The idea of the American community is deceptively simple, as long as one does not require a rigid definition. The term evokes a rich imagery associated with the “country village,” the “small town,” or the “big city” of an earlier day. One thinks of the country village’s Main Street, with its several stores and post office, and the streets, houses, and lawns that immediately surround it in the setting of an enveloping prairie, dairy-farm country, or forest. One recalls the road that traverses the five, ten, or twenty miles—seldom more except in the Far West—connecting it with a small city. Here in the small city is a larger population, a greater variety of shops and services, a daily newspaper, a series of wholesale establishments serving surrounding villages, perhaps a college or university, a hospital, a number of industries. Or one imagines the larger city with its concentration of people, its burgeoning suburbs, its businesses, medical center, museums, department stores, and newspapers that serve a large section of the state or perhaps parts of several states.
One thinks of places large and small, places whose appearances reflect the specialized industrial or other functions they perform, places that vary with climate and topography, with the origin of the people who first settled or later migrated there, with diverse history and traditions—places that differ from each other in a dozen ways and yet with much in common.
The idea of the American community is deceptively simple, as long as one does not require a rigid definition. The term evokes a rich imagery associated with the “country village,” the “small town,” or the “big city” of an earlier day. One thinks of the country village’s Main Street, with its several stores and post office, and the streets, houses, and lawns that immediately surround it in the setting of an enveloping prairie, dairy-farm country, or forest. One recalls the road that traverses the five, ten, or twenty miles—seldom more except in the Far West—connecting it with a small city. Here in the small city is a larger population, a greater variety of shops and services, a daily newspaper, a series of wholesale establishments serving surrounding villages, perhaps a college or university, a hospital, a number of industries. Or one imagines the larger city with its concentration of people, its burgeoning suburbs, its businesses, medical center, museums, department stores, and newspapers that serve a large section of the state or perhaps parts of several states.
One thinks of places large and small, places whose appearances reflect the specialized industrial or other functions they perform, places that vary with climate and topography, with the origin of the people who first settled or later migrated there, with diverse history and traditions—places that differ from each other in a dozen ways and yet with much in common.
One thinks of communities, large or small, as clusters of people living in proximity in an area containing stores and other service facilities for the sustenance of local people and industries whose produce is distributed throughout a much wider area. Surrounding this concentration of people there is usually a much larger geographic area, which is the effective “service area” of that place and whose size varies according to types of “services.”
Various criteria thought to characterize communities include a specific population living within a specific geographic area with shared institutions and values and significant social interaction....
Basic Transformations in Communities
Recent decades have seen an arresting transformation in American community life. The growth of large metropolitan complexes, including the mushrooming of suburbs and the transformation of the central cities, has received wide attention. But even in smaller communities outside the metropolitan complexes, changes are taking place that make older conceptions of community living inadequate. Thus, we find two interrelated developments. One is the actual change occurring in communities; the other is the change taking place in theoretical formulations among students of the community.
Perhaps the most conspicuous development is the constant filling in of large sections of the American landscape with concentrations of people in metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas consist of large cities and the relatively densely populated territory surrounding them. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, as they are defined for the 1970 Census, must contain at least one city or twin cities of fifty thousand or more inhabitants. Generally they include the city’s surrounding county and adjacent counties that have a metropolitan character and are integrated socially and economically with the county containing the central city. The most arresting development, perhaps, has been the closing of gaps between metropolitan areas, particularly on the eastern seaboard where the whole countryside from Portland, Maine, to Virginia is expected soon to constitute one solid metropolitan complex of overlapping and intermingling metropolitan areas. Similar complexes are developing in the Middle and Far West. What happens to traditional concepts of the community under these circumstances?
