Amitai Etzioni in New Golden Rule (1996) points out that community may be defined with reasonable precision. Community has two characteristics:

1. A web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another (as opposed to one-on-one relationships);
2. A measure of commitment to a set of shared histories and identities – in short, a particular culture.

David E. Pearson (1995) states:

To earn the appellation of “community”, it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily, indeed by definition, coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don’t.

More recently, the term community has been used to indicate a sense of identity or belonging that may or may not be tied to geographical location. In this sense, a community is formed when people have a reasonably clear idea of who has something in common with them and who has not. Communities are, therefore, essentially mental constructs, formed by imagined boundaries between groups (Anderson 2006). An example of this is the nation as a community (for example, ‘Indianness’) and thereby different from other nations even when they could not know personally other members of the imagined community.

The term community continues to have some practical and normative force. For example, the ideal of the rural community still has some grip and we often see town planners aim at creating a community spirit in these designs.

Association

Association refers to any group sharing common purpose or interest.

Ferdinand Tonnies, a German sociologist and a founder of the German Sociological Association, is best known for his distinction between ‘community’ and ‘association’, which he elaborated in Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1887), translated as Community and Association.

Tonnies identified three separate branches of sociology:

1. Pure or theoretical
2. Applied
3. Empirical

The distinction between ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘association’ (Gesellschaft) constituted the core of his theoretical sociology. These ‘fundamental concepts’ were to guide empirical and applied sociology in the study of the transformation of society from communal to associational relationships. Although they are ideal types, Tonnies wanted to use his pair of concepts to describe the historical transformation of society of Germany from a rural to an industrial society.