Research

Every since the beginning of the field of Sociology, people have sought to understand the ways in which we organize our world, consciously and unconsciously: the formation of communities is one of those main ways.

Most of the research that seeks to study community & the impact in has on relevant groups specifically looks at neighborhoods which are territorial communities. While the majority of research studies communities of this type, all sorts of new types of communities exist. For more information on this see our page on “Macro and Micro Communities”: https://sociologyofcommunity.home.blog/types-of-community/

A study conducted in 1974 by John D. Kasarda and Morris Janowitz, “Community Attachment in Mass Society” used a survey of 2,199 adults to measure the impact of various factors “on local community attitudes and sentiments,” (331).

According to Kasarda and Janowitz community organization is…

a structure which has ecological, institutional, and normative dimensions. The local community is viewed as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and on-going socialization processes.”

Kasarda, John D. and Morris Janowitz. 1974. “Community Attachment in Mass Society.” pg. 329

They examined, more specifically, population size, density, length of residence, social class, and stage in life cycle “on friendship, kinship, and associational bonds within the community” and then the association between all eight of those concepts on community ‘attachment’ which was measured by several questions on the survey including “How interested are you to know what goes on in [respondent’s community]?” and “How many people would you say you know who live in [community name]?” (Kasarda and Janowitz, 331). The survey also sought to meaure the degree of each respondent’s participation formally in community groups/organizations.

Results

This study sought to observe a very wide variety of independent variables, their impact on several dependent variables, and the relationships between those dependent variables.

For example, membership in local formal organizations had a positive relationship with one’s community interest (so the greater one’s formal participation, the greater their interest), and community interest was positively associated with one’s sense of community and desire to remain in the community, but formal community participation had little independent impact on one’s desire to remain of their sense of community.

Other main findings Kasarda and Janowitz’s analysis are below.

  • The key factor to the development of social bonds “crucial” to local community attachment is the length of one’s residence (Kasarda and Janowitz, 338).
  • Contrary to the expectations of many other studies & sociological conceptualizations of community both within and external to this work, “neither large population size nor high density significantly weaken[s] local friendship and kinship bonds or formal and informal social ties,” (Kasarda and Janowitz, 334)
  • In accordance with McMillan’s observations of the importance of bidirectional influence of the community onto the individual and the individual on the community, a person’s position in the social structure had the greatest influence on their “interest in the affairs of the local community,” (Kasarda and Janowitz, 335). Therefore, “higher status persons have the skills and orientations to articulate their interests in community affairs” and these skills ensure more successful representation of one’s interests by the community, which generates more trust and responsibility on the part of the individual towards the goals of the community (Kasarda and Janowitz, 335).

Critiques on Community Studies

Similar to the conceptualization of deviance, Community Disorganization is constructed in opposition to conceptualizations of what communities and their structures should look like. Therefore, collective action that challenges established structures of power is ‘disorderly’. However, it is commonly an imperative of sociologists to question these ideas, and consider the ways in which the process and state of community disorganization are socially understood.

Joe R. Feagin in his paper ‘Community Disorganization: Some Critical Notes” addresses the main issues in older understandings of community deviance, and community organization in general. Feagin mainly applies Conflict Theory to criticize prior analyses of ‘divergent’ communities and the common dismissal of the ways in which social structure (with innate hierarchies) generates “collective violence” and the struggles of those who are “worse off” (Feagin, 138).

The focus on disorganization requires an analysis of the definition of this idea and concepts associated with its prevalence. Feagin defines community disorganization as the “disintegration of orderly social arrangements and the weakening of social norms by a variety of disruptive factors” (124). The ‘disruptive factors’ Feagin questions are “migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence” (123).

The weakening of social norms that is essential to disorganization is often blamed on migratory shifts or migrant populations, with no supporting data, through the generalization of those people as broken/disorganized, even though they consistently maintained organized informal and formal normative social networks. Similar to the attribution of disorganization to population demographic shifts, Feagin emphasizes the significant bias against majority-Black and majority-poor areas, and the over-generalizations of these communities as necessarily deviant ‘non-communities’.

Consistent with Robert Merton’s Strain Theory, Feagin discusses the was in which these “patterns of behavior commonly viewed as disorganizational or pathological [may be understood as] adaptive-functional sociocultural arrangements” that maintain social and cultural norms in the forms of ‘unfamiliar’ means.

It is then essential to redefine order within a community, with four relevant qualifications as generated by Feagin, as “organization with (1) continuity of social structure (as in the case of migration), (2) normative and organizational similarities between various socioeconomic groups, (3) different (but adaptive-functional) sociocultural structures, and (4) overlap of similar-different sociocultural structures,” (142).

Although Feagin proposed these revisions to the understanding of community in the mid-1970s they remain relevant as dominant-group bias persists in judgments of non-white, non-middle class communities as less socially-conscious, less integrated, and having greater tendencies towards disorganization or deviance.

Sources

  • Kasarda, John D. and Morris Janowitz. 1974. “Community Attachment in Mass Society.” American Sociological Review 39(3):328–39. Retrieved (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2094293).