Even without the overlapping and intermingling, the very growth of the single metropolitan city has placed great strain on older conceptions of the community. While it may have been true that Brooklyn was always transformed into a small town when the old Brooklyn Dodgers were in a pennant race, it is difficult to conceive of Brooklyn as a community, let alone the whole of New York City, with its five boroughs, each a separate county, each large enough to he a good-sized city or metropolis in its own right, each constituting what was formerly a number of relatively independent though interrelated, communities. A half-century ago Canarsie, Flatbush, Bensonhurst, and Brownsville shared many of the characteristics that are usually associated with a community. Today the concept of community no longer fits them, nor does it fit the Borough of Brooklyn, which contains them, nor does it fit New York City. The concept’s extension to the entire Metropolitan New York-northern New Jersey-southern Connecticut area has a certain logic but takes us so far away from earlier formulations of the community’ as to demand a reexamination of the term.
At the same time the notion of the community as a limited geographic area with relatively definite ascertainable boundaries has become less tenable with the growth of overlapping municipal and other governmental or quasi- governmental units. A host of water districts, public “authorities,” school districts, fire districts, and other units has arisen to confuse the picture. The situation is further complicated by the fact that so many people live in one locality but earn their living in another ..
How different the situation is from the days when Charles Galpin was able with relative success to delineate communities by traveling along each road out of town and noticing in which direction the ruts in the farmhouse driveways went. This method can still be used meaningfully in many places in the United States and Canada, but the number of people living in the smaller rural communities that retain the semblance of a relatively clearly delineated, relatively self sufficient geographic area becomes smaller and smaller with each succeeding decade.
How different, too, from the studies made by Dwight Sanderson in upstate New York communities in the twenties and thirties. He found that when he delineated the high school area, the hardware area, the grocery area, the church area, and other relevant service areas of a rural community, the lines of all of these closely coincided. Thus, there was one community center serving an area with various types of institutional services, whose service areas generally coincided. One’s community for one purpose remained one’s community for another. Sanderson’s definition of the rural community had both meaning and applicability: “A rural community is that form of association maintained between the people, and between their institutions, in a local area in which they live on dispersed farmsteads and in a village which is the center of their common activities” (1). This definition hardly applies in most of America today.
The development of suburbs created an altered community situation. For the suburb, though in many respects an attempt to recapture the characteristics of small-town community living, is different from the traditional small-town community in several ways. It is dominated to a much greater degree by the neighboring large city than is the nonsuburban small town. This characteristic is true not only of those suburban communities where a large proportion of wage-earners commute to the central city but of other suburbs as well. Commuter suburbs, especially, show this dependence on the central city as a source of daily occupational sustenance, a function traditionally thought of as one of the basic prerequisites of a community. Another important characteristic of the suburb is the transiency of its population, a circumstance that militates against the development of strong community ties among its residents (2).
On a more fundamental level, certain major changes occurring in American society have been transforming the structure and function of American communities. These changes include: an increasing specialization and division of labor, both within and among communities; the proliferation of differentiated interests among local people who thus associate more often on the basis of specialized interests than on the basis of merely living in the same place; increased interdependence within communities, with other communities, and with social systems in the larger society; increased bureaucratization and depersonalization; the entrance of many formerly local functions into the money-price-exchange-market system; the growth of large metropolitan areas with central cities and suburbs; and finally, a gradual change in many earlier values corresponding to the other changes just enumerated. These changes are sufficiently important to merit separate, extensive treatment. They constitute two additional changes that should be added to the conditions demanding a new formulation of the concept of community.
In the first place, they signalize the increasing and strengthening of the external ties that bind the local community to the larger society. In the process, various parts of the community—its educational system, its recreation, its economic units, its governmental functions, its religious units, its health and welfare agencies, and its voluntary associations—have become increasingly oriented toward district, state, regional, or national offices and less and less oriented toward each other.
In the second place, as local community units have become more closely tied with state and national systems, much of the decision-making prerogative concerning the structure and function of these units has been transferred to the headquarters or district offices of the systems themselves, thus leaving a narrower and narrower scope of functions over which local units, responsible to the local community, exercise autonomous power. True, the local office of the state welfare department, the local post office, the local unit of the multibranch bank, the local plant of the national manufacturing company, the local unit of the labor union, and the local branch of the supermarket chain are all located within the community and are largely staffed by community people. But the continuation of their very existence in the community, the formulation of their policies, and the determination of their specific behavior are not as subject to local control as they were in earlier decades.
