Community and community development 9783111696287, 9789027975126

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COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

New Babylon

Studies in the Social Sciences

23

MOUTON • THE HAGUE • PARIS

Community and Community Development by

ALLAN D. EDWARDS and

DOROTHY G. JONES

MOUTON • THE HAGUE • PARIS

ISBN: 90-279-7512-4 © 1976, Mouton & Co., The Hague, Netherlands Jacket design by Jurriaan Schrofer Composed by Cédilles, Amsterdam, Netherlands Printed by Krips-Repro bv, Meppel, Netherlands

Contents

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 / THE NATURE OF COMMUNITY Definition of Community The Community as a Social System Social Structure, p. 15 — Interrelatedness and Interaction: Linkages among Individuals, p. 16; Linkages through Informal Groups, p. 16; Linkages through Formal Groups, p. 17; Linkages through Subsystems, p. 18; Potential Barriers .to Community Interrelatedness and Interaction, p. 19 — Norms and Values, p. 21 — Boundary Maintenance, p. 21 — Limitations of Social System Analysis, p. 22. The Dynamic Nature of Community Directions of Community Change: Urbanization, p. 24; Industrialization, p. 30; Modernization, p. 31 — Levels of Modernization: Traditional Communities, p. 33; Modernizing Communities, p. 33; Relatively Modernized Communities, p. 34 — Rates of Community Change, p. 35. Summary Bibliography CHAPTER 2 I COMMUNITY: SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE . Types of Social Groups Informal Groups, p. 42 — Formal Groups, p. 43 Social Stratification Community Social Class Structure: Social Classes in the United States, p. 45; Social Classes in Soviet Russia, p. 48; Social Caste System in India, p. 48; Social Class Subcultures, p. 49 — Community Power Structure: Pyramidal Model of Community Power, p. 51; Pluralistic Model of Community Power, p. 52; Community Characteristics Associated with Different Structures of Community Power, p. 53 — Minority Status, p. 54.

9 11 12 14

23

36 38 41 41 43

Community Subsystems The Family Subsystem: The Extended Family in Traditional Communities, p. 56; The Family in Modernizing and Relatively Modernized Communities, p. 57; Families as a Focus of Community Concern, p. 60 — The Economic Subsystem: The Subsistence Economy of Traditional Communities, p. 62; The Modernizing Economic Subsystem, p. 63; The Economic Subsystem of Relatively Modernized Communities, p. 65 — The Subsystem of Government: Organization of the Governmental Subsystem, p. 67; Participation in the Community's Governmental Subsystem, p. 69 — Religion as a Subsystem: Variations in the Subsystem of Religion by Level of Modernization, p. 71; Community Functions Performed by the Religious Subsystem, p. 72; The Black Church in Communities of the United States, p. 73 — The Education Subsystem: Informal Character of Education in Traditional Communities, p. 75; Development of Formalized Education, p. 75; Education and Social Mobility, p. 80; Community Issues and the Education System, p. 81 — The Social Welfare Subsystem: Mutual Aid in Traditional Communities, p. 82; Formal OrganizationforSocialWelfare,p.83;Services Offered through the Social Welfare Subsystem, p. 86; Values in Social Welfare, p. 87. The Normative Structure of the Community Trend toward Pluralistic Norms, p. 90 — Norms and Values Related to Community Change, p. 90. Summary Bibliography CHAPTER 3 / COMMUNITY: DEMOGRAPHIC AND ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Demographic Features of the Community Population Size, p. 98 — Composition of the Population: Population Pyramid: Portrayal of Population Distribution, by Age and Sex, p. 100 — Birth and Death Rates: Demographic Transition, p. 103 — Patterns of Population Movement: Community Migration: In and Out, p. 104; Mobility within Communities, p. 105. Ecological Features of the Community Processes Producing Spatial Distribution: Community Life Cycle, p. 109; Rhythm of Community Life, p. 109; Ecological Processes, p. 110 — Ecology of Rural Communities: Dispersed Patterns of Settlement, p. 114; Intermediate Patterns of Settlement, p. 115; Nucleated Patterns of Settlement, p. 117 — Ecology of Urban Communities: Ecology of Traditional Cities, p. 124; Ecology of Relatively Modernized Cities, p. 126 — Theories of Urban Growth, p. 131. Summary Bibliography

Contents

7

CHAPTER 4 I THE PROCESS OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT. Definition of Community Development The Value Basis of Community Development The Community Context of Community Development Community Actions Components of a Community Action: Recognition of Need for Action, p. 149; Initiation of Action, p. 151; Study and Diagnosis of the Need for Action, p. 153; Selection of a Goal and Plan for Action, p. 154; Goal Achievement, p. 156; Institutionalization of the Achieved Goal, p. 157 — Variations in Community Actions, p. 159 — Interrelatedness of Task Achievement and Ability to Work Together, p. 161. Summary Bibliography

137 138 141 142 147

CHAPTER 5 I LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Concept of Community Leadership The Leadership Base of the Community Community Power Structure as a Source of Leadership, p. 168 — Social Class Structure as a Source of Leadership, p. 169 — Subsystem Hierarchies as Sources of Leadership, p. 169 — Customers, Clients, or Members of Local Organizations as Sources of Leadership, p. 171 — Individuals with Personal Potential for Leadership, p. 172. Development of Leadership in Community Actions Leadership in Selected Community Actions A Comprehensive Community Action in Vicos, Peru, p. 178 — A Demonstration Community Action in Vadala, India, p. 180 — A Health Service Community Action in Johannesburg, South Africa, p. 183 — A Delinquency-Control Community Action in Bristol, England, p. 186. Summary Bibliography

165 166 167

CHAPTER 6 / COMMUNITY CONFLICT Nature of Community Conflict Definition of Community Conflict, p. 191 — Self-Generating Character of Conflict, p. 192 — Self-Containing Character of Conflict, p. 192 — Double-Edged Role of Conflict in Community Actions, p. 193. Origin of Community Conflict Predisposing Factors: Antagonisms from Previous Conflicts, p. 194; Competition Associated with Differentiated Groupings, p. 195; Feelings of Relative Deprivation, p. 195; Nonresponsiveness of Community Institutions,p. 196; Exclusion from Decision Making, p. 19 7; Variations in Community Susceptibility to Conflict, p. 197 — Precipitating Factors, p. 198. The Course of Community Conflict Spread of Conflict, p. 200 — Intensity of Conflict, p. 202 — Settlement of Conflict, p. 205.

191 191

162 164

174 178

188 189

194

200

Contents

8

Conflict Strategy Procedures Used in Conflict Strategy: Procedures Used by Established Authorities, p. 210; Procedures Used by Protest Groups, p. 212; Procedures Used by Revolutionaries, p. 216 — Evaluation of Conflict Strategy, p. 218. Summary Bibliography CHAPTER 7 I PROFESSIONALS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT The Special Position of Professionals Roles of Professionals Roles of the Community Development Agent, p. 228 — Social Worker Roles: Roles in Continuing or Recurrent Community Actions, p. 230; Roles in Shorter-Range Community Actions, p. 234 — Roles of Planners: Preparing Master Plan, p. 241 ; Preparing Short-Range Plans for Specific Community Actions, p. 242; Planning for New Communities, p. 251; Planning in Rural Communities, p. 254 — Roles of Health Care Professionals: Planning and Coordinating Health Care Services, p. 255 ; Working with Paraprofessionals, Indigenous Workers, and Volunteers, p. 258; Delivering Health Care Services, p. 259 — Roles of Education Professionals: Assisting in Basic Education Projects, p. 260; Assisting in Education Projects for Disadvantaged Persons, p. 261 — Roles of Extension Service Professionals: Promoting Adoption of New Scientific Techniques, p. 264; Helping the People to Take Collective Action, p. 265. Difficulties That Face Professionals Summary Bibliography

208

222 223 225 226 228

267 271 273

CHAPTER 8 I RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT. . Scientific Method and Community Development Research . . . . Unevenness in the Scientific Character of Community Development Research, p. 2 78 — Ways of Increasing the Scientific Character of Community Development Research, p. 279. Types of Community Development Research The Community Survey: Kinds of Community Surveys, p. 282; Assessment of Community Surveys, p. 284 — Action Research: Projects Illustrating Action Research, p. 287; Assessment of Action Research, p. 291 — Project Evaluation: Examples of Project Evaluation, p. 295; Assessment of Project Evaluation Research, p. 300. Summary Bibliography

275 276

302 303

INDEX OF NAMES

305

SUBJECT INDEX

311

280

Introduction

The distinctive feature of this book is its attempt to bring together knowledge about the community and about community development. The community is viewed as a locality-based unit of social organization that still retains a vital role in societal life despite its increasing subordination to, and dependence upon, larger units. Community development is viewed as a process by means of which the people of a community engage in collective action to make or to block some community change. The particular combination of sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of a given community constitutes the setting in which the needs for action arise and from which the potentials for, and limitations on, collective action can be ascertained. The thesis of the book is that understanding of the community is prerequisite to effective application of the community development process in a community action. Stated conversely, this means that lack of understanding of the community impairs effective use of the community development process to the extent that it limits insight into the underlying conditions that generate needs for action, reduces sensitivity to the particular needs for action that are perceived by different segments of community residents, and leads to inaccurate assessments of either the potentials for action or the outcomes that a given action will produce for the different interest groupings in the community as well as for the community as a whole. Efforts made since World War II to enable communities to upgrade the life experiences of their lower-income populations, using extracommunity resources but relying also upon local self-help,

10

Introduction

have absorbed large investments of time and money and civic energy. Yet they have experienced limited success, even widespread failure, in terms of what their participants desired or envisioned. Even when efforts have succeeded to some extent, dissatisfactions within the community have often increased as changes have failed to come as fast or as fully as the people who needed them expected. The assumption here is that lack of success in community actions can be explained, in part at least, by the participants' lack of informed understanding of the community and of the community development process. To help supply that understanding this book brings together in one volume a sociological analysis of the community, an analysis of the community development process, and a tracing out of the interrelation between the two which is clarified with illustrations from actual community action efforts. This sort of information, though enriching for all types of students, is particularly appropriate for students of society, students preparing for careers in the human services, and professional practitioners as well as lay community residents who are, or are interested in becoming, active participants in community action efforts. Both the scope and realism of the book are extended by its cross-cultural orientation; by the fact that its analyses take into consideration variations among communities that are at different levels of modernization — still predominantly traditional, moving toward modernization, and already relatively modernized; and by the fact that it deals with both consensus and conflict approaches to the use of the community development process. The tone of the book reflects the relative neutrality that derives from trying to maintain a scientific stance of precision and objectivity.

CHAPTER 1

The Nature of Community

Functioning within the larger society of which it is a part is a 'grassroots' locality-oriented unit of social organization known as community. The word itself denotes a merging of common habitat, common concerns, and common culture that gives to societal life at the level of the locality a distinguishable form and character. The people of a community do occupy a specific geographic space; they do have enough shared concern to see to it that the means exist for meeting their daily needs; and they do engage in enough collaborative endeavor to provide the order and continuity by which their community can endure, even as patterns of living change and as people come and go. Beyond this core of common attributes, there is wide diversity among communities — rural and urban contrasts and contrasts associated with different levels of modernization. The differences are readily observable in external appearances, for example, in the contrast between a small fishing village with its wooden huts rising on stilts in a cluster above a lagoon and a large industrial city with its skyscrapers, factories, and church spires intermingled across its skyline. On one extreme, there are communities where it takes great expenditure of human energy to achieve even a precarious subsistence, where people live in personalized relationships with one another in accord with sacred traditions that have been handed down for generations. At the other extreme, there are affluent communities where highly specialized personnel using intricate mechanized processes achieve voluminous output of goods and services with little expenditure of human energy, where life is largely formalized and caught up in a network of worldwide interdependencies.

12

The Nature of

Community

It is toward the purpose of establishing a clearer understanding of community life in its myriad variations that the first three chapters of this textbook are directed. This first chapter concentrates on formulating, from a multiplicity of viewpoints on the subject, the definition of community that applies in all the chapters that follow. The community is perceived as a social system containing differentiated, interlinking subsystems and operating through intricate linkages with extracommunity systems. Change is cited as an everpresent phenomenon in community life; and overall trends in community change are recognized as being in the direction of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. Typical characteristics of traditional, modernizing, and relatively modernized communities are enumerated. The two chapters following this one bring the analysis of community to focus on the features of community life — sociocultural, demographic, and ecological — on which some specific information has to be gathered before even minimal understanding of a given community can be achieved. These features, manifested through a particular grouping of people with their particular patterns of culturally-structured social organization in a particular geographic locale, combine to create the distinctive character of a particular community — the setting within which people make use of the community development process.

DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY The term community refers in this textbook to such varied settlements as the plantation, the farm village, the town, and the city. What is common to all of these and what is considered essential to the definition of community used here is that in each case there is a grouping of people who reside in a specific locality and who exercise some degree of local autonomy in organizing their social life in such a way that they can, from that locality base, satisfy the full range of their daily needs. The people's culture will be in many respects like that of the larger society of which they are a part, but it will contain some distinctive elements that arise from the community's particular geographic and demographic features and its unique cultural heritage. Their sense of belonging to the community

Definition

of

Community

13

and its various groups will vary considerably, and it is likely that some of them will even feel alienated from the life of the community. Their cooperation with one another to provide the means for meeting the common needs of daily living does not deny that competition and antagonisms will also be present among them, as is shown in Chapter 6, Community Conflict. The conceptualization of community employed here implies a greater measure of self-sufficiency and a broader locality orientation than are found in smaller units of social organization, such as the household and the neighborhood, and a more limited self-sufficiency and locality orientation than are characteristic of such larger units of social organization as region, nation, and world.1 It does not mean to imply that all the residents of a community in equal degree contribute to, or rely upon, the local activities that make the community a functioning entity. Nor does its indication of selfsufficiency deny either the linkage of the community to the larger society or the interdependence that can, and often does, exist among communities. In including, as four components, people, location in geographic space, social interaction, and common ties, the definition of community used in this text is in line with a majority of the ninety-four definitions of community analyzed by Hillery.2 It also harmonizes with Poplin's idea that in contemporary communities the degree of people's locality identification and commitment to a common core of values may be far from complete as well as with points made by Zentner that: (1) the community is a group structure integrated around goals that derive from the people's collective occupation and utilization of habitational space, (2) members of the community have some degree of collective identification with the occupied space, and (3) the community has a degree of local autonomy and responsibility.3 1. For a similar idea of community occupying a range on a broad continuum of simple to complex social organization, see Gene F. Summers, John P. Clark, and Lauren H. Seiler.'The Revival of Community Sociology', Rural Sociology, 35 (1970): 220. 2. George A. Hillery, Jr., 'Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement', Rural Sociology, 20 (1955): 118-119. 3. Dennis E. Poplin, Communities: A Survey of Theories and Methods of Research (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 21-25; and Henry Zentner, 'The State and the Community', Sociology and Social Research, 48 (1964): 420.

14

The Nature of

Community

This text does not apply the term community to professional or other groups that have communality of interest but no specific locality base — a procedure used by Goode and others; 4 to any formal special-interest organization with or without a definite locality base; or to total institutions, such as prisons and mental hospitals — a practice followed by Clemmer and others. 5 It agrees with Moe in assuming that communities differ from special-purpose organizations in having more diffuse interests, activities, and goals. 6 And it concurs in Hillery's conclusion that the total institution, in spite of its locality orientation and its relative self-containment, is so unlike the village and the city in the staffinmate division of its population, in its specialized structure and functioning, and in its sharply delimited boundaries that, if the term community is applied to villages and cities, it loses its distinctive meaning if it is also applied to total institutions. 7

THE COMMUNITY AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM The social organization of the community has many of the characteristics that social theorists attribute to a social system. 8 This means essentially that the different parts of the community's structure are so interrelated and organized that they operate as a selfpropelling entity. Analyzed from the standpoint of social system theory, the com4. See, for example, William J. Goode, 'Community within a Community: The Professions', American Sociological Review, 22 (1957): 194-200; and Seymour Martin Lipset, et al., Union Democracy (Glencoe: Free Press, 1956). 5. See, for example, Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York: Rhinehart, 1958) and Maxwell Jones, et al., The Therapeutic Community (New York: Basic Books, 1953). 6. Edward O. Moe, 'Consulting with a Community System: A Case Study', Journal of Social Issues, 15 (No. 2, 1959): 29. 7. George A. Hillery, Jr., Communal Organizations: A Study of Local Societies (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 313-346. 8. For other considerations of the community as a social system, see Charles P. Loomis, Social Systems (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1960),pp. 57-128;Irwin T. Sanders, The Community (2nd ed.; New York: Ronald, 1966), especially pp. 23-53; Roland L. Warren, The Community in America (2nd ed.; Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), pp. 135-302; and René König, The Community, trans, by Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 28-29.

The Community as a Social System

15

munity would be found to have a definite social structure; that structure would be sustained through the interdependent interaction of its parts; the interaction would be guided by prevailing norms and values; and the persistence of the community as an entity with distinguishable boundaries would be maintained by the locality-oriented activities of the people and the ties they have with one another through those activities.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The social structure of a community consists of three types of units: individual persons; informal groups, such as friendship and other spontaneous groups; and formal groups, such as schools, churches, businesses, labor unions, and social welfare agencies. The three types of units are patterned into the subsystems of family, economy, government, religion, education, and social welfare. 9 These subsystems constitute the media through which individuals as well as informal and formal groups carry on, with varying degrees of cooperation and competition, the various functions that supply the measure of autonomy and self-sufficiency essential to community life. According to Warren, these functions are: producing-distributing-consuming goods and services; providing socialization for the community's members — particularly persons new to the community by birth or in-migration; exercising social control that secures enough conformity to dominant local norms to maintain a relatively stable way of life; adapting to ongoing as well as unexpectedchanges; and supplying formal and informal arrangements for mutual aid. 10

INTERRELATEDNESS AND INTERACTION

The patterning of the parts of the social structure just described indicates their interrelatedness. This interrelatedness fosters and is 9. The subsystems are localized manifestations of what sociologists identify as society's major social institutions. There could be a different list of them. For example, health and recreation, included here in the social welfare subsystem, could be treated as separate subsystems. 10. Warren, pp. 9-11.

16

The Nature of

Community

fostered by the process of interaction, i.e., the process by which two or more persons or groups communicate with each other. At the community level, interaction may be cooperative or competitive, carried on in good will or fraught with antagonism and hostility; it may be in the context of bargaining or in the contexts of a legally binding, a bureaucratically imposed, or a spontaneously accepted obligation that people assume for one another. 11 It may occur on a routinized basis without particular conscious thought or effort, and it may be initiated in deliberate and calculated design. The channels through which it takes place include face-to-face contacts, telephone conversations, and direct written communications as well as such indirect vehicles of communication as press, radio, and television. Linkages among

Individuals

The interrelatedness among individuals in a community system rests largely on a network of statuses and roles that exist in the various informal and formal groups that are in the community's social structure. Occupants of the different ascribed and achieved statuses play the roles attached to those statuses and thereby interact in established relationships with one another. The roles, in involving some degree of reciprocity, as is suggested in the pairing of such statuses as those of employer and employee, parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and student, evoke a continuity in interaction. Reciprocal role relationships may be primary ones — intimate, personal, and informal — or secondary ones that are more impersonal and formal. As communities increase in size, statuses tend to become more numerous and more specialized, interaction tends to become more impersonal and formally structured, and the individual's various roles increasingly conflict with one another. Linkages through Informal

Groups

Informal groups may not be directly linked to other units in the 11. For analysis along this line, see J o h n E. Bebout and Harry C. Bredmeier, 'American Cities as Social Systems', American Institute of Planners Journal, 23 (May, 1 9 6 3 ) : 66.

The Community as a Social System

17

community social system or they may be linked, for example, through their connections with formal groups that, in turn, are part of a community subsystem. In bureaucratic organizations, so commonplace in urban communities, specific patterns of interaction are prescribed for the hierarchically structured status levels. At the same time, informal and unofficial channels of interaction develop, too, both within and between status levels to provide freer communication around the immediate and personal concerns of the individuals. The norms and goals of the informal groups that form through this unofficial interaction may or may not be consistent with the norms and goals of the bureaucratic organization. The fullest contribution to community integration is probably achieved when official and unofficial norms and goals are in harmony and at the same time harmonize with overall community goals. Linkages through Formal Groups Formal groups in the community system are within one or another of the community's subsystems. Those within a particular subsystem are interlinked with one another to the extent that their individual members belong to different groups within that subsystem, as is the case in the economic subsystem when members of the same labor union work for different businesses, and also to the extent that groups within a subsystem belong to coordinating organizations within that subsystem, as is the case when social welfare agencies belong to a united fund organization. Linkages beyond the subsystem extend into the community through the services that the formal groups provide, through the competition that they have with one another, and through individual and group memberships that overlap with formal groups in other subsystems. Formal groups usually also have linkages outside the community, as a local chamber of commerce is linked with a state and a national chamber of commerce and a local chain store is linked to its national organization. To the extent that members of a community believe that formal groups are pursuing special interests contrary to the interests of the community, community cohesion is impaired. Furthermore, community autonomy is reduced to the extent that local formal groups have their decisions controlled by extracommunity organi-

18

The Nature of

Community

zations or b y e x t r a c o m m u n i t y events, such as a strike or a business recession or enactment of a law.

Linkages

through

Subsystems

The subsystems in a c o m m u n i t y system are interlinked by the way in which they c o m p l e m e n t each other in enabling the m e m b e r s of the c o m m u n i t y to satisfy the full range of their daily needs and to the extent that persons active in one subsystem are also active in, or have interpersonal ties with, other subsystems. As is the case with formal groups, this horizontal linkage exists along with the vertical linkage that the c o m m u n i t y subsystems have with extrac o m m u n i t y systems. B o t h horizontal and vertical linkages tend to be intensified and elaborated in the process of m o d e r n i z a t i o n . 1 2 Especially are links f o r m e d between the c o m m u n i t y and higher levels of government in more and more different areas of community life, constituting channels through which the government supplies financial aid for, and exerts increasing control over, local subsystems. The e x t r a c o m m u n i t y linkages m a y reduce c o m m u n i t y a u t o n o m y ; or they m a y supply the resources a given c o m m u n i t y needs to realize its potentials and assert itself more freely; or they can, as shown in the following case study of Caliente, b e the means for introducing difficulties that, in turn, spread through the community's network of horizontal linkages.

The case of Caliente. The experience of Caliente is similar to that of numerous other communities in which patterns of c o m m u n i t y life have been disrupted as a consequence, in part at least, of the fact that they were linked with a society in which rapid technological changes were taking place. Caliente, a one-industry railroad town in the Southwest region of the United States, had grown up as a railroad division point to service steam locomotives. The e f f e c t s of engineering developments that had earlier lengthened the traveling distance of locomotives and had thereby brought devastating experiences to railroad towns located at shorter distance division points, b y virtue of Caliente's 12. For fuller d e v e l o p m e n t of this idea, see Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 6 5 , 9 0 - 9 3 , a n d 1 0 7 .

The Community as a Social System

19

location increased the demand for servicing in Caliente and boosted the community's economy and economic outlook. The people put in a new water system; established businesses; built homes, school buildings, a theater, a twenty-seven-bed hospital, and a park; and established various civic organizations, including a chamber of commerce. The crisis for Caliente occurred in the mid-1940's when the railroad company substituted diesel engines for steam locomotives and closed its shops in Caliente, since the services provided through them were now virtually obsolete. The action taken by the company represented a decision made outside the community, taken without consulting the residents of Caliente. The efforts of the people to get the action reversed proved to be unsuccessful, as were their efforts to attract new industry to the community. Within Caliente, the effects of the railroad's action spread not only through the community's economic subsystem but through other subsystems as well. Three out of every four men had to look for new jobs, since the use of diesel engines had reduced the overall need of labor. Some workers, such as boilermakers, took jobs as unskilled laborers, since their old skills were now outmoded. Some workers who could get employment elsewhere left the town. Their departure and the declining incomes in Caliente forced many local businesses to close, further reducing opportunities for employment and further increasing the number of persons experiencing lowered income. Many homeowners lost their homes when they could not keep up their payments. Beyond the economic subsystem, the consequences extended to churches, schools, civic clubs, and recreation programs, all of which experienced devastating decline in financial and personal support. 13 Potential Barriers to Community Interrelatedness and Interaction Few communities exhibit the full measure of interrelatedness and interaction that social system analysis tends to portray for them. Instead, community systems generally contain certain conditions that can serve as barriers to interrelatedness and interaction. These 13. W. F. Cottrell, 'Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change', American Sociological. Review, 16 (1951): 358-365.

20

The Nature of

Community

barriers arise around differences among people, for example in race, religion, social class, or ethnic background, when persons on the basis of one or more of those attributes are assumed to be superior or inferior to other people and a complex network of legal and moral norms develops to sustain the ascribed status-differential. The discriminatory practices that result constitute barriers to interaction through such forms as segregation in residential location, schools, churches, employment, transportation, and recreation; exclusion from full political participation; and prohibitions against certain types of social intercourse, such as eating in the same restaurants, attending the same parties, or intermarrying with one another. Though the discriminations probably reflect community prejudice, they are not synonymous with it. 1 4 The barriers of discrimination in communities in South Africa reflect that nation's extreme segregationist apartheid system. The barriers in traditional communities of India arise from caste rules deeply rooted in custom and reinforced by tenets of the Hindu religion. In communities of the United States, racial segregation, legally enforced in some states, was also maintained by informal social customs and practices. In both India and the United States, the legal basis for segregation has been removed; but social pressures to preserve certain features of segregation continue to be effective. The existence of segregation does not necessarily impair a sense of community wholeness if the people agree on, believe in, and live by the rules prescribing the rights and prerogatives of the different groupings and if they dovetail their activities. To the extent, however, that efforts develop to redefine citizen rights and prerogatives, community cohesiveness will be reduced, at least temporarily. In some communities, the segregated groupings of people form subcommunities with their own distinctive life styles and common loyalties. Members of such subcommunities usually interact more readily with one another than on a broader community basis. This may serve to separate them from community participation and 14. For description of the categories of prejudiced discriminators, nonprejudiced discriminators, prejudiced nondiscriminators, and nonprejudiced nondiscriminators, see Robert Merton, 'Discrimination and the American Creed', in Discrimination and National Welfare, Robert M. Maclver (ed.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1949), pp. 99-126.

