Community Studies

Early Forays into Community Studies

Social science concerns about the character of community took much longer to develop. Many early social scientists struggled to understand the evolution of new forms of social relations, distinguishing small-scale face-to-face forms of social organization from the sorts of organization that characterize larger societies, in which there is greater impersonality and social distance. The classic distinction drawn by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) between community (gemeinschaft) and society (gesellschaft) captures these differences.

In the United States, the report in 1911 of the Country Life Commission appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt marked the national beginning of concern about the future of rural, agriculturally based communities, and in 1915, an early sociologist made what was probably the first attempt at a systematic study of a rural community. In 1929, Helen and Robert Lynd conducted the classic sociological community study in Muncie, Indiana, attempting to understand, among other things, the character of classes in small-scale urban communities. For their part, anthropologists, who had previously focused their attention on preindustrial, small-scale, traditional societies, also began to look at more modern manifestations of community.

Similarly, although initiated as an attempt to understand why workers did not share their employers' enthusiasms for factory life, research in factories in the late 1930s and the 1940s began to reveal the nature of worker communities. This was the birth of industrial sociology. Subsequent studies of occupational communities have examined printers, longshoremen, meatpackers, and others.

Widespread Acceptance of Community Studies

Community analysis became a significant approach for social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. The primary researchers were anthropologists and sociologists, who conducted a plethora of studies in North America and elsewhere. Anthropologists were particularly active in [Page 311]Latin America, but for a number of reasons, including trends in anthropological theory that ran counter to the philosophy of community development, community study took on negative connotations within anthropology.

For the most part, sociologists have continued to take a community studies approach that, while incorporating descriptive ethnographic material, tends to focus on analyses of current theoretical and intellectual issues, particularly the issue of rural-urban differentiation. While Blythe's Akenfield was writerly or literary in character, more recent analyses of formerly rural villages have a distinctly social scientific flavor. A good example is sociologist Michael Bell's 1994 study of Childerly, a village near London (Childerly: Nature and Morality in a Country Village).

Early studies assumed that rural communities differed markedly from urban ones. The researcher W. F. Whyte upset this assumption in the 1950s with the discovery near downtown Boston of an urban ethnic community whose residents maintained the intimate, faceto-face social relations believed to be found only in rural communities. This gave rise to a genre of urban community studies such W. H. Whyte's Organization Man (1956) and Herbert Gans's Urban Villagers (1962). A similar study by Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (1968), demonstrated how a small rural community was being penetrated by mass society.

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