Inadequacy of Older Community Concepts
While such changes as the above transform American communities, making older conceptions of the community less and less appropriate1 a number of points of possible weakness of the older conception itself are appearing on the theoretical level. Students of the community have come to doubt the adequacy of earlier community theory even to describe the situation that existed several decades ago, before the great transformation described above had taken place. Yet there remains much that is valid in the community concept Sociologically, the term community implies something both psychological and geographical. Psychologically, it implies shared interests, characteristics, or association, as in the expression “community of interest” or the term “the business community.” Geographically, it denotes a specific area where people are clustered. Sociologically, the term combines these two connotations. It relates to the shared interests and behavior patterns that people have by virtue of their common locality. Mere similarity of interest does not in itself make a sociological community, nor does mere geographic proximity of residence. In one earlier study of 94 definitions of the term community, it was found that 69 were “in accord that social interaction, area, and a common tie or ties are commonly found in community life.”(3)
It was recognized a long time ago that the political boundaries of a village or city did not necessarily coincide with the area of shared life and shared institutions and behavior that constituted the local community. Indeed, one of the most important discoveries of students of the community early in this century was the close interrelatedness of the village or city center with the surrounding countryside, which constituted its “trade area.” Here was a social entity that did not appear on a map, and yet its reality could not be denied. Further studies acknowledged that a community must be of sufficient size to contain a fairly broad set of institutions—industry, stores, churches, organizations, schools, government, and so on—so that one could live one’s entire life within the bounds of the community, as one sociologist put it. Other characteristics of the community were also identified.... For the moment, let us simply note that this formulation of the community concept arose from a realization that people’s lives were intertwined with the institutions that served them locally, that a community was a total framework of living rather than merely a political jurisdiction, and that an interesting though complex network of people, institutions, shared interests, locality, and a sense of psychological “belonging” had been identified and could be further studied with the “community” as the unit for such study.
But the very locality-oriented nature of the community concept encouraged the study of local behavior as though it existed sui generis, in its own right, independent of the cultural and social forces from the larger society surrounding it. It is enlightening to observe how often this path was followed in the many community studies written in the first half of the twentieth century. It is likewise interesting to notice how often the investigator acknowledged that, of course, outside forces should be taken into account, but then did not do so. What Steward wrote regarding anthropological studies applied to studies made of American communities as well:
Most studies, however, have treated the community as if it were a primitive tribe—that is, as if it w ere a self-contained structural and functional whole which could be understood in terms of itself alone. Scholars are quite en are that any modern community is a functionally dependent part of a much larger whole but in general they have not yet taken account of this larger frame of reference in community study. Individual communities are often studied as if the larger whole was simply a mosaic of such parts.(4)
Community theory is now in a process of revision, as different types of theoretical approach are formulated to encompass the widespread realization that an adequate description must somehow meaningfully relate the community to the rest of society.
An additional theoretical difficulty confronting students of the community has been the relation of one community to another, particularly communities of different sizes. Let us consider this problem from the standpoint of a small city of fifteen thousand people. Such a city is often the wholesale center for a group of surrounding villages, each of which, on a particular level of goods and services constitutes, with its immediate trade area, a community in itself. As a wholesale center with its hospital, radio station, more specialized shops, and many other facilities, the small city may serve the whole group of surrounding communities, however. In turn, the small city, with its surrounding communities, may be part of the area of service of a metropolis, with its medical center, specialized stores and services, and so on.
Thus, it has long been recognized that American communities do not consist of a number of discrete and separate entities but that there are communities within communities, depending on what level of goods and services and social behavior is under consideration. No one has ever made an adequate systematic classification of these various levels of goods and services and social behavior so that students of the community could speak uniformly about how a community is related to another by being contained within it or by containing it, depending on the order of data being investigated.