The Community

as a Social

System

21

reduce their Feeling of belonging to the community, or it may give them a chance to make a distinctive contribution to community life, for example through their distinctive music or food or political ideologies.

NORMS AND VALUES

The form and character that interaction takes in a given situation in a given coriimunity and the particular patterns formed by the various parts of the community system's social structure are, to a large extent, shaped by the system's cultural context. A major source of influence from that context is the community's normative structure, i. e., the standards of expected behavior the people hold up to one another, the penalties and rewards they apply to those who do not and to those who do conform to what is expected, and the judgments of 'right' and 'wrong' they pass on one another. This structure of norms and values provides the guidelines by which stability and order are maintained in the daily round of community life. To the extent that norms and values are consistent and unified around basic beliefs in the purposes and objectives of community life (pursuit of economic goals, for example, or maintenance of a traditional religious system), order and stability are increased. The larger the community and the more complex its social structure is, the more pluralistic its norms and values tend to be and the more likely it is that conflict between different sets of values will occur.

BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE

Particular emphasis is placed in social system theory on the boundary maintaining process by means of which a social system's identity is preserved and its characteristic patterns of interaction are maintained. 15 The three different types of boundaries cited for the community are geographical, psychological, and social. Membership in a community, according to social system theory, 15. See, for example, Loomis, p. 31.

22

The Nature of

Community

would be identified by occupancy of a specific geographic base and by psychological and social ties that are associated with the interaction and interdependence the people experience in community life. In some situations, boundaries and ties are clear-cut and it is possible to tell with precision who the members of the community are. This is usually the case, for example, in plantation and in village-type communities, where people and their activities are clustered and intervening space separates them from other settlements. On the other hand, where there is no open space to mark the boundaries between settlements, delineation is less precise. This situation exists at the periphery of open-country, town-country, and urban communities where settlement is continuous and where there are scattered residents who divide their participation among two or more communities and do not, in a full sense, belong to any community. Legal boundaries do not facilitate delineation when they do not correspond with actual community boundaries. 16

LIMITATIONS OF SOCIAL SYSTEM ANALYSIS

The analysis just made of the community as a social system has moved beyond social system theory, in a sense, each time it has cited community conditions that would be disruptive to a smooth pattern of interrelatedness and interaction. Social system theory has tended to focus on the equilibrium and order that are assumed to prevail among the component parts of a system and either to ignore patterns of organization that would be disturbing to that order or to assume that such patterns are destructive to the system. It remained for conflict theorists to explain that conflict is a normal and ubiquitous feature of community life, which can be constructive as well as destructive in its consequences. 17 The analysis has also moved beyond social system theory by 16. See, for example, Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology (New York: Ronald, 1950), pp. 245-246; 256-258. For a discussion of the delineation of rural communities, see John H. Kolb and Edmund de S.Brunner, A Sociology of Rural Society (4th ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 210-223. 17. See, for example, Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U. Press, 1959); and Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956).

The Dynamic Nature of Community

23

implying at least that the interrelationships within the community system exist because they perform certain functions vital to community life. Social system theory does not deal with this level of analysis per se. It is the role of functional theorists to discover just what functions do have to be performed at the community level to assure a community's viability, by what alternative means those functions can be performed, and which consequences of which functions will be manifest, i. e., obvious and visible, and which will be latent, i. e., unintended and not readily recognizable. 18 The analysis1 in citing the case of Caliente again moved beyond social system theory in focusing on the change aspect of community life. The social change theorists add this dimension of analysis, taking account of the historical roots of community life and tracing out the patterned transformations that communities undergo. 19 This text draws on social system, conflict, functional, and social change theoretical orientations in analyzing the community. Out of this synthesis of perspectives, the phenomenon of community change emerges as a striking feature of the nature of community life.

THE DYNAMIC NATURE OF COMMUNITY The Caliente case showed dramatic and rapid changes taking place in a community. The main impulses for the changes in that case were imposed by an extracommunity system. But there are changes taking place as an ever-present aspect of life in all communities. Generations as well as physical structures come and go, people move in and out, businesses and other organizations change hands, innovations are borrowed or devised locally, features of the natural environment change — gradually or sometimes catastrophically. The community is thus impelled to be adaptive and dynamic or to 18. For fuller discussion of functional theory, see Marion J. Levy, Jr., The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1952), especially pp. 71-76 and 149-197; and Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (rev. ed.; New York: Free Press, 1957), pp. 20-23, 30-36, 60. 19. See, for example, William F. Ogburn, On Culture and Social Change, Otis Dudley Duncan (ed.) (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1964); and Wilbert Moore, Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

24

The Nature of

Community

face the alternative of decline and disintegration. Response in the form of purposive, planned change that uses the community development process, is a means of anticipating as well as achieving adaptation. Two aspects of change considered here are the directions that community change has tended to take and the different rates at which community change occurs. Purposive community change through community development is dealt with in later chapters.

DIRECTIONS OF COMMUNITY CHANGE

Three broad categories of community change can be readily identified. These are the changes involved respectively in the movement of communities toward urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. While these movements do involve many of the same types of changes, they are not identical patterns of change. For example, a community can move toward modernization without actually industrializing, and a rural community can draw on industrial technology and become modern in character without becoming an urban community. In all cases, however, there are likely to be modifications in the size and composition of the population, in the spatial distribution of the people and their activities, in the economic subsystem of the community, and in the community's organizational patterns. Urbanization The transformation of rural into urban communities is a long-term trend that dates back over centuries and that is becoming increasingly accelerated on a worldwide basis. Though in 1970 the majority of the world's population were still living in rural communities (under 2,000 population), the overall trend was toward an increase in the proportion residing in urban communities. 2 0 In the United States, for example, the proportion of population living on farms 20. Homer Hoyt, World Urbanization: Expanding Population in a Shrinking World, Urban Land Institute Technical Bulletin No. 4 3 (Washington, D. C.: Urban Land Institute, 1962), Table 16, p. 49.

The Dynamic Nature of

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25

declined from 33 to less than 5 percent between 1920 and 1971. 21 The pace of urbanization is so rapid that, if recent trends continue, by 1990 half of the world's people will be living in cities of 100,000 or more population. 2 2 Traditionally, the community was a small, self-contained, autonomous, fairly secluded locality grouping within which intimate social interaction and strong communal ties of mutual concern predominated. Its setting was a rural one and the people lived by pursuing some sort of agricultural activities. Successive changes in technology that permitted shifts from human to animal to inanimate (steam and gasoline, for example) sources of energy increased per capita productivity and made it possible for increasingly larger numbers of people to occupy a common geographic locale and to engage in more and more different kinds of occupational activity. Even without industrialization, cities grew up as centers of trade, government, or religious activity. 23 Development of efficient modes of transportation and communication further enhanced people's capabilities for settling in increasingly larger concentrations and at increasingly greater distances from their rural sources of food supply. Along with urbanization, i.e., increase in the number of urban communities and in the numbers of people living in specific urban communities, has gone the spread of urbanism, i.e., a set of life styles and social perspectives more typical of urban dwellers than of residents of traditional rural communities. And the growth of urbanism has been marked by a decline in the communal and the autonomous character of locality. Increasing numbers of people play roles that are less roles in community life than they are roles in some large-scale bureaucratic organization or some special-purpose association whose basic goals and policies are determined outside the community. Fewer and fewer economic, political, and

21. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Farm Population (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, May, 1972), p. 1. 22. Kingsley Davis,'The Urbanization of the Human Population', in Urbanism in World Perspective, Sylvia Fleis Fava (ed.) (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), p. 33. 23. For a clear analysis of what a city is like without industrialization, see Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: Free Press, 1960).

26

The Nature of

Community

other types of decisions highly relevant to the locality are being made at the locality level. Such loss of communality and autonomy and sense of belonging has been judged by some writers to represent the loss of the essential nature of the community. 2 4 Even though new modes of organizing social life have emerged with urbanization, such as bureaucracy and government centralized at levels broader than the level of locality, and even though people may not have primary loyalty to an urban community in the fashion typical in the traditional rural community, it is the conclusion of this text that urbanization does not destroy the opportunity for, or the reality of, meaningful social organization and interaction within the locality context. The rural-urban continuum. In an attempt to discover more precisely the changes that do take place in the transition from rural to urban, sociologists have collected and analyzed research findings around the idea of a continuum. The concept of a rural-urban continuum assumes that there are identifiable 'rural' and 'urban' characteristics that are associated with population size and that vary in degree as size changes by gradations from 'very small' to 'very large'. In reality, the configurations of characteristics currently used to differentiate rural from urban are most consistent toward each of the polar extremes, whereas along the middle range of the continuum a given community might fit at one place on the basis of some of the characteristics and at different places on the basis of other characteristics. A community near the rural polar extreme, like the folk community described by Redfield, is a small, isolated, relatively homogeneous, inward-looking, nonliterate, closely knit social unit having low density of population, minimal division of labor, and an economy of self-sufficiency. 25 Its social relationships, social values, 24. See, for example, Baker Brownell, The Human Community: Its Philosophy and Practice for a Time of Crisis (New York: Harper and Row, 1950); and Robert A. Nisbet, Community and Power: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1962). 25. Robert Redfield, 'The Folk Society', American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1947): 293-308. The concept of 'folk' was earlier examined by Redfield in his book Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1930). For critiques of the folk-urban continuum, see Horace Miner, 'The Folk Urban Continuum', American Sociological Review, 17 (1952): 529-537; and Hillery, Communal Organizations, pp. 186-187.

The Dynamic Nature of

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27

and social organization fit closely the model of Gemeinschaft described by Tonnies. For example, most relationships are traditional and personal, cemented by the people's agreement upon the common values and norms that govern their lives and that have been handed down for generations. A strong sense of kinship prevails among the members of the community, who share one another's joys and good fortunes as well as their sorrows and hardships. Neighborliness so pervades interpersonal relationships that even 'business dealings' cannot become entirely calculative or contractual. Each person's membership in the community is viewed as 'natural' and is something that can be expected to last a lifetime because of the emotional meanings it has for other community members as well as for the individual. 26 Few, if any, contemporary communities have the degree of isolation, autonomy, and self-sufficiency implied for the community at the rural polar extreme. In varying degrees, and increasing as the level of modernization of their society increases, rural communities of the mid-twentieth century are being drawn into greater interdependence with the modern mass society. Although one effect of that interdependence is to reduce traditional rural-urban contrasts, smaller communities still differ markedly from larger ones. A community near the urban polar extreme has a population ranging into the millions; its efficient means of communication and transportation keep it in contact with other urban centers over the world as well as with a wide-ranging rural hinterland; its population contains diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups; and its elaborate division of labor is associated with highly differentiated, specialized, and interdependent roles; its residents are largely literate, and their participation in community life is more through a multiplicity of bureaucratized special-interest organizations than through the family. This Gesellschaft kind of social organization goes along with relationships and values that are predominantly 26. Ferdinand Tonnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, trans, and ed. by Charles P. Loomis as Community and Society (Lansing: Michigan State U. Press, 1956), especially pp. 33-35. For a critical evaluation and suggested revision of the Tonnies formulations, see Marion J. Levy, Jr., 'A Revision of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft Categories and Some Aspects of the Interdependences of Minority and Host Systems', in Internal War, Harry Eckstein (ed.) (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964), pp. 233-266.

28

The Nature of

Community

formal, impersonal, and secular in tone. Behavior is governed mainly by rationally devised conventions and enacted laws, and individuals tend to be judged objectively by the efficiency with which they carry out their duties rather than on the basis of their ascribed status. Empirical data that tend to substantiate the rural-urban continuum concept have come from such studies as those of Redfield, Duncan, Yuan, and Hillery. Redfield and his associates studied four Yucatan (Mexico) communities of different size — Tusik, Chan Kom, Dzitas, and Merida — and found successive and continuous differences urbanward in the direction of increasing heterogeneity of culture and of population as well as increasing division of labor, mobility, impersonality, formality, secularization, and emancipation from family controls. 27 Duncan, using data on communities of the United States, related size of population as the independent variable to fifteen dependent variables that he grouped into three configurations: (1) characteristics defining urbanism, i.e., population per square mile, percent of employed males in farm occupations, percent nonwhite, and percent foreign-born white; (2) demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, i.e., percent male, percent 65 years old and over, intracounty mobility rate, percent high school graduates, whitecollar workers as percent of all nonfarm workers, and median income; and (3) family characteristics, i.e., percent males and percent females in the labor force, fertility ratio, and average size of primary families. For the variable of population size, he ranked communities in declining order from populations of 3,000,000 or more down through incorporated places of 1,000 below which he placed nonfarm rural population and then farm nonvillage rural population (neither of which was broken down by size). The fact that the variables tended to increase or decrease with variations in population size and the fact that their change showed no sharp breaking point between rural and urban led Duncan to conclude that his data gave general support to the hypothesis of a rural-urban continuum. But the fact that the variation in certain instances was not continuous or consistent convinced him that variables other 27. Robert Redfield, 'Culture Changes in Yucatan', American gist, 36 (1934): 68-69.

Anthropolo-

The Dynamic Nature of

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29

than population size must be taken into account in predicting ruralurban differentials. 28 D. F. Yuan, employing Duncan's general approach with data on Taiwan, used the two variables of population size and administrative classification (municipality, town, and village) as the basis for placing communities between the two polar extremes of municipalities having a population of 500,000 or over and villages having a population of under 5,000. When he examined his continuum in terms of eight basic characteristics defining urbanism, he found it to be predictive of such characteristics as population density, community dependence on agriculture, ethnic heterogeneity, population mobility, and occupational composition of the labor force. 29 This study suggests that adding variables other than size does increase the precision with which communities can be differentiated. Starting without a definite theory, Hillery developed a community model based upon studies of ten folk villages and five cities and checked his model against classical continuum theories. In general, his findings support the continuum hypothesis, but they also suggest the following modifications: communities at the folk end of the continuum do not uniformly exhibit the homogeneity that Redfield cited, but instead may contain people of different races, religions, occupations, and social status; family organization in the urban community is not entirely replaced by individual contractual relations, even though the family's dominance may be reduced and its functions shared with other institutions; and communities at any point on the folk-urban continuum can vary sharply in the degree to which status is emphasized, from open-class to caste-like status structures. 30 While further empirical research is needed to find out which community characteristics co-occur and vary together in communities that are at different intervals all along the rural-urban continuum, the research that has been done generally confirms that 28. Otis Dudley Duncan, 'Community Size and the Rural-Urban Continuum', in Cities and Society, Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (eds.) (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 35-45. 29. D. F. Yuan, 'The Rural-Urban Continuum: A Case Study of Taiwan', Rural Sociology, 29 (1964): 247-260. 30. Hillery, Communal Organizations, pp. 186-187.

30

The Nature of

Community

such a continuum does exist and that it provides more accurate portrayal of community life than a concept that dichotomizes rural and urban. Industrialization Another pattern of change, which has characteristically been associated with changes toward urbanization, though, as already noted, urban communities can develop without it, is the pattern involving changes that take place when a community industrializes. Despite the fact that industrialization is essentially a process that begins and has its main focus in the economic subsystem, its effects tend to spread along the network of linkages among all the other subsystems. The changes are so radical and far-reaching that they have been widely referred to as the Industrial Revolution. This Revolution has been spreading to increasing numbers of communities over the world since it first occurred in some communities of Western Europe in the late 18th century. Basic changes are from hand labor to use of machinery in production and from centralizing manufacturing processes in the home to centralizing them in factories. The cost of equipment and buildings usually necessitates the accumulation of sizable amounts of capital. Work for wages tends to displace subsistence-type occupational activities, and marked differentiations in income and life styles tend to develop between the workingclass members of the community and the owners and managers of the industries. As automated processes increase, the demand for skilled workers increases and the demand for unskilled workers decreases; levels of living rise for virtually all members of the community, but especially for those with the skills and training needed in manufacturing, service, and professional occupations. Such special-purpose organizations as labor unions and corporations develop in number and in power. Hours of work become shorter and more rigidly scheduled than is the case in noncommercialized agricultural communities. Dependence upon resources and markets becomes intensified. Generally speaking, if any change toward industrialization takes place in a community, industrial lifeways eventually win out over traditional lifeways and there is no return to the preindustrial way of life.

The Dynamic Nature of

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31

Modernization Most of the changes that occur in urbanization and industrialization combine with other changes to constitute the process of modernization. The general character of the overall change pattern at different levels of modernization is described later in this chapter. At the community level, modernization typically involves changes that take place in the direction of: increasing size of community in both population and land area; increasing economic productivity based upon increasing use of inanimate sources of energy and increasing specialization of economic activities and occupational roles; increasing involvement in a market economy; increasing geographic and social mobility of community residents that reflects their being increasingly freed from traditional bonds and restraints; increasing use of increasingly efficient modes of transportation; rising levels of education among the community's people; increasing exposure of community residents to radio, newspapers, television, and other mass media of communication; increasing numbers of special-purpose organizations in all the different subsystems of the community and increasing numbers of persons who participate in such organizations; increasing numbers of community members who take part in both local and extracommunity political activities, such as voting, running for office, holding public office, and serving as members of decision-making bodies; increasing diversity in the roles that people play in the community and in connection with extracommunity activities; increasing pluralism in community norms and values; and increasing interdependence of the community's subsystems with one another and with extracommunity systems. 31

31. For fuller discussion of the concept of modernization, see Marion J. Levy, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), 1 , 1 1 , 3 5 - 1 2 9 ; Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958), pp. 4 6 , 50-51, 61-64; Cyril Edwin Black, 'Change as a Condition of Modern Life', in Modernization, Myron Weiner (ed.) (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 17-27; Marion J. Levy, Jr., 'Social Patterns (Structures) and Problems of Modernization', in Readings on Social Change, Wilbert E. Moore and Robert M. Cook (eds.) (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1967), pp. 189-208; and Chandler Morse, et al.,Modernization by Design (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1969), especially pp. 34-382.

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The Nature of Community

LEVELS OF MODERNIZATION

Three different levels, or 'bench marks', of modernization are used in this text as a basis for differentiating among communities. These are: (1) the level before changes toward modernization have been initiated or have made enough headway to alter the traditional character of the community; (2) the level at which changes toward modernization are occurring on a broadening scale but have not yet displaced many of the features of community life that prevailed before those changes started; and (3) the level at which changes toward modernization have achieved a high degree of development and have displaced or modified most, if not all, of the traditional features of community life. The labels 'relatively nonmodernized' and 'traditional' are applied to communities at the first level; the label 'modernizing' to those at the intermediate level; and the label 'relatively modernized' to those at the next level. The qualification 'relatively' is intended to communicate the ideas that communities differ in the degree to which they have the traits that represent modernization and that individual communities at any level of modernization can have some traits that are more typical at another level, i. e., there are no absolutely traditional or absolutely modernized communities as would be predicted by a strict interpretation of a unilinear theory of community change. 3 2 On a societywide basis, communities in Australia, Canada, J a p a n , New Zealand, the United States, and the European countries would generally be placed toward the relatively modernized pole of the continuum. Communities in Africa, Asia (other than J a p a n ) , and Latin America would more likely be placed toward the relatively nonmodernized pole or in the intermediate range of modernizing. These distinctions, however, are only gross ones; and there may be considerable variation in degree of modernization among communities in the same country as well as in communities of different countries. Steady development of technologies that facilitate communication, transportation, and economic productivity and the dynamic responsiveness of community life are factors that help to 3 2 . For fuller discussion of the relative nature of m o d e r n i t y , see J o s e p h G u s f i e l d , 'Tradition a n d M o d e r n i t y : Misplaced Polarities in the S t u d y of Social Change', American Journal of Sociology, 72 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 3 5 1 - 3 6 2 .

The Dynamic Nature of

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33

explain the general worldwide changes toward greater and greater degrees of modernization. Traditional

Communities

Communities that have not experienced some change in the direction of modernization are extremely rare. Those that do exist are most likely in very isolated locations, and they are also likely to be small both in population numbers (several hundred, for example) and in land area. Their sociocultural characteristics can be expected to bear a close resemblance to those of the folk community described by Redfield, especially those of Tusik — the isolated tribal village he identified as being closest to the folk polar extreme (see above, pp. 26-27). The family subsystem will probably be dominant, the other subsystems differentiated from it in only rudimentary fashion. Members of the community will most likely get their values from the family, what they do and do not do will reflect directly on the family, and in all probability the main concern of most of them will be to do what the family and the family's tribal unit want them to do for the 'best interest' of the community. The various sociocultural facets of community life will be closely interwoven into a consistent whole and permeated with an aura of sacredness that evokes respect and awe. The people of the community, like those in Zimmerman's localistic communities, will consciously seek to meet one another's needs and will very likely exhibit attitudes of fear and suspicion toward both outsiders and proposals for change. 33 Modernizing

Communities

Modernizing communities, especially in the early years of their change toward modernization, usually exhibit a mixture of old and new lifeways. Rational, scientific ideas and practices are likely to be intermingled with traditional ways of dealing with community situations that defy rationality and efficiency. For example, 33. Carle C. Zimmerman, The Changing Community and Row, 1938), p. 108.

(New York: Harper

34

The Nature of

Community

medicinemen will probably be plying their ancient craft close by, and possibly in competition with, highly trained professional physicians. Modern factories will probably have been established, but workers will likely not have become habituated to following the unfamiliar regimentation of work schedules that factory labor is normally expected to follow. Some members of the community may be affluent enough to accumulate capital that could be invested in establishing new industries, yet still so bound in traditional thoughtways that they do not make such investments. Norms and values will be undergoing change and becoming less clear-cut and authoritative. For instance, emphasis on individualism in pursuing an occupation or in choosing a marriage partner may be increasing, while concern for familistic and collectivistic interests may be decreasing. Levels of living will be rising, though perhaps not as rapidly as community members expect them to; and, as indicated in Chapter 3 in the discussion of the demographic transition, a sharp decline in death rates coupled with continuing high birth rates will be producing sudden and considerable population increase. The rise in levels of living will be associated with increased use of machinery and higher per capita productivity. Occupational roles will be becoming more diversified and specialized, and the people's dependence upon one another for different kinds of goods and service will be greater. Religious sentiments and motivations will be less pervasive than formerly, and the family subsystem's domination of community life will be giving way before the rising dominance of the economic and governmental subsystems. Relatively Modernized

Communities

Relatively modernized communities are like those described above for the urban pole of the rural-urban continuum. Community life in them can be expected to have a highly secular character; occupational roles will likely be highly differentiated and specialized; employment rates will probably be high, especially in service occupations, but unemployment and underemployment rates will probably be rising, particularly among those persons in the community who do not have the credentials of formal education or technical skill demanded in highly technical and automated occupational activities; levels of living, including levels of education, will be gener-

The Dynamic Nature of

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35

ally high. The budding orientation toward individualism noted for modernizing communities will probably have reached high proportions; anonymity will be an experience that nearly anyone can know; alienation and loneliness will be multiplied; reliance upon informal measures of social control will, to a large extent, have given way to formal ones. Fuller details on the differences among communities at the different levels of modernization are given in Chapters 2 and 3.

RATES OF COMMUNITY CHANGE

The changes that take place as communities urbanize, industrialize, and modernize vary in speed from one community to another, from one period of time to another in the same community, and among the different facets of community life in a particular community at a particular time. As a rule, the more isolated a community is from exposure to outside lifeways, the slower its tempo of change tends to be. An extremely isolated Manus community in the Admiralty Islands had changed so slowly that when Mead studied it in 1928 she considered it typical of the 'Stone Age' in its culture. By the time she studied the community twenty-five years later, after it had been exposed to outside contacts — especially contacts with military personnel stationed there in World War II — its culture had, she concluded, been transformed from Stone Age to twentieth-century character.34 Within a period of six years, through a community action initiated by a team of Cornell anthropologists, the indigenous people of the remote Peruvian community of Vicos changed substantially the traditional life styles that had prevailed there for generations. The major changes were toward more active participation of the people in community life, more scientific farming practices, and more modern health care and educational services.35 34. Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation — Manus, 1928-1953 (New York: Morrow, 1956), pp. 8; 450-453. 35. Allan R. Holmberg, 'Changing Community Attitudes and Values in Peru: A Case Study in Guided Change', in Social Change in Latin America Today, Richard N. Adams, et al. (eds.) (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 63-107. For more detailed discussion of the Vicos project in this text, see Chapters 5 and 8.

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The Nature of Community

On a broader scale, the gradual, cumulative changes by means of which communities in Western society t o o k two centuries to make the transition f r o m an agrarian to an industrial way of life have been replaced in increasing numbers of communities in relatively nonindustrialized countries of the world by more rapid, centrally planned changes. These changes may be a part of nationalistic political movements or of nationally-sponsored 'community developm e n t programs'. 3 6 Mainly since World War II, though beginning around 1880, even the most isolated rural communities in J a p a n have, according to Norbeck, become an integral and interdependent part of that country's industrialized, urbanized economy — their farming enterprises increasingly specialized and mechanized. 3 7 Similarly, nonliterate peasant communities in Soviet Russia have, since 1917, been widely transformed through government control and planning into communities that engage in commercialized farming enterprises and have life styles more nearly like those in urban communities. 3 8 As communities undergo overall types of change, it is likely that the specific changes taking place in the different facets of community life will take place at different rates. For instance, population may increase faster than f o o d supply or housing or medical care or police protection; the people may increase the number of automobiles they use faster than they develop parking places to put t h e m ; and the people's ways of using up the natural environment may develop faster than their interest in conserving it. These uneven rates of change o f t e n give rise to c o m m u n i t y needs that, as shown in later chapters of this text, become the targets of community action efforts.

SUMMARY The c o m m u n i t y is a grouping of people in a given locality whose 36. Morse, et al., pp. xi-xii. 37. Edward Norbeck, Changing Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 12. 38. Alexander Vucinich, 'Soviet Ethnographic Studies of Cultural Change', American Anthropologist, 62 (1960): 867-877.

