Community Power Structure
Fainstein S S, Fainstein N, Hill R C, Judd D R, Smith M P 1986
Restructuring the City, (rev. edn.) Longman, New York
Foglesong R 1986 Planning the Capitalist City. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ
Goldsmith M 1995 Autonomy and city limits. In: Judge D,
Stoker G, Wolman H (eds.) Theories of Urban Politics. Sage,
London
Harding A 1994 Urban regimes and growth machines: Towards
a cross-national research agenda. Urban Affairs Quarterly 29:
356–82
Harding A 1995 Elite theory and growth machines. In: Judge D,
Stoker G, Wolman H (eds.) Theories of Urban Politics. Sage,
London
Harloe M (ed.) 1977 Capti
e Cities. Wiley, London
Harloe M, Pickvance C G, Urry J (eds.) 1990 Place, Policy, and
Politics: Do Localities Matter? Unwin Hyman, Boston
Harvey D 1973 Social Justice and the City. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, MD
Harvey D 1985 The Urbanization of Capital. Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, MD
Hunter F 1953 Community Power Structure. University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
Judd D, Swanstrom T 1998 City Politics, 2nd edn. Longman,
New York
Judge D 1995 Pluralism. In: Judge D, Stoker G, Wolman H
(eds.) Theories of Urban Politics. Sage, London
Logan J, Molotch H 1987 Urban Fortunes. University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA
Mollenkopf J 1983 The Contested City. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ
Molotch H, Vicari S 1988 Three ways to build: The development
process in Japan and Italy. Urban Affairs Quarterly 24:
188–214
Peterson P 1981 City Limits. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago
Pickvance C G 1976 Urban Sociology. St Martin’s, New York
Polsby N W 1970 Community Power and Political Theory. Yale
University Press, New Haven, CT
Reed A 1988 The black urban regime. In: Smith M P (ed.)
Power, Community and the City. Transaction, New Brunswick,
NJ
Saunders P 1979 Urban Politics. Hutchinson, London
Smith N 1991 Une
en De
elopment, 2nd edn. Blackwell, Oxford,
UK
Squires G 1989 Unequal Partnerships. Rutgers University Press,
New Brunswick, NJ
Stoker G 1995 Regime theory and urban politics. In: Judge D,
Stoker G, Wolman H (eds.) Theories of Urban Politics. Sage,
London
Stone C N 1989 Regime Politics. University Press of Kansas,
Lawrence KS
Stone C N 1993 Urban regimes and the capacity to govern:
A political economy approach. Journal of Urban Affairs 15:
1–28
Swanstrom T 1993 Beyond economism: Urban political econ-
omy and the postmodern challenge. Journal of Urban Affairs
15: 55–78
Tabb W, Sawers L 1984 Marxism and the Metropolis. Oxford
University Press, New York
Wirt F M 1974 Power in the City. University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA
Yates D 1977 The Ungo
ernable City. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA
S. S. Fainstein
2374
Community, Social Contexts of
1. From Rural Decline to Globalization
Community denotes first a local government (village,
town, city). Second it conveys social integration—
actual, or desired by the speaker—as in ‘the global
community.’ Community sociology was shaped by
Toennies, Weber, and Durkheim in the late nineteenth
century over concerns for rural decline, industria-
lization, and urbanization. They held that small
communities generated more social integration. These
concerns continue today, but in the post-industrial
word, globalization is reshaping the basic contours of
social life, via global capitalism, worldwide migration,
mass communication, and the Internet (Sassen 1991).
For Weber and Durkheim the community was a
strategic research site for refuting theories of pure
individualism. Today as then, localities are strategic
research sites for huge processes and forces—strategic
first since one can observe global dynamics on a scale
manageable for research. Second, because there are so
many communities, they encourage comparison and
thus scientific generalization.
The massive community research by sociologists in
the twentieth century was shaped more by nineteenth
century concerns than by new global concerns, which
emerged only near 2000. This article considers three
major themes from past community research still vital
today:
(a) individual citizens and the nation;
(b) intermediary groups, like civic associations, and;
(c) new public agendas like environment issues.