Such a classification might help with a related theoretical difficulty: the size problem. Is the term community sufficiently flexible to include both a village of two thousand people with its surrounding service area and a city of a million people? Are the same types of relationships involved? Are we still talking about the same phenomenon? Or does the vast complexity of wheels within wheels in the organization of the large city make it more a federation of communities, as it were, than a community itself? There is no consistently acknowledged theoretical resolution of these questions, and some studies have been made of a whole city or metropolitan area as a community while others have taken only one small part of the city for the basis of a community study. When the former is done, the study is typically limited to some one aspect of community life because of the gigantic complexity of the data involved.
Life would be much simpler for students of the subject if communities could be clearly delineated geographically from each other and if there were no overlapping among them. The community concept, based as it is on common life shared by people within a specific geographic area, presents both practical and theoretical difficulties once one attempts to draw lines on a map. It is relatively easy to define and delimit an organization, a business company, or a governmental unit. The community remains elusive, often encompassing one area and one group of people if looked at in a certain way, a different area and different people if looked at in another.
Let us consider still another difficulty: One can point to the formal organization of a business company, or of a church, or of the municipal government on an organization chart; but where is the organization chart for the community? Clearly, it has no formal organization, for it is not formally constituted as a special social “being.” Its reality exists only in its constituting a social entity, only in the behaviors and attitudes that its members share, only in the patterns of their interaction. In this respect, it is analogous to a small, informal group of friends. They do not have a constitution or charter, with specified membership requirements, written rules and regulations, specified procedures for choosing leaders, specified duties and privileges of leaders, and so on. Yet they constitute an important social reality. Recent decades have seen great advances in small group research, and some of the most promising theoretical thinking about the community is arising today from theories about the small, informal group.
When all such difficulties are considered, a few sociologists throw up their hands and urge that the whole concept of the geographic community be discarded as a useless theoretical will-o’-the wisp. Yet the term remains, and community analysis goes forward. The reason is simple. People’s lives and their behavior are significantly influenced by their propinquity. Living together in physical proximity requires social structures and social functions that sustain life in the locality and provide the satisfactions that people seek. By living in the same geographical area, even in today’s conditions of rapid transportation, people must share common local institutions and facilities. They have a common interest in the local schools, in stores, sources of employment, churches, and other institutions and services whose availability to individuals in their own locality is a part of the total pattern of American society. The intertwining of their lives on a locality basis, even in these days of specialized interests, urban anonymity, and depersonalization, provides an important social reality and an important focus of study, even though such a study is fraught with theoretical difficulty. In the following chapter, we shall see that several new approaches to community study, as well as the best in some of the older approaches, provide tools for a meaningful analysis of such locality-oriented behavior.
A Community Model
It is the inescapable fact that people’s clustering together in space has important influences on their daily activities that perhaps gives us our best clue to a definition of the community as a social entity. We shall consider a community to be that combination of social units and systems that perform the major social functions having locality relevance. In other words, by community we mean the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to those broad areas of activity that are necessary in day-to-day living. In this book we shall organize our description and analysis of such activities around five major functions that have such locality relevance. These functions are:
While all have locality relevance, they are not necessarily functions over which the community exercises exclusive responsibility or over which it has complete control. On the contrary, the organization of society to perform these functions at the community level involves a strong tie between locally based units such as businesses: schools governments, and voluntary associations and social systems extending far beyond the confines of the community. Rather than being extraneous to the present consideration of the community, these relationships to extracommunity systems will be an important focus of attention in this book. Nor, as we shall see, does it mean that these functions are not performed by other types of social systems such as informal groups, formal associations, and whole societies. The community, however, is especially characterized by the organization of these functions on a locality basis.
The function of production-distribution-consumption relates to local participation in the process of producing, distributing, and consuming those goods and services that are a part of daily living and access to which is desirable in the immediate locality. While it is customary to consider economic entrepreneurs, most typically the modern business corporation, as the principal providers of such goods and services, all community institutions, whether industrial, business, professional, religious, educational, governmental, or whatever, provide such goods and services. Indeed, the conditions under which one such unit or another provides the particular goods or services are an important consideration, and the switch in their provision from one type of auspices to another has important implications....