Summary

37

culturally-structured social organization is distinctive in its potentiality for providing the means for meeting the full range of daily needs. Degrees of local autonomy and of interdependence with the larger society show considerable variation from one community to another and from one time to another in the same community. There are also wide variations among communities in size, population composition, age, sociocultural characteristics, and geographic setting. Analysis of the community as a social system throws light upon the interrelatedness of the individuals, informal groups, and formal groups that compose the community's social structure and upon the interaction by means of which individuals and groups through the subsystems of family, economy, religion, government, education, and social welfare carry on, under a prevailing structure of norms and values, the locality-relevant activities that maintain the community as an identifiable social entity. Functional, conflict, and social change theoretical orientations enlarge the social system analysis of community by identifying the functions that have to be performed to assure a community's viability as well as the manifest and latent consequences that derive from specific functions; by recognizing conflict as a normal feature of community life that can exert constructive as well as destructive influences; and by tracing out from their historical roots the patterned changes that communities experience. The dynamic nature of the community is revealed in the changes that take place continually in community life, for example as people and physical structures come and go, as well as in patterned changes in technology, social organization, artifacts, normative values, demographic characteristics, and ecological features that occur in three major processes of change, i. e., toward urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. Though urbanization, industrialization, and modernization involve many of the same types of changes, the three processes are not identical. A community can move toward modernization without actually industrializing, and a rural community can draw on industrial technology and attain modern character without becoming an urban community. The changes that characterize a community's move toward modernization are typically in the direction of: increasing size of both

38

The Nature of

Community

area and population; greater economic productivity based upon increasing use of inanimate sources of energy and increasing economic specialization; increasing involvement in a market economy; increasingly efficient modes of transportation and communication; rising levels of education; increasing spread of political participation; increasing exposure to mass media of communication; increasing numbers of special-purpose organizations as well as increasing numbers of persons who participate in such organizations; increasing geographic and social mobility; increasing heterogeneity of roles and cultural norms and values; and increasing interdependence of community subsystems with one another and with extracommunity systems. Three different levels of modernization that can be used to differentiate among communities are: (1) the level before changes toward modernization have altered the traditional character of the community; (2) the level at which traditional lifeways coexist with changes being made toward modernization; and (3) the level at which changes toward modernization have virtually displaced traditional features of community life. This text applies the labels 'traditional' ('relatively nonmodernized'), 'modernizing', and 'relatively modernized' to the three different levels respectively and uses the three-level differentiation throughout the later chapters. Rates of community change vary from one community to another, from one period of time to another in the same community, and among the different facets of community life in a particular community at a particular time. The uneven rates of community change tend to produce community needs that become targets for community action efforts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hillery, George A., Jr. Communal Organizations. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968. An attempt to derive an empirically based theory of community from a cross-cultural analysis of selected community studies of ten folk villages and five cities. The author checks several well-known continuum theories against the findings of his analysis. Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society. Glencoe: Free Press, 1958. An analysis of the process of modernization in six countries of the Middle

Bibliography

39

East supplemented by an analysis of statistical data from 73 other countries to provide a world perspective. Loomis, Charles P. Social Systems. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960. Social system differentiation of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft community types. Miner, Horace. 'The Folk-Urban Continuum', American Sociological Review, 17 (1952): 529-537. Evaluation of various criticisms of the folk-urban continuum. Poplin, Dennis E. Communities: A Survey of Theories and Methods of Research. New York: Macmillan, 1972. A succinct summary and evaluation of theories relating to the community as a unit of social organization. Redfield, Robert. Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1930. Report of the field study in which the concept of 'folk' was first examined. Redfield's detailed description of folk society is his article "The Folk Society', American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1947): 293-308. Sanders, Irwin T. The Community. 2nd ed.; New York: Ronald, 1966. An analysis of the community as a social system, rich in descriptive detail. Sjoberg, Gideon. The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. New York: Free Press, 1960. An elaborate description of the preindustrial city and of the ways in which it differs from the industrial city. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1st ed. 1887). Trans, and ed. by Charles P. Loomis as Community and Society. Lansing: Michigan State U. Press, 1956. A classic delineation of society into opposite polar types of social organization. Warren, Roland L. The Community in America. 2nd ed.; Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972. The most comprehensive attempt, to date, to apply social system analysis to the contemporary American community. (ed.). Perspectives on the American Community. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966. A book of readings that deal with the nature of the community and community change.

CHAPTER 2

Community : Socioculturai Perspective

The distinctive character of a particular community and the specific setting in which community development occurs can be analyzed in terms of three interrelated sets of variables — sociocultural, demographic, and ecological. This chapter views the community from the sociocultural perspective and deals with variables of social organization and culture. The next chapter takes first the demographic and then the ecological perspective to trace out respectively the kinds of population information and the kinds of information about the people's spatial relationships within their geographic locale that make the community as a whole more understandable. The social system analysis of community presented in Chapter 1 has already indicated in a general way the principal sociocultural features of community life. Examined here in greater detail are: the informal and formal groups within which the people of a community carry on activities that have community wide relevance; the social stratification patterns by which the people are differentiated into social class and power hierarchies; the subsystems through which the people perform continuing, regularized functions in the spheres of family life, economic activities, government, religion, education, and social welfare; and the prevailing structure of norms and values that supply the guidelines for the people's social interaction and institutionalized activities.

TYPES OF SOCIAL GROUPS The residents of a community identify with their locality and par-

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Perspective

ticipate in its activities through the recurrent interaction they have within social groups. The groups vary in size, degree of intimacy, the extent to which their members share common values and responsibilities, the relative specificity or generality of their reason for being, and the length of time they endure. Membership in some groups, such as the family of orientation, is usually automatic; in many groups, it is voluntary; in certain groups of school age children it may be compulsory; and, in certain cases, it follows automatically from membership in some other group, as happens for example when membership in the work group of a unionized factory leads automotically to membership in a labor union. Regardless of the method of induction and regardless of the individual's degree of identification with the group, the members of a group have a special relationship with one another that unites them as a social unit and excludes all nonmembers.

INFORMAL GROUPS

An informal, or primary, group forms around interpersonal relationships that are meaningful to its members regardless of the activities in which they are engaged or any goals that may be achieved. The group is limited in size to the degree that it permits intimate and personalized interaction. It is likely to be characterized by strong bonds of loyalty and heavy dependence of its members upon one another for emotional satisfactions. The family, even though it is socially defined in mores or laws, functions generally as an informal group in the intimacy and meaningfulness of the relationships among family members. Informal groups that are composed of persons of similar ages and interests are termed peer groups. Such groups, according to Riesman, constitute the single most important influence on behavior in relatively modernized communities. 1

1. David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Crowd (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1950), p. 36.

Lonely

Social

Stratification

43

FORMAL GROUPS

Formal groups, such as labor union locals, business firms, and country clubs, differ from informal groups in that they have an officially established organization structure in which relationships and responsibilities are to some extent prescribed. Since formal groups may rely upon impersonal and official means of communication, they can function with much larger numbers than is true for informal groups. Large-scale formal organizations usually have a bureaucratic structure, i.e., a rationally systematized hierarchical arrangement of positions for which qualifications, responsibilities, and authority are specifically prescribed and the functioning of which is governed by clearly stated official procedures that provide for continuity of operation and security of tenure. Informal groups tend to arise within formal organizations and may either facilitate or obstruct the attainment of organizational goals. 2 As communities move toward modernization their relatively small number of formal organizations, which characteristically perform general functions and use personalized and informal procedures, give way to increasingly larger numbers of diverse kinds of narrowly specialized organizations that operate on an impersonal basis and make use of professional personnel. Rural communities that are relatively modernized are likely to have fewer and less varied formal groups than is the case with urban communities. The formal groups they have are, as is the case in urban communities, increasingly likely to be affiliated with regional, state, or national organizations through which community residents are linked with the larger society.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION The groups in a community and all persons in the community are 2. See, for example, Charles H. Page, 'Bureaucracy's Other Face', Social Forces, 25 (1946): 90-91; and Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1939), especially Part 4, a description of the well-known Hawthorne studies. For study of formal organizational structure, see Peter M. Blau and Richard A. Schoenherr, The Structure of Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

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Perspective

ranked on the basis of such variables as social prestige and power. The social prestige ranking is linked directly with the community's social class structure, i. e., a hierarchical arrangement of different social classes, each class containing people who associate as social equals, share a distinctive style of life, and have about the same relationship of subordination or superordination to any higher or lower social classes. The ranking on the basis of power is associated with the hierarchies of positions in the community's economic, governmental, religious, education, and social welfare subsystems in such a way that occupants of higher-level positions have greater capacity for influencing decisions on communitywide matters than is true for occupants of lower-level positions. Generally speaking, the rankings that community residents have in the social class and power hierarchies correspond closely, but the correspondence is far from perfect. For example, there may be people in the community who rank higher in the social class than in the power hierarchy because the prestige of their family background persists even though they have lost their wealth and their political influence. The degree of difficulty people experience in moving from one level to another in the social class and power hierarchies shows considerable variation among communities and from one time to another in the same community. Open-class social systems theoretically encourage social mobility, as do democratic political systems and free enterprise economic systems. Closed-class, or caste systems, on the other hand, stress ascribed status and assume that people should stay in the social, political, and economic situation into which they are born. In industrialized and industrializing countries, social class and power differentials are being reduced somewhat by specific government efforts to eliminate discrimination and to redistribute wealth and income through such measures as progressive taxation, social security, and provisions for social services. Soviet Russia and other Communist countries have gone even further in trying to eliminate differentials by sharply reducing private ownership of the means of production and by providing exceptionally comprehensive services. 3 3. T. B. Bottomore, Classes in Modern Society (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 4-6.

Social

Stratification

45

Establishment of new industries in a community usually expands the social class and power hierarchies at their middle levels and shrinks them at their lower levels. A wide range of job opportunities in middle-level white-collar and skilled occupations opens up both in the new industries and in a variety of auxiliary transportation, trade, and service industries. Professional, managerial, and technical positions £ilso increase in number. Persons in these positions tend to displace some or all of the established leaders in the local power hierarchy.

COMMUNITY SOCIAL CLASS STRUCTURE

Some sort of social class structure, whether based upon socially inherited privileges and a virtually unchangeable hierarchy of ranks or upon a much more alterable and amorphous pattern of social strata, is found in all communities regardless of their level of modernization. The literature on social classes reveals agreement on the point that a social class hierarchy is part of the reality of community life. But, beyond this point, there is considerable lack of agreement, for example, on identifying just what criteria separately or in combination accurately differentiate the social strata and on specifying what procedure provides an accurate means of sorting community residents into the social classes to which they belong. The greatest difficulties probably arise in trying to differentiate strata within the broader categories of upper, middle, and lower — especially within the broad middle category. To whatever extent class lines cannot be delineated accurately, it is not possible to get precise information about the different sociocultural, demographic, and ecological conditions that characterize each different stratum. The limitations that inhere in the difficulties of making exact assignments of social class standing are implicit in the following descriptions of the social class structures of communities in the United States, Soviet Russia, and India. Social Classes in the United States Social classes in communities of the United States are part of an open-class system, which means that movement upward or down-

46

Community:

Sociocultural

Perspective

ward from one social class level to another is considered possible and does take place. Such movement requires resocialization in the life style, norms, and values of the social class into which movement is made and the loosening of ties with the social class from which movement occurs. To the extent that a community has residents in the process of changing social class and to the extent that closely related members of the same kinship group are in different social classes, the community's social class lines are blurred. Residents of Kansa City, Missouri, except when they were assessing persons in movement between social classes, appeared to be readily capable of rating their fellow citizens as above, equal to, or beneath themselves in the local social class hierarchy. They perceived, according to Coleman and Neugarten, who made the study in 1955, definite social ratings for every neighborhood in the city and surrounding suburbs, for the various religious denominations and in some cases individual churches within the denominations, for the town and country clubs, the women's associations, and the men's fraternal organizations, as well as for occupations, schools, houses, clothing, cars, and stores. Using an Index of Kansas City Status that they devised from the people's rating, Coleman and Neugarten delineated thirteen strata distributed over five social classes: two strata in the upper class, three in the upper-middle class, three in the lower-middle class, three in the working class, and two in the lower class. 4 Other studies of the social class structure of communities in the United States have been made in Natchez, Mississippi ('Old City'), by Davis and the Gardners, in the middle and late 1930's; 5 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Warner and Lunt, in the early 1930's; 6 and in Morris, Illinois ('Jonesville', 'Elmtown'), in the early and middle 1940's, by Warner and his colleagues and also by Hollingshead.7 4 . Richard P. Coleman and Bernice L. Neugarten, Social Status in the City (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971), pp. 8-79. 5. Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1941). 6. W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1 9 4 1 ) ; and Warner and Lunt, The Social Status of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1942). 7. W. Lloyd Warner, et al., Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper and Row, 1 9 4 9 ) ; and August B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: John Wiley, 1949).

Social

Stratification

47

Findings on community social class structure have also been reported, for example on Muncie, Indiana, studied first by the Lynds in 1925 and again in 1935, 8 and the rural community of Springdale, New York, studied by Vidich and Bensman in the 1950's. 9 The six social classes described by Warner are: upper-upper, composed of the community's long-standing elite, its old and aristocratic families of high prestige (not necessarily the economically dominant families); lower-upper, composed of high-income residents who lack the aristocratic lineage and elitist socialization they need to gain full acceptance in the highest class and who use their newly acquired affluence to live in prestigious residential locations and to get membership in prestigious organizations; upper-middle, composed of established business and professional residents who have a less pretentious life style than that of the upper classes and who are active civic leaders; lower-middle, composed of lower-paid white-collar workers, the elite of the blue collar workers (skilled workers), and proprietors of small businesses; upper-lower, composed of the bulk of the blue collar workers (semiskilled workers) who have fairly regular employment; and lower-lower, composed of unskilled and other manual laborers who are irregularly employed. 1 0 The typical number of classes identified in these communities was either five or six. According to Warner, the social class structures of communities in the United States are basically similar, but they do show variations in the number of social class levels they contain, in the relative size of each class, in the subculture and social composition of the various classes, and in the vertical social mobility that is permitted. 1 1 Each of these variations, in turn, can be expected to vary according to the method employed in studying the social class structure and according to such community 8. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1929); and Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1937). 9. Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1958). 10. W. Lloyd Warner, Marcia Meeker, and Kenneth Eells, Social Class in America (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1949), pp. 6-24. Also see W. Lloyd Warner (ed.), Yankee City (New Haven: YaleU. Press, 1963), pp. 35-61. 11. W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 55.

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Perspective

characteristics as geographic location, size and heterogeneity of population, and the community's historical background. Variations from the social class structure just described are found in the theoretically 'classless' communities of Soviet Russia and in the traditional caste system that prevails in communities of India. Social Classes in Soviet Russia Distinctive features of the social class structure of Russian communities are the relatively small differences in income between the different social class levels and the stress that is placed upon position in the local power structure of the Communist party through which differential access is provided to such social amenities as preferred jobs, education, housing, and ownership of automobiles. 12 Nine social class levels that varied by income, life style, power, and prestige were identified by Inkeles, in 1950. In the highest class were persons high in Communist party and government positions, prominent scientists, top-level managers in industry, and selected artists and writers. The bottom class, composed of persons assigned to forced labor, was just below a class of disadvantaged workers of low skill and productivity. 1 3 Social Caste System in India In the traditional caste system which still persists with modifications in communities throughout India, the social class structure is made up of a multiplicity of castes, i. e., social classes into which individuals are born, within which they are expected to marry, and out of which they are not expected to move. Each caste contains people who pursue a particular occupation or set of occupations peculiar to that caste, and extremely detailed rules prescribe and proscribe a wide range of behavior including the diet patterns, the residential locations, and the inter-caste contacts that members of a given caste are expected to observe. The various castes are ranked hierarchically in order of their differences in social prestige. 12. See, for example, Arvid Bodersen, The Soviet Worker (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 167-201. 13. Alex Inkeles, 'Social Stratification and Mobility in the Soviet Union: 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 5 0 A m e r i c a n Sociological Review, 15 (1950): 466-467.

Social

Stratification

49

National legislation, enacted after India gained independence in 1947, removed the legal basis of the caste system and outlawed its discriminatory rules so far as they applied in public life, for example, in the use of public transportation, public buildings, and other public accommodations. Modernization has also served to render many caste rules impractical and to foster relaxation or adjustment of regulations to change the pattern of occupations that members of various castes can enter and to permit more freedom of interpersonal contact. Furthermore, emancipation accompanying modernization has been associated with some increase in marriage across caste lines as well as some decrease in conformity to rules governing diet and forms of etiquette to be used in intercaste contacts. 1 4 Social Class

Subcultures

In the social class structure of all communities, each of the different social classes or castes can be expected to have its own distinctive subculture, i. e., a style of life and a set of norms and values that are somewhat different from those of the other social classes. While the different subcultures do not preclude socialization in certain overall community norms and values, such as the norm that people ought to be lawabiding, they do supply ingredients of socialization that tend to perpetuate class differences, for example, in speech patterns, food preferences, outlook on life, and a variety of consumer practices. The lack of familiarity that the people of one social class have with the subculture of other social classes tends to add to the social distance separating the social classes and to increase the difficulty members of a community have when they try to work together across social class lines, for example, in school or church situations or in particular community actions. Social class differences that could be expected to affect the use of the community development process to further modernization were found between lower and middle classes of Santiago, Chile. Middle-class families exhibited a higher potential for change asso14. For a more detailed discussion of the Indian caste system and recent changes in this system, see M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1966). For description of the traditional caste system in a village of Southern India, see Alan R. Beals, Gopalpur (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p. 36.

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Perspective

ciated with wider socialization, broader communication, and greater exposure to education and to mass media. Lower-class families expressed stronger kinship ties, more passivity, more alienation from the urban milieu, more reluctance to engage in planning, and fewer expectations from life. 15 Even though each social class has its own distinctive subculture, marked differences in behavior and values can still exist between different groupings of people within the same class. For example, in a college community there is often a 'town-gown' division that reflects differences between the more idealistic and liberal outlook of the college and the more practical and traditional outlook of the business people, even when the two sets of people live in the same neighborhood and have about the same amount of income and are in the same social class. Such differences in outlook can have an obstructive effect on community action efforts if they lead to disagreement over objectives or procedures for bringing about community change. As a general rule, people at the higher social class levels have readier access than people at the lower social class levels to preferred housing, residential locations, occupations, education, recreation, health care, and organizational membership. They also tend to exercise greater influence in the community's economic and political decision-making activities. There is a world-wide trend toward directing some effort at the community level to the goals of increasing economic and educational opportunities for people at the lower levels of the social class hierarchy and also to encourage their participation in community decision making, especially in matters that affect them directly.

COMMUNITY POWER STRUCTURE

The power hierarchy in communities, reflecting as it does the different abilities the people have for exercising influence and getting what they want in the arena of community affairs, varies from one community to another and from one time to another in the same 15. Robert C. Williamson, 'Social Class, Mobility, and Modernism: Chileans and Social Change', Sociology and Social Research, 56 (1972): 149-163.

Social

51

Stratification

community. Those who exercise the most influence in community decision making are generally those in the upper social classes or who rank high in political, economic, or other subsystem hierarchies. The variations in power structure among communities are related to differences in the number of people who participate in making decisions on community issues, the extent to which the same people take part in making decisions on different issues, the extent to which persons from one subsystem dominate local decisionmaking activities, the extent to which participation is spread among different subsystems, and the extent to which decision makers are perceived by the local populace as being representative of a broad range of the community's population. Studies made on communities in the United States have identified several different patterns of power distribution from which models have been formulated. Pyramidal Model of Community

Power

On the basis of his study of Atlanta, Hunter formulated the model of a pyramidal (monolithic) community power structure. According to this model, a relatively small number of persons from the top levels of the community's economic subsystem hierarchy constitute a power elite who control decision making on all major community issues. Members of the power elite agree informally on the issue outcome they desire and then informally and without publicity make their wishes known to a larger number of lesser leaders — 'executors of policy' — who are in a position to see to it that the desired decisions are effected. 1 6 The pyramidal type of community power structure has typically been identified in research that has employed the reputational method of studying local power. The investigator asks informed residents, starting with those who occupy top positions in the subsystem hierarchies, to name the persons they consider to be most 16. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1953), especially pp. 109-111. Findings similar to Hunter's have been reported in other studies. See, for example, Roland J. Pellegrin and Charles H. Coates, 'Absentee-Owned Corporations and Community Power Structure', American Journal of Sociology , 6 1 (1956): 413-419 and Carol Estes Thometz, The Decision-Makers: The Power Structure of Dallas (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), pp. 5.9-61.

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Perspective

influential in community affairs. The persons named by most informants are assumed to be members of the power elite. Reputation for wielding influence is equated with the amount of influence the person is actually capable of exerting. Informants are presumed to be representative of the community's residents who are 'in the know' regarding local exercise of influence in decision making. Pluralistic Model of Community

Power

A contrasting model to the pyramidal community power structure is that of the pluralistic (decentralized) structure of local power. Instead of a single center of power or a cohesive coalition of groups that control local decision-making activities, the pluralistic model portrays numerous centers of power, none of which is completely dominant. These centers of power do not overlap or coalesce from one issue area to another in any consistent way. The persons who influence decision making in one issue or event are usually not the same persons who influence decision making in another issue or event. 17 The pluralistic model of community power structure has been found typically by researchers who used the decisional approach to identifying community leaders. In this approach, the investigator analyzes a number of community issues to find out who participated in making the decisions on them and what parts the key participants played. Dahl, using this method in New Haven, concluded that decision making was distributed in such a way that different groups supplied the key participants for issues in different areas of community life. Only a few people made the decision on each issue, but they accepted and acted on the indirect influence of larger groups. Communication with organized community groups was used as a means for getting decisions legitimized, for mobilizing support, for airing differences of opinion, and for heading off possible conflicts. 18 Banfield, also using the approach of decision-making analysis, found that the fragmentation of authority in the city's political 17. Willis D. Hawley and Frederick M. Wirt (eds.), The Search for Community Power (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 89. 18. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1961), p. 75.

Social

53

Stratification

subsystem and the complexity of the other subsystems tended to decentralize decision making in Chicago. To avoid stalemates in community action efforts it was necessary to achieve informal centralization of the various groups concerned with a given effort. The most influential persons in the decision-making processes were the managers of large organizations the maintenance of which was at stake; a few civic leaders whose judgment, negotiating skill, and disinterestedness were unusual; and, above all, the chief elected officials. The organizations referred to were ones supported by 'customers' rather than 'members', for example, profit-making businesses, public agencies that gave free services, or public and semipublic agencies that sold services. The initiative on most questions, Banfield found, arose from the maintenance and enhancement needs of these formal organizations. Once a move was made, other organizations then supported, opposed, or sought modification. 1 9 Further support for an interpretation of pluralistic structure came from Jennings' study of Atlanta made in the 1960's. His findings indicated that a coalition of business-civic, governmental-political, and earlier black leadership persisted from one change issue to another, but that particular representatives of these segments tended to vary. While all participated in the decision making on at least one of the issues studied, none participated in all of the issues. 20 Schemmel found that, although there had been a small hierarchy of business leaders who made Atlanta's decisions in the 1950's and early 1960's, they were no longer dominant in the 1970's but were gradually being replaced by younger men who had not yet consolidated their influence. The increasing importance of blacks was cited as one reason for the decline of the old power structure. 2 1 Community Characteristics of Community Power

Associated

with Different

Structures

According to Gilbert, local power structures in the United States 19. Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence (New York: Free Press, 1961), pp. 240-241, 263-265, and 268. 20. M. Kent Jennings, Community Influentials: The Elites of Atlanta (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 199-201. 21. Bill Schemmel, 'Atlanta's Power Structure Faces Life', New South 27: 2 (1972), pp. 62-65.

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tend to become more pluralistic as communities become urbanized and the degree of pluralism is affected by the sociocultural character of the region in which the community is located; for example, Western communities tend to be more pluralistic than those in the South and East. Gilbert's findings are based on an analysis of data obtained from published studies on the power structure of 166 communities scattered over 46 states of the United States and ranging in size from villages of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants to central cities of over 1,000,000. 2 2 Clark found that decentralization of the decision-making structure was positively correlated with community size and with diversity of economic structure when, in 1967, he studied 51 American communities ranging in size from 50,000 to 750,000 population, using the field staff of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. 23

MINORITY STATUS

Ranking in both the social class and power structure of a community is affected by whether or not the person belongs to a segment of the population that has minority status. Such a segment consists of people of a particular race, religion, or ethnic background, for example, who, whether they are outnumbered or not, are put in the condition of being barred from full and equal participation in the various phases of community life. Typical forms of discrimination against minorities include: denial of equal job opportunities and of equal pay for the same job, circumscription of full voting, rights and of opportunities to hold public office, exclusion from preferred residential locations and from membership in prestigious organizations, exclusion from higher caliber schools, and denial of social services and financial aid in spite of need and eligibility. 22. Claire W. Gilbert, 'Community Power and Decision Making', in Community Structure and Decision-Making: Comparative Analyses, Terry N. Clark (ed.) (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), pp. 139-156. 23. Terry N. Clark, 'Community Structure, Decision-Making, Budget Expenditures, and Urban Renewal in 51 American Communities', in Community Politics, Charles M. Bonjean, Terry N. Clark, and Robert L. Lineberry (eds.) (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 303-304.

Community

Subsystems

55

The particular groupings of persons who occupy a minority status vary among communities, depending to a large extent upon the country or the part of the country, in which the community is located. For example, in the United States, Orientals and Chicanos are likely to have minority status in communities on the West coast, Puerto Ricans in the New York area, blacks and American Indians in various parts of the country. In communities of India, Moslems have minority status, while in communities of Pakistan Hindus have that status. In South Africa, blacks and peoples from India are held in minority status by the greatly outnumbered whites. While the people within a given minority may themselves be stratified by social class and power differences, their rankings in the overall community social class and power hierarchies are likely to be lower than in the minority hierarchies and lower than the rankings of persons who have similar economic positions but who do not have minority status.

COMMUNITY SUBSYSTEMS A third feature, other than groups and social stratification, in the sociocultural facet of community life is the complex of subsystems that are the localized manifestation of society's major social institutions, i.e., the family, the economy, government, religion, education, and social welfare. In small traditional communities of relatively nonmodernized societies, these various subsystems are only to a limited extent differentiated from the dominant subsystem of the family. In more modernized communities, the different subsystems function as distinct and separate, though interrelated, entities. THE FAMILY SUBSYSTEM

The family subsystem consists of the various nuclear and extended family units residing in the community and whatever kinship networks extend beyond the immediate family unit. Depending upon the level of modernization of their community and upon their position in that community's social stratification structure, families can be expected to exert quite different influences and to have quite different experiences in the life of the community.