All three illustrate transformations of community
processes by global forces that shift power among
participants and redefine the rules of the game.
Weber’s and Durkheim’s concerns continued for
decades across much of the world, sparked by rapid
urbanization and industrialization, which often
brought explosive numbers of migrants to large cities,
escalating crime, and political and social conflicts
between new and old residents.
More abstractly, Weber and Durkheim used local
communities to illustrate collective processes like
shared values, migration, and the division of labor.
They discussed these interrelated processes to arti-
culate a focus for sociology, complementing the
methodological individualism of Adam Smith’s econ-
omics and the political contract theory of Hobbes,
Locke, Bentham, and J. S. Mill.
Durkheim, Toennies, and many others contrasted a
rising and seemingly unbridled individualism of the
city against the socially-integrated (if perhaps ideal-
ized) small town, the Gemeinschaft. In this traditional
community, they suggested, the individual was inte-
grated via deep personal relations with family,
neighbors, and strong institutions, especially churches.
Such ties were broken when people migrated to cities

for new jobs. For George Simmel and Louis Wirth the
city could thus offer ‘Freie Luft’: freedom and cos-
mopolitanism in the sophisticated diversity of urban
life, liberating individuals from local provincialisms.
Many contemporaries, from Baudelaire’s poetry of
alienation to Dreisen’s novels of despair, projected
individualism to radical extremes. Durkheim wrote of
anomie and suicide, and Weber of harshly ascetic
Protestant individualism.
Yet these big hypotheses, which seemed almost
patently obvious when first stated, were surprizingly
often not supported on careful investigation. The
main surprize was discovering tight and powerful
social relations among families and (selected) friends
and new institutions in large cities. Close ties were not
necessarily nearby; they might be miles or a phone call
away; but they were often found when sociologists
looked closely. This ‘rediscovery of the primary group’
emerged in ethnographic studies and later systematic
surveys. Further, many rural residents reported con-
siderable isolation and distrust, when studied closely.
We are still unclear how much has changed, since
more precise research emerged only at the end of the
twentieth century (e.g. Fischer 1982). Thus it may be
that some past small towns demonstrated greater
interconnectedness and value consensus. Still as the
range and depth of studies expand to include rural
persons in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, reports
are common of deep social conflicts and manipulations
paralleling those in large urban areas. I have recently
analyzed citizen reported trust in 34 countries, and
found almost no differences by city size for towns from
2000 up to millions of residents. In just three countries
do residents in the smallest towns report more trust.
(In towns under 2000 inhabitants in the UK and China
and under 10,000 in India, using the World Values
Survey of 80,000 respondents. Item:
‘Would you say that most people can be trusted or
you can’t be too careful in dealing with people.’
Most countries, like the US in Fisher’s results, are
more homogeneous. Still locations vary drastically in
trust and social relations. Why, if not by community
size?
Weak support for earlier hypotheses prompted new
investigations. Most differ from the past by elab-
orating more precise intervening connections, like
civic groups, but still use the community as a strategic
research site to detail impacts of ‘community context’
like residents’ educational level. Stressing context, as
Abbott (1999) suggests, was a key element of Chicago
urban sociology that continues today. We consider
three illustrations of contextual variation in the next
three sections. Transition from the first to the third
illustrates the principle of hierarchy leveling.
2. Citizenship and the Nation State
T. H. Marshall identified ‘citizenship’ as a core con-
cept linking citizens to the nation. He traced shifts in its
Community, Social Contexts of
meaning over two centuries. Every citizen of a nation
has ‘rights’ which rose from minimal to extensive
along with egalitarianism. The national welfare state is
the agency largely responsible for implementing these
rights, which extended employment guarantees, health
care, retirement, and later, children and animal rights.
As they grew, dependence on the locality paled.
Still national centralization varies substantially
across countries. Napoleon declared it illegal for
French citizens to meet publicly or to organize civic
groups; Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany went further
by making everyone a potential police informant, thus
seeking to destroy social ties among all individuals.