The function of socialization involves a process by which society or one of its constituent social units transmits prevailing knowledge, social values, and behavior patterns to its individual members. Through this process the individual comes to take on the way of living of his or her society rather than that of some other. The process is particularly important and noticeable in the early years of the individual, but it extends throughout one’s life. In American communities the formal school system is ordinarily considered the principal community institution discharging this function, although it is recognized that individual families have an important role to play, particularly in the early years, and that many other groups are also active in the process.
The function of social control involves the process through which a group influences the behavior of its members toward conformity with its norms. Here, too, several different social units perform this function on the community level. Customarily, formal government is considered particularly pertinent, since by definition government has ultimate coercive power over the individual through the enforcement of universally applicable laws. The police and the courts are especially relevant in the performance of the social-control function by local government, but, as we shall see, many other social units, including the family, the school, the church, and the social agency, also play a large part.
An important community function is that of providing local access to social participation. Perhaps the most widely prevalent unit for providing this participation is the religious organization—church or synagogue—and we shall consider these organizations in the context of their great importance in performing this function. Ordinarily, one thinks of voluntary organizations of various sorts as the community’s most important units for channeling social participation. Nevertheless, many different types of social unit, including businesses’ government offices, and voluntary and public health and welfare agencies, provide, through their formal activity, important avenues of social participation to their employees or volunteer workers in the course of the performance of their occupational tasks. Likewise, family and kinship groups, friendship groups, and other less formal groupings provide important channels of social participation.
A final major community function is that of providing mutual support on the local level. Traditionally, such mutual support whether in the form of care in time of sickness, exchange of labor or helping a local family in economic distress, has been performed locally very largely under such primary-group auspices as family and relatives, neighborhood groups, friendship groups, and local religious groups. Specialization of function, ...has led to a gradual change in auspices for many of these mutual-support functions: to public welfare departments, to private health and welfare agencies, to governmental and commercial insurance companies, and so on. Perhaps the present archetype of the community-based mutual-support unit might be the voluntary agency in the field of health and welfare, but the distribution of this function, like others, through a wide range of social auspices is an important aspect of the current situation in American communities....
As the above implies, the definition of the community in terms of the systems that perform the major social functions having locality relevance leads to an emphasis on community functions rather than on community institutions. A conventional way of describing the related community phenomena is to consider the various institutional areas of the community: its economic institutions, its government, its educational institutions, its religious institutions, and perhaps its health and welfare, recreational, communicational, or other institutions. As noted, however, these institutional areas correspond only very loosely to the major locality-relevant functions. As already indicated, most of these functions are performed by a great variety of institutional auspices. The present period is characterized by important shifts in the performance of these functions from one set of community auspices to another. Hence, a functional rather an institutional approach seems to have the greatest potential or bringing out this cross-institutional distribution of important community functions.
A problem facing any student of American communities is how make general statements that apply widely despite the many gradations in size and other characteristics that differentiate one community from another. One possible approach is to consider numerous different “ideal types” of communities and to make general statements only about each type. Another alternative is to confine one’s statements to relationships that are so general that they apply to all communities, regardless of the important differences existing among them. Another possible approach is to consider some of the important dimensions along which communities differ from each other, relate these dimensions to general statements applicable to all communities, and then “locate” any particular community or type of community under discussion at a particular point along each such dimension. Thus, one can set up a dimensional field that is broad enough to encompass all communities and make meaningful statements about them on an appropriately abstract level; at the same time the dimensional field can provide a means for describing the difference between one community and another with respect to location within the multidimensional field. Statements about specific communities can thus have general relevance as long as the location of the community within the field is known. Stein has made an attempt to apply this procedure to the analysis of American communities, employing his three main analytical concepts—urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization—as the dimensions of his field.(5) For our present consideration, a somewhat different set of dimensions will be employed. Their relevance and importance will become apparent in subsequent chapters, so they will receive only brief treatment here.
The first of the ways in which American communities differ from each other in their structure and function relates to the dimension of autonomy. Our postulate is that American communities differ along this dimension and that this difference is relevant to an approach defining the community in terms of its functions. In considering any community, we shall be interested in the extent to which it is dependent on or independent of extracommunity units in the performance of its five functions.
