CONCEPT: Community

Community: In sociology, a community is typically a face-to-face group or 'aggregation' of families and individuals living in relatively close proximity with each other and bound together by certain genealogical and/or 'social ties' as well as ecological/geographical factors, or givens, to which their livelihoods are more or less physically tied. All of this generates reasons and opportunities for joint action at the local level, and hence such ideas as "self-help groups" [more accurately harambee (= let's pull together) groups], "the therapeutic community", "mutual-aid groups" and "community policing".

Ferdinand Toennies made a widely acknowledged distinction between Community (Gemeinschaft) and Society (Gesellschaft). By his reckoning, a community displayed the characteristics outlined above, which were typical of all pre-modern (or traditional) and usually rural and isolated collectivities. According to Emile Durkheim, a community thus organized was held together by the centrifugal pull of sameness or similarity; that is , by what one may call the logic of "birds of a feather". 

In contrast, the heterogeneity manifest in a modern society, due principally to widespread division of labour beyond household and community boundaries, was welded together by a crucial byproduct of that very division of labour -- namely, the "mutual dependence" of those who could no longer directly produce the resources required for their own full subsistence, but were now bound together, if more impersonally, by the operations of "market exchange".

In an influential empirical study of respondents' conceptualizations of "community", K. MacQueen et al (2001) identified five core elements of a community. These were: Locus (a sense of place, which can be both located and described by those concerned), Sharing (common interests -- values, norms, mindset, ideology, vision, activities, skin color), Joint action (which serves as a source of cohesion and identity, and includes opportunities/contexts, structures or 'arenas' for socializing, conversation, gossip and get-together), Social ties (interpersonal relations - encompassing sub-elements such as family units, lovers, friends, neighbors and support groups) and Diversity (that is, "social complexity" or heterogeneity due to the presence of sub-communities within or migrants into the community -- sub-communities or migrants characterized by distinct identities such as clan, ethnic group, race, religion, caste, occupational status and unequal family standing) 

[To be updated]