Some national leaders pursue such centralization to
control dissent. But centralization springs from other
sources: building on the social contract tradition, the
philosopher John Rawls held that no thorough ega-
litarianism is possible unless all social ties are eli-
minated, including those in families.
This is an extreme form of the common criticism
that community institutions preserve tradition, and
should thus be weakened. In societies with auth-
oritarian leaders and institutions, opposition groups
often seek to level hierarchies through radical egali-
tarian programs. Many left, social democratic-type
parties thus favored national control to level hierarchy
and implement egalitarian citizenship in much of the
twentieth century. Parallel arguments led most north-
ern and eastern European countries to consolidate
their small towns into ‘metropolitan governments,’
consciously eliminating traditional ‘parish-based’
loyalties. Following these and other centralizing poli-
cies, nation states generally rose in power, social
responsibility, and budgets for the past two centuries,
undermining local communities.
The strong nation legacy came under criticism in the
last decades of the twentieth century, as people grew
more affluent, educated, and sophisticated: they criti-
cized national agencies for high costs, inefficiency, and
non-responsiveness to citizens. Support for local
autonomy thus rose. Globalization presses in the same
direction: with more cross-national travel, communi-
cation, investment, and trade, the nation declines in its
abilities to deliver ‘egalitarian’ welfare benefits, since
ideal standards are less national and increasingly
international ‘Human rights’ rises as a new standard.
Yet the world is too large, as are regional entities like
the European Union, to implement specifics. The net
effect is thus to bolster regional and local entities. Still,
why should they work?
3. Searching for Democracy and Trust In Acti
e
Ci
ic Groups
An early critic of Napoleonic state centralization was
Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America in
2375
Community, Social Contexts of
the 1830s contrasted the French state-dependency of
citizens with the rich array of American community
associations. Local civic groups, linked to small and
autonomous local governments, gave (ideally) all
citizens the ability to participate meaningfully in
decisions affecting them. Such experiences built net-
works of social relations and taught the values of
participation, democracy, and trust in fellow citizens.
Parallel ideas have been advanced in research on
organizations, small groups, families, and socializ-
ation: more participation by all generates more social
interaction among peers, and more social skills and
trust. This is achieved better in small units, encour-
aging more focused exchange and meaningful social
contacts. This has similarly led to analyzing specific
types of intermediary groupings, from social classes to
political parties, churches, and business groups.
Large literatures document these basic ideas in
studies of different types of associations, causes and
consequences of greater participation, citizen trust,
and confidence in leaders. Over the twentieth century,
many organizations shifted from the hierarchical and
centralized to the smaller and more participatory. The
community power literature from Floyd Hunter (1953)
to Robert Dahl (1961) and beyond suggests a decline
in the ‘monolithic’ city governance pattern which
Hunter described in Atlanta. In contrast, Dahl docu-
mented a more participatory, ‘pluralistic’ decision-
making process, where multiple participants combine
and ‘pyramid’ their ‘resources’ which affects decisions
in different ‘issue areas’ Dahl’s quoted concepts
highlighted freedom of choice and openness of leader-
ship to popular initiatives. Some 160 studies were
completed seeking to explore implications for Hunter
vs. Dahl’s concepts. Peter Rossi, Robert Crain and
Terry Clark started national comparative research in
1967 with the Permanent Community Sample at the
National Opinion Research Center, University of
Chicago. The same US municipalities were resurveyed
periodically to monitor change. These studies continue
in the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation (FAUI)
Project, which by 2000 included surveys of over 10,000
communities in some 30 countries.
These comparative studies document support
among citizens and leaders for more decentralized,
egalitarian, participation by citizens the world over.
