Elements of Community Action

IN ANOTHER paper' the line of thought has been taken that sociological research in the field of "community" might be pursued with greater fruitfulness if the concept, community, were clearly distinguished from the concept, local society, and if the research were related to ongoing processes of action and their analysis rather than primarily to the delineation of structure.2 While "local society" would embrace all social phenomena in a particular area, "community" was conceived as more or less the policy-deciding, selfor identity-maintaining social system of families residing in a particular area which confronts collectively problems arising from the sharing of the area. And it was suggested that such a system could not simply be assumed to exist wherever such clusters of families in particular places were to be found but was problematic, and consequently its occurrence could be conceived as a variable and not as an attribute. To develop some manageable and meaningful unit of research in community and to focus greater attention upon action analysis as a tool for developing better community theory, we suggested that an effort to specify the character of community actions was in order. If the policy-deciding and identity-maintaining social system of a local society is "community," then those actions related to these processes constitute community actions. From this standpoint it is obvious that most behaviors or actions of people within a local area do not constitute "community" actions. Our need then is to suggest the criteria according to which actions could be classified as "community" or "noncommunity" in type.3 This paper seeks to do this by developing a system of three differentially weighted frameworks of cross-classified dichotomized elements based upon certain assumptions about the character of "community." Combining these frameworks, a system for scoring any given action is derived, and this then is shown graphically on a three-dimensional model for further clarity of the constituency of the elements. Finally, some suggestions about the use of this conceptual scheme in research on sociology of the community is presented. The main assumptions upon which the following conceptual scheme is based are the following: (1) Since the characteristic particularly unique to community as a social system is the localityorientation of the action patterns, the primary or most important quality of community action in contrast to noncommunity action is a high degree of usage of the locality as a datum in the action.4 * An earlier version of this paper was read at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 1959. 1 Willis A. Sutton, Jr. and Jiri Kolaja, The Concept of Community (to be published in Rural Sociology). While the work on both papers was in progress, Harold F. Kaufman developed a paper whose content converges with our line of thought. See his "Toward an Interactional Conception of Community," Social Forces, 38 (October 1959), pp. 8-17. 2 Albert J. Reiss, Jr., "A Review and Evaluation of Research on Community," a Working Memorandum Prepared for the Committee on Social Behavior of the Social Science Research Council, Mimeographed, Nashville, Tenn., 1954; Albert J. Reiss, Jr., "The Sociological Study of Communities" Rural Sociology, 24 (June 1959), pp. 118-130; Selz Mayo and James W. Green, "A Framework for Research in the Actions of Community Groups," Social Forces, 31 (May 1953), pp. 320-237. Jessie Bernard, "Some Psychological Aspects of Community Study: Some Areas Comparatively Neglected by American Sociologists," British Journal of Sociology, 11 (March 1951), pp. 12-30; Marion Pearsall and Solon T. Kimball, "Event Analysis as an Approach to Community Study," Social Forces, 34 (October 1955), pp. 58-63; and Norton E. Long, "The Local Community as an Ecology of Games," American Journal of Sociology, 64 (November 1958), pp. 251-262. 3 In the other paper, we suggested that social actions might be classified along an assumed continuum of degrees of "communityness." We sought there, by means of four sets of dichotomies arranged in a table of cross-classification, to suggest the direction in which we might develop certain means-approximately operational-of distinguishing "community" from "noncommunity" actions. 4See E. T. Hiller, "The Community as a Social Group," American Sociological Review, 6 (April 1941), pp. 189-202; Reiss, "The Sociological Study of Communities," loc. cit.; George A. Hillery, Jr., "Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement," Rural Sociology, 20 (June 1955), pp. 111-124.