The second type of difference is in the extent to which the service areas of local units (stores, churches, schools, and so on) coincide or fail to coincide. At the one extreme, the service areas coincide and hence everyone within the community service area boundary is served by institutions from the same community. At the other extreme, there is relatively little coincidence of service areas, and people may find themselves living within the school district of a locality to the east, going to church in a locality to the south, trading at a trade center to the north, and so on, without any common geographic center of community activities and without a common geographic area of service.
A somewhat different type of variation concerns the extent of psychological identification with a common locality. In some communities a strong sense of local identification is apparent; that is, the local inhabitants consider the community as an important reference group At the other extreme are communities whose inhabitants have little sense of relationship to one another, little sense of the community as a significant social group, and little sense of "belonging" to the community
A final dimension will be the extent to which the community’s horizontal pattern is strong or weak. The horizontal pattern is the structural and functional relation of the various local units (individuals and social systems) to each other. In some communities the sentiments, behavior patterns, and social systemic interconnections of the horizontal pattern may be strong, in others weak.
In considering community differences, specific instances can be contained within a more generalized frame of reference by using these four dimensions. Putting this graphically, we can say that communities differ on all four of the following dimensions, and we can meaningfully locate each community at some point on each of the lines going from one extreme to another (see Figure 1-1).
0 1 2 3 4 5 1. Local autonomy Independent | | | | | | Dependent 2. Coincidence of Coincide | | | | | | Differ service areas 3. Psychological Strong | | | | | | Weak identification with locality 4. Horizontal pattern Strong | | | | | | Weak
The Community “Problem”
So far we have discussed some changes that have taken place in American communities, some theoretical difficulties involved in community studies, and the functional conception of the community that we shall use in this book. Let us turn now to a somewhat different type of problem, perhaps much more meaningful to nonsociologists. In their eyes, the problem lends urgency to the study of communities, giving it an importance that mere theoretical interest would not afford. For through their newspapers and television and through their own experience, discerning Americans have come to the uneasy realization that all is not right with their community living, that undesirable situations appear with growing frequency or intensity and that these are not the adventitious difficulty of one community or another so much as the parts of a general pattern of community living. “Something is wrong with the system”; there is a community problem.
It is apparent that certain types of “problems” are broadly characteristic of contemporary American communities. While most noticeable in the metropolitan areas, most of them are apparent in smaller communities as well. They appear in such forms as the increasing indebtedness of central cities, the spread of urban blight and slums, the lack of affordable, adequate housing, the economic dependence of large numbers of people in the population, poorly financed and staffed schools, high delinquency and crime rates, institutional racism, inadequate provisions for the mentally ill, the problem of the aged, the need for industrial development, the conflict of local and national agencies for the free donor’s dollar, the pollution of air and water, the problem of affording rapid transit for commuters at a reasonable price and at a reasonable profit, and the problem of downtown traffic congestion. The list is almost endless, and each of the problems mentioned could be subdivided into numerous problematical aspects.
On this level, one can continue naming specific problems almost indefinitely. Are such problems simply a host of disparate plagues with which the modern community, Job-like, is made to suffer? Or are they in some sense interrelated? If so, how? This book is not problem-oriented in the sense of being an analysis of community problems and what might be done about them. Yet no systematic treatise on the community can overlook their existence or neglect to explore their interrelations with each other and with other aspects of community living.
Perhaps we can shed some light by examining community behavior as it has developed and changed in recent decades. A closer look at some of the underlying processes taking place within the community may afford a backdrop against which the community conditions that we interpret as "problems" can be understood as part and parcel of the system of community living that has developed in America. The alternative approach is to take each problem out of its situational context and treat it in relative isolation from the basic community conditions that produced it. To do so is to operate on a superficial and often ineffectual level, as many concerned citizens who have attempted to cope with these problems can attest....
Meanwhile, it is well to distinguish between the existence of a problem and the existence of the ability to take effective action to resolve it. Looked at another way, if no social system is “perfect,” then each system will produce certain “problems.” They are, in a sense, the price paid for whatever advantages that particular System of community living entails. We can thus inquire what sorts of problems are generated in American communities and also how effectively they are dealt with.