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Community:

The Extended Family in Traditional

Sociocultural

Perspective

Communities

In traditional settled agricultural communities, extended family units (composed of more than two generations) tend to be typical and bonds of loyalty to the kinship group tend to be pervasive and strong. These bonds are reinforced by the mutual aid arrangements on which family members rely and by the economic interdependence that exists within the kinship group, involving in some instances property that is jointly owned or operated. In the life of

Community

Subsystems

57

the community, the family subsystem is dominant over all other subsystems. 24 It is the subsystem, in fact, that performs the central functions that keep the community going. Besides replenishing the population and assigning status to new family members, it cares for the young and schools them in the skills they need if they are to play useful roles in community life. It is the main unit for producing as well as consuming goods and services. Furthermore, it serves as a major agency of social control, a major local provider of protective services, a center of religious practices, and the main wellspring from which the community's members get their emotional security and support. The Family in Modernizing and Relatively Modernized

Communities

The family subsystem in modernizing communities undergoes a definite pattern of change that is part of the modernization process. Some of its change is necessary before other subsystems in the community can move fully toward modernization. For instance, the loosening of traditionally restrictive family ties is needed to give family members the freedom to go into the new occupations that are emerging in the economic subsystem and to participate in other new community activities that require relative independence from traditional familial obligations. 25 Other changes in the family subsystem that occur with modernization include an increased sharing of traditional family functions with the other subsystems as they assume increasing importance in the life of the community. Production of goods and services as a household operation shifts from the home to the factory, store, or office and usually does not continue to be a joint effort of family members. The family becomes a consuming rather than a producing unit and increasingly dependent upon cash income instead of the traditional subsistence farming. Increasing numbers of family 24. See, for example, Rae Lesser Blumberg and Robert F. Winch, 'Societal Complexity and Familial Complexity: Evidence for the Curvilinear Hypothesis', American Journal of Sociology, 77 (1972): 898-920; also Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: Free Press, 1960), p. 324. 25. William J. Goode, 'The Family as an Element in the World Revolution', in The Study of Society, Peter I. Rose (ed.) (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 528-538.

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Perspective

members go into nonfarm or highly specialized farm occupations, and the family's traditional function of preparing children for their occupational roles is increasingly taken over by the education and economic subsystems. 26 Even though some parents, especially those at the higher levels of the social class and economic hierarchies, continue to exert influence upon their children's occupational socialization, children generally tend to be educated beyond and away from their parents. As modernization proceeds and expands the community's exposure to the outside world through greater use of mass media, wider travel, and broader patterns of communication, family members become familiar with a widening range of different lifeways and acquire new tastes and values. Their economic demands increase in number and variety, they become more secular in their outlook, and both their social and physical mobility increase. The changes cited here do not, however, occur in uniform fashion throughout the family subsystem. Some families retain mainly traditional features, some displace traditional features with more modern ones, and others exhibit a mixture of traditional and modern features in a varying combination of more old than new and of more new than old. A detailed description of the variations in change patterns within the family subsystem of a modernizing community has been supplied by Stephenson for Shiloh, a mountain community in the Southern Appalachian region of the United States. In that case, the families most responsive to modernization were generally in the top levels of the community's social class hierarchy and, compared with other local families, had higher incomes, more formal education, smaller family size, more equalitarian husband-wife relations, and least tendency to be affiliated with fundamentalist churches. A cluster of opposite traits generally characterized the most traditional families, while between these two clusters there were two intermediate types — one having more features of the traditional and the other more features of the modern. 2 7

26. George A. Hillery, Jr., Communal Organizations: A Study of Local Societies (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 286. 27. John B. Stephenson, Shiloh: A Mountain Community (Lexington: U. of Kentucky Press, 1968), pp. 91-136.

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The family subsystem in the relatively modernized community exhibits similar variations, the main differences being that the family changes have generally had a more pronounced thrust than in the modernizing community. Centrality of the family declines to the extent that both parents work outside the home, elderly parents and grown children who are or are not married live in separate domiciles, and small children are taken care of in day nurseries or at school. The degree to which these conditions prevail varies both among and within communities. Although members of kinship groups in relatively modernized communities assume less responsibility for one another than is generally true in traditional and newly modernizing communities, kinship networks of social relationships and mutual aid continue to function. Sussman, for instance, has cited an accumulation of evidence drawn from research undertaken since 1950 which shows the modern urban family, on all social class levels, operating within a kinship network through which relatives were helping one another to obtain jobs and get established in a new community, supplying assistance during crises of death or illness or other personal trouble, taking care of children and elderly kin, exchanging gifts and advice, and getting together for visits or recreational activities. 28 Despite its involvement in the kinship network of mutual aid and social relationships, the modern urban family maintains an ideology of independence; and the relationships among family units are relatively elastic and free of authoritarian control. Furthermore, since some types of aid rendered through the kinship network are not dependent upon propinquity, family members are relatively free to make independent moves as occupational, military, or health demands require. The motivation for maintaining mutual aid and social relationships springs, according to Litwak, from a combination of emotional ties, sense of obligation, and self-interest, and enables family members to have a high capacity for giving and 28. Marvin B. Sussman, 'Relationships of Adult Children with Their Parents in the United States', in Social Structure and the Family: Generational Relations, Ethel Shanas and Gordon F. Streib (eds.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 62-92. For similar evidence on cities in West Africa, see Joan Aldous, 'Urbanization, the Extended Family, and Kinship Ties in West Africa', in Urbanism in World Perspective, Sylvia Fleis Fava (ed.) (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), pp. 297-305.

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receiving aid through the kinship network as well as for using aid extended through formal organizations. 29 Families as a Focus of Community

Concern

Though the family subsystem performs various functions for the community, it is also a source of what community members perceive to be troubling situations. While these situations generally occur with greater frequency among families of minority status and families at the lower levels of the social class and power hierarchies, they may be found at all levels and in all segments of the community. One set of troubling situations is linked with the family subsystem's failure to rear children who can perform in school, get and hold jobs, and abstain from delinquency and crime. Such failure tends to be most conspicuous among families at the lower levels of the community's social class and power hierarchies — especially among families being served by agencies in the social welfare subsystem. Many of these families have minority status and, among blacks in communities of the United States, a high proportion of them represent female-headed households. They are a special target of community concern both for the marked degree of economic deprivation they experience and for the atypical (by middle-class norms) socialization they provide. 30 Community concern for families in various social classes is also shown in efforts to provide more adequate housing, daycare services for children, family planning services, and family counseling to prevent family break-up or to facilitate adjustment to break-up that does occur. Families' housing needs are associated with their not having the money or credit to obtain standard openmarket housing arrangements, with acute shortage of housing produced by 29. Eugene Litwak, 'Extended Kin Relations in an Industrial Democratic Society', in Social Structure and the Family: Generational Relations, Ethel Shanas and Gordon F. Streib (eds.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 310. 30. See, for example, Lee Rainwater, 'Crucible of Identity: The Negro LowerClass Family', in The Negro American, Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark (eds.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp. 164-166. For discussion of links between juvenile delinquency and the stresses and strains of families who are alienated from community life, see descriptions of the Bristol Social Project in Chapters 5 and 8 of this text.

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sudden influx of population, and with deterioration of what was once adequate housing. The need for daycare services has increased as more mothers have entered the labor force, as more families have developed favorable attitudes toward daycare, as availability of domestic help has decreased, and as geographic separation of kin has limited the availability of help from this source. Demand for family planning services has grown with the development of more effective birth control techniques and of more favorable attitudes toward birth control. Some campaigns in this sphere have been motivated toward the objective of reducing the number of children and families receiving public assistance, others toward the objective of reducing the rate of population growth. Need for family counseling in relation to family break-up has been intensified by rising rates of divorce, particularly among couples with children, and by increased awareness of the financial and emotional effects that can follow family break-up. More radical types of concern affecting the family subsystem are expressed in efforts to establish new norms that would gain full social and legal acceptability for premarital and extramarital sex relations, abortions, homosexual partnerships between consenting adults, communal marital arrangements, and 'no fault' divorce.

THE ECONOMIC SUBSYSTEM

The economic subsystem is the medium through which community residents participate in producing, distributing, and consuming goods and services — thereby gaining their livelihood. These activities are involved in the processes by which privilege and social prestige are distributed among community members; and they tend to have familial, religious, and political as well as economic meanings. They are affected directly by community ideologies on such issues as: whether property and basic natural resources should be owned collectively or individually; whether employers should or should not treat laborers in paternalistic fashion; and to what extent businesses and industries, in introducing new technologies, should take responsibility for safeguarding the interests of employees and for protecting the natural environment. Economic subsystems of communities vary from those that rely

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on a relatively simple technology and minimal elaboration of economic roles to maintain a self-sufficient subsistence-level livelihood to those that have a highly scientific technology, an elaborate organization of specialized economic roles that create a marked interdependence among the units in the economic subsystem, and a degree of productivity that supports a relatively high level of living. The subsistence communities are typically found among hunting, fishing, and gathering peoples, such as the Andaman Islanders, the African Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, the Australian aborigines, and the Tungus of Siberia. The communities with the most complex technology and economic organization are the large urban communities of the United States, Western Europe, Soviet Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. 3 1 Most of the communities of the world fall between these extremes. The economies of rural communities in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America — though still close to a subsistence level of production — are becoming increasingly involved in exchange of goods and services through extracommunity markets. The Subsistence Economy

of Traditional

Communities

In traditional communities that are near the rural polar extreme, the basic producing and consuming unit in the economic subsystem is the individual family or kinship group. This unit expends virtually its entire economic effort in securing little more than the minimal necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Work is organized along simple lines, tradition defining the tasks that are to be performed by persons of particular age and sex. Members of the community learn their work skills in the process of growing up; and within age and sex categories, workers can be easily substituted for one another since they all know and use the same skills. The technology of the community rests on the use of simple tools that are operated by human or animal energy, for example, hoes, diggers, and crude plows. Per capita productivity is low, but it provides almost complete economic self-sufficiency for the community at a subsistence level of living. 31. For brief characterizations of economies along this range, see Lowell D. Holmes, Anthropology (New York: Ronald, 1965), pp. 165-170.

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63

Subsystems

All economic practices are supposed to be conducted in ways that do not conflict with the familial and religious norms of the community. Concern about fulfilling kinship obligations and having the esteem of other community residents takes precedence over keeping property for personal use. Any change that may be made in organizing the use of time, resources, or personnel in work activities is made, not on the basis of some single economic consideration, such as increasing productivity, but also from consideration of its effects upon the whole life of the community. The Modernizing Economic

Subsystem

A central process in a community's change toward modernization is the process widely referred to today as 'economic development'. Each community pursues its own historically rooted path in making the changes that transform it from traditional to modern character. 3 2 In the economic sphere this means changing from the selfsufficient and localized kind of economic subsystem just described to an economy in which the people, instead of consuming most of what they produce, sell that and buy most of what they consume. Many of their transactions have linkages beyond the community, possibly even with economic subsystems that are international in scope. The organization of economic activities increases in complexity and workers have to be specially trained to perform skillfully in the varied specialized roles that accompany the elaborate division of labor. Over time, indigenous markets and bazaars are supplemented and perhaps eventually displaced by Western-style supermarkets, service establishments, and department stores. Special-purpose formal groups arise around specific economic interests. The social class structure enlarges around the middle-class level. If industries are introduced into the community (no community can modernize unless it at least has linkage with communities that have industries), the proportion of agricultural workers declines and the proportions of workers in manufacturing and in service industries increase. 32. For fuller discussion of differences between the economies of traditional and modern communities, see Marion J. Levy, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), I, 35-122.

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Modern equipment and technological 'know-how', diffused from the industrialized areas of the world, enable modernizing communities today to transform their economic subsystems faster than was possible for communities that industrialized a hundred years ago. Furthermore, national governments of modernizing countries tend to give their communities substantial backing for programs designed to raise the educational level of the people and to train workers for the professional and technical jobs considered essential to national growth. Extensive changes in norms and values and in the subsystems have to take place if the modernizing community's economic growth is to be sustained. Ambition for personal betterment, for example, must spread rather widely among the people of the community and must be supported by willingness to get the education and training required to further that ambition. Ties to land and family have to relax enough to permit workers to shift from their traditional agricultural roles to wage-earning roles in industry. Values placed on less disciplined, less regimented, less efficient, and less rational procedures and practices may have to give way to acceptance of the more punctual and rational procedures pursued in an industrial work situation. The norms of nepotism will likely have to give way to norms of merit system selection. Increasing emphasis will probably have to be placed upon political stability and upon political processes whereby the governmental subsystem backed by a national system of government provides incentive, leadership, and material resources for economic development. 33 Traditional communities that are presented the chance to industrialize may respond, according to Blumer, in one or more of the following ways: by rejecting the opportunity; by adding on industrialization but not integrating it into community life;by absorbing it into their traditional lifeways; by using it to strengthen the traditional order by accepting it in such a way that the traditional order disintegrates. 34 The fact that communities make varying responses to industrialization helps to explain some of the variation among communities in the degree of their industrialization and also 33. See, for example, Wilbert Moore, Social Change (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 93-96. 34. Herbert Blumer, 'Industrialization and the Traditional Order', American Journal of Sociology, 48 (1964): 129-138.

Community

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some of the variation among communities in the degree to which traditional lifeways persist in the midst of industrialization. Once communities industrialize they can continue to grow economically, they can stagnate, or they can die. There is no indication that they can go back to their old traditional order. The Economic Subsystem of Relatively Modernized

Communities

The typifying characteristics of the economic subsystem of relatively modernized communities — rural and urban — derive largely from the large-scale and mechanized nature of the economic operations. Rural. In relatively modernized rural communities the economic subsystem centers around large-scale commercialized agricultural enterprises that are highly specialized for such operations as dairy farming, production of livestock, truck farming, or production of one or several special crops like cotton, corn, wheat, sugar cane, or tobacco. The nonagricultural economic enterprises are mainly ones that service the agricultural, for example, facilities for storing and processing food, retail stores, seed and fertilizer companies, and machinery sales and repair shops. The technology rests heavily upon late-model, automatic machinery; use of chemical fertilizers; and scientific know-how. The high per capita productivity makes it possible for fewer workers to supply the growing urban communities with the agricultural products on which their residents depend. The workers who are retained in the highly mechanized agricultural employment tend to be well-paid. The economic outcomes for farm workers who are displaced by machines depend upon opportunities for work available in other types of industries. The norms and values governing the economic subsystems of rural communities in Communist countries stress collectivistic practices and objectives; but they permit some private use of plots of land and equipment for private purposes, especially after the farm or the community has achieved its quota of production for the state. In rural communities of other countries, the norms and values stress profit-making, use of scientific agricultural methods, and government action in the interest of farm people.

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Urban. The economic subsystems of relatively modernized urban communities are similarly oriented, in more extreme degree, to large-scale bureaucratic economic enterprises that are typically organized as corporations. While small and medium-sized enterprises are likely to be far more numerous in the communities of capitalist societies than giant corporations, the latter tend to dominate the economic subsystem in employing the largest proportion of local workers and in affecting the level of local prices. Many of the factories, wholesale and retail outlets, banks, and service agencies in the community are branches of large corporations; others are independently organized and may or may not be directly linked with the corporations through operating their franchises, subcontracting to produce goods or services for them, or selling services or products to, or for, them. The technology of the economic subsystems of relatively modernized urban communities characteristically relies upon the most up-to-date scientific knowledge, method, and equipment. Its highly automated processes tend to expand job opportunities at skilled levels. Those same processes also have the overall effect of creating an economy of abundance that provides the means for eliminating poverty, but in the face of which poverty persists. The 'modern' norms and values in the economic subsystems of relatively modernized communities coexist with more traditional norms and values that have carried over from earlier generations and there are likely to be numerous clashes between the two normative systems. Both, however, are in basic agreement that contemporary communities require some such economic stabilizers or social welfare measures as social insurance programs, pension plans, public assistance, and other public and private income-maintenance programs. Capitalistic norms and values in the subsystem tend to stress efficiency, reliability, competition, high productivity, and maximization of profits. These may conflict with humanistic norms and values in the familial, religious, political, and social welfare subsystems or, as is the case in numerous communities in the Western world, with the value systems of certain youth groups or of certain low-income segments of the community's population and their more affluent sympathizers. There are also likely to be value disagreements regarding the fairness of government regulation of: wages, prices, hours of work, in-

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terest rates, credit policies, methods of settling labor-management disputes, and standards of health and safety for employees and for consumers — all of these being thrusts that the governmental subsystem makes into the economic subsystem of the relatively modernized community.

THE SUBSYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

Along with the subsystems of family and economy, all communities have a subsystem of government which handles such responsibilities as maintaining order within the community and providing certain services that are presumed to benefit the community as a whole. The maintenance of order involves enforcing the community's established norms as well as adjudicating disputes among residents of the community. The number of services provided tends to increase with increasing community size and increasing modernization. Growth in the number and quality of government services, many of which are at least partially financed by higher levels of government, is now a worldwide trend. Organization of the Governmental

Subsystem

In traditional communities, responsibility for keeping order among community members and for dealing with extracommunity groups rests with the heads of the families or a council of elders. Bonds among the residents of the community are so strong and so reinforced by tradition that the norms can be maintained through established conventions, with minimal exercise of additional authority. 3 5 The local governmental authority in village communities is typically vested in an elected council that administers village affairs. 36 35. See, for example, Gunther Wagner, 'The Political Organization of the Bantu of Kavirondo', in African Political Systems, M. Fortes and E. E. EvansPritchard (eds.) (London: Oxford U. Press, 1940), p. 200. 36. For description of the saniri in Indonesia, see Frank L. Cooley, 'Allang: A Village on Ambon Island', in Villages in Indonesia, Koentjaraningrat (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1967), pp. 153-156; of the panchayat in India, Carl C. Taylor, et al., India's Roots of Democracy (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1965), pp. 87-101.

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Officials serving with the Council are usually a headman or mayor, who represents the village in 'affairs of state'; a clerk, who is responsible for keeping records; and a treasurer, who collects taxes and handles the public funds. 3 7 Usual services rendered by village governments are street maintenance; police protection or some form of social control; and some part in providing education, health, and sanitation programs. The governmental subsystem of nonnucleated types of rural communities is usually the locality representation of an extracommunity governmental unit, such as a county or a district. The governing body of that unit has administrative jurisdiction and is responsible for providing public services. Urban communities have their own governmental organizational structures, which are characteristically closely interlinked with larger governmental units. The personal and casual manner of fusing administration, government, and politics typical in rural communities gives way to impersonal and rational arrangements, 38 such as those found in the merit system method of selecting and promoting personnel. The official governing body, for example, the city council-mayor-city manager, administers a steadily growing number of specialized public services that are provided through a bureaucratized arrangement of departments covering such fields as city planning, fiscal operations, police and fire protection, utilities, education, public health and environmental control, recreation, and public welfare. If a community, as is frequently the case, extends beyond a town's or city's legal boundaries, the governmental subsystem has no political unit that corresponds with the ecological community. The fragmentation is produced by the presence of numerous agencies, boards, and commissions that are not unified under any one authority and that serve only certain parts of the community. For example, Levittown, a 'packaged' suburban community developed on Long Island (New York), about 1950, encompassed at its outset twenty-one separate political jurisdictions — two townships, four

37. See, for example, Michael Moerman, 'A Thai Village Headman as a Synaptic LeaderJournal of Asian Studies, 28 (1969): 535-549. 38. Roscoe C. Martin, Grass Roots (University: U. of Alabama Press, 1957), pp. 26, 33-41.

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Subsystems

water districts, four fire districts, four school districts, two Congressional districts, and five postal districts. 39 The proliferation of units and functions is being counterbalanced to some extent by trends toward consolidation 40 and by the creation of new metropolitan forms of government and other coordinating types of organizational structure that increase political unity in metropolitan communities. For example, the Miami-Dade County (Florida) merger, effected in 1957, coordinates under the county government the activities of numerous authorities, special districts, commissions, boards, and other governmental units that serve both Miami and the county. 4 1 Participation in the Community's

Governmental

Subsystem

Residents of communities participate in the subsystem of government through holding elected or appointed government office, performing professional services in specialized government programs, serving on local advisory committees, working actively in apolitical party organization, joining with other citizens to protest against or press for some particular government action, and voting in elections. Political participation in urban communities of newly modernizing countries is generally limited, according to Breese, by the lack of any prevailing tradition of broad-based participation in the governmental process, the conditioning the people have to the authoritarian rule of tribal chiefs and colonial governments, the unfamiliarity 39. William M. Dobriner, Classin Suburbia (EnglewoodCliffs,N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1963), p. 89. See also Lowry Nelson, et al., Community Structure and Change (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 302-309, for further discussion of political fragmentation of the urban community. 40. Joyce M. and William C. Mitchell, 'The Changing Politics of American Life', in Indicators of Social Change, Eleanor Bernert Sheldon and Wilbert E. Moore (eds.) (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), p. 253. 41. Edward Sofen, The Miami Metropolitan Experiment (2nd ed.; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966). Coordination on a broader scale to increase governmental unity for numbers of communities in a metropolitan region is also being attempted. For description of the arrangement developed for Metropolitan Toronto, see Webb S. Fiser, Mastery of the Metropolis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 117-125; for description of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council, which serves in addition to the two cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul (Minnesota) about 130 smaller municipalities and seven counties, see John Fischer, 'The Minnesota Experiment: How to Make a Big City Fit to Live in', Harper's, 238 (April, 1969): 12-32.

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that the ex-rural dwellers have with urban governmental forms, and the carry-over into the urban situation of tribal ways of doing things. 4 2 In more modernized urban communities, the people tend to depend u p o n such associations as labor unions, chambers of commerce, and their professional or nonprofessional occupational associations to represent their interests. Government officials — elected and appointed — vary considerably in the extent to which they take initiative in playing their roles in the governmental subsystem. The implication of research reported by Vidich and Bensman is that small localities in the United States are so dependent upon larger political units that officials in the governmental subsystem can be relatively passive if there are other local citizens w h o have access to, and know-how for dealing with, the outside bureaucratic agencies which might grant funds for local activities and services. 43 Community power structure patterns of participation are described earlier in this chapter. Those patterns overlap in varying degrees with governmental participation, depending u p o n the extent to which decisions on issues fall within the sphere of the community's governmental subsystem. Since the 1960's, in communities of the United States, special efforts have been made to increase the political participation of c o m m u n i t y residents, especially blacks and low-income segments of the population. Voter registration drives and the anti-poverty program's policy of maximum feasible participation of the p o o r are illustrative of the attempts. At the same time, low-income blocs and blocs of ethnic and racial minorities, by virtue of their increasing concentration in metropolitan communities over the country, have come to constitute large legislative districts through which they are obtaining increasing representation in the political sphere. RELIGION AS A SUBSYSTEM

Religion as a subsystem of c o m m u n i t y life is f o u n d in all societies — functioning to maintain beliefs about forces that are considered 42. Gerald Breese, Urbanization in Newly Developing Countries (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 95-96. 43. Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1958), pp. 99-101.

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supernatural and sacred, to prescribe symbolic practices that are thought to be in harmony with the beliefs about the supernatural, and to link the community's established definitions of 'right' and 'wrong' behavior with supernatural rewards and punishments. Variations in the Subsystem of Religion by Levels of Modernization In traditional communities, religious roles are fused with other roles, and persons bom into the community are born as much into its religious as its familial subsystem. 44 As communities move toward modernization, the religious subsystem acquires formal organizational structure: such specialized roles as those of shaman, priest, or preacher; such specialized places of worship as temples, shrines, and churches; and some systematic arrangement for securing economic support. The religious aspects of community life are differentiated from, but exert considerable influence upon, the secular aspects. In relatively modernized communities, the subsystem of religion operates in competition with a multiplicity of secular associations, in a highly secularized sociocultural environment, and is typically accommodative to the secular demands of community life. 45 Its organizational scope can be expected to embrace an increasing multiplicity of faiths, denominations, sects, and cults as the size of the community increases. These diverse religious bodies exhibit varying degrees of competitiveness and cooperation with one another and with the community's different subsystems. Each one is likely to have within it numerous special-purpose groups and organizations that vary in the stress they put, respectively, upon spiritual and secular activities. Generally, too, there is a hierarchy of positions — some occupied by religious officials and some by lay participants. While high positions in the hierarchy tend to be associated with high social prestige in the community, there are decided variations along this line that are related to variations in social prestige among different faiths and denominations and even among churches in the same denomination. Local people may change their religious affiliation to facilitate their social mobility. 44. See, for example, Robert Bellah, 'Religious Evolution', American logical Review, 29 (1964): 361-364. 45. Levy, II, 616-624.

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Community

Community : Sociocultural Functions Performed by the Religious

Perspective

Subsystem

Various community as well as more specifically religious functions are performed by the subsystem of religion. The Buddhist wat, or compound, according to Welty, serves as the educational and recreation center of communities in Cambodia, Burma, Laos, and Thailand. 46 Fiesta celebrations in Catholic communities of Latin America are an occasion not only for holding religious services and processionals, but also for having family reunions, renewing friendships, feasting, drinking, and dancing. 47 Religious bodies in communities of the United States engage in such service enterprises as the operation of schools, hospitals, child care centers, homes for the aged, and family counseling services, as well as cooperatives and other business ventures. They sponsor various youth groups, such as Scouts, or conduct their own youth clubs, athletic groups, and recreation programs. Similar activities are found under religious sponsorship in communities of most non-Communist countries — some of them established as missionary undertakings, others developed locally. From a study he made in Detroit, Lenski concluded that socioreligious membership is a variable comparable to social class both in its potency and the extent or range of its influence. Jews, Catholics, white Protestants, and black Protestants — the. four socioreligious groupings that he studied — differed from one another in the probabilities that they would engage in such behavior as buying on the installment plan, opposing racial integration in the schools, maintaining close family ties, completing a given unit of education, or moving upward socially. 48 A particular current focus of the religious subsystem in large urban communities of the United States is the development of a ministry that involves both clergy and laity in social activist efforts to secure improved housing, recreation resources, medical and social services, and employment opportunities for segments of the com46. Thomas Welty, The Asians (rev. ed.; New York: Lippincott, 1966), pp. 292-294. 47. See, for example, Oscar Lewis, Tepoztlan (New York: Henry Holt, 1960), pp. 13-15. 48. Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (rev. ed.; Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963), p. 320.

