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Traditions of Theorizing Community

However problematic the concept may be, the quest for community has long been one of the main themes of the social sciences and is closely connected to the development of the discipline (Mazlish 1989; for a discussion of Durkheim, Weber and Marx on community, see also Day 2006).

Before presenting to you how I think we may best theorize the community, I'm going to show, in this chapter, where these ideas come from and how they build on what others have theorized before. I do not intend to give you a compendious overview of the status quaestionis: I selectively picked and chose just those ideas that have exercised the greatest influence on the thinking that went into my book. First we will see how fear of the demise of community has influenced the thinking of sociologists. Then we will see how network analyses were developed as an alternative way to study community.

Fear of the demise of community

Social critics, social reformers and sociologists have shared and continue to share fears about the loss of community (Anderson 1959: 68; Fischer 1982: 2). Writing about his travels through the Americas in the eighteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, sociologist avant la lettre, worried that

each person, withdrawn into her- or himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.

(Tocqueville 2003, as quoted in Sennett 1992b: vi)

Sociology started to emerge as a 'science' at the end of the nineteenth century in northern Europe, out of literary and social criticism. There - thanks to colonial exploitation, industrialization and urbanization (a process whereby the population grows at a higher pace in cities than in the countryside) - agrarian and largely feudal societies turned into industrialized, class-based social formations. As cities expanded with tremendous speed and became the icons of vice, disintegration, anonymity and immorality, the fear that communities would disappear was an immediate result and was seen from the outset as connected with urban development. Following Ferdinand Tönnies (1887), for whom social change was a shift on the continuum of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (see Bell and Newby 1971: 23), many sociologists, for example the Chicago School scholar Louis Wirth (1938), regarded the disappearance of traditional "natural" bonds as causally linked to the city. Urbanism was a way of life induced by the density, heterogeneity and size of the city. Some, for instance Simmel (1995), considered it to provide mankind with freedom. But, as social control faded, the urban fear that humans would live atomized, disconnected and lonely lives grew stronger.

The numerous studies of debates on the topic indicate that the concern with social bonds has held an important place ever since the beginning of social science (for an overview, see Vidich, Bensman and Stein 1964; Bell and Newby 1974; Saunders 1986; Nisbet 1993). One of the problems all along has been the confusion between what a community should be - the normative prescription for it - and how it is in people's actual experience - its empirical description (Bell and Newby 1974: xlvii; see also de Valk 1977: 108). Various early definitions and perspectives on it intimate that a community was a social entity situated in physical space; that it implied shared and fixed lifestyles; and that it included a notion of collective behaviour (Kaufman 1959: 9; see also Kolaja and Sutton 1960). I will now turn briefly to some of the historical developments in urban studies, especially in urban sociology, to demonstrate this early view.

Many of the western concerns about community are directly linked to transformations in the industrial era (see Janowitz 1978: 264), whether on the land or in the city. The separation of life into spheres - work and non-work, public and private, productive and reproductive - generated a complex set of changes that inevitably affected the ways in which people got involved with and detached themselves from one another - or, in Simmel's (1964) terms, formed webs of affiliations. Industrialization separated work from residence and created residential communities; but members' involvement in and attachment to these communities varied greatly (Janowitz 1978: 264). Gluckman (1961) and colleagues (quoted in Hannerz 1980: 141) noted that, in Central African towns, the 'industrial system was the dominant reality, and the primary points of orientation for a townsman were the communities of interest and the prestige system which came with it'. According to Janowitz, the metropolis changed its social fabric under industrialization not because the city increased in size but because its organizational scale changed (Janowitz 1982: xi). Yet for a long time working-class neighbourhoods were still seen as geographically organized and as providing the workers' families with their sustenance needs (ibid.). Migration to the city under industrialization meant that, for migrant households, networks of self-help were a realistic answer to problems of low income, to economic necessity and to unpredictable crises (Bulmer 1987: 49), in the absence of alternatives (ibid., 55). Owuor and Foeken (2006: 22) showed how informal economic activities of migrants in three neighbourhoods in the Kenyan town of Nakuru tended to be neighbourhood-based. Similar arguments are made by Kanji (1995) for Harare in Zimbabwe and by Wallman (1996) for Kampala in Uganda. Omasombo, too, shows how new sociabilities and ties developed in Kisangani, Congo after the collapse of the state during the Mobutu era (Omasombo 2005: 96-117). Traditional neighbourhoodism, according to Bulmer,

did not rest upon some 'natural' human tendency to be helpful or on generalized goodwill to others, but was a specific response to economic adversity and deprivation, in which mutual aid was a way of coping. In the changed circumstances of the late twentieth century, with much greater prosperity, mobility and choice, such traditional patterns are unlikely to persist.

(Bulmer 1987: 91; see also Gans 1975)

Especially in the United Kingdom, once the field moved on from a primary concern with morphological characteristics on a continuum from rural to urban, the study of community was above all the study of working-class neighbourhoods. Here again, this kind of research must be seen against the background created by the fear of community's demise. Bell and Newby (1974: 42) even claim that the study of rural and working-class communities in Britain can be explained as generated by the very idea that there was a 'dying culture'. A rich industrial heritage and collective public memories of 'traditional' working-class communities - reflected for example in the displays of the People's History Museum in Manchester or at the Quarry Bank Mill just outside of the city - reinforce the impression of a local working-class culture that, although poor, had a solidarity and compassion no longer to be found in the poor neighbourhoods of today. Power, and the exploitation on which the whole production system was based, remain unaddressed in these displays: in the text accompanying the exhibition at Quarry Bank Mill, for example, the writers attribute the absence of labour unrest to good working conditions and excellent employer-worker relationships rather than to oppression in the industrial village or to intimidation in the workplace (see also Blokland 2003: 5). Even the factories offered a sense of community, 'not just an assortment of men and women at work': 'There was constant joking; the gathering at the lavatories [.] A constant reaching-out for the communal marked the natural style of life' (Jackson 1968: 156). Bott, too, argued that the most close-knit ties could be found among the working class (Bott 1968: 103). These authors had little to say about the advantages of docile labourers that residents in quiet, family-based, non-political communities had for the reproduction of labour - advantages that benefitted the elites. Especially religious and ethnic community formation was an effective tool, based on a reflexive class position, against militant communities. By fostering identification with categories other than class, elites could avoid the formation of a class 'for itself' - or at least keep it in check. Where religion continues to be dominant in public life, religious-political organizations such as those in Beirut (Bou Akar 2012), or religious rituals such as the puja in Kolkata, India (Benjamin 2015) still have this effect. Madoeuf (2005: 68-99) shows a similar effect of the festivals around the Mawlid (the celebration of Muhammed's birthday) in Cairo, Egypt.

Lamenting the lost community was intertwined with the rising affluence of the working class and the changing class structure in Britain (Goldthorpe et al....