Community Studies

The Origins and Development of Community Studies

The predominately Anglo-American tradition of community studies has been primarily concerned with the holistic analysis of the social organization and institutional structure of three distinct settings: small towns, rural areas, and working-class districts. Although definitional tensions continue to plague the precise meaning of the term community, the interdisciplinary field of community studies has generally assumed the mandate of investigating patterns of social groupings or population aggregates contained within a particular setting. The field has its origins in three complementary approaches.

First, the study of population growth and demographic change by social surveyors, statisticians, and social reformists working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a notable precursor of what later became known as the community study. Although focusing largely upon issues of health and sanitation in overcrowded and impoverished urban conglomerates, implicit within such investigations was an emphasis on the effects of social change and modernization upon the social and moral order of community life.

Second, many of the investigative and methodological approaches utilized within community studies have also been influenced by the classifica-tory schemas of cultural anthropology, particularly in regard to how such variables as employment, family, kinship, political structure, and patterns of religious belief contribute to the stability of the social order and the maintenance of a functionally integrated society. Although later criticism sought to reveal the complicity of anthropological theory and method with colonialism, the fundamental focus placed upon the everyday dynamics of community life served as a point of commonality between classical anthropological studies, traditionally conducted in distant locales, and the application of such approaches in Western societies.

Third, the founding fathers of sociology were concerned with the decline of traditional social relations amid the transformation from folk society to urban society. Fearing that traditional ways of life and communal relations were being threatened with dissolution by the increasing heterogeneity and sheer social complexity resulting from the combined forces of industrialism and urbanization, classical social theory sought to explore the effects of social change upon community life and mechanisms of social integration. Building upon the legacy of these three traditions, community studies subsequently emerged as an independent focus of study in its own right to occupy a central role in sociology, anthropology, social geography, urban studies, and social policy programs.

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