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munity that have not generally participated in making the decisions that affect their way of life. The typical target of attack is the inner city area that has lost its more affluent residents to the suburbs and gained in their place a largely low-income population, often predominantly nonwhite. 4 9 In communities that have a complex social structure of different occupational, educational, income, and social class groupings, the religious subsystem tends to proliferate in such a way that it can serve homogeneous segments of the community's population. Even within the same faith or denomination, there are likely to be different churches or other religious units for persons of different educational, ethnic, or social-class backgrounds, each one reflecting in its activities and services the preferences of its constituency regarding such matters as ritualism, emotionalism, other-worldliness, and rationalism. 50 This differentiation also reflects the ecological patterning of the community to the extent that the religious subsystem is organized to have specific units that serve specific neighborhoods of, for example, working-class, middle-class, or upperclass residents. The differentiated groupings may operate to create antagonisms among community residents by fostering parochial loyalties and reinforcing people's limited perspectives; yet it is also true that the subsystem of religion provides the medium through which people, especially newcomers, gain a sense of identity in the community and the context for much of their social life. 51 The Black Church in Communities

of the United

States

The black church has characteristically played a major part in the community life of black residents in both rural and urban commu4 9 . Richard Henry Luecke, 'Protestant Clergy: New Forms of Ministry, New Forms of Training', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 387 (1970): 87-95. For analysis of effects of the suburban outward migration on the inner-city churches, see Gibson Winter, 'The Exodus', in Religion, Culture and Society, Louis Schneider (ed.) (New York: Wiley, 1964), p. 4 4 0 . 50. See, for example, Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1942), pp. 130-133; and Brian Wilson, Sects and Society (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 317. 51. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), p. 47.

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nities in the United States. It has given black clergymen an opportunity to fill leadership roles when most other avenues of leadership were closed to blacks; it has held up norms and made demands upon behavior that have helped to motivate lower-class blacks into conformity to middle-class values by means of which they have stayed closer to the mainstream of community life than they otherwise would have done; and, in recent decades, it has provided organizational structure and leadership for black protest in the civil rights movement. The church, Lee found, is the medium through which various political, civic, and social groups have generally worked when they wanted to obtain mass support for a project or program or when they needed to communicate with local blacks. 52 As militant attitudes and actions have increased, however, local churches have been faced with the question of whether or not to be the vehicle of the more extremist groups in the Black Power movement. According to Cone, if the major black denominations do not reorder their structures to respond positively to the more radical groups, they can be expected to intensify the revolutionary attitudes and actions of those groups. 53

THE EDUCATION SUBSYSTEM

Education, as analyzed here, is the subsystem of the community that carries primary responsibility for providing instruction in the knowledge and skills that the community and usually its larger society seek to have transmitted. Formal instruction is accompanied by varying degrees of informal instruction rendered inadvertently or with deliberate intent by instructors and by those being instructed. Infused into the education subsystem also are streams of formal and informal instruction emanating from such sources as the family, the mass media, and various interest groups of a religious or political or economic nature. 52. J. Oscar Lee, 'Religion among Ethnic and Racial Minorities', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 332 (1960): 113114. 53. James H. Cone, 'Black Consciousness and the Black Church: A Historical and Theological Interpretation', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 387 (1970): 49-55.

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Subsystems

Informal Character of Education in Traditional

Communities

In nonliterate traditional communities, instruction is handled informally by the family or tribal group and is incidental to other activities that are an integral part of everyday living. Lowie says that children in such communities learn through play that is imitative of adult activities to do the tasks and hold to the traditions and values that will be expected of them in their roles as adults. 54 There may also be for particular age categories specially arranged instruction in skills and traditions that are highly valued in the life of the community. For example, certain designated elders of a tribal community may be expected to give instruction in hunting skills, folklore, moral conduct, and the religious rites of the tribe to youth who are being inducted into manhood through ceremonial 'rites of passage'. Development

of Formalized

Education

One of the early thrusts that a community makes toward modernization is in the direction of developing a formalized subsystem of education that seeks to serve the whole community, not just a special elite. To the extent that higher levels of government initiate, finance, and plan curricula for school programs at the community level, communities can move with increasing speed and uniformity to develop education subsystems that produce higher levels of literacy and of technical training. Communities just beginning to modernize typically provide primary schools; those somewhat further modernized extend through secondary schools; and those that are relatively modernized seek to make college-level opportunities available on a general basis, highly specialized technical and professional preparation available for appropriately qualified individuals, and various types of continuing education programs available to all persons who wish to upgrade their occupational skills or to satisfy their aesthetic or intellectual interests. 55 54. Robert H. Lowie, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955), p. 252. 55. See, for example, Levy, II, 633.

(New

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Organization of the education subsystem. In modernizing and relatively modernized communities, the education subsystem may be organized entirely under public (tax-supported) auspices or under a combination of public and private auspices. The tax-supported component may operate as asubunit of a national education system which determines educational policies for the country as a whole — the type of organizational set-up most widely used over the world. Or it may be part of a decentralized type of set-up like that in the United States, where operation of the community's education subsystem has traditionally been local though becoming increasingly dependent upon state and federal levels of government for financial support and policy decisions. The growing size and increasing bureaucracy of urban schools in the United States have reduced community control over the education subsystem by giving school patrons less chance to exert influence in such matters as selection and retention of school personnel, curricula, disciplinary measures, and grading practices. Several cities, including New York and Washington, D. C., responding to demands of blacks that they be given more voice in governing schools that serve black students, have made some effort to decentralize school control with the aims of getting curricula more closely adapted to the needs and social backgrounds of the students, allocating power to the consumers of education services, and reviving school-community ties. 56 Diverse functions of the education subsystem. The education subsystem of relatively modernized communities performs diverse functions for the community in support of which it operates an ever-widening range of activities and services. Along with its primary function of providing basic instruction in knowledge and skills that will supply the community with functionally literate citizens who can perform needed occupational roles, it performs the function of passing on from one generation to the next beliefs and values that contribute to the continuity and orderliness of community

56. See, for example, Henry M. Levin (ed.), Community Control of Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1970); and Mario Fantini, Marilyn Gittell, and Richard Magot, Community Control and the Urban School (New York: Praeger, 1970).

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life. It also attempts to promote the total personal development of students through such activities as athletics, band, drama, glee club, debating clubs, and various other clubs. To reduce or prevent the handicapping effects on school work that can result from malnutrition and other health problems, disturbed family situation, and lack of motivation, the education subsystem makes available to students school lunch programs and services of school nurses, school social workers, and guidance counselors. Special provisions are made, too, for physically handicapped children either through special classes or homebound instruction and for mentally exceptional children through special classes for slow and for gifted learners. A still further function is that of helping the people of the community to update their knowledge and skills and to strengthen their role performance in various spheres of community life. The school's functions in teaching cognitive skills and factual information and in transmitting values are being increasingly affected by what Coleman describes as the open and information-rich sociocultural environment in which children are being reared. The individual's cognitive and value world, according to Coleman, is being shaped less by school and family than by radio, television, movies, comic books, paperbacks, and a broad array of newspapers and magazines that express varied ideologies and interests. 57 Since the school can no longer shape selectively what students read and see and hear, its function shifts from being almost the exclusive source of information and values to the function of helping students to use the new media of information with discernment and understanding as one means of enriching their educational experience. Inequalities in educational opportunities. Educational subsystems vary considerably from one community to another in the scope and quality of the educational opportunities they provide. Furthermore, the education subsystem of a given community may show marked variation in the quality of the educational opportunities it provides to the different ecological areas and to the different racial, ethnic, and social class groupings in the community. Variations among communities may be explained, in large part, by differences 57. James S. Coleman, 'The Children Have Outgrown the Schools', Psychology Today, 5 (February, 1972): 72-74.

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in ability or in motivation to provide adequate support for the schools. Variations within communities can stem, for one thing, from a community's lack of commitment to serving all groups equally. This sort of situation is effected by law in communities of South Africa and by long-established custom or as a by-product of residential segregation in many communities of the United States when schools in segregated minority neighborhoods are not equal in quality to those in other neighborhoods. 58 Even when children of different ethnic, racial, and social class backgrounds attend the same schools, their differences in background operate to keep them from being equally served by the programs that are provided. Teachers are not equally qualified to deal with pupils from different backgrounds. Also, in some communities, school personnel give preferential treatment to students from the higher levels of the social class and power hierarchies, a situation like that Hollingshead found, in the 1940's, in Elmtown, where even grades and scholarships were distributed unevenly along social class lines. 59 Furthermore, the different subcultures associated with different social class and ethnic groupings have subtle features that cumulatively affect educability and motivation to make use of schooling that is available. 60 The net result is that lower-class children are less likely than middle-class children to succeed in school or to continue through school. Moles, drawing on research relevant to the education of children from low-income families in communities of the United States, found that lower-class children were not learning from their subculture the language skills that middle-class children obtained from their subculture. Since instruction in school was being geared more to the nuances of meaning conveyed in middleclass language, lower-class children who lacked that language experience were being handicapped in taking tests and in understanding

58. See, for example, Otis Dudley Duncan, 'Discrimination against Negroes', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 371 ( 1 9 6 7 ) : 89. 59. August H. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: Wiley, 1949), pp. 1 6 3 - 2 0 3 . 6 0 . Catherine S. Chilman, Growing Up Poor (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Welfare Administration Publication No. 13, 1966), pp. 41-55.

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the full meaning of what the teacher said. 61 The cumulative handicapping effect of the situation of the lower-class in relation to the middle-class child is further suggested by the findings of Douglas that at successive ages working-class children show a decrease, while middle-class children show an increase, in their scores on intelligence tests. 62 Ghetto schools in cities of the United States face particularly intense problems of attracting and compensating qualified teachers and administrative personnel, articulating the school curriculum and program to the needs and interests of the pupils, and eliciting the interest and support of the parents in a situation where the social class and also language backgrounds of the people served by the school are unfamiliar to the school personnel. Efforts made by the Mobilization for Youth project to deal with these problems in schools of New York's Lower East Side are described in Chapter 7. Other major attempts to redress the educational disadvantages of low-income and minority status children have been made in numerous relatively modernized communities in countries over the world. Special compensatory programs have been developed to decrease the pupil-teacher ratio, provide more relevant teaching materials, and increase expenditures for education. In making an assessment of such programs, Riessman found that, both in the United States and in European countries, they had not generally succeeded in having a significant effect upon the educational achievement of the disadvantaged child. The following features of the compensatory programs that have been tried in the United States supply, according to Riessman, the main explanations for the negative outcomes: (1) they have tended to stigmatize their target population and, in implying that less is expected of the pupils, they have gotten less than they might have gotten if they had created a climate in which pupils felt higher expectations for achievement; (2) they have suffered from the lethargy or the intransigence of school administrators and from failure to include teachers, pupils, and parents in planning 61. Oliver C. Moles, Jr., 'Educational Training in Low-Income Families', in Low-Income Life Styles, Lola M. Irelan (ed.) (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Welfare Administration Publication No. 1 4 , 1 9 6 6 ) , pp. 33-35. 62. J. W. B. Douglas, The Home and the School (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964), p. 46.

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and implementation; (3) they have not been imaginative enough in developing appropriate means of teaching, testing, and evaluating the pupils; (4) they have lacked the personnel who are specially trained and qualified to deal constructively with disadvantaged children; and (5) they have not been planned in such a way that regular feedback could be obtained on what they were or were not accomplishing. 63 Education and Social Mobility The inequalities in educational opportunities that appear so difficult to overcome serve to stabilize the social class structure of the community to the extent that generation after generation families higher in the social class hierarchy get greater advantages from the education subsystem than families lower in the hierarchy. Those who gain the greater advantages are generally those whose social class subculture provides them the particular social skills, speech patterns, and motivation to which the typical school program is geared. Head Start programs in the United States are designed to change lower-income children in ways that will enable them to take advantage of the middle-class oriented school. The failure of schools to make adjustments in the direction of lower-class orientation has tended to vitiate Head Start achievements. Nevertheless, the community's subsystem of education does provide a major mechanism for social mobility when it becomes the instrumentality for selecting, training, and placing persons in occupations higher than those of their parents. This is the trend that characteristically accompanies the transformation of the occupational structure that occurs with increasing industrialization. As increasing numbers of jobs open up at middle and higher levels of income, the education subsystem functions to qualify increasing numbers of persons for more prestigeful jobs and a more prestigious style of life than they would otherwise attain. 63. Frank Riessman, 'Can Schools Teach Children: What Is Stopping Them — What Is to Be Done?', Journal of Research and Development in Education, 5 (1972): 83-90. See also Richard H. Davis, 'The Failures of Compensatory Education', Education and Urban Society, 4 (1972): 238-248; and Philip K. Jensen, et al., 'Evaluating Compensatory Education: A Case Study', Education and Urban Society, 4 (1972): 211-233.

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Subsystems Issues and the Education

Subsystem

The interrelatedness of the education subsystem with other community subsystems tends to involve it in a wide range of community issues. Controversies that confront school authorities in communities of the United States, for example, include such issues as whether or not the school should have religious observances in the form of daily prayers and Bible readings, hold patriotic ceremonies in the form of a salute or a pledge of allegiance to the flag, transport pupils by bus for the purpose of obtaining racial balance in the schools, and offer a program of sex education. The education subsystem is also likely to become involved in controversies over the size of the school tax to be levied, the degree to which the organization of the schools should be decentralized, the relative emphases to be given vocational and academic curricula, and what arrangements are appropriate for educating gifted and slow learners. Especially in communities of newly modernizing nations where different languages are in use there are likely to be problems regarding selection of the language in which most of the courses will be taught or regarding the appropriateness of a given language for particular purposes. In the United States, the language issue arises within communities where a nonEnglish language dominates certain ecological areas and where a distinctive black language is being recognized as appropriate in certain situations. A new issue is emerging around the question of whether current educational requirements for many occupational pursuits are artificial and unnecessary. People, it is being argued, are barred from useful employment by demand for qualifications that are arbitrary and unrelated to actual performance requirements. A recurring issue is posed by critics who charge the schools with using testing procedures, grading practices, and authoritarian measures that leave many school children feeling that they are failures, a feeling that goes on impairing their performance of roles in community life. 64 Equally controversial are some of the experimental school programs, such as the one operated by Neill at his Summerhill school in Leiston, England, since 1921. Summerhill commits 64. William Glasser, Schools Without Failure (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 95-110.

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itself without reservation to the principles of freedom and nonrepression under a system of student government in which the children themselves have complete authority. Class attendance is entirely voluntary and there are no examinations and no grades unless pupils request them. Every feature of the school program is intended to fit the child, and no effort is made to fit the child to the school. Reported results indicate that the children become interested in learning, learn with alacrity, develop self-confidence and originality, and acquire a relatively high degree of self-discipline. 65 THE SOCIAL WELFARE SUBSYSTEM

Social welfare as a subsystem of the community consists of all the regularized, ongoing arrangements that are made in the community for getting help to people who are in situations that obstruct performance of their roles in community life, for preventing such conditions from developing, and for increasing opportunities for people to achieve fuller realization of their potentialities. As conceived in this text, it includes arrangements for health care and recreation as well as for supporting income and rendering social services. Mutual Aid in Traditional

Communities

The structure of the social welfare subsystem in small traditional communities is mainly as a network of mutual aid arrangements. Members of kinship groups take responsibility for seeing that food, shelter, and other necessary items are supplied to any of their number who need them and they give one another emotional support and help in times of personal crisis. Such informal but regularized arrangements serve to meet needs that pose a threat to the stable functioning of community life. The obligations that they impose are supported by kinship norms that are generally reinforced by religious norms and values that stress the moral duty of caring for those in need. The hand-to-mouth sort of economy in which they occur provides such limited resources that a natural disaster like drought, flood, or insect plague can reduce an entire community to destitution. 65. A. S. Neill,

Summerhill (New York: Hart, 1960).

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Formal Organization for Social Welfare As communities move toward modernization, they increase their economic productivity and their capacity for meeting the needs of all community residents at a 'health-and-decency' level. In communities of a feudalistic type of society, mutual aid is usually supplemented by paternalistic provisions for assistance that landlords supply and by benevolences that religious bodies provide especially for the sick, the aged, and neglected or dependent children. There may also be some governmental provisions for helping to relieve extreme economic and health needs. In communities of countries that have made some headway toward industrializing, the social welfare subsystem is likely to contain local units of national governmental programs that have been designed to protect people against the risks of loss of income that are intensified in an industrialized economy. A study of 133 nations that had independent political status in 1971 showed that work-injury programs were being operated in 122 of them; programs covering old age, invalidism, and death, in 101; sickness and/or maternity programs, in 68; some type of family allowance, in 63; and unemployment insurance programs, in 34. 66 The structure of the social welfare subsystem in relatively modernized urban communities tends to be along bureaucratic lines and to have well-developed private and public (tax-supported) sectors. Agencies are organized to give their personnel specialized functions, to get staff positions set up in a hierarchical order, to provide for staff members to be hired and promoted on the basis of merit, to assign roles on the basis of technical qualifications, and to spell out in precise and formal terms the rules governing client eligibility. 67 The private sector. The part of the community's social welfare subsystem that is referred to as the private, or voluntary, sector is the part that is operated under nongovernmental auspices and with little 66. Social Security Administration, Social Security Programs throughout the World, 1971 (Washington, D. C.: Research Report No. 40, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Security Administration, Office of Research and Statistics, 1971), p. xi. 67. Harold L. Wilensky and Charles N. Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1958), pp. 233-243.

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or n o support f r o m tax funds. Hie provisions in this sector may be organized on a profit or a n o n p r o f i t basis. Those on a p r o f i t basis include services provided by independent professional practitioners, such as psychiatrists, physicians, and social workers in private practice, and recreation, nursing h o m e , hospital, and daycare services provided by enterprises established to make a profit as well as render service. Provisions offered on a n o n p r o f i t basis may be organized under religious or secular auspices. Homes for the aged, institutional care for children, hospitals, and such organizations as the Young Men'sYoung Women's Christian or Hebrew Association, the Salvation Army, and Catholic and Jewish social service agencies are examples of social welfare provisions that are conducted under religious auspices. The Red Cross, Travelers Aid, Boy and Girl Scout programs, family and children's service agencies, and various specialized health organizations illustrate the provisions made under secular auspices. Also under secular auspices are such provisions as pension plans, health care services, recreation programs, and child care services that business and industrial enterprises and labor organizations make for their employees and members. Financial support for the private sector of the social welfare subsystem comes primarily f r o m fees charged or funds contributed. The contributed funds may be obtained f r o m annual fund-raising campaigns conducted in the c o m m u n i t y (either a coordinated drive f o r a n u m b e r of different agencies or separate drives for individual agencies) a n d / o r f r o m private foundations, religious bodies, industries, labor unions, and, in some cases, f r o m government subsidy. (For fuller discussion of coordinated fund-raising, see Chapter 7.) The characteristic functions of the social welfare subsystem's private sector are t o deliver professional social work, health care, and recreation services; to pioneer new or experimental programs that are eventually taken over b y the public sector; and to supplem e n t the efforts of the public sector by providing amenities, supplementary financial aid, direct services, and informational and referral services. In communities of the United States, the private sector, since the 1930's, has tended to engage itself more with middle- and upperincome than with lower-income segments of the c o m m u n i t y b o t h in serving clients and in seeking members for policy-making boards

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and committees. 6 8 There is a current counter-trend, however, toward getting a more representative cross section of community residents to assist in formulating policies that relate to the nature and delivery of services and toward making use of system-changing measures that employ community organizing techniques in behalf of low-income clients. The public sector. The social welfare subsystem's public sector is financed mainly by tax funds and administered under governmental auspices. The tax funds may come from national, state, and/or local levels or some combination of these levels. The trend is in the direction of the national government's assuming more control, supplying more financial support, and providing for not only more adequate but also more different kinds of social welfare services. The public sector tends to support a floor of minimal services and income as a right of all citizens. Specialized types of services that are viewed as beneficial to the nation as a whole are on the increase. Services may be offered as social utilities available free to all persons regardless of income, on an ability-to-pay basis, on an ungraduated fee basis, free to certain categories of individuals regardless of financial need, and to certain categories of persons who are in proven financial need. Typical agencies in the public sector of the social welfare subsystem in communities of the United States include: the local Social Security Administration office, which administers Old Age Survivors Disability Health Insurance (OASDHI), i.e., 'social security' and 'Medicare'; the department of social services (formerly department of public welfare), which administers the public assistance, Medicaid, and Food Stamp programs for persons in proven financial need as well as a comprehensive program of social services not based on financial need; vocational rehabilitation, which provides occupational counseling, physical/mental restoration, and occupational training and placement services to persons who have some physical and/or mental handicap; the employment security agency, which administers unemployment insurance and employment placement 68. See, for example, Richard A. Cloward and Irwin Epstein, 'Private Social Welfare's Disengagement from the Poor: The Case of Family Adjustment Agencies', in Social Welfare Institutions, Mayer N. Zald (ed.) (New York: Wiley, 1965), pp. 623-644.

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services; the local agencies of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which administer various facets of the antipoverty program; mental health centers; family courts; the department of public health, which administers a variety of preventive health services; and the department of public recreation, which administers a park, playground, and recreation program for all age groups. Services Offered through the Social Welfare Subsystem Three main types of services — social work, health care, and recreation — are offered through the social welfare subsystem. While the three types could be viewed as belonging to separate subsystems, they are treated here as belonging to the one subsystem of social welfare in which at the community level they are closely interrelated, are being increasingly offered out of the same multifunctional centers, and are being increasingly brought together by community organizers and social planners to provide a comprehensive and integrated type of service that is responsive to consumer needs and wishes. Hie specific kinds of services provided through the social welfare subsystem vary considerably by the community's level of modernization and its demographic composition as well as by the adequacy of its financial resources. In relatively modernized urban communities typical services would include: casework and group work services of a therapeutic nature for people in problem situations; daycare and other types of self-development rather than therapyoriented services for children, parents, the elderly, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded; adoption services; legal aid; employment counseling and placement; rehabilitation services to youthful and adult lawbreakers as well as to alcoholics and drug addicts and to handicapped persons whose employability can be enhanced; such nutritional services as those provided by homemaker services, 'meals on wheels', school lunch programs, and Food Stamp/surplus Commodities programs; family planning services; health care services designed to treat and prevent physical and mental illnesses; recreation activities for all age groups, including both participating and spectator types of activities; information and referral services that help to link individuals with needs to resources for meeting those needs; advocacy services that provide intervention in behalf

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of clients to enable them to secure resources to which they are entitled; services focused on changing the social welfare subsystem in the direction of making it more responsive to individuals and community needs, of getting its delivery of human services more accessible to the people needing the services, and of increasing the scope and adequacy of services; and services provided through organized self-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Synanon (for drug addicts), and AFDC mothers' clubs. Further description of services rendered by professionals in the social welfare subsystem is presented in Chapter 7. In addition to the direct types of services cited above, the social welfare subsystem in increasing numbers of communities over the world offers a variety of income maintenance programs. Some of these programs are in the form of insurance that covers contingencies of death, disability, unemployment, and old age; some of them provide financial subsidies to lower-income persons to cover minimum subsistence needs and, in some cases, to subsidize costs of housing, medical care, job training, and education. In some countries, a family allowance plan provides cash payments to families at all income levels on the basis of family size. 69 Values in Social Welfare The values under which the social welfare subsystem operates are probably most clear-cut in communities of small, nonliterate societies where Gemeinschaft relationships foster a spirit of mutual aid. In communities of modernizing and relatively modernized societies there is widespread agreement that societies have a responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the well-being of their members. However, beyond this point, values tend to be pluralistic and, in some cases, contradictory. For example, in non-Communist societies there are divergent views on just what functions of the social welfare subsystem should be under government auspices and just what functions should be under secular or religious auspices. Similarly, there is lack of consensus on which provisions the social welfare 69. For fuller discussion of these programs and proposals, see Charles I. Schottland, 'Government Economic Programs and Family Life', Journal of Marriage and the Family, 29 (1967): 92-123.

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subsystem makes for supplying or supplementing people's income should be conceived as permanently needed or as merely emergency measures. Values generally vary, too, from one community to another and within the same community on the extent to which social welfare provisions obtained as aid should be free of stigma, rendered with a respect for human dignity, and held to a level of quality comparable to that found in provisions obtained by middle- and upper-income residents of the community. National and state policies reflect differences in values regarding who should be legitimately entitled to receive services and aid from the local social welfare subsystem, for example, everybody or only certain categories of people, such as the aged or dependent children; how much financial or other aid persons should receive, how soon recipients of aid should be expected to regain self-supporting status, and to what extent the provisions should be considered a civil right. Values favoring increased provisions for leisure-time activities or for money payments or services that are not work-related conflict with moral values that the Puritan ethic attaches to work and to the belief that people should work for what they receive. Growing support in the United States for establishing a minimum level of income as the guaranteed right of every citizen not only conflicts with the Puritan ethic, but also encounters disagreement over whether that income should be only enough to support a subsistence level of living or enough for a level of 'health and decency'. While values in the social welfare subsystem are most ambivalent toward the ablebodied poor, all persons in need are generally differentiated by normative definitions that separate 'the deserving' from 'the undeserving'. And both groupings, if they are receiving financial aid, are characteristically judged by moral standards for violations of which sanctions are more severe than they are for selfsupporting persons. Public assistance recipients, for example, who file fraudulent claims tend to be more severely condemned than more affluent people who file fraudulent income tax returns. There is, however, an emerging trend toward 'blaming' the various social institutions — the economic, the educational, and even the social welfare subsystem itself — rather than the individual for creating community problems that are dealt with by the social welfare subsystem. The shift is from an earlier view of the individual

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as 'culprit' to a view of the individual as 'victim'. Industries, for example, are held accountable for creating a wide range of health and safety hazards; schools are criticized for failing to provide the kinds of educational experiences that equip people to fulfill their societal roles in keeping with their capabilities; agencies in the social welfare subsystem are condemned for the inadequacy of their provisions and for the dehumanizing manner in which the provisions are delivered; the economic subsystem is blamed for not providing full and regular employment or incentives for increasing competency. Policies for dealing with community difficulties like these vary in the degree to which they reflect humanitarian values or values of economic self-interest. Social insurance provisions, for example, can be enacted to accomplish the humanitarian goal of relieving people's financial and personal distress or for the economic goal of checking the spread of unemployment and stabilizing the economy.

