Whereas traditional sociology was the study of institutions, the speed of social change in contemporary society and the apparent flexibility of social arrangements have meant that sociologists have sought to avoid treating institutions as if they were things, and have looked more towards social processes – that is towards institutionalization, de-institutionalization and re-institutionalization – than towards stable clusters of roles. Institutions may not be reified, but rather treated as maps by which to read social processes.

Community

The term community is one of the most elusive and vague in sociology and is by now largely without specific meaning. At the minimum it refers to a collection of people in a geographical area.

Three other elements may be present in any usage of the term community.

1. Communities may be thought of as collections of people with a particular social structure; there are, therefore, collections which are not communities. Such a notion often equates community with rural or preindustrial society and may, in addition, treat urban or industrial society as positively destructive.
2. A sense of belonging or community spirit.
3. All the daily activities of a community, work and non-work, take place within the geographical area; it is self-contained.

Different accounts of community will contain any or all of these additional elements.

Many 19th century sociologists used a concept of community, explicitly or implicitly, in that they operated with dichotomies between preindustrial and industrial, or rural and urban societies.

Ferdinand Tonnies, for example, in his distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, treats communities as particular kinds of society which are predominantly rural, united by kinship and a sense of belonging, and self-contained. We shall elaborate this later while discussing association.

For many 19th century sociologists, the term community was part of their critique of urban, industrial society. On the one hand, communities were associated with all the good characteristics that were thought to be possessed by rural societies. Urban societies, on the other, represented a destruction of community values. Some of these attitudes persist today. However, it became clear that societies could not be sharply divided into rural or urban, communities or non-communities, and sociologists proposed a rural-urban continuum instead, along which sentiments could be ranged according to various features of their social structure.

There was little agreement about what features differentiated settlements along the continuum, beyond an insistence on the significance of kinship, friendship and self-containment. The community study tradition was also important in its development of techniques of participant observation but has lost favour recently, partly because, as national considerations become important, communities become less self-contained, and partly because urban sociologists have become interested in other problems.