Encyclopedia of Sociology

COMMUNITY

by the latter stages of industrialization. According
to Warner’s vision of Yankee City, the loss of local
economic control over its industries through a
factory system controlled by ‘‘outsiders’’ disrupt-
ed traditional management—labor relations and
communal identification with local leadership.
Moreover, the factory system was seen by Warner
as promoting an increasingly rigid class structure
and decreased opportunities for social mobility. In
particular, Warner’s discussion of the loss of local
economic control through horizontal and vertical
affiliation, orientation, and delegation of authori-
ty seems to have offered a prophetic glimpse into
the future for many American communities.

Although the Yankee City study produced a
voluminous ethnographic record of an American
city that has remained untouched in scale, Warner
found little support for his contention that the
ethnographic portrait of Newburyport produced
by the Yankee City series could be generalized to
other small American communities. Moreover,
Warner’s contention that social mobility is re-
duced by industrial change was not supported by
the quality of his data and was less true in Warner’s
time than it probably is today. Other critiques of
Warner’s Yankee City study primarily concern his
nearly exclusive reliance on ethnographic infor-
mation as the basis for all measures of social
structure and his disdain for historical data
(Thernstrom 1964).

Both Gerald Suttles’s The Social Order of the
Slum (1968) and William Whyte’s Street Corner
Society (1943) provide sociology with unparalleled
ethnographic accounts of neighborhood social
structure and communal life in urban environs.
Suttles’s work focuses on the territorial relation-
ships, neighborhood social structure, and commu-
nal life among Italian, Latino, and African Ameri-
can inhabitants of the slums of Chicago’s Near
West Side in the 1960s. Whyte’s Street Corner Socie-
ty, based on Whyte’s residence in a Chicago Italian
slum district a generation earlier, provides sociolo-
gy with an understanding of the complex and
stable social organization that existed within slum
neighborhoods conventionally believed to have
epitomized social disorganization. Whyte’s obser-
vations and keen insights concerning small group
behavior are pioneering contributions to that area
of sociology. Both studies, in method, theory, and
substance are classic examples of Chicago School

sociology. More contemporary community stud-

ies, while they draw heavily on Chicago School

sociological traditions in theory and method, have

as their primary concern aspects of community

that relate to poverty, juvenile delinquency, and

violence. For example, Robert Sampson and his

colleagues conducted a large-scale study of Chica-

go neighborhoods that linked subjective defini-

tions of neighborhood with social cohesion and

violence inhibiting actions on the part of neigh-

bors (Sampson 1997a, 1997b). Theoretically,

Sampson’s work draws heavily on Robert Park’s

conception of the social cohesion that exists within

the ‘‘natural areas’’ of the city that are defined by

both physical and sentimental boundaries (Park

1925), while methodologically Sampson and his

colleagues employed the classic Chicago School

preference for field observation—albeit with the

modern advantages of a video camera located

within a slowly moving van in place of the shoe

leather sociology of their predecessors.

COMMUNITY IN THE CONTEXT OF

SOCIAL REFORM

Efforts to enhance the social context of human

existence continuously take place at all levels of

social organization, from the microcontext of the

nuclear family to the macrocontext of relation-

ships between nation-states. No unit of social or-

ganization has received more attention in theories

and activities linked to social reform than the

human community, however it is defined and

measured. Community in the context of social

reform is typically viewed or employed in one of

the following four ways: as a unit of analysis for the

purpose of broad generalization, as a critical medi-

ating influence between the organization of mass

society and individual outcomes, as a specific tar-

get of social reform efforts, or as a symbolic con-

ception of whatever is ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘wrong’’ with

society at large.

The use of rural and urban communities as

the basis for reform-motivated generalization

emerged in the United States during the Progres-

sive era, when social activists affiliated with Chica-

go’s famous settlement house, Hull House, and

the newly formed Department of Sociology at the

University of Chicago shared a common geographi-

cally-rooted conception of social science and con-

cern for the living conditions of Chicago’s urban