THE NORMATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE COMMUNITY The social structure of the community — as described above through social groups, social stratification patterns, and subsystems — gets its stability and order from the fact that it exists within a normative structure. The normative structure is made up of norms, i. e., rules and standards that define what people should and should not do in the various facets of their community living; sanctions, in the form of penalties applied for violation of, and rewards offered for conformity to, the norms; and values that represent the priorities people attach to material and nonmaterial features of their culture. The degree of stability and order maintained is in proportion to the degree that the people agree on and live by the norms. The dynamic character of community life is supported by the fact that norms are subject to change and some norms and values may actually call for community change. Mores, the norms that have moral significance and to which severe sanctions are attached, tend to change more slowly than folkways, the norms that merely prescribe what is proper and for violation of which the sanctions are relatively mild. Codified norms in the form of laws and written regulations are most readily enforced when they are backed by the informal norms.

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TREND TOWARD PLURALISTIC NORMS

Unless they are intentionally established in protest against some or all prevailing societal norms, communities generally have a normative structure essentially like that of the society in which they are located. Traditional communities characteristically have clear-cut norms that have acquired a stability by virtue of the many generations through which they have been handed down and a sacredness infused from the subsystem of religion. The relative geographic and cultural isolation of such communities tends to prevent or limit the introduction of alternative norms and values. Conformity to norms is usually widespread and enforced, to a large extent, by the psychological mechanism of shaming or ostracizing those who do not conform. As communities modernize and increase their contacts and linkages with other communities, norms tend to become more secular and rational. The more complex social structure gives rise to pluralistic norms; some norms are even so contradictory that conformity to one means automatic violation of the other. Within communities, the various social class and minority subcultures can be expected to have normative structures that are in varying degrees of disagreement with the normative structure of the community as a whole. Local residents may experience 'culture shock' when they try to live, work, attend school, or play with fellow residents who have been socialized in a subculture different from their own. The same sort of experience can occur when people move from one locality to another where norms are very different and unfamiliar. People who live among confused norms or where guides to behavior are lacking are being exposed to the experience of what Emile Durkheim designated as anomie. To the extent that alienation is widespread, the community's stability and order tend to be threatened.

NORMS AND VALUES RELATED TO COMMUNITY CHANGE

Particularly relevant to community development are norms and values that affect the people's attitudes toward change. Communities with a secular, scientific, cosmopolitan outlook are likely to

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be more favorable toward change than communities with a sacred, traditionalistic, local outlook. In addition to their orientation toward change in general, communities also vary in the nature of their overall reactions to specific types of change or to specific innovations. Hie norms of the Old Order Amish community in Pennsylvania, for example, are conservative and relatively hostile toward any social change, but they are less hostile toward technological change that would make farming more efficient than toward technological change that would make travel easier or faster. They are most hostile and resistant toward any social change that exposes members of the Amish group to non-Amish secular influences, such as those to be experienced in nonfarm occupations or in attendance at consolidated public schools that have non-Amish teachers. Furthermore, within any given community there may be variations among different groups and segments of the population in their norms and values related to change. Ethnic variations, for example, were discovered by Pederson in a Wisconsin community where higher proportions of Danish than of Polish farmers had adopted every one of the twenty-one dairy farming practices he examined in his study. The Danish culture's value on education in contrast to the Polish stress on home training, the outgoing and community-centered orientation of the Danish farmers in contrast to the Polish farmers' family-centered orientation, and the Danish group's value on independence and freedom in encouraging a relatively complete break in operation between father and son in contrast to the Poles' gradual transfer of the farm from father to son were value differences cited by Pederson to explain the greater ease of introducing new ideas among the Danish farmers. 7 0 Variations by social class and income levels have been cited in numerous studies. For example, families at the lower levels, one study showed, were about half as likely as families at the middle or upper levels to have their children immunized against polio when the free Salk vaccine immunization campaigns were conducted in communities of the United States. Similar differences in response occurred in a diphtheria immunization campaign held in Great Britain. 70. Harold A. Pederson, 'Cultural Differences in the Acceptance of Recommended Practices', Rural Sociology, 16 (1951): 37-49.

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The lesser receptivity of families at the lower levels was associated, according to Irelan, with their being more likely than families at higher levels to live by value systems of fatalism and of greater orientation to the present than to the future. 7 1 Variations by amount of wealth occur but not necessarily in straight-line fashion. For example, rich farmers were found to adopt new farming practices more readily than others when the innovations were first brought to the communities under study. Middleincome farmers, however, were more conservative about adopting than their wealth would have predicted. By the time they began accepting the innovations low-income farmers — though in smaller numbers — were accepting them, too. The wealthier farmers were better informed than the others about the nature of the innovations, and therefore, their adopting involved less risk. As knowledge about the innovations spread within the community, risk as a deterrent declined in importance. 7 2 The men in a Spanish-American community in New Mexico had a value system that was receptive to a hybrid corn seed the county agent introduced to them as more productive in its yield than the corn seed they had been planting. But the women's value system stressed the cooking quality of the flour made from the corn; and since the flour milled from the new corn did not have the quality they valued, they prodded the men into going back to the old less productive corn seed. 73 Resistance to change can be minimized if a proposed innovation is fitted into the community's existing value system. For instance, a Peace Corps worker in a Sierra Leone community avoided the kind of problem encountered by the county agent in the New Mexico community by making sure that the new strain of rice he was in71. Lola M. Irelan, 'Health Practices of the Poor', in Low-Income Life Styles, Lola M. Irelan (ed.) (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1966), pp. 51-65. 72. Frank Cancian, 'Stratification and Risk-Taking: A Theory Tested on Agricultural Innovation', American Sociological Review, 32 (1967): 912-927; and Barry L. Isaac, 'Preliminary Note on an Agricultural Innovation in Mando Chiefdom, Sierra Leone', Human Organization, 30 (Spring, 1971): 73-78. 73. Anacleto Apodaca, 'Corn and Custom: The Introduction of Hybrid Corn to Spanish American Farmers in New Mexico', in Human Problems in Technological Change, Edward H. Spicer (ed.) (New York: Russell Sage, 1952), pp. 35-39.

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troducing satisfied the cooking expectations of the women as well as the taste preferences of the community's residents and the increase in crop yield desired by the farmers. 7 4 A missionary doctor associated with a community action effort to introduce modern medical practices into certain Navajo communities neutralized the opposition of the tribal medicine men and eventually elicited their cooperation by teaching them simple 'medical practices' that strengthened rather than weakened their position in the community. Relieved of the fear that they would lose the prestige they had in the existing value system, the medicine men ceased their thwarting of the health project and began referring difficult cases to the physician. 75

SUMMARY Community has been examined in this chapter from the sociocultural perspective focusing on informal and formal groups; patterns of social stratification; the subsystems of family, economy, government, religion, education, and social welfare; and the structure of norms and values. It is through the recurrent interaction and shared norms of informal and formal groups that the residents of a community identify with their locality and participate in the activities that go on there day in and day out. Relatively nonmodernized communities tend to have few formal organizations and those few tend to be highly inclusive, general-purpose associations that operate on a personal and informal basis. Relatively modernized communities, on the other hand, have a multiplicity of informal groups and formal special-purpose organizations; it is mainly through these that the different subsystems perform their respective functions. All communities exhibit patterns of social stratification that reflect hierarchical rankings of the people in terms of variations in social prestige linked to the community's social class structure and 74. Isaac, pp. 76-77. 75. Earl H. Bell and John Sirjamaki, Social Foundations (2nd ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 512.

of Human Behavior

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of variations in power associated with the hierarchies of positions in the local subsystems. Each of the different strata of the social class hierarchy has its own distinctive subculture. The same is true for each of the different minorities in the community. The stratification patterns are meaningful in community life in that people at the higher strata tend to have freer access than people at the lower strata to preferred housing, residential location, and health care services as well as greater opportunities for education, employment, and participation in community decision-making activities. The family subsystem generally performs the functions of replenishing the community's population, assigning status to new family members, and locating responsibility for the care and rearing of children. The less modernized the community, the more likely it is that the family will also be active in performing such functions as producing as well as consuming goods and services, educating the youth, providing religious instruction, exercising social control, supplying various kinds of protection for family members. A central process in a community's change toward modernization involves changing from the self-sufficient, localized, subsistencelevel type of economic subsystem characteristic of traditional communities to an economic subsystem of increasing productivity in which the people sell most of what they produce and buy most of what they consume. Minimal division of labor and heavy reliance upon human or animal energy give way to a highly specialized elaboration of economic roles and use of a highly scientific machine technology. The subsystem of government performs the functions of maintaining order in the community and administering justice. The worldwide trend is toward an increase in the number and kinds of services performed by this subsystem and toward encouraging a broader base of citizen participation in political decision making. The subsystem of religion performs the functions of maintaining beliefs about forces considered sacred and supernatural and linking the community's established norms of 'right' and 'wrong' behavior with potential rewards and punishments of the supernatural. As communities move toward modernization this subsystem encounters more competition with other subsystems for the time and support

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of community residents and tends to develop a more proliferated structure in which different units develop to serve different social class, racial, and ethnic groupings. The subsystem of education has the main responsibility for transmitting formally the knowledge and skills and values the community wishes to have perpetuated. In the more modernized communities this becomes a large-scale, bureaucratized operation. The trend is for the education subsystem to extend the variety and level of the preparation it offers and to try to find ways of upgrading the educational experiences of pupils from low-income and minority status backgrounds. Hie social welfare subsystem performs the functions of getting help to people who have difficulty in carrying on their roles in community life, of preventing conditions that give rise to that difficulty, and of facilitating the fuller realization of people's potentialities. The subsystem, as conceived in this text, includes health care and recreation as well as measures for maintaining income and rendering social services. The normative structure, which gives a community stability and order to the extent that people agree on and live by local norms, tends to become increasingly pluralistic as communities increase in size and degree of modernization. Receptivity to change is usually greater in communities that have a cosmopolitan, secular, and scientific outlook than in communities that have a traditionalistic, sacred, and local view of the world. All community actions take place through the informal and formal groups, the social stratification patterns, and the subsystems of the community. These aspects of community life are also targets toward which community action efforts are directed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY B o t t o m o r e , T. B. Classes in Modern Society. New Y o r k : Vintage, 1 9 6 8 . An e x a m i n a t i o n o f social class structure in industrial societies, b o t h capitalist a n d socialist. Clark, Terry N. (ed.). Community Structure and Decision-Making: Comparative Analyses. S a n Francisco: Chandler, 1 9 6 8 . A synthesis of comparative research on c o m m u n i t y decision making. The authors o f the various chapters analyze the relations between c o m m u n i t y

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structure and patterns of decision making reflected in the power structure of the community. Coleman, James S., et al. Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Office of Education, H. E. W., 1966. A report of a comprehensive study of the extent to which schools in the United States offer equal educational opportunities and effects that different educational provisions have on educational results. Levy, Marion J . , J r . Modernization and the Structure of Societies. 2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966. A comparative analysis of relatively modernized and relatively nonmodemized societies, covering family, economic, governmental, religious, and educational institutional structures. Spinrad, William, 'Power in Local Communities', Social Problems, 12 (1965): 335-356. A comparison of studies that employ the reputational and decision-analysis methods of studying leadership. Particular attention is paid to the relative amount of influence exerted by different institutional sectors and the relative number of top leadership positions filled by representatives from the various sectors. Vidich, Arthur J . ; and Bensman, Joseph. Small Town in Mass Society. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1958. A study that emphasizes the impact of mass society on a small New York community. Wickenden, Elizabeth. Social Welfare in a Changing World. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1965. An interpretation of social welfare as an instrument of self-help, as a distributive mechanism, and as a mechanism for social planning. The material is in the context of changes that accompany modernization. Winch, Robert F.; and Goodman, Louis Wolf (eds.). Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family. 3rd. ed.; New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. A book of readings that provide a comprehensive sociological analysis of the family. Variations in the structure and functions of the family among cultures at different levels of modernization are described in some of the selections.

CHAPTER 3

Community : Demographic and Ecological Perspectives

The sociocultural perspective taken in Chapter 2 has to be supplemented with study of the community from demographic and ecological perspectives if a well-rounded understanding of particular communities is to be achieved. From the demographic perspective, specialized information can be gathered to identify the meaning that derives for a community from its population size; the composition of its population by such variables as age, sex, and race; its birth and death rates; the migration of population into and out of the locality; and people's change of residence within community boundaries. Hie ecological perspective provides information about the relationships between the people and the geographic setting of the community as they are reflected in the particular uses the people make of particular segments of space, the processes by which the uses undergo change, and the effects that particular land uses have upon the natural environment in decreasing or increasing the community's viability. It is implicit in thé descriptions offered here and in Chapter 2 that the sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of the community are in close relationships with one another. For example, as the demographic variable of population size increases, the community's social organization becomes more complex and ecological changes occur in the distribution of the local population, outward into previously unoccupied areas and/or upward into 'high rise' buildings. Simultaneously, the community experiences increasing demand for a wide variety of public services and increasing needs to deal with such problems as traffic congestion, pollution, and rising crime rates.

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DEMOGRAPHIC FEATURES OF THE COMMUNITY POPULATION SIZE

Size of population, as indicated in Chapter 1, is a variable used by social scientists to distinguish between rural and urban communities. After communities reach a certain population size they tend to display characteristics that are defined as urban, i. e., specialization of economic activities, multiplicity of formal organizations, and heterogeneity of population. Social relations generally become more formal, less personal, more superficial, and more segmented than they are in rural communities. Two sets of variables — the relative numbers of births and deaths and the relative numbers of in-migrants and out-migrants — jointly determine the size of a community's population. Change in population size reported for a given town or city as a result of annexation does not represent actual change in population size if the annexed area was already a part of the community except for its legal status. For a community to attract new members and retain those it already has it must have a combination of technology, social organization, and access to natural resources from which the people can obtain the goods and services they require in meeting their daily needs. To the extent that the community is not self-sufficient, it must depend upon a transportation system for bringing in necessary supplies and taking surplus goods to market. The larger the population of the community becomes, the greater the need for efficient sanitation facilities that prevent the spread of contagious diseases and for governmental arrangements that maintain order and provide necessary public services. A growing population increases consumer demands and is usually welcomed by business interests in the community. Sudden and drastic growth, however, is likely to overburden a community with demands for housing as well as social welfare, education, sanitation, water, and other services. A declining population is typically considered undesirable from the standpoint of the economic subsystem, though in agricultural areas it may enable the people who remain in the community to acquire larger farming units and raise their level of living. Research studies from which communities can

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get accurate predictions of population trends provide a basis for orderly planning and development of facilities and services that are appropriately balanced with local needs.

COMPOSITION OF POPULATION

Communities may vary considerably in terms of such demographic variables as the proportions of people they have in different age, sex, race, nationality, religious, and occupational groupings. These variations have direct meaning in community life. For example, the smaller the proportion of a community's population in the productive ages, 20 to 65, the larger the number of dependents each productive resident must support. The higher the proportion of children, the greater the needs for schools and playgrounds. The higher the proportion of elderly residents, the greater the need for such services and facilities as nursing home care and special transportation arrangements for shopping and getting to the doctor and also the greater the likelihood that conservative attitudes toward community change will prevail. A marked imbalance of adult males and females reduces the opportunities for monogamous marriage available to the sex that is in the numerical majority. The greater the diversity of racial, religious, and nationality groupings in a community, the more pluralistic the norms and values tend to be and the more open the community is to innovation and change, but the harder it is to achieve community consensus on goals or plans for collective action. Generally speaking, in communities of the Southern United States, the higher the ratio of blacks to whites, the greater has been the delay in effecting racial desegregation in the schools. Traditional and modernizing communities characteristically have proportionately more persons in the younger age groupings (under age 25, for example) and proportionately fewer persons in the middle and older age groupings than is the case in relatively modernized communities. Among relatively modernized communities there are rural-urban variations and suburban-central city variations in the age composition of the population. Rural communities tend to have proportionately fewer persons in the productive ages than urban communities have, and suburban ecological areas

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tend to have proportionately fewer older persons and proportionately more children and more young adults than is the case in the central city. Suburban areas of cities generally resemble rural communities in having relatively high proportions of children. In communities of relatively modernized societies, the sex ratio, i.e., the number of males per 100 females, tends to be higher in rural than in urban areas. However, in newly modernizing cities of Asia and Africa, where more young adult males than females migrate urbanward, the pattern is reversed. 1 Within the same country, communities differ considerably in the sex ratios that they have not only in their total population but also in various age groupings. An unbalanced sex ratio for young unmarried adults is usually a consequence of differential migration either into or out of the community; for older adults it is also a consequence of a differing life expectancy between the sexes. Population Pyramid: Portrayal of Population Distribution, by Age and Sex A population pyramid is a device for portraying the age and sex distribution of given populations. It can be used to compare different communities at a particular time or the same community at different periods of time. The population pyramid in Figure 1 portrays the age and sex distribution of the population of the urbanized area of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1970. The data are broken down by race, reported in the Census as Negro and white. According to the 1970 Census, the urbanized area of Charlotte, i. e., the legal city and its surrounding suburbs, had a total population of 279,530 —204,700 whites and 74,830 nonwhites. Of the nonwhites, 73,819 were blacks. The bars of the pyramid show how the people were proportionately distributed by age and sex within each race. The distribution, in turn, reflects demographic changes that have occurred in earlier decades and provides a basis for estimating changes that can be ex1. See, for example, Ralph Thomlinson, Population Dynamics (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 430; and William J. Barber, 'Urbanization and Economic Growth: The Case of Two White Settler Territories', in The City in Modern Africa, Horace Miner (ed.) (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 101-103.

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Community

MALES

FEMALES AGE

4

3 2 PERCENT

Fig. 1. Age and Sex Distribution,

2 3 PERCENT

4

by Race, Urbanized Area of Charlotte, N. C., 1970. Source: U. S. Census of Population, 1970

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pected to occur later. For example, looking toward the past, the larger proportions in the age groupings 10-14 and 15-19 (persons born in the 1950's) as compared with the proportions in the age groupings 30-34 and 35-39 (persons born in the 1930's) reflects the fact that birth rates were higher in the 1950's than they had been in the 1930's. Looking toward the future, the relatively small proportion of both blacks and whites under five years of age indicates that for the immediate future there will be a smaller proportion of the population in elementary school and, for somewhat later in the future, a decline at the high school level — unless this trend is offset by rapid in-migration. In portraying differences between the races in the age and sex distribution of Charlotte's population, the pyramid stimulates inquiry into possible sociocultural conditions that could serve as explanations. The proportion of blacks, for instance, in 1970, was greater than it was for whites in each age grouping under 25 and smaller in each age grouping above age 25. This situation reflects a higher birth rate for blacks than for whites, coupled with a greater outward or a smaller inward migration among blacks than among whites for persons in the ages 20-29. The greater outward or smaller inward migration of blacks could be partially accounted for by lack of employment opportunities for blacks in Charlotte, a situation associated with the fact that Charlotte's occupational structure is weighted toward white-collar and highly skilled blue-collar jobs for which blacks have less likely been qualified and from which they have more likely been barred through discriminatory practices in employment. The examples given here indicate the kinds of demographic and sociocultural interpretations that can be made from inspection of a population pyramid. Even more detailed findings can be obtained by using census data that have been collected for census tracts, i. e., various groupings of contiguous blocks within a large city. Analyses of census tract data provide a picture of intracommunity variations by geographic area, showing differences, for example, in age, sex, race, income, housing conditions, and education, among different areas.

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BIRTH AND DEATH RATES

The size and composition of a community's population are related to the community's rates of births and deaths. When there is an excess of births over deaths, population increases unless there is a net increase in outward migration sufficient to balance or offset the natural increase. If the birth rate is high, the community's population has relatively high proportions of children and young adults. As the death rate is lowered, the relative proportions in the middle and older age groupings increase. The highest median age can be expected in communities where both birth and death rates are low, the lowest median age in communities where both rates are high. Rates of migration, of course, modify the effects of birth and death rates on age distribution. In communities of relatively modernized Western countries, birth and death rates are in inverse relationship to position in the social class hierarchy. Higher death rates are associated with limited access to adequate food, shelter, and medical care. Birth rates are associated with religious and family values and with access to family planning knowledge and facilities. Demographic

Transition

During modernization, communities generally exhibit a pattern of change in birth and death rates known as the demographic transition. From a stage in which both birth rates and death rates are high (a rate of about 40 per 1,000 population), there is a transition to a stage in which death rates decline sharply (to a level of 20 or fewer deaths per 1,000 population), while birth rates remain high. Then follows a third stage that is characterized by a lowered birth rate as well as a low death rate. Most communities of the world and all of those for which reasonably accurate statistics are available are either in stage 2 or stage 3. A typical Mexican community in stage 2 of the demographic transition, in 1970, would probably have had a birth rate of about 41 (per 1,000 population) and a death rate of about 9 (per 1,000 population). A typical community in Sweden, representing stage 3 of the demographic transition, in 1970, would probably have had a birth rate of about 14 (per 1,000 population) and a death rate of

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about 10 (per 1,000 population). 2 The rates cited are crude rates, i.e., based upon total populations. They are not corrected for age distribution. The fact that the crude death rate in the typical Swedish community was slightly higher than that in the typical Mexican community, even though health conditions (measured by infantmortality, longevity, and age-specific death rates) were more favorable in the former than in the latter, reflects the fact that the Swedish communities had proportionately more people in the older age brackets where death rates tend to be higher than at younger ages.

PATTERNS OF POPULATION MOVEMENT

Community Migration: In and Out The patterns of population movement relative to communities are of four types: from one rural community to another, from an urban to a rural community, from a rural to an urban community, and from one urban community to another. The largest and most rapid movement into agricultural communities generally occurs during the early settlement and/or after the community increases the intensity of land use, for example, through irrigation or some type of crop production that requires an increased supply of labor. Movement into urban communities typically occurs when the city's economic base expands to provide an increase of job opportunities. Conversely, both rural and urban communities can be expected to lose population when their overall employment opportunities decline. Except in countries that are already predominantly urban, the most pronounced intercommunity movement is currently from rural to urban communities. The extent of this movement is indicated by the fact that the percent of the world's population living in cities of 20,000 or more 2. For a discussion in depth of the demographic transition, see, for example, William Petersen population (2nd ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 9-17 and 4 0 1 - 4 8 5 . For evidence from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Egypt that in-migration of young adult rural migrants to modernizing urban communities may delay the lowering of urban birth rates, see Alvin O. Zarate, 'Fertility in the Urban Areas of Mexico: Implications for the Theory of Demographic Transition', Demography, 4 (1967): 363-373.

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increased from 2.4 in 1800 to 27.1 in 1960. During the same period, the number of people residing in such cities increased about 40 times, while total world population increased only a little more than three times. 3 The flow of people to the cities of modernizing countries, according to Mehta, has usually been in excess of job opportunities, housing, and civic facilities. Slums and shanty towns have mushroomed, and city governments have had neither the technical manpower nor the resources to supply them even the minimal services needed. Marked contrasts exist between the luxury level of living of the cities' small number of wealthy residents and the stark poverty and discomfort of the large numbers of low-income people. 4 In the United States and the countries of Western Europe, the current patterns of population movement are mainly from one city to another. 5 Professionals and executives are especially likely to engage in this type of movement, since they tend to change jobs to advance their careers or are transferred by their employers from one location to another. According to the Webbers, movement of this sort is made with apparent ease and seldom presents an adjustment of crisis proportions to the families involved. 6 Research on a national sample of families who engaged in intercommunity migration between 1966 and 1969, in the United States, showed that about four times as great a proportion of white as of black families moved (17.3 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively). 7 Mobility within

Communities

In addition to population movement from one community to an3. Gerald Breese, Urbanization in Newly Developing Countries (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 16-19. 4. Asoka Mehta, 'The Social Impact of Urbanization as a Universal Process', Urban Development, Proceedings of the XIHth International Conference of Social Work (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1967), pp. 28-31. 5. Warren S. Thompson and David T. Lewis, Population Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 150-151. 6. Melvin M. Webber and Carolyn C. Webber, 'Culture, Territoriality, and the Elastic Mile', in Taming Megalopolis: Volume I, What Is and What Could Be, H. Wentworth Eldredge (ed.) (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 39. 7. Ronald J. McAllister, Edward J. Kaiser, and Edgar W. Butler, 'Residential Mobility of Blacks and Whites: A National Longitudinal Survey', American Journal of Sociology, 77 (1971): 448.

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other, there is also movement within the community from one place of residence to another. For this type of movement, in the United States, between 1966 and 1969, black households exceeded white — 48 percent as compared with 28 percent. Renters were much more likely than owners to change residence, and there was a high ratio of black to white renters. 8 A distinctive pattern of intracommunity movement in Western cities is from the central city to the suburbs. This was once predominantly a movement of wealthy upper-class residents, but the current trend — facilitated by mass-produced housing and rapid transportation — involves a wider range of income and social class levels. 9 Still typically excluded, however, and left behind in the central city are racial and ethnic minorities, families of lower income and social class standing, and elderly residents. Some of the suburban movement has been motivated by desire to escape the city's noise and congestion; some by desire to avoid the city's civil disorder, crime, conflict over school issues, and rising costs of municipal expenditures; and some by positive attraction to a less urbanistic style of life than that in the city proper. To the extent that the central city loses higher-income residents to the suburbs and gains proportionately more lower-income residents through natural increase or in-migration, it loses income and other resources and adds greatly increased needs for funds and services. Furthermore, as Kasarda and Neenen have shown, a suburban population by virtue of its daily use of the facilities of its central city, generally raises the costs of municipal services more than it compensates the city through employment and sales taxes. Detroit, Neenen found, was supplying net subsidies to its suburbs ranging from $1.73 per capita for a low-income industrial suburb to $ 12.58 per capita for a high-income residential and commercial suburb. 1 0 In the United States, some intracommunity mobility is necessited by residential relocation projects in urban renewal and Model 8. Ibid., pp. 448-451. 9. David R. Morgan, 'Community Social Rank and Attitudes toward Suburban Living', Sociology and Social Research, 55 (1971): 401-413. 10. John D. Kasarda, 'The Impact of Suburban Population Growth on Central City Service Functions', American Journal of Sociology, 77 (1972): 11231124; and William Neenen, 'The Suburban-Central City Exploitation Thesis: One City's Tale', National Tax Journal, 23 (1970): 139.