One sees not only specific problems of one type or another but also the general problem of inability of the community to organize its forces effectively to cope with its specific problems. Let us consider this last for a moment. The question now becomes: What are the conditions of American community living that make it difficult for people to muster their resources on the community level to cope with their problems?
Certainly, one part of the answer is the fact that many of the problems that are confronted on the community level simply are not solvable on that level, but are problems of the larger society of which the community is a part. Any single community’s effort is as little or nothing as against the forces of the larger society. Much important behavior that takes place at the community level takes place within units, groups, companies, and other entities that themselves are integral parts of larger state or national systems. It is a thesis of this book that such units often are more closely related to these larger systems than to other components of the local community. Thus, problems of the larger society are not something that are adventitiously imported into the local community like a germ carried by some visitor, but rather they are conditions inhering in the systems of which the community’s various units are a part, and the community’s units share these conditions as a basic part of their very existence.
Thus, for example, problems of unemployment or of inflation are not amenable to solution community by community, a though some palliative action on the community level may attenuated the former. On a somewhat different plain, certain problems are more closely related to the interaction that takes place within the Community itself. These problems include those arising from marital and family conflict, from the vicious fund-raising controversies between national and local health and welfare organizations and difficulties in the central city that are attendant upon the flight to the suburbs of upper- and middle-income groups along with the retail stores that serve them. Nevertheless, such difficulties are a part of the larger cultural patterns of living, which communities share by being a part of American society.
As an example, the problem of family breakdown in the local community is partly, at least, a result of forces in the wider culture, such as conflicting role expectations in marriage, discontinuity in the socialization process, emphasis on hedonistic romantic irresponsibility in the courtship process, decline in opportunities for useful functions performed by children, and separation of the economic sustenance function from the home. Just as communities are not islands isolated from the major social systems of American society, so they are not cultural islands separated from the broad forces of cultural development and change that characterize the major institutions of American society. In sum, many problems that communities face are simply beyond resolving through the effective mustering of resources at the community level alone.
A closely related barrier to effective community action is the loss of community autonomy over specific institutions or organizations located within it and closely intermeshed with its welfare. The decision of the absentee-owned company to discontinue its branch plant and the decision of the state highway department to bullet the new road on the east side of the river rather than on the west represent decisions by community-based units over which the community exercises little control.
To ineffectiveness of possible action at the community level and loss of community autonomy can be added a third barrier to effective community action, one that seems on the surface, at least, to be more nearly under the potential control of community people. This barrier consists of a number of related phenomena that may best be characterized as lack of identification with the community.
Perhaps the most widely recognized aspect of such lack of identification of the individual with the community is the much deplored apathy of citizens regarding community affairs. People who plunge into community problems with a concern for community improvement often complain with despair that “you can’t get anybody interested” in whatever the problem happens to be. So many problems seem to depend for their effective confrontation on sustaining the interest and activity of a large number of people over a sufficient period of time to bring about the remedies thought to be desirable that the alleged apathy of citizens seems to be a paramount stumbling block. The point is often distorted by unrealistic comparisons with overidealized depictions of New England town meetings or by invidious comparisons with some community where “people got together and really did something about it.”
Yet there is a valid point here. The increasing association of people on the basis of common occupational or other interests, rather than on the basis of locality alone (as among neighbors, is no doubt a contributing factor. The union man, the banker and the school administrator often have strong vocational ties to their own groups, and they have less in common vocationally than, say, three farmers living in the same rural neighborhood. Even in recreational and civic activity, association is often on the basis of specialized interest. Thus, the apathy is not complete, for interests often run high in specialized concerns. It consists, instead, of a lack of interest in community-wide concerns that cut across the various specialized interests and thus become “nobody’s business.”
