
Find this resource:

Disorder

Communities are not always harmonious, but can also be characterized by social conflict and disorder. Scholars have long sought to understand both the causes and consequences of community disorder in communities labeled as slums and ghettoes. Disorder can include crime, but more broadly can also include a lack of community leadership and a lack of investment in the local community, with much debate focusing on whether observed phenomena are causes or consequences. For example, some contend that poverty can lead to high crime rates, while others contend that residents in communities plagued by crime will be unable to find work and be pushed into poverty. Still others ask whether communities often characterized as disordered actually are, and they thus seek to uncover the more informal or alternate forms of community order that exist in poor or high-crime areas. Thrasher 1926 and Shaw and McKay 1942 present some of the earliest discussions of community disorder that, while critiqued today, continue to influence scholarship on the topic; Sampson and Groves 1989 offer a direct test of these ideas. The influential “broken windows” theory, which has been widely adopted by city officials for controlling crime, was initially proposed in Kelling and Wilson 1982, but it has also been critiqued for not recognizing the confounding roles of race and class (see Feagin 1973). Finally, Perkins and Taylor 1996 considers and compares a range of methods for measuring community disorder.

Feagin, Joe R. 1973. Community disorganization: Some critical notes. Sociological Inquiry 43.3–4: 123–146.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.1973.tb00005.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Feagin critiques discussions of community disorder for defining the concept in a biased way, from the perspective of privileged and predominantly white researchers.
Find this resource:

Kelling, George L., and James Q. Wilson. 1982. Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly 127 (March): 29–38.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kelling and Wilson propose the “broken windows” theory of community disorder, which contends that small signs if disorder, such as broken windows in an abandoned building or a broken streetlamp, convey a sense of disinvestment in the community, and thus invite further disorder.
Find this resource:

Perkins, Douglas D., and Ralph B. Taylor. 1996. Ecological assessments of community disorder: Their relationship to fear of crime and theoretical implications. American Journal of Community Psychology 24.1: 63–107.
DOI: 10.1007/BF02511883Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Perkins and Taylor explore how social and physical cues that indicate community disorder can lead residents to be fearful of crime in the community, independent of the actual crime rate.
Find this resource:

Sampson, Robert J., and W. Byron Groves. 1989. Community structure and crime: Testing social-disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology 94.4: 774–802.
DOI: 10.1086/229068Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sampson and Groves offer a direct test of Shaw and McKay’s theory of community disorder, finding support in a large sample of neighborhoods in Great Britain: residents of communities characterized by poverty, ethnic diversity, and residential mobility have fewer local friends and participate less in local organizations.
Find this resource:

Shaw, Clifford, and Henry McKay. 1942. Juvenile delinquency and urban areas: A study of rates of delinquents in relation to differential characteristics of local communities in American cities. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Shaw and McKay present a theory of community disorder in which they argue that poverty, diversity, and mobility can account for levels of crime and delinquency in urban communities.
Find this resource:

Thrasher, F. M. 1926. The gang as a symptom of community disorganization. Journal of Applied Sociology 1.1: 3–27.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Thrasher, who also wrote an extended ethnographic study of street gangs in Chicago, argues that when communities lack jobs and adult leadership, street gangs form to provide youth with an alternative form of community.
Find this resource:

Social Capital

Like economic capital (money) or human capital (skills), social capital describes a type of resource that can be used to achieve desired ends. Social capital is a resource that derives from one’s relationships with others; for example, an individual may rely on friends to learn about a new job opportunity. Some have viewed social capital as a resource that individuals have through their own social networks, while others have argued that whole communities can have social capital as well. As a result, there are many different conceptions of social capital, leading to confusion about the meaning of the term and its consequences. Hanifan 1916 and Coleman 1988 both provided early descriptions of social capital, and both drew on the role of public schools to illustrate, but adopted distinctly different definitions of the concept. Putnam 2000 expanded on Hanifan’s notion of social capital as a characteristic of communities, while Burt 2005 expanded on Coleman’s conception of social capital as a characteristic of social structure. As a result of the multiple approaches to social capital, some have sought to bring clarity to the debate (Portes 1998 and Portes 2000), and others have sought to challenge claims about the benefits of social capital (DeFilippis 2001).