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Cities programs. Under these circumstances, the relocated persons usually receive financial payments to cover the cost of moving and assistance in finding and obtaining housing. In some cases, they are helped to secure low-interest loans and long-term budget counseling as a means of relocating in new residences and buying their own homes in what are considered more desirable residential sites. The intracommunity movement that has led to the concentration of blacks in central cities of the United States has had both positive and negative effects for that segment of the population. On the one hand, it has served to get the power hierarchy more responsive to the needs of black residents, and in some communities, for example, Gary, Indiana, Cleveland, Ohio, and Newark, New Jersey, it has increased the opportunity for blacks to move into top-level positions in the governmental subsystem. On the other hand, it has tended to isolate blacks in ghettos where housing accommodations, recreation facilities, and opportunities for education are inadequate and where rates of crime, unemployment, and underemployment are high. Teen-age blacks (ages 1 6 - 1 9 ) represent a grouping particularly affected by the population shifting. Their numbers in central cities increased 72 percent between 1 9 6 0 and 1 9 6 9 , and their unemployment rates were higher than those of any other age and racial grouping in the labor force. 1 1

ECOLOGICAL F E A T U R E S O F THE COMMUNITY As a population grouping in a given locality develops the social organization and shared way of life that are basic in the development of a community, the people become caught up in an ongoing interrelationship with their geographic environment. That environment affects, and is affected by, the particular uses the people make of the particular space and natural resources that are present. The uses, in turn, yield a patterned and dynamic spatial organization which constitutes the ecology of the community. 11. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-23, No. 3 3 , Trends in Social and Economic Conditions in Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), p. 12, and No. 3 8 , The Social and Economic Status of Negroes in the United States, 1970 (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1971),p. 53.

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In considering the ecological features of a community, attention is given to the processes by which the spatial distribution of people and their activities in a given locale develops and changes; the particular patterns of spatial organization that, to some degree, recur in rural and in urban communities; and the different theories that attempt to explain the growth patterns of urban communities. It is assumed that reciprocal influences operate continually between ecological patterns and the community's sociocultural, demographic, and geographic features. 12

PROCESSES PRODUCING SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION

The ways in which people of different communities distribute, in their geographic setting, the locations of their residences, their routes of transportation, their institutional activities, such as their businesses, schools, churches, government services, and recreation, vary in detail from one community to another and from one time to another in the same community. However, there does tend to be rather generally a common ecological pattern that prevails among communities of similar size and dominant economic activity in a given culture or subculture. For example, land uses are much more highly differentiated in large metropolitan communities than they are in small agricultural communities, reflecting the great variety of specialized activities carried on in the large city. Universal processes that operate to efffect the patterns of ecological organization that develop include: competition, concentration and dispersion, centralization and decentralization, specialization and segregation, and invasion and succession. Each of these will be described later, beginning with competition, which operates both independently and as a concomitant of the other processes. Before that, consideration will be given to two other sets of community conditions that constitute a framework within which the ecological processes occur 12. For fuller treatment of theories on community ecology, see Nels Anderson, The Industrial Urban Community (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), pp. 88-109; Amos H. Hawley and Basil G. Zimmer, The Metropolitan Community (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1970), pp. 1-64; R. E. Pahl, Patterns of Urban Life (London: Longmans, 1970); and Robert Ezra Park, Human Communities (New York: Free Press, 1952).

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and which themselves affect the spatial distribution of the community's people and their activities. One of these is the potential life cycle that communities tend to undergo, and the other is the temporal dimension that gives day-to-day life in the community a collective sort of rhythm, or 'flow'. Community

Life Cycle

Communities and parts of communities, according to Forrester, experience ecological changes that are associated with a usual, but not inevitably complete, cycle of growth — equilibrium — decline. This cycle begins when new land is occupied and a period of growth ensues, lasting until the land is fully utilized for a particular pattern of use — given the available technology. When gain in population and innovativeness in economic pursuits become balanced by population loss and decline in economic activities, a period of relative equilibrium prevails. At this point, new buildings and new businesses are keeping pace with the deterioration of aging buildings and a downward trend in economic activities. Unless there is continuing renewal, for example, through the introduction of new technology or additional resources, the cycle moves on and population numbers and/or the people's levels of living decline. In extreme cases, the community, or its affected part, eventually becomes extinct. 1 3 Unusual events, such as fires, floods, and earthquakes, speed up or slow down the cycle, depending upon the extent to which the community is prepared to deal with such disasters and is able to provide rehabilitation from the damage that is done. In increasing numbers of modernizing and relatively modernized communities, there is concern about the ecological changes — long-range and shortrange — that particular practices can produce and the potential of those changes for enhancing or despoiling the community's water, air, soil, minerals, flora, and fauna. Rhythm

of Community

Life

Spatial patterns in communities form and change against a backdrop 13. Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics pp. 1-8.

(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969),

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of a collective rhythm in community life that gives a high degree of predictability to what goes on in the locality. For example, a daily rhythm emanates from the ebb and flow of traffic as people go from their homes to work and back to their homes again and from the hours of high population density in business centers when shoppers and workers are there followed by the hours of low population density when shoppers and workers have gone. A different kind of rhythm is supplied by local folkways and mores that prescribe certain days of the week and certain hours of the day for engaging in specified activities, such as attending religious services, holding school, and observing special celebrations. There is also a seasonal rhythm that is associated in agricultural communities with sowing, cultivating, and harvesting, and in rural and urban communities with seasonal changes in merchandise, vacationing, and school sessions. The larger and more pluralistic the community, the less periodicity there is in activities. Even the differentiation between daytime and nighttime pursuits — so marked in small traditional communities — becomes increasingly blurred in the round-the-clock continuity that characterizes activities of large urban communities. Ecological

Processes

Competition for land use. From the point of view of classical ecologists, land becomes allocated for various commercial, industrial, and institutional purposes and for residential use by different ethnic and social class groupings as a consequence of competitive interaction that takes place at an impersonal and subsocial level among individuals and groups who are usually not aware of, or concerned about, the effects their actions will have on the community as a whole. Other ecologists see the distribution affected more by the people's cultural values and practices, for example, their desire to preserve historic landmarks and their use of social planning and zoning regulations that modify or control the competitive process. Competition occurs when different interest groups vie with one another to get a given site to use for a group's particular purpose — commercial, industrial, institutional, or residential. Under conditions of free economic competition, the group that gets the site is the one that pays the most for it. Similarly, residential land is dis-

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tributed by competition among different income, racial, nationality, and social class groupings in such a way that those who pay the most get the most desirable sites. However, discriminatory practices that are operative against certain groupings take precedence over, or modify, allocation based on ability to pay. Modification also results from use of public housing or housing subsidies that enable low-income households to obtain more preferred residential locations than they could otherwise secure. Economic but not necessarily other types of competition are largely eliminated in communities where the government controls housing as well as other kinds of land use. Some degree of cooperation and of accommodation usually accompanies the competition for space. For example, businessmen join forces to keep what they consider an objectionable enterprise from obtaining space in the vicinity of their business, local civic leaders work together to get space that will attract industries to the community, residents of a neighborhood agree n o t to sell to persons of a different race or religious background. Accommodation represents the adjustments and compromises that groups competing for a desired site make with each other so that neither is excluded from the community. The cooperative and accommodative processes that temper the competition for land use help to sustain the degree of unity essential in community life. Concentration and dispersion. The term concentration is applied to the process by which people congregate residentially in a given locale thereby either establishing a community, increasing the population size of a community already established, or increasing the density of population (ratio of people to land area) in some part of a community. The process is impelled by two sets of circumstances: availability of employment and community facilities that draw people to a community and availability of a residential site that can be obtained or afforded. The concentration of low-income populations in low-rent areas of urban communities is typically linked with the people's inability to obtain residential arrangements in more favorable locations. Dispersion is the process that is operative when people move residence from an area of higher to an area of lower population density either within the same community or in some other com-

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munity. Movement within the community, illustrated in movement from the central city to the suburb, is facilitated by the availability of transportation, space, and desired conveniences and features of life as well as by the 'push' effect of congestion, noise, overcrowding, and civic disorder. Movement from a larger to a smaller community generally depends upon the pull effect of special economic opportunities, for example, local need for a particular type of professional practitioner or business enterprise as well as the special appeal of a less competitive and more personal way of life to be found there. Centralization and decentralization. The process of centralization is the process by which particular functions and services rather than residences become congregated in a strategic location, for example, to form a rural community trade center or the central business district of a city. The location is typically the ecological center of the community where major routes of transportation converge. Limits on centralization are likely to be in the form of high land values, high rents, and inconveniences produced by congestion. The process of decentralization involves the movement of functions and services away from central locations within the community. Viewed from the standpoint of the community as a whole, the movement of business and service enterprises from the central business district, for example, to newly developed shopping centers or to the periphery of the community illustrates decentralization; for the sections of the community involved, the new locations constitute focuses of centralization. Specialization and segregation. The process of specialization produces a distinctive clustering of particular types of establishments and services, such as theater districts and financial districts in cities or the separate clusters of specialized shops and crafts in the bazaars of villages of India. Enterprises that specialize in a certain activity, such as sale of fabrics, locate near one another as a means of attracting customers and of obtaining facilities and services for which they have common need. Specialization provides the customer an easy opportunity to compare quality and prices and probably greater variety in choice. The process of segregation produces a distinctive clustering of

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persons of the same race, social class, ethnic background, or level of income. These clusters generally form as a consequence of two sets of circumstances. In one case, persons actively seek to live among people like themselves so that they can maintain familiar or desired standards and ways of life or can be near friends or relatives. In the other case, persons are excluded by social pressures, zoning ordinances, restrictive covenants, or economic conditions from areas in which they could be with people different from themselves. The most rigid segregation is found in the apartheid system that dominates some African communities and in the caste separations that occur generally in communities of India. Segregation is preferred when it is chosen, but it is resented when it is imposed by law or by informal norms and sanctions. The resentment is linked to the feeling that members of the dominant segment consider the excluded segment to be inferior. Invasion and succession. In the process of invasion a kind of land use or population type enters an area occupied exclusively by a different type of land use or population. For instance, a business establishment locates in a residential area or a black family moves into an all-white neighborhood. The invader may be welcomed, resented, or both. The business establishment, for example, is likely to be welcomed in the residential area by property owners who expect it to raise the sale value of their property, but it will probably be resented by persons who wish to continue residing in the area. If the invading business or black family becomes established, the tendency is for other businesses or black families to move into the area. The process of succession occurs when there is a complete change over from one type of land use to another or from one population type to another. Over a period of time, there may be a series of change overs, as happens, for example, when a certain section of a community is occupied successively by English, Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican residents. Succession in rural communities is illustrated when crop farming replaces cattle ranching and when an agricultural area becomes absorbed into a nearby urban community. The ecological processes just described, affected as they are by variable sociocultural and demographic factors and operating as they do within the context of a community's particular geographic

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setting, life cycle pattern, and rhythm of life, still tend to produce certain recurrent broadly similar ecological patterns in both rural and urban communities.

ECOLOGY OF RURAL COMMUNITIES

The ecological form of rural communities follows either a dispersed, a nucleated, or an intermediate pattern of settlement. Differentiations along these lines have been used by Edwards in classifying five ecological types of rural communities: town-country, open-country, line village, plantation, and village. 14 Village communities, on the basis of economic organization or source of livelihood, are divided into five subtypes: agricultural village, cooperative village, fishing village, mining 'patch', and mill village. Dispersed Patterns of

Settlement

The dispersed type of settlement found in rural communities exists in two forms — one labeled town-country and the other labeled open-country. Both tend to have vague geographic boundaries and indefinite population membership at the community's periphery. The town-country ecological type of rural community is a settlement pattern in which farm families live on dispersed farmsteads in the open country around a hamlet or village which constitutes the center of locality-relevant activities. Residents of the center are mainly retired farm people, people who are engaged in occupations closely related to agriculture, and persons who provide services for members of the community through business establishments, schools, churches, health care, and recreation facilities. The relative importance of neighborhoods as units of social organization within rural communities tends to decline as local functions and activities become increasingly centralized in the hamlet or village center. The town-country ecological type is the predominant type of 14. Allen D. Edwards, 'Types of Rural Communities', in Community Structure and Analysis, Marvin B. Sussman (ed.) (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), pp. 36-58.

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rural community in the United States. It is becoming increasingly common in other parts of the world, for example, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, where conditions favor its development, i. e., a dispersed settlement of farmers who produce commodities chiefly for sale, family-sized farms, good means of transportation, and a rising standard of living. The open-country ecological type of rural community is one in which not only farm residences are dispersed, but residences of nonfarm families as well as stores, churches, schools, and other functions are also scattered and not centralized in a hamlet or village. Communities of this type are found in Pennsylvania, for example, among the Amish people who are prevented by church rules from engaging in nonagricultural activities that would enable them to develop trade centers. They also occur in other parts of the United States, though with less frequency than the town-country type. The ecological trend affecting both open-country and towncountry communities is toward an increasing spread of area and of population, a situation that involves the absorption of small communities into larger ones. The trend is associated with a shift from subsistence to commercial farming, the movement of people from central cities to rural hinterlands, the improvement of roads, and the more widespread use of automobiles. The effects of the changes are reflected in an increasing diversity of local services and an increasing tendency for residents of rural communities not to be restricted to working, shopping, attending church, and engaging in recreation within their community's boundaries. Intermediate

Patterns of

Settlement

The line village is an intermediate ecological type in which farm families are concentrated more closely than in an open-country or town-country type, but not so closely as in a village type. The line effect derives from the rectangular shape and relatively narrow width of the farms and the locations of residences at one end of the farm in rows fronting on a stream, highway, or other avenue of transportation. A line village resembles an extended village street, with here and there a school, a church, or a small trade center where the buildings are more closely clustered. The closeness of the set-

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Fig. 2. A Rural Community That Exhibits the Line-Village Ecological Pattern of Land Settlement

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tlement pattern makes it difficult to determine the point at which one village ends and another village begins. The line village ecological pattern originated in France and spread to Holland, Germany, Canada, and Louisiana. It has also been widely used in Brazil's colonization program. 1 5 The circular-line village form of settlement used in some parts of Israel is a variation on the usual line village type. In this pattern, a circular street several hundred yards in diameter constitutes the community's core. Religious and community buildings,playgrounds, and similar land uses are within the circle. The farmsteads laid out in wedge shape extend back from the circle, with their houses located in the narrow end of the wedge fronting on the circle. Family members reside on the land they use, not away from it as in the typical farm village. 16 Nucleated Patterns of

Settlement

In the nucleated pattern of settlement farm as well as nonfarm residences are clustered rather than scattered and are in close proximity to stores, churches, schools, and other community facilities. A pattern like this makes it easier than in more dispersed settlements for the local residents to get such utilities as electricity, telephones, and water and also for them to engage in cooperative activities. It also makes it easier to identify the population membership of a given community. The plantation ecological type of rural community is a transitional one in that it develops on an agricultural frontier and disappears as the frontier disappears. It is characterized by nucleated settlement on a large landholding that is owned or leased by a planter or a corporation and operated on a rigidly stratified basis under unified direction and control for the purpose of producing for a world market an agricultural staple, such as sugar, tea, rubber, or bananas. Virtually all of the residents are directly involved in the plantation 15. T. Lynn Smith, Brazil: People and Institutions (rev. ed.; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. Press, 1963), pp. 250-253. 16. T. Lynn Smith, The Process of Rural Development in Latin America (Gainesville: U. of Florida Press, 1967), p. 62.

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operation either as owner, manager, technicians, foremen, or laborers in the production enterprise or as personnel who render services to the production unit, for example, as commissary staff, bookkeepers, nurses, and teachers. The typical ecological layout of the plantation community reflects the social class stratification. At the center of the settlement is the 'big house' of the owner or manager. Close by, but distinctly separated, are the small cottages or cabins of the laborers. Personnel of higher status occupy dwellings that are set apart from the laborers' quarters and that are larger and more comfortable than those occupied by laborers. The commissary, church, school, and other buildings for special service or production functions are centralized and not distant from the residences. The original need to locate plantations on islands, seacoasts, or river banks to be easily accessible to transportation has been largely eliminated by modernized methods of transporting the plantation products. As the land frontier is absorbed into cultivation and as a surplus replaces a scarcity of labor, the plantation community tends to be transformed into either an open-country or a town-country community of family-size farms or its large landholdings are converted into a mechanized, large-scale commercial farming enterprise that engages a small force of workers whose residences may be in nearby towns or cities. 17 The latifundium, or hacienda, of Latin America resembles the plantation in being a large landholding that is under unified direction and control, in having a population that is involved directly in agricultural production or in servicing persons who are so engaged, and in having a rigid social class stratification. It differs from the plantation in that production is focused on self-sufficiency rather than on crop specialization. Each family occupies a piece of land that its members cultivate for family use, and family members of appropriate age and sex work for the patron (owner or manager) to produce crops for market and to provide whatever services are needed to sustain an elite style of life for the patron's family. 17. For discussion of typical changes in the plantation community, see Edward Norbeck, Pineapple Town, Hawaii (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1959), pp. 8-9; 152-155.

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Community

Most of the hacienda communities in Mexico, which have now been transformed into ejidos or into a town-country ecological type, exhibited an ecological pattern in which the casa grande of the owner or manager was located at one end of a square, with the peons' dwellings lining the other three sides of the square. In the classic hacienda, the dwellings of the peons would be interspersed with a store, a church, a postoffice, a burying ground, a jail, and occasionally a school. 1 8 The village is a nucleated type of settlement in which the residences of the people are concentrated within a relatively small area and close to all community facilities and services. Agricultural villages vary in relation to the type of land ownership, i. e., whether individual or cooperative, and nonfarm villages vary in relation to the dominant economic activity of the people, i. e., fishing, mining, or manufacturing. The ecology of the typical farm village exhibits a pattern in which a market or stores, a temple or church, a school, and other services and public buildings are centrally located. Close by them are the dwellings and outbuildings of the residents of the village, those of the farm families interspersed among those of the nonfarm families. Farmers go back and forth daily between their residences and their fields and pastures, which are located in the area surrounding the village proper. The farm village is the most prevalent type of agricultural community in Europe (except in Soviet Russia), in Africa, in Asia (except in the People's Republic of China), and in much of Latin America. In the United States, it is limited largely to the Mormon villages in Utah and nearby states and to the SpanishAmerican villages of the Southwest. The ecological pattern of cooperative villages, such as the ejidos of Mexico, the kolkhozen of Soviet Russia, the communes of the People's Republic of China, and the kibbutzim of Israel, derives in large part from the fact that farm land, tools, machinery, and livestock are centralized in their respective sites within the community so that they can be used collectively. There is variation among cooperative villages in the numbers and kinds of communal facilities 18. Raymond Wilkie, San Miguel, a Mexican Collective Stanford U. Press, 1971), pp. 9, 17.

Ejido

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that are provided. Housing is always made available, but in some villages family members live together and in other villages certain age groups have their own separate living quarters. Kitchen and dining facilities are private in some communities and communal in others. The ejido of San Miguel in the Laguna region of Mexico, as described by Wilkie, exhibited an ecological pattern typical for that region. Its layout was in the shape of a rectangle, nine-tenths of a mile wide and about four miles long. The highway between Torreon and Matamoros traversed the locality and cut the ejido into two unequal parts. The two-thirds block contained most of the irrigated cropland; the one-third block contained the corn fields and the village buildings. Facing the highway from the latter block were a cotton gin, a schoolhouse, and a baseball field. Behind the gin and schoolhouse, on each side of the central area, were two to four rows of adobe houses, some of them painted in bright colors and roofed in tile. Within the central area were an assembly hall, a theater, and an uncompleted church, as well as two small stores, a butcher shop, a barbershop, and two pool rooms which either adjoined or were part of a dwelling. Close by the central area, but set somewhat apart, was the cooperative store and corn mill — a blue, high-roofed structure with a brick porch. Water for the community came from wells and a strictly controlled system of irrigation canals that could tap either the wells or two nearby rivers. Each family cultivated a plot of the collectively owned land to use for its own purposes and each family prepared its own meals, had its own farm tools and equipment, and lived in its own private dwellings. Collective activities of the community's residents included: preparation of the soil for all crops; the planting of cotton, wheat, grapes, and alfalfa; and operation of the cotton gin, the wells, the irrigation system, and the cooperative store and corn mill. 19 The ecology of the Israeli kibbutz 'Kiryat Yedidim', described by Spiro, suggests more communal functioning than Wilkie found in the ejido of San Miguel. Near the center of the kibbutz, was a communal dininghall, and on opposite sides of that, laid out in parallel rows, were ranch house apartments that served as the residences of the community members. Close by the apartments were 19. Ibid., pp. 27-32; 54-56; and 62-75.

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communal toilets and showers and such facilities as a laundry, sewing room, clothing storehouse, kosher kitchen and dining room for elderly residents, dispensary, office, store, library, reading room, and the children's dormitory and school. On the periphery of the dwelling area were the sheds and barns for the livestock and farm machinery, a warehouse, a packing plant, and a carpentry shop. The various fields and orchards radiated from the hub of the village center. 20 At least 262 cooperative communities are known to have been established in the United States before 1945. 2 1 Either religious or social reform motives figured prominently in their establishment. The Farm Security Administration developed experimental communities of this type, between 1937 and 1942, in an effort to raise the levels of living of low-income farm families through cooperative use of modern farm machinery. According to Infield, the experiments were proving effective in rehabilitating farm families, but they were liquidated before their effectiveness as an enduring form of rural life could be tested. 22 A revival of interest in cooperative communities, in the United States, is currently demonstrated by the hundreds of communes that have grown up in various parts of the country mainly since 1960. These cooperative communities on the contemporary scene differ from the traditional cooperative communities, according to Jerome, in being smaller, more radical socially and politically, and characterized by more intense emotional ties among the members. 23 The variety among the new communes is so great that it is difficult to identify any particular ecological pattern among them. The description of Lorien, just north of Questa, New Mexico, furnished by Hedgepeth, suggests the typical efforts of rural commune dwellers to get close to nature, to achieve self-sufficiency in obtaining food, and to have a closeness of habitation that permits intimate social interaction. 24 20. Melford Spiro, Kibbutz (New York: Schocken, 1963), pp. 64-66. 21. Henrick F. Infield, Cooperative Communities at WorA (New York: Dryden Press, 1 9 4 5 ) , p. 13. 22. Ibid., pp. 6 7 , 8 3 - 8 4 . 23. 'Conversation with J u d Jerome', in Communitas, 1 (July, 1 9 7 2 ) : 24. 2 4 . William Hedgepeth, The Alternative (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 8284. Photographs by Dennis Stock.

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The Lorien commune, when Hedgepeth visited it, occupied 53.3 acres of land in a desert-like countryside within sight of the mountains. The land was owned by the commune's founder, a twentysix-year-old Philadelphia dropout, who had bought it for $25,000 with money from IBM stock he had inherited. The other thirty-four community residents were mainly adolescent high school dropouts and flunkouts — boys and girls — and a few young adults. The ecological center of the commune was an adobe house, situated on the crest of a slight slope of cleared land that was circled by patches of trees among which were located the teepees and wood huts of the residents. The adobe house served mainly as a kitchen. The cleared land was for cultivation, and four acres of it had been planted with twelve different vegetable crops. A creek traversing the community supplied much needed water for irrigation, though the Lorien settlers could divert it to their crops only on certain days and for limited, supervised periods of time. An 80-acre site owned by Lorien's founder high in the mountains back of Lorien served as retreat for those of the commune residents who needed opportunity to get away for 'self-training'. In the commune itself the young people spent their time philosophizing, writing poetry, playing cards, cutting firewood, cooking, and tending their crops and their animals — dogs, horses, and cows. 25 The ecological distinctiveness of the fishing village subtype is its geographic setting adjacent to some body of water, such as an ocean, bay, lake, or river. Whether or not its location is isolated or remote, its residents must maintain contacts with other communities in order to have market outlets and to get supplies. The greater the number of outside contacts, the more likely it is that innovations, for example, motorized fishing vessels, modern home conveniences, and modern fishing equipment, will be diffused into the community and cultural uniqueness will decrease. 26 Distinctive in the ecology of the mining village, or 'patch\ is the integration of community functions around the mining activities on which the livelihood of all the residents depends. Generally speaking, mining villages are located in mountainous terrain close 25. Ibid. 26. See, for example, Oscar Waldemanjunek,/io/aied Communities: A Study of a Labrador Fishing Village (New York: American Book, 1937).

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to the mineral, for example, coal or iron, that is being mined. The ecological center of these villages is typically a main street along which are located stores, pool halls, service stations, liquor stores, restaurants, and rooming houses. In rows, on the hillside above the main street are the dwellings of the residents of the community — persons associated directly with the mine; persons retired from, or disabled by, work in the mine; and persons who render services to the former groupings, for example, as storekeepers, teachers, ministers, and law enforcement personnel. 27 The ecology of the traditional mill village reflects both the paternalistic way in which the mill owner has dominated the community and the social stratification pattern that corresponds with the hierarchical ranking of the different types of jobs in the mill. In the typical ecological arrangement, mill personnel in the higher echelons have occupied the most desirable residences, in the most desirable locations — somewhat set apart from the dwellings of rankand-file workers. These dwellings, characteristically in a homogeneous architectural design, are clustered near the mill and close to stores, churches, recreation areas, and schools — traditionally provided by the mill ownership. Though providing ready access to means for meeting the full range of daily needs, the arrangement has tended to segregate the village residents physically, socially, and psychologically from nearby communities. Increased use of automobiles and a trend away from mill ownership and control of mill village residences and facilities have not eliminated the nucleated ecological arrangement of the village, but the situation is changing to the extent that mill workers reside, and patronize facilities, outside the village and persons other than mill workers occupy residences in the village. Many mill villages have been absorbed into larger communities, some of them persisting as subcommunities. 2 8 2 7 . H a r o l d A . G i b b a r d , ' E x t r a c t i v e Industries a n d F o r e s t r y ' , in The Southern Appalachian Region, T h o m a s R . F o r d (ed.) ( L e x i n g t o n : U. of K e n t u c k y Press, 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 1 1 1 . S e e also Muriel Corley S h e p h e r d , Cloud by Day (Chapel Hill: U. of N o r t h Carolina Press, 1947). 2 8 . F o r a general picture of changes in mill villages, see Harriet L . Herring, Passing of the Mill Village (Chapel Hill: U. o f N o r t h Carolina Press, 1 9 4 9 ) . For a m o r e intimate view of a s u b c o m m u n i t y that was f o r m e r l y a mill village, see K e n n e t h M o r l a n d , Millways of Kent (Chapel Hill: U. of N o r t h Carolina Press, 1 9 5 8 ) , especially pages 1 9 - 2 7 .