Over the years, communities have grown larger and larger. The problem of direct as against representative participation arises in large social bodies, not only in government but in various community affairs. Attempts to solve this problem have been no freer of defects in other aspects of community participation than they have in political representation. Community councils, for example, represent an attempt to involve both individuals and organizations in processes of community-wide betterment. They have been extremely sporadic, and even at their best they seldom attain active participation from more than a small minority of the citizenry. Participation in community activities thus usually takes place through participation in some specialized interest group such as a health association, a chamber of commerce, or a better government league, each having its own sphere of interests and activities and its loyal supporters who can generally be relied upon to rally to a cause within their sphere of interests, but not necessarily outside it.
One might ask what else might reasonably be expected, for time does not permit each individual citizen to participate actively in all the concerns that have broad community import. Thus, what Is often interpreted as apathy, as “nobody cares,” is merely an Instance of the hard fact that the number of legitimate community concerns is so great that individual citizens could not actively concern themselves with all of them even if they wanted to and of course many do not.
The increasing transiency of residents of the suburbs has already been mentioned. The constant moving back and forth across the country in search of the better job, as a result of the company’s planned policy of personnel rotation, or for whatever reason puts a premium on the tree that can survive with shallow roots, a point that William H. Whyte has made with great effectiveness in his study of The Organization Man.6 The knowledge that one will probably not remain for many years in the community where one is now living seems unlikely to favor civic participation, and the really remarkable thing is that participation does run so high precisely in the suburbs that show such a great degree of transiency.
Failure to identify with the community takes still another form, which might be called alienation.7 An example is the extent to which useful participation roles are increasingly unavailable to the aged in American communities. Numerous studies of the "problems of the aged" document the point that as people grow older, their roles in family, religious organization, occupation, and voluntary civic endeavor become less meaningful and less active. Compulsory retirement, the friction caused by having older inlaws living with the nuclear family, the fast pace that turns to youthful leadership and new ideas rather than to the wisdom accumulated from another day by older people—all these tend to estrange the elderly from normal avenues of community participation and force them into a state of dependency that is caused less by their inability to function effectively than by the community’s inability to make vital use of them. The fact that this estrangement occurs at the very time when shortages in vital community jobs are experienced, particularly in the professions, and when the need for volunteer services in health and welfare agencies is greater than ever, makes the situation particularly ironic.
Groups of people who hold values different from those dominant in the community represent another type of estrangement, which may even constitute a deliberate rebellion against the community’s values. These small groups take various forms: splinter sects, practitioners of various cults, members of the “counter-culture,” revolutionaries, and so on. Many such groups perform a useful function in challenging the validity of the prevailing values, as gadflies to the conscience of society. Delinquency, vice, and mental illness, on the other hand, represent an order of deviance whose usefulness to the community is far less apparent. They all have in common, though, the estrangement of the individual from the usual values, behavior systems, and satisfactions of the community. There is considerable evidence that such estrangement is widely characteristic of people in the lowest socioeconomic status, the so-called lower-lower class as described by Warner, Hollingshead, and others.(8) So basically different is their whole pattern of living that they might well constitute a completely different culture.(9)
Estrangement from commonly held values has, since Durkheim, come to be described by the term anomie, or normlessness (10), a situation in which there is little sharing of commonly accepted values and social control over behavior becomes ineffectual. In analyzing the disintegration of a New England community, Homans observes:
If the good opinion of his neighbors is a reward to a man then a loss of their good opinion will hurt him, but if this loss does not follow a breach of a norm, where is the punishment? And how can it follow, when the norms themselves are not well defined? (11)
The society-wide character of many problems, lack of community autonomy, and lack of identification with the community are, three barriers to the efficient mustering of forces to confront community problems.... [I]t might be well to relate these characteristics to the rise of a process that has come to be called "community development.” For one way of describing community development is to say that it is a process of helping community people to analyze their problems, to exercise as large a measure of autonomy as possible and feasible, and to promote a greater identification of the individual citizen and the individual organization with the community as a whole. Through such a process, communities may be helped to confront their problems as effectively as possible.
The deliberate attempt by community people to work together to guide the future of their communities and the development of a corresponding set of techniques for assisting community people in such a process constitute important advances in the current changes occurring in American communities....