Burt, Ronald S. 2005. Brokerage and closure: An introduction to social capital. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Burt provides a general introduction and detailed discussion of social capital focused on social networks. He discusses two forms, brokerage and closure, which broadly correspond to the bridging and bonding forms introduced in Putnam 2000.
Find this resource:

Coleman, James S. 1988. Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology 94:S95–S120.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Coleman offers the foundations for a structural conception of social capital as a property of closed social networks. He argues that sentiments like trust are more likely to develop in communities characterized by closed social networks in which social bonds are strong within the community but relatively weak with outsiders.
Find this resource:

DeFilippis, James. 2001. The myth of social capital in community development. Housing Policy Debate 12.4: 781–806.
DOI: 10.1080/10511482.2001.9521429Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
DeFilippis challenges Putnam’s claim that social capital is a panacea for community problems, arguing that it fails to consider the roles of power and economic capital.
Find this resource:

Hanifan, L. J. 1916. The rural school community center. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 67: 130–138.
DOI: 10.1177/000271621606700118Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hanifan coined the term “social capital” to describe the intangible benefits that community members might derive from being members of a strong community. In this paper, he discusses how rural schools, serving not only as educational institutions but also as centers for the whole community, can create social capital.
Find this resource:

Portes, Alejandro. 1998. Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 1–24.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper provides an overview of the concept of social capital, tracing its development over time in multiple disciplines, and critiquing its sometimes unclear usage.
Find this resource:

Portes, Alejandro. 2000. The two meanings of social capital. Sociological Forum 15.1: 1–12.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007537902813Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Portes distinguishes individual conceptions of social capital like those formulated by Coleman and Burt from community conceptions like those formulated by Hanifan and Putnam.
Find this resource:

Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this book, which attracted significant academic and media attention when first published, Putnam argues that participation in social groups has declined, leading to a loss of community and social capital in America. He also introduces two forms of community social capital: bridging and bonding.
Find this resource:

Sense of Place

An individual’s sense of community (or sense of place) describes an attachment to that person’s community, which is often viewed as a specific place, such as a neighborhood. Thus, discussions of “sense of community” can also be found in research on community attachment and neighborhood attachment. As an attitude with multiple facets, sense of community can be challenging to measure, leading much research in this area to deal with issues of measurement through surveys and other instruments. Because a strong sense of community is often assumed to lead to positive outcomes (e.g., higher quality of life or community economic growth), other work in this area addresses approaches to enhance or facilitate the development of a sense of community. Working within a sociological tradition, Kasarda and Janowitz 1974, Sampson 1988, and Hummon 1992 focus on how individuals develop a feeling of attachment to their community despite the mobility and anonymity of large cities, while Sarason 1974 and McMillan and Chavis 1986 approach the issue from a more psychological perspective. Cutting across these approaches, Talen 1999 explores whether a sense of community can be purposefully manufactured through the built environment.

Hummon, David M. 1992. Community attachment: Local sentiment and sense of place. In Place attachment. Edited by Irwin Altman and Setha Low, 253–278. New York: Plenum.
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hummon develops an alternative perspective on sense of community that highlights how even individuals living in the same community may experience a sense of community in different ways.
Find this resource:

Kasarda, John D., and Morris Janowitz. 1974. Community attachment in mass society. American Sociological Review 39.3: 328–339.
DOI: 10.2307/2094293Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kasarda and Janowitz investigate two competing perspectives with their origins in the Chicago school: a linear development model focused on community size and density (Wirth), and a systemic model focused on length of residence (Park).
Find this resource:

McMillan, David W., and David M. Chavis. 1986. Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology 14.1: 6–23.
DOI: 10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1%3C6::AID-JCOP2290140103%3E3.0.CO;2-ISave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
McMillan and Chavis define four dimensions of sense of community: membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Most measures of sense of community aim to assess residents’ attitudes on these four dimensions.
Find this resource:

Sampson, Robert J. 1988. Local friendship ties and community attachment in mass society: A multilevel systemic assessment. American Sociological Review 53.5: 766–779.
DOI: 10.2307/2095822Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sampson introduces a multilevel perspective to community attachment, arguing that both community-level and individual-level characteristics impact one’s sense of community.
Find this resource:

Sarason, Seymour B. 1974. The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sarason offers an introduction to, and definition of, the notion of a psychological sense of community, which has since become a central focus in the discipline of community psychology.
Find this resource:

Talen, Emily. 1999. Sense of community and neighbourhood form: An assessment of the social doctrine of new urbanism. Urban Studies 36.8: 1361–1379.
DOI: 10.1080/0042098993033Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Talen evaluates New Urbanism as an approach to building communities that is intended to promote a positive sense of community through the incorporation of public open spaces and the mixing of residential and retail land uses.
Find this resource:

Organizing and Capacity

In order to react to social problems such as poverty or crime, or to achieve collective goals such as the installation of a traffic light at a busy intersection, communities must be organized and have the capacity to bring about social change. Discussions of community organizing and capacity range from academic considerations about the nature and mechanics of social change through community collection action to practical and applied manuals about how community members can actually engage in organizing for social change. All of the works in this section draw, either directly or indirectly, from Alinsky’s seminal work on organizing, Rules for Radicals (Alinsky 1971). Some take the form of handbooks designed to guide the actions of practicing community organizers (Gittell and Vidal 1998, Homan 2008), while others offer a more academic assessment of the theory and effectiveness of community organizing (Speer and Hughey 1995; Chaskin, et al. 2001; Chaskin 2001; Warren 2001; Minkler and Wallerstein 2003).

Alinsky, Saul D. 1971. Rules for radicals: A practical primer for realistic radicals. New York: Random House.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book outlines a series of strategies and tactics for community activists and organizers seeking to bring about social change in their communities. It not only documents the strategies used by Alinsky, but remains a widely used manual and guidebook for community organizers.
Find this resource:

Chaskin, Robert J. 2001. Building community capacity: A definitional framework and case studies from a comprehensive community initiative. Urban Affairs Review 36.3: 291–323.
DOI: 10.1177/10780870122184876Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Chaskin provides a shorter, article-length overview of community capacity and strategies for developing a community’s capacity for collective action.
Find this resource:

Chaskin, Robert J., Prudence Brown, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Avis Vidal. 2001. Building community capacity. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book provides an overview of the concept of community capacity—the capabilities a community has to engage in collective action and social change through its various resources.
Find this resource:

Gittell, Ross, and Avis Vidal. 1998. Community organizing: Building social capital as a development strategy. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book introduces social capital as a tool to be deployed in organizing communities for social change, and thus connects discussions of community social capital with methods of community organizing.
Find this resource:

Homan, Mark S. 2008. Promoting community change: Making it happen in the real world. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In the same genre as Alinksy’s classic work, this is an example of a more recent practical handbook for community organizers.
Find this resource:

Minkler, Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein, eds. 2003. Community-based participatory research for health. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although explicitly focused on issues of community health, this edited volume provides an overview of community-based participatory research, which engages the community in academic research projects focused on promoting positive social changes.
Find this resource:

Speer, Paul W., and Joseph Hughey. 1995. Community organizing: An ecological route to empowerment and power. American Journal of Community Psychology 23.5: 729–748.
DOI: 10.1007/BF02506989Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Speer and Hughey highlight the role of social power in community organizing, and focus on the reciprocal relationship between the power held by community organizations and the power help by their individual members.
Find this resource:

Warren, Mark R. 2001. Dry bones rattling: Community building to revitalize American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Warren explores how community organizing, especially through religious congregations and other community organizations, offers a path to increasing communities’ participation in the democratic process.
Find this resource:

Politics and Power

Community affairs are driven by a political process and a political structure, which in some cases is dominated by an elite, and in others by a complex mix of interest groups. Studies of community power, which were most active in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed to understand what type of power structure shaped the political process in American cities. Subsequent research in this area has revolved around revisiting these initial studies and exploring the determinants of different types of power structures. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, sociologist Floyd Hunter (Hunter 1953) and political scientist Robert Dahl (Dahl 1961) both initiated the field of community power studies, fueling debates that continued through the 1970s (see Clark 1975 and Domhoff 1978). Since then, others have taken different approaches, incorporating postmodern (Young 1986) and Marxist (Logan and Molotch 1987) perspectives, and considering the role of community attachment in politics (Cox and Mair 1988).