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ECOLOGY OF URBAN COMMUNITIES

Within urban communities of whatever level of modernization, the spatial distribution of people and their activities follows a pattern in which density of population is highest in and near the center of the city and decreases by gradations as distance from the center increases. Very large cities commonly have densities ranging upward from 100,000 persons per square mile in centrally located neighborhoods adjacent to or in the actual city center, while densities in their peripheral area are likely to be somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 persons per square mile. As modernization spreads, cities in all parts of the world are developing ecological patterns that resemble, superficially at least, the ecological pattern typical of highly industrialized Western cities, i. e., a central business district is at the center of the community, the social class level of residences rises and population density declines as distance from the center increases, and industry is separate, but not far, from residential areas. Nevertheless, two fairly distinct and contrasting urban ecological patterns are still observable: one in traditional cities where walking continues to be the main means of local transportation and the other in relatively modernized cities that make widespread use of highly mechanized modes of transportation and production. The former have less clear-cut separation of residential from business and industrial areas and more intensive use of land already settled than is true in the latter. Ecology of Traditional

Cities

The typical ecological pattern of traditional cities is reasonably well illustrated in the indigenous parts of the cities of India. At the center of these cities is a main business area, or bazaar, which is crowded with small retail shops that deal in food, cloth, hardware, and other consumer goods. Groups of competing merchants tend to occupy a particular section so that there is a specialized area for grain merchants, another for greengrocers, and so on. One street is occupied by goldsmiths, another by silversmiths, another specializes in brassware, another in pottery. Native bankers and moneylenders, oculists, dentists, and public letter-writers congregate in the vicinity of the central bazaar, some of them residing in second-story rooms

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above shops. More generally, the merchants use the rear and upperstory rooms as their places of residence. Close by are the wholesale grain and other bulk-commodity markets. In some cities, the retail businesses extend a mile or two along the main arteries of traffic. Surrounding and adjacent to the commercial streets are the primarily residential neighborhoods. The best-built residential areas in or near the center of the old cities are occupied by Brahmins and other high castes. Muslims are clearly separated from Hindus and have their own quasi-caste and economic subgroups. The laboring castes and menial outcastes of lowest socio-economic status occupy the poorest houses and tend to be located toward the outskirts. Within the predominantly residential areas are service industries and various kinds of manufacturing operations. 29 Cities of Latin America range from traditional to highly modernized, yet they generally still reflect in their ecology something that is distinctive from the Western pattern. These cities have at their center a typical central plaza in which are centralized the city's major government, religious, and commercial buildings. Extending on all sides from this plaza to the periphery of the city are residential areas in which upper-class families live closest to the center and along the main transportation routes that converge in the plaza; the less prosperous families live next to the upper-class families, and the poorest families farthest out. Retail trade is centralized in markets, which are located near to, but away from, the plaza, and which have the same pattern of internal specialization as that found in the Indian bazaar. Small plazas and parks are found at various points throughout the residential areas. Handicraft manufacturing operations tend to be widely distributed and located either within the family residence or in workshops nearby. A distinctive ecological feature of the Latin American city is its division into barrios, i. e., semiautonomous neighborhood units each of which has its own churches, its own fiestas, and its own patron saint. 30 29. John E. Brush, 'The Morphology of Indian Cities', in India's Urban Future, Roy Turner (ed.) (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1962), pp. 57-70. 30. See, for example, Fernando Penalosa, 'Ecological Organization of the Transitional City: Some Mexican Evidence', Social Forces, 46(1967): 221-229. For a description of barrios in the context of the broader ecological pattern of San Juan, Puerto Rico, see Theodore Caplow, Sheldon Stryker, and Samuel E. Wallace, The Urban Ambience (Totowa, N. J.: Bedminister Press, 1964).

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As traditional cities have become more involved in the large-scale operations of the market economy, they have developed a central business district, have shifted some of their handicraft manufacture to factory production, have established heavy industries in outlying areas, and have developed upper-middle and upper-class suburbs — all ecological features typical of Western cities. 31 A characteristic phenomenon in newly modernizing cities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa is the presence of large squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city and/or of large numbers of impoverished people who live unhoused, sleeping in the streets or in makeshift shelters that they set up in parks and other open spaces. 32 The larger cities of Japan have made a rapid transition from traditional to relatively modernized character. The ecological pattern in Tokyo, the world's largest city, and one widely duplicated in other large Japanese cities — especially those that have undergone extensive rebuilding since World War II — bears a close resemblance to the ecological pattern of relatively modernized Western cities. A distinctive variation is the persistence of Japan's living-in system of stores and household-based production, which yields a high degree of functional homogeneity within many areas of the metropolis. 33 The country's traditional ecological pattern, in which businesses and residences are distributed in an almost uniform density throughout the city's area, is still found in the smaller municipalities. 34 Ecology of Relatively Modernized

Cities

The ecological pattern exhibited in cities of the United States developed along with industrialization and usually with less constrain31. For description of changes in ecological patterns in Latin America cities, see, for example, Floyd Dotson and Lillian Ota Dotson, 'Ecological Trends in the City of Guadelajara, Mexico', Social Forces, 32 (1954): 367-374; their survey of other Mexican cities cited in Noel P. Gist and Sylvia Fleis Fava, Urban Society (5th ed.; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964), pp. 205-206; and Andrew H. Whiteford, Two Cities of Latin America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 27-34. 32. Ralph Thomlinson, Urban Structure (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 175-177. 33. Takeo Yazaki, The Japanese City (Rutland, Vt.: Japan Publications Trading Company, 1963), pp. 13; 70-71. 34. Thomlinson, Urban Structure, p. 172.

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ing influence from the cities' cultural origins than is the case with older cities. The typical ecological areas in the pattern include a central and a secondary business district, a zone of transition, specialized districts for wholesale trade and light manufacturing as well as for heavy industry, residential areas that extend into the suburbs, a scattering of large-scale shopping centers, and a rural-urban fringe. The central business district, which is the ecological center of the city where main lines of transportation converge, is the area in which are focalized the city's high-level business and financial operations and functions that serve the whole community. Here are found the tallest office buildings, the highest rents, and the highest land values in the entire city. Surrounding this district is a secondary business district of less prestigious business and service establishments, lower rents, and lower land values. Extensions of such business types of land use occur at intervals as subcenters along major transportation routes and also in the form of shopping centers located near residential areas where parking facilities are readily available. 35 Historically, the central business district has been by far the most dominant area of business activity in cities of the United States. Its relative dominance, however, is currently declining somewhat as businesses and other service facilities have left the center of the city to locate in shopping centers at various points over the community or in sites at the community's periphery. The effects of this trend have been greater in the larger than in the smaller cities. For example, a study made in 1958 showed that the central business districts of the largest SMSA's in the United States made only 9.6 percent of the total sales in those communities as compared with 32.1 percent in the country's smaller SMSA's. The possibility has been posed by Ullman that the central business district may become just one of many centers in the urban community, possibly more important than the others but not so dominant as it has been in the past. 36 35. James A. Quinn, Urban Sociology (New York: American Book, 1955), pp. 76-77. 36. Edward L. Ullman, 'The Nature of Cities Reconsidered', in Taming Megalopolis, Volume I: What Is and What Could Be, N. Wentworth Eldredge (ed.) (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 87-91.

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Zone of transition. Between the business districts and the residential sections is an area of mixed commercial and residential land use referred to as the zone of transition. This area was once the locus of the city's middle- and upper-income residents. Their fashionable houses have been made over into low-rent office or apartment space, rooming houses, and boarding houses. Mixed in with these are cheap hotels, pawnshops, stores and service establishments that cater to low-income clientele, and the residences of low-income racial and ethnic groupings. It is an area of high mobility, low levels of living, high dependency and delinquency rates, and high proportions of single individuals. The low rents are associated with land values that are relatively high in anticipation of future business use. Slums are usually located here, though they are n o t limited to this location and it is n o t exclusively a slum area. A 'Skid Row', one type of slum, is likely to be in the zone of transition in any city of half a million or more population. In such a section, substandard rooming houses are intermingled with taverns, employment agencies offering jobs for unskilled laborers, pawnshops and secondhand stores, restaurants serving low-cost meals, barber colleges, burlesque shows, penny-arcades, tattoo palaces, bakeries that sell stale bread at reduced prices, and missions that provide free meals. 37 Wholesale trade and manufacturing districts. Not far from the central business district are districts used for wholesale trade and for light manufacturing. Easy rail, water, or highway accessibility and proximity to the city's markets and labor force are factors that favor the development of these districts. Heavy industries tend to be centralized toward the outskirts or the former edge of the city where land is plentiful and cheap and where transportation facilities and utilities are readily accessible. There is a recent trend in the United States toward the development of industrial parks, i.e., land sites that provide utilities and rail and road facilities for newly locating industries. These parks may be under either public or private auspices or some combination of the two.

37. Donald J . Bogue, Skid Row in American Cities (Chicago: Community and Family Study Center, U. of Chicago, 1963), pp. 1, 17.

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Low-income residential areas. Situated primarily just beyond the zone of transition, in areas adjacent to industrial centers and in the physically and socially less desirable sections of the urban community, are the residences of lower-income families, usually of unskilled and semiskilled industrial and service workers. Dwellings are of cheaper construction and more crowded than those in the residential areas of higher-income families, but less deteriorated than those in the zone of transition. Most residents of the area live as families rather than as single individuals, and the families may represent diverse nationality and racial groups that tend to form more or less distinct ethnic subcommunities that are segregated from one another. A middle-income residential area generally begins at the outer edge of the lower-income area and extends to the area where upperincome families live near the city's periphery and in the suburbs. Within the middle-income area, there are gradations, outward, in which styles of life become increasingly expensive, residences larger and of higher value and more expensively landscaped. Rates of home ownership are high, recorded rates of crime and delinquency are low, and rates of civic participation are high. Upper-income residential areas are found almost anywhere inside or around the city except within the central business district or near industrial or transportation centers. These areas acquire prestige and a reputation for exclusiveness and desirability apart from any natural advantage of location that they may have. Encompassed in them may be the well-preserved mansions of the city's old and aristocratic families; streets of high-rent apartment buildings, many of which are convenient to downtown locations and perhaps also close to slum tenements; and equally expensive single-family residences set off from one another by extensive lawns and landscaping. Suburbs. Typically located just outside the corporate limits, but still within the urbanized area of a city are ecological areas that are socioculturally integrated into the city proper. These are the city's suburbs. Though chiefly residential, some of them are what Schnore has called 'employment suburbs', that is, they have a larger number

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of workers who come daily to work in them than the number of workers who leave them each day to work elsewhere. The residential suburbs occur in a variety of forms, ranging from exclusive upper-income residential areas to areas of working-class residences. The employing suburbs generally have manufacturing as the chief type of employment, though education, recreation, or even mining may take the place of manufacturing. 38 The 'packaged' suburb, or new suburbia, differs from other types of suburbs in that it is produced virtually full-blown by massproduction methods on unused lands outside the city limits. The housing of different packaged suburbs is pitched to different income levels and, as a consequence, generalizations about such suburbs are difficult to make. Some suburban developments are not part of an ecological city, but are themselves communities in a metropolitan region, i. e., a region consisting of one or more central cities, one or more suburban communities, and the interstitial rural area. Though they have enough localized self-sufficiency and autonomy to be communities, they do not have the greater balance between residences and jobs that characterizes the central city. The rural-urban fringe is an ecological area on the outskirts of the city near to hard-surfaced roads and beyond the strictly urban development. Its residential, commercial, and industrial density tends to decrease with increasing distance from the city limits until, at its outer rim, it adjoins, oris interspersed with, more or less active agricultural land use. Its own land use is generally heterogeneous, uncoordinated, and unplanned; it normally has an incomplete range and penetration of urban utility services, such as water and sewage systems and sidewalks; and it is likely to lack local social organization, such as its own government and its own system of fire and police protection. It is subject to continual change as the city expands, is likely to become absorbed into suburban development, and perhaps eventually will be legally incorporated into the city through annexation. The residents of the rural-urban fringe consist 38. Leo F. Schnore, 'The Growth of Metropolitan Suburbs', American Sociological Review, 22 (1957): 167. See also Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1960); and William Dobriner (ed.), The Suburban Community (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958).

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mainly of farm families and their adult children who are employed in the city and of nonfarm families who have moved out from the city for purposes of residence. 39

THEORIES OF URBAN GROWTH

The basic groundwork of ecological form in urban communities derives from the layout of streets, which, unless modified by unusual topography or by plan, tends to have either one or another or some combination of axial, radial, or nuclear arrangements. Physical barriers, such as rivers and railroad tracks, in some cases so separate the parts of the city that the different parts develop or perpetuate distinctive characteristics and sometimes marked social distance from one another. Similarly, social barriers associated with differences in ethnic background, race, income, religion, or social class may foster and perpetuate segregated residential areas, each characterized by a distinctive type of people and a distinctive way of life. As suggested in the ecology of relatively modernized Western cities, economic areas also may be elaborately differentiated into such specialized sectors as retail districts, financial districts, theater districts, warehouse districts, and separate districts for light and heavy industry. There are other specialized land uses, too, in such forms as parks, playgrounds, institutional campuses, country clubs, and golf courses. The pattern of the various ecological areas usually undergoes patterned change as sociocultural and demographic changes occur. Three major theories have been formulated to explain the pattern that develops as cities grow — a concentric zone theory developed by Burgess in the mid-1920's, a sector theory formulated by Hoyt in the late 1930's, and a multiple-nuclei theory formulated by Harris and Ullman in the mid-1940's. Concentric zone theory. Burgess described the city as a composite of 'natural areas', i. e., areas that develop without deliberate plan39. Robin J. Pryor, 'Defining the Rural-Urban Fringe', Social Forces, 47 (1968): 202-206; and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology of Urban Regions (2nd ed.; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), pp. 122-123.

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ning. On the basis of his study of Chicago, he concluded that the different areas grow outward from a central business district in a series of concentric circles, each of which has a distinctive type of land use, of population, and of institutions. Around the central business district, for example, is a zone of deteriorating residences, cheap rooming houses, and a mixture of commercial land uses; and beyond this slum zone are successive zones of increasingly 'betterclass' residences extending into the periphery of the city. 4 0 Sector theory. Hoyt's sector theory, formulated from data on 142 United States cities, holds that city growth is radial (rather than circular) along major lines of transportation and that a particular type of land use tends to locate and continue in a particular sector of the city. High-rent areas, for example, are usually located on the outer edge of one or more sectors instead of forming a concentric zone at the periphery of the city, low-rent districts may extend from the city's center t o its periphery in the shape of a slice of pie; while industrial areas, instead of forming a concentric zone around the central business district, develop along water courses and railroad or motor lines. 41 The multiple-nuclei theory postulated by Harris and Ullman traces city growth not from one center but from several. According to this theory, a given city may have started with several centers or different centers may have developed later. Centers, or 'nuclei', develop for various reasons: some activities cluster around the specialized facilities they require; some activities are similar and benefit from being close to one another; some activities are dissimilar and need to be located apart from one another; some activities cannot afford more desirable sites. The shopping center provides a cluster of services that are convenient to one another and to customers. 4 2 40. Ernest W. Burgess, 'The Growth of a City: An Introduction to a Research Project', in The City, Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (eds.) (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1925), pp. 47-62. 41. Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Federal Housing Administration, 1939), Chapter IV. See also Homer Hoyt, 'The Structure of American Cities in the Post-War Era', American Journal of Sociology, 48 (1943): 475-481. 42. Chauncy D. Harris and Edward L. Ullman, 'The Nature of Cities', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 24 (1945): 7-17.

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Evaluation of theories of urban growth. Each of the three theories sheds some light on the growth pattern of most cities, but all three — even taken together — fail to provide a complete explanation of the growth of any one city or to account for variations in growth patterns among cities in different cultures. They fall short by not taking into consideration such factors as population size of the city; the city's physical features, i. e., any bodies of water or topographical irregularities that might be present; its prevailing modes of transportation, whether mainly pedestrian or motorized; its main economic base, i. e., whether it is primarily a manufacturing center, a center of government, a resort, or a center of educational or religious institutions; and the attitudes and sentiments of its people, for example, in relation to the preservation of historical landmarks or of open areas and to the implementation of zoning and social planning that would modify the lines of ecological growth that might otherwise follow the so-called typical pattern. 43 Stockholm's ecological pattern, according to Thomlinson, is an example of European cities in which the government owns large tracts of land and has controlled urban growth through official policy. Such cities have a socioeconomic gradient like that in Latin American cities, and there is no zone of transition. 44

SUMMARY The perspectives of demography and ecology serve to round out an analysis of community life that is begun from the sociocultural perpsective. The specialized view of demography focuses upon the community's population numbers and the composition of the population by such factors as age, sex, and race; upon rates of birth and death; 43. For descriptions of some of the variations in ecological pattern among relatively modernized cities, see Dennis C. McElrath, 'The Social Areas of Rome: A Comparative Analysis', American Sociological Review, 27 (1962): 390; T. Brennan, 'Urban Communities', in Australian Society, A. F. Davies and S. Encel (eds.) (New York: Atherton Press, 1965), pp. 303-307; Theodore Caplow, 'Urban Structure in France', American Sociological Review, 17 (1952): 544-549; and Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1947). 44. Thomlinson, Urban Structure, p. 168.

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and upon movement of population into, out of, and within the community. The relative numbers of births and deaths and the relative numbers of in-migrants and out-migrants are the two sets of variables that jointly determine the size of a community's population. The population pyramid is a device for portraying the age and sex composition of a community's population. The pyramid reflects past birth and death and migration trends and facilitates community planning for various age groupings. Communities at progressively higher levels of modernization illustrate a demographic transition in a pattern of change from a stage of high birth and death rates that approximately balance each other, to a stage of high birth rates and declining death rates that permit explosive population increase, to a stage of low birth and death rates with little or no population change. The worldwide pattern of intercommunity population movement is from rural to urban communities. However, in countries where most of the people already live in cities, this sort of movement is from one urban community to another. The specialized view of ecology focuses upon the patterned ways in which a community's people and their institutionalized activities are distributed over the community's geographic area. Explanations of the patterns and the changes they undergo are sought in the interplay among the physical features of the space, the technology available for modifying those features, and the cultural values and practices of the people. The interplay of those sets of variables is seen as operating through ecological processes that concentrate and centralize respectively the community's population and functions; that disperse and decentralize the population and functions; that segregate the people by race, social class, or ethnic background into residential clusters and bring about separate specialization of land uses for different types of activities or services; that initiate change in the character of a given area by invading it with a different type of land occupancy that may culminate eventually in succession, i.e., conversion of the area into the new type of occupancy. Rural communities can be differentiated by their ecological form into types characterized by either a dispersed, a nucleated, or an intermediate pattern of settlement. The dispersed type is exem-

Bibliography

135

plified in town-country and open-country communities; the intermediate type, in line villages; and the nucleated type, in plantation communities and villages. Five subtypes of village are identifiable — farm, cooperative, fishing, mining, and mill villages. The village is the most widely prevalent type of rural community over the world; the town-country type is predominant in the United States. There is a basic difference between the ecology of traditional and of relatively modernized cities. In traditional cities, where walking is the main means of transportation, the most affluent residents live closest to the center of the city and other income groupings at increasing distances from that center as levels of income decrease. This is the reverse of the residential pattern typically found in relatively modernized cities, and where separation of residential and economic areas is more pronounced than in traditional cities. As cities modernize, they usually develop ecological patterns that resemble, at least superficially, those typical of highly industrialized Western cities. The ecological areas of relatively modernized urban communities include: a central business district that is surrounded by a secondary business district, a zone of transition, specialized districts for wholesale trade and for light and for heavy industry, separate residential areas for low-income, middle-income, and high-income residents, suburbs, and a rural-urban fringe. Cities have been described in three major theories as growing either in the form of concentric circles, in the form of sectors along main routes of transportation, or in the form of developments around several nuclei or subcenters. These theories — even taken together — provide only a partial explanation of city growth. Factors that modify the patterns described in the theories include: city size, physical features, prevailing modes of transportation, dominant economic base, and local attitudes and sentiments regarding land use.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boskoff, Alvin. The Sociology of Urban Regions. 2nded.; New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. Analysis of the urban region as a sociological system, employing both demographic and ecological perspectives.

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Edwards, Allen D. 'Types of Rural Communities', in Community Structure and Analysis. Marvin B. Sussman (ed.). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959, pp. 37-58. A classification and analysis of ecological types of rural communities. Fava, Sylvia Fleis (ed.). Urbanism in World Perspective. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. A selection of readings that give a comparative and cross-cultural view of the effects of urbanization in modernizing and relatively modernized urban communities of the world. Ecological and demographic factors are considered in relation t o value systems and social organization. Forrester, J a y W. Urban Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969. Analysis of the life cycle of an urban area, using the methods of industrial dynamics developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It uses a computer simulation approach that makes it possible to consider the effects of alternatives believed t o be pertinent to urban growth, aging, and revival. Hedgepeth, William. The Alternative. New York: Macmillan, 1970. A first-hand report, illustrated with photographs by Dennis Stock, on selected contemporary communes in various parts of the United States. Thomlinson, Ralph. Population Dynamics. New York: Random House, 1965. A cross-cultural analysis of world and local changes in population over the last two centuries. It suggests explanations for, as well as effects that derive f r o m , the demographic changes that occur. Urban Structure. New York: Random House, 1969. An ecological view of the urban community. It gives succinct summaries of twelve different 'theories' on the spatial patterning of Western cities and then cross-cultural contrasts with those cities. Wilkie, Raymond. San Miguel, A Mexican Collective Ejido. Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1971. A case study of a cooperative village in the north central region of Mexico, detailing both population and ecological features.

CHAPTER 4

The Process of Community Development

The sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of communities are, as already indicated, subject to continuing change. Though some of that change is in a sense undirected, some of it is directed to serve special and private interests that may or may not coincide with what local residents consider the community's wellbeing, and some of it is specifically directed by the local people toward objectives they regard as beneficial to the community. This latter way of dealing with community change is being used in increasing numbers of communities over the world under the label of community development. Under this label, in the period since World War II, numbers of newly modernizing Asian, African, and Latin American nations have instituted programs that are designed to effect rapid cultural and social changes at the community level, with maximum reliance upon community self-help. Similar programs, whether they use the community development label or not, are found in such fields as social work, planning, health care, education, and extension service in communities of other countries, including the United States. All of the programs referred to here make use of what this textbook calls the process of community development. Out of their experiences in applying the process, professional participants are developing a body of knowledge that may eventually explain how community development takes place. The knowledge is being refined through the cross-checking that different practitioners make of one another's observations, through the research that is built into some of the projects that use the process, and through the attempts of social scientists to relate principles from

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their special disciplines to their analyses of community development. The purpose of this chapter is to draw from available knowledge a conceptualization of community development which describes the planned community change process that is widely utilized now in both newly modernizing and relatively modernized communities. The definition of community development that is formulated here is related to definitions offered by other authors. Brief descriptions are given of the value basis from which, and the community context within which, the process is applied. Then a detailed analysis is made of the real-life manifestations of community development in community actions, giving consideration to the components of a completed community action, to variations among action efforts, and to the two constituent elements of all community actions — the task performance features involved and the ability of the people to go on working together to deal with community change. The remaining chapters of the book consider, in turn, leadership, community conflict, professionals, and research as instrumentalities of community development.

DEFINITION O F COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT The term community development, as it is used in this book, refers to the process in which the people of a community attempt a collaborative effort to promote what they consider to be the well-being of their community. The unitary effort they undertake is referred to as community action. It may make use of either a consensus or a conflict strategy and may be directed either toward making or blocking some community change. A community change, according to Sutton and Kolaja, can be distinguished from other types of change at the locality level by the degree of its 'communityness', the degree increasing to the extent that (1) the change is related to the locality as a whole, (2) the people affected by it are identified with the locality, and (3) the people who participate in making (or blocking) it are residents of the locality. 1 The collective effort may 1. Willis A. Sutton, Jr., and Jiri Kolaja, 'Elements of a Community Action', Social Forces, 38 (1960): 325-331.

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be wholeheartedly cooperative or fraught with disagreements, but it will involve collective decision making and/or other collaborative activities. The minimal number of persons who have to be engaged in the interaction is whatever number the community's residents as a whole recognize as being representative of the interest of the community. While there is considerable variation in the way that different authors have defined community development, 2 the definition employed here is consistent with other definitions that contain the following elements: (1) involvement of the people of the community in an effort to attain common goals (self-help); (2) some emotional commitment to the effort on the part of the people involved; (3) enough formalization of goals to assure that their meaning is conveyed to the people involved; (4) use of procedures that were designed for effectiveness and for consistency with those goals; (5) attention paid to people's felt needs for action; and (6) consideration given to the sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of the community as a whole. 3 Except for not considering governmental involvement a necessary condition in community development and except for assuming that community development can occur on a local basis without receiving technical assistance from the outside and without promoting the integration of the community into the larger society, this text is in basic agreement with the following statement formulated by the United Nations: the processes by which the efforts of the people themselves are united with those of governmental authorities to improve the economic, social, and cultural conditions of communities, to integrate these communities into the life