The New Political Culture (Clark and Hoffmann-
Martinot 1998) uses the FAUI data to chart the rise of
new rules of the game for public decisions and building
more active citizen-leader contacts via mechanisms
like focused groups, block clubs, cable-TV coverage of
local associations, and Internet groups. Putnam’s
(1993) related work documents clear differences across
Italian communities, from hierarchical, state control
in the South to Tocquevillian participation in the
North. Fukukyama shows national differences in
citizen trust to follow the pattern Tocqueville pro-
posed: least in counties with national states that
destroyed civic groups (France, Italy, former Soviet
2376
areas), more in countries with active civic groups
(USA, Scandinavia).
Globalization forces have opened more hierarchi-
cally-organized societies to permit civic and political
associations to emerge even if they oppose the national
government. Ethnic separatist groups in Mexico,
Yugoslavia, and former Soviet areas grew more active
via intervention from international human rights
associations, global media coverage of scandals, and
international organizations like the UN and NATO.
The global trend is toward the more decentralized,
participatory patterns of culture, which rekindle local
democracy and civic life.
4. New Mo
ements, Agendas, and Policies:
Greening the World
New Social Movements (NSMs) emerged in the 1970s
to push new agendas: they championed ecology,
feminism, peace, gay rights and other issues that ‘old’
groups and political parties ignored. The NSMs were
initially less formally organized and often used con-
frontational tactics, sometimes even terrorism, gen-
erating the findings that those more organized and
ready to use violence had more impact (Gamson 1975,
1990). More recent work stresses the ‘political op-
portunity structure’ accessible to social movements
(McAdam D, McCarthy J D, Zald M N 1996) or the
more general ‘hierarchical leveling’ propositions in
Clark and Hoffmann-Martinot (1998). For instance in
the 1970s in Italy even Communist and Socialist
parties rejected the new issues; this encouraged radical
tactics including marches and street violence. But
as political parties and governments embraced
many new social issues, the opportunity structure
drastically shifted. Movement leaders then shifted
from ‘urban guerilla warfare’ to participating in
elections, lobbying, and advising governments. This
expanded participation process encourages modera-
ting demands.
In Europe, the national state and parties were the
hierarchical ‘establishment’ opposed by NSMs. In the
US, local business and political elites were more often
targeted. The NSMs demanded more responsiveness
to the environment and to more diverse lifestyles and
ethnic concerns. From the 1970s to 2000, support grew
for the new issues, but explaining why remains
controversial. One interpretation in the US literature
is that business elites redirect agendas toward growth
(Logan and Molotch 1987). Similarly Stone (1989)
held that leadership ‘regimes’ were slanted toward
business. For Peterson (1981) competitive market
capitalism forced all communities to pursue growth by
lowering taxes and welfare-like benefits—or lose resi-
dents and jobs. Business dominance driving a ‘pro-
growth agenda’ was commonly reported in the 1970s
and 1980s, but by the 1990s the rise of new issues led to
questioning past interpretations. Clark and Goetz

(1994) showed that 26 percent of US municipalities
had anti-growth movements in the 1980s, which often
had major impacts: on zoning, limits on size and
number of new building, environmental impact hear-
ings, historic preservation, and sensitivity to amenities
like lakes. If green NSMs won, did business lose?
Logan et al. (1997) reviewed 20 years of studies and
found much less business impact than the growth
machine hypothesis suggested. Similarly, Clark and
Goetz found zero relations between business domi-
nance and environmental policy, although business
leaders did rank as powerful in many US cities. The
resolution of this apparent paradox is that many
business leaders do not promote growth, but support
public agendas which vary across communities, ref-
lecting local concerns.
Behind pressures from NSMs and organized groups
lies the question of why such groups emerge? They are
more common in localities with citizens more highly
educated, reasonable affluent, who work in profes-
sional and technical occupations, where the media are
powerful, and traditional parties, unions, and ethnic
groups are weak (Clark and Hoffmann-Martinot
1998). Individuals with such characteristics similarly
support new agendas, termed a new political culture or
post-industrial politics, in more than 20 countries
where detailed surveys are available (Clark and
Rempel 1997). Inglehart (1997) has argued that such
‘post-modern’ values emerge more powerfully as
income rises, since after material needs are met, then
‘post-materialist’ or post-modern concerns can be
pursued, like democracy, a nicer environment, gay
marriages, or abortion rights.