Clark, Terry Nichols. 1975. Community power. Annual Review of Sociology 1: 271–295.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.01.080175.001415Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Clark provides an overview of the community power studies initiated by Hunter and Dahl, and which played out in the academic literature as a debate about whether communities are governed by an elite or a plurality.
Find this resource:

Cox, Kevin R., and Andrew Mair. 1988. Locality and community in the politics of local economic development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78.2: 307–325.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1988.tb00209.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cox and Mair consider the roles of space and sense of community in the political process, examining how business’s attachment to their local communities can be used as a tool for economic development.
Find this resource:

Dahl, Robert A. 1961. Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Questioning Hunter’s findings in Atlanta (see Hunter 1953), Dahl introduced an alternative approach to studying community power: the decisional approach. Using this approach in New Haven, he reached a different conclusion, arguing that the city was governed by a series of overlapping interest-based groups: a plurality.
Find this resource:

Domhoff, G. William. 1978. Who really rules? New Haven and community power reexamined. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Domhoff reopened the community power debate by reexamining Dahl’s original New Haven data (see Dahl 1961), from which he argued that the original conclusion of a plurality presented an overly optimistic view about community power.
Find this resource:

Hunter, Floyd. 1953. Community power structure: A study of decision makers. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Among the first empirical studies of community power, in which Hunter sought to understand how political power was distributed in Atlanta. Using the reputational approach, introduced here, he concluded that the city was governed by a small political elite.
Find this resource:

Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Logan and Molotch adopt a Marxist perspective on political power and influence in urban communities. They describe the role played by “growth machines,” or coalitions of powerful land-owning elites, whose primary goal is the continued growth of the city and the subsequent increase of land value.
Find this resource:

Young, Iris Marion. 1986. The ideal of community and the politics of difference. Social Theory and Practice 12.1: 1–26.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Young moves beyond earlier debates about community power structure by introducing a postmodern perspective. She highlights how defining community as a unified and cohesive group ultimately shapes the political process by excluding those who are different.
Find this resource:

Finding Other Communities

Communities exist in many different forms and places, and they are not always easy to locate or identify. The works in this section focus on finding and studying types of communities that might be easily missed, or that may not immediately come to mind as examples of community.

Marginalized Communities

Many communities exist at the margins of society, making them difficult to locate and characterized by different processes than more mainstream communities. These books and articles examine different marginalized communities, and thus offer examples of the range of human communities that can be studied. Although communities in poverty are commonly a focus for sociologists (Lomnitz 1977, Snow and Anderson 1993, Wilson 1996), some have also examined communities characterized by their subculture (Fischer 1975, Fischer 1995), sexual identity (Castells 1983), place of residence (Baldassare 1992), and health behaviors (Singer 2006).

Baldassare, Mark. 1992. Suburban communities. Annual Review of Sociology 18: 475–494.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.18.080192.002355Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Baldassare reviews the nature of suburban communities, focusing on some of their recent problems including political fragmentation and the lack of affordable housing.
Find this resource:

Castells, Manuel. 1983. Cultural identity, sexual liberation, and urban structure: The gay community in San Francisco. In The city and the grassroots: A cross-cultural theory of urban social movements. By Manuel Castells, 138–170. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the first studies of the gay community, in which Castells focuses on how this community establishes its identity and territory, which it uses to obtain political recognition and power.
Find this resource:

Fischer, Claude S. 1975. Toward a subcultural theory of urbanism. American Journal of Sociology 80.6: 1319–1341.
DOI: 10.1086/225993Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Fischer develops a theory to explain why marginal communities, or subcultures, can develop in cities, and how they interact with mainstream cultures to shape life in cities.
Find this resource:

Fischer, Claude S. 1995. The subcultural theory of urbanism: A twentieth-year assessment. American Journal of Sociology 101.3: 534–577.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Fischer revisits his subcultural theory, clarifying some of the original theory’s ambiguities and reviewing subsequent empirical research that is generally consistent with the theory’s propositions.
Find this resource:

Lomnitz, Larissa Adler. 1977. Networks and marginality: Life in a Mexican shantytown. New York: Academic Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lomnitz uses a social network perspective to study how features of a poor Mexican community (compadrazgo, or fictive kin, and confianza, or reciprocity) help the community’s members deal with day-to-day struggles.
Find this resource:

Singer, Merill. 2006. What is the “drug user community”? Implications for public health. Human Organization 65.1: 72–80.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Singer asks whether the notion of community can be applied to the population of drug users, but more generally raises questions about when it is appropriate to describe marginal populations as communities.
Find this resource:

Snow, David A., and Leon Anderson. 1993. Down on their luck: A study of homeless street people. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using an ethnographic approach, Snow and Anderson consider how community does not necessarily require a house or apartment, but can also be found among Austin’s homeless population.
Find this resource:

Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Knopf.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though primarily an economic analysis of the causes and consequences of urban poverty, Wilson provides a window into the communities in which the urban poor live and the challenges these communities face.
Find this resource:

Virtual Communities

Not all human communities exist in the face-to-face world. Increasingly, communities can be found online in the form of Internet-based discussion and support groups, social networking sites like Facebook, and multiplayer online games like Second Life. These new types of virtual communities have led scholars to question whether they are real communities and how they affect interactions in face-to-face offline communities. Research of virtual communities has been relatively recent, with most attention focused on cataloging their existence and behavior (Rheingold 1993, Preece 2000, Smith and Kollock 1999, Wilson and Peterson 2002), as well as comparing them to more traditional nonvirtual communities (Driskell and Lyon 2002, Hampton and Wellman 2003).

Driskell, Robyn Bateman, and Larry Lyon. 2002. Are virtual communities true communities? Examining the environments and elements of community. City & Community 1.4: 373–390.
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6040.00031Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Driskell and Lyon are among the first to offer an answer to the title question, and to document the similarities of and differences between virtual and offline communities.
Find this resource:

Hampton, Keith, and Barry Wellman. 2003. Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet supports community and social capital in a wired suburb. City & Community 2.3: 277–311.
DOI: 10.1046/j.1535-6841.2003.00057.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study aimed to empirically investigate whether the Internet leads to declines in face-to-face interactions and a loss of (offline) community. Contrary to expectations, in one Toronto neighborhood, Hampton and Wellman found the reverse, as the Internet in fact strengthened offline communities and social interactions.
Find this resource:

Preece, Jenny. 2000. Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. New York and Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book serves as a handbook for the development of virtual communities, addressing technical issues that influence users’ ability to participate, as well as social issues that influence their willingness to participate.
Find this resource:

Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Rheingold documents the development of online communities in the Internet’s earliest days. This work thus serves not only as an empirical study, but also as a historical document.
Find this resource:

Smith, Marc A., and Peter Kollock, eds. 1999. Communities in cyberspace. New York: Routledge.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This edited volume includes chapters that cover a range of topics, and it includes several detailed discussions of how virtual communities establish their collective identity and maintain control over members.
Find this resource:

Wilson, Samuel M., and Leighton C. Peterson. 2002. The anthropology of online communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 449–467.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wilson and Peterson provide an overview of the theoretical and empirical research on online communities from an anthropological perspective.
Find this resource:

Detection

The most abstract conception of a community—one that is now applied in both the social and natural sciences—focuses only on the patterns of interactions between entities, no matter what the entities may be. A community is then defined as a set of entities that interacts more with one another than with any other entities in the population. For example, using this conception, a neighborhood would constitute a community if the residents of the neighborhood interacted more with their own neighbors than with others. This had led researchers to theorize about the nature of community as an abstract structural entity (Wolfe 2006, Gulbahce and Lehmann 2008), and to develop methods for detecting and locating communities by studying networks of interactions (Burt 1978, Girvan and Newman 2002, Fortunato 2010).

Burt, Ronald S. 1978. Cohesion versus structural equivalence as a basis for network subgroups. Sociological Methods and Research 7.2: 189–212.
DOI: 10.1177/004912417800700205Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Burt contrasts two ways of thinking about community membership: cohesion, which focuses on members’ direct interactions; and structural equivalence, which focuses on members’ similarity to one another.
Find this resource:

Fortunato, Santo. 2010. Community detection in graphs. Physics Reports 486.3–5: 75–174.
DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2009.11.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Fortunato provides a comprehensive review of the theoretical and empirical research on community detection, including introductions to and descriptions of each of the principal approaches.
Find this resource:

Girvan, M., and M. E. J. Newman. 2002. Community structure in social and biological networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99.12: 7821–7826.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.122653799Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Girvan and Newman provide an abstract definition of community that can be applied to interaction networks in multiple settings, and they propose a widely used approach for identifying them.
Find this resource:

Gulbahce, Natali, and Sune Lehmann. 2008. The art of community detection. BioEssays 30.10: 934–938.
DOI: 10.1002/bies.20820Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Gulbahce and Lehmann provide an overview of the role that hierarchy plays in the formation of communities, and of network-based conceptions of community that focus on local versus global structures.
Find this resource:

Wolfe, Alvin W. 2006. Network perspectives on communities. Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences 1.4.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wolfe provides a nontechnical overview of the abstract network-based conception of community, illustrating how it can be used in multiple settings.