COMMUNITYRoland Warren (1978) describes the modern so-
cial transformation of community as a change of
orientation by the local community units toward
the extracommunity systems of which they are a
part, with a corresponding decrease in community
cohesion and autonomy (Warren 1978, pp. 52–
53). Warren identifies seven areas through which
social transformation can be analyzed: division of
labor, differentiation of interests and association,
increasing systemic relationships to the larger so-
ciety, bureaucratization and impersonalization,
transfer of functions to profit enterprise and gov-
ernment, urbanization and suburbanization, and
changing value.
Bender (1978) proposes that the observations
by various community scholars at different points
in historical time, each suggesting that theirs is the
historical tipping point from community to mass
society, contradict linear decline or an interpreta-
tion of history that stresses the collapse of commu-
nity. He suggests that a ‘‘bifurcation of social
experience’’ or sharpening of the distinction be-
tween Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft realms of social
interaction is a more accurate interpretation of the
historical transformation of community than that
provided by the linear Gemeinschaft-to-gesellschaft
framework.
Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton (1979)
suggest that there are three essential arguments
concerning the fate of community in mass society:
community ‘‘lost,’’ community ‘‘saved,’’ and com-
munity ‘‘liberated.’’ The community ‘‘lost’’ argu-
ment emerged during the Industrial Revolution,
as traditional communal modes of production and
interaction gave way to centralized, industrialized
sources of production and dependence. Accord-
ing to this hypothesis and its variations, the inti-
mate, sustained, and mutually interdependent hu-
man associations based on shared fate and shared
consciousness observed in traditional communal
society are relentlessly giving way to the casual,
impersonal, transitory, and instrumental relation-
ships based on self-interest that are characteristic
of social existence in modern industrial society.
The classic essay in the community ‘‘lost’’
tradition is Louis Wirth’s ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of
Life’’ (1938). Wirth’s eloquent essay presents a
perspective of urban existence that continues to
capture sociological thinking about the emergence
of a heterogeneous urban mass society character-
ized by a breakdown of informal, communal ways
of meeting human need and the rise of human
relationships that are best characterized as ‘‘large-
ly anonymous, superficial, and transitory’’ (Wirth
1938, p. 1). Another important contribution in the
decline of community tradition is the ‘‘community
of limited liability’’ thesis (Janowitz 1952; Greer
1962). According to this thesis, networks of hu-
man association and interdependence exist at vari-
ous levels of social organization, and there are
social status characteristics associated with differ-
entiated levels of participation in community life
(e.g., family life-cycle phase). The idea of ‘‘limited
liability’’ poses the argument that, in a highly
mobile society, the attachments to community
tend to be based on rationalism rather than on
sentiment and that even those ‘‘invested’’ in the
community are limited in their sense of personal
commitment.In direct contrast to the community ‘‘lost’’
perspective, the community ‘‘saved’’ argument sug-
gests that communities and communal relation-
ships continue to exist within industrialized bu-
reaucratic urban societies as people are increasingly
motivated to seek ‘‘safe communal havens’’ (Wil-
liam and Lieghton 1979, p. 373). For example,
Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick (1983), forty years
after the Lynds’ Middletown in Transition study,
failed to find the singular trends in bureaucratiza-
tion, secularization, mobility, and depersonaliza-
tion that would be predicted from a linear decline
of community hypothesis. Their observation of
Middletown in the 1970s was more consistent with
the perspective proposed by Robert Redfield
(1955); that both urban ways and folkways coexist
within contemporary small towns and cities: ‘‘In
every isolated little community there is civilization;
in every city there is the folk society’’ (Redfield
1955, p. 146).The community ‘‘liberated’’ argument con-
cedes and to some extent qualifies key aspects of
both the community ‘‘lost’’ and community ‘‘saved’’
perspectives. While it acknowledges that neigh-
borhood-level communal ties have been weakened
in the face of urbanization, it argues that commu-
nal ties and folkways still flourish, albeit in alterna-
tive non-spatial forms. The community ‘‘liberat-
ed’’ argument suggests that the spatial dependence
of communal ties have been replaced by ease of
mobility and communication across boundaries of