Classic ways of looking at community

A classic way of looking at community is that of Ferdinand Toennies, who drew a distinction between gemeinschaft, or the local community, and gesellschaft, larger society. The bonds of local community he saw as stronger, being based on kinship, locality, and a shared culture (Another notoriously hard word to define). Gesellschaft, on the other hand, was more impersonal and goal oriented, prescribed by contractual relationships. While many people still commonly use this idea of local versus larger, most theorists today shy away from using such strong binaries. The social capital model can mesh with the idea that gemeinschaft tends to be stronger, by pointing out that kin-based or traditional community-based groups tend to have more bonds of social capital with out being as inflexible, and leaving room for a more detailed analysis. Furthermore, communities are not so concretely separated between a relationship focus and a task-oriented focus. All communication must have a relationship focus, or grounds on which the two (or more) parties can interact, and content, or the message of the communication that orients the relationship towards some point.

Allan Friedman
January, 2002