Note that most of these new agenda issues concern
consumption and leisure more than work and jobs.
Aesthetic and amenity concerns rise—like suburban
sprawl, sports stadiums, and parks. These issues do
not divide people into rich versus poor as did class
politics and party politics for much of the twentieth
century. Rather than national issues like Keynesian
spending or income redistribution championed by
past left versus right (national) political parties, the
new agenda issues are led more by community civic
groups. Indeed the largest US environmental organi-
zation, the Sierra Club, reported that its average
member belonged to seven other environmental org-
anizations, many local. Even in Japan, where NSMs
and local communities are less salient, local ecology
groups were nevertheless the driving force generating
national air and water standards, reversing the normal
centralization (Michio 1997). The agendas of com-
munity civic groups (including block clubs and neigh-
borhood associations) are set more locally through
more general participation, consciously contrasting
with more hierarchical parties and unions—which
alienate many younger activists. Voter turnout for
elections organized by the classical national parties
(which still control local candidate selection in most of
the world) thus declined, while new issue-specific
Community, Social Contexts of
community associations mushroomed in the late
twentieth century.
What about poor and minority groups? Some have
shifted from the classic welfare\redistribution issues
to embrace more civic and individual initiative, albeit
more in the US than traditionally hierarchical societies
(consistent with the leveling proposition). By 2000,
Jesse Jackson, heir of Martin Luther King’s move-
ment, continued civil rights issues through classic
marches and protests, but he added more speeches
advocating self-help and hard work to rise econ-
omically and socially—even publishing a book in 2000
with his politically active son entitled It’s About the
Money: How You Can Get Out of Debt, Build Wealth,
and Achie
e Your Financial Dreams. Broadly analo-
gous, some observers hold, are the dramatic spread
of Protestant evangelism in Latin America and Asia,
even China, based often on a strong self-help message.
Globalization heightens these trends, weakening
traditional agendas and promoting the new issues in
countries that might change slower without inter-
national contact. Local affiliates of NSMs like ecology
groups drew tactics and policies from their inter-
national counterparts, via congresses, newsletters, and
the Internet. Tourism and the media lead citizens to
aspire to consumption standards based more on global
than national standards. With the Cold War over,
global markets increasingly replaced national states.
Left political party leaders the world over often shifted
from class and national issues to these new agendas.
Presidents and Prime Ministers in the US, the UK, and
Germany, illustrated this shift, as did many in Latin
America and Asia, plus countless mayors. The new
agenda thus spread globally, with slogans like ‘think
globally but act locally,’ helping local communities
re-emerge.
See also: Citizenship: Political; Civic Culture; Com-
munity, Expression of; Community Sociology; Durk-
heim, Emile (1858–1917); Globalization and World
Culture; Neighborhood: General; Urban Activity
Patterns; Urban Ethnography; Urban Sociology;
Urban Sprawl; Weber, Max (1864–1920)
Bibliography
Abbott A 1999 Department & Discipline. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Clark T N, Goetz E G 1994 The anti-growth machine. In: Clark
T N (ed.) Urban Inno
ation. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA
Clark T N, Rempel M (eds.) 1997 Citizen Politics in Post-
Industrial Societies. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Clark T N, Hoffmann-Martinot V (eds.) 1998 The New Political
Culture. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
Dahl R A 1961 Who Go
erns? Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT
Fischer C S 1982 To Dwell Among Friends. University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Gamson W A 1990 The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd edn.
Wadsworth, Belmont, CA
2377
Community, Social Contexts of
Hunter F 1953 Community Power Structure. University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
Inglehart R 1997 Modernization and Post Modernization. Prince-
ton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Logan J R, Whaley B R, Crowder K 1997 The character and
consequences of the growth regimes. Urban Affairs Re
iew.
32(5): 603–30
Logan J R, Molotch H L 1987 Urban Fortunes. University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA
McAdam D, McCarthy J D, Zald M N (eds.) 1996 Comparati
e
Perspecti
es on Social Mo
ements. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK
Michio M 1997 Local Power in the Japanese State. University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA
Peterson P E 1981 City Limits. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago
Putnam R D 1993 Making Democracy Work. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ
Sassen S 1991 The Global City. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ
Stone C N 1989 Regime Politics. University Press of Kansas,
Lawrence, KS
T. N. Clark
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Community/Society: History of the
Concept
Community and society are key concepts in so-
ciology and political and historical philosophy. In
antique Greece, community and society were kept
together in one concept χοινωνιhα. The antique Greek
political philosophy did not distinguish between the
institutions of community and society. χοινωνιhα was
translated into Latin as sometimes societas, some-
times communitas without clear distinction. The
synonymity—and the ambiguity—continued with
the oldest Christianity and the scholastic philosophy.
In the eighteenth century the complexity of the
conceptual field around the equivalent terms of
community and society had increased and included
communion, participation, joining, taking part,
sharing, liaison, union, corporation, co-operative,
friendship, brotherhood, fellowship, etc. During the
nineteenth century community and society split up
and became counterconcepts expressing social and
institutional alternatives. The roots of this separation
were already in the eighteenth century. Together with
another, closely connected, couple of counterconcepts,
state and society, they played a crucial role in the
reflection and the theory building in social sciences
with clear ideological and political implications.
With Thomas Hobbes and Baroch Spinoza in the
seventeenth century nature disappears as explanation
of human collectivity. With the exception of the fa-
mily all forms of socialization and communalization
(collegium, corporation, craft, parish, municipality,
partnership, trading company, etc.) were secondary
2378
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
formations within a state federation (ci
itas, res
publica) constituted through a social convention.
Hobbes talked about ‘systems of people, numbers of
men joined in one interest, one business.’ Instead of
the concept of society understood as synonymous with
community a new concept of society emerged based on
a conventional meaning identical to that of the state in
the modern sense of the word.
From the middle of the eighteenth century and
increasingly from the 1850s society and the social were
seen as taking shape between individuals or house-
holds and the political order. Almost all social thought
during this period was preoccupied with con-
ceptualizing the collective entities that emerged within
the ‘social’ in order to describe and analyze their
nature, stability, and ties of cohesion. Besides com-
munity and society, concepts like nation, class, and
culture were suggested. Societies were seen as organ-
ized by division of labor and social interests, by class
struggle, or by cultural-linguistic identity. This was the
more general framework of the debate on community
and society.
John Locke emphasized the transformation from
the traditional view on social relationships, based on
natural right, to the modern thought based on ration-
alism and positive law, and replacing Aristotle’s
teleological view with the functional idea of collective
security. The emphasis on collective security should be
seen in the context of the growing role of private
property. This development, where in political phil-
osophy society became the preferred concept, did not
mean that community disappeared. With the excep-
tion for political economy, where ‘community’ was
narrowed down to trade company, the definition of
society as community remained in everyday language
until the end of the eighteenth century. Immanuel
Kant viewed society, in its context of being based on
reason and conventions among individuals, as a
dynamic totality, the elements of which acted with and
against one another. The ‘unsocial sociality’ (un-
gesellige Geselligkeit) of humans drove them to form
societies. However, this drive towards convention-
based collectivity provoked resistance, and the threat
of the dissolution of the society was permanent. Kant’s
view was in this respect close to the school of English-
Scottish moral philosophers (Adam Smith, David
Hume, and Adam Ferguson).
Kant’s question about a perfect society based on the
free interaction among individuals was taken up by
Johann Gottlieb Fichte at the beginning of the
nineteenth century and put into a historical and
linguistic-critical context. Although Fichte often used
society and community as synonymous terms, he
exposed the two concepts, and that of state, to
linguistical-critical scrutiny observing the prevailing
conceptual confusion.
As far as the German-speaking area is concerned,
around 1800 Johann Gottfried Herder suggested a
distinction between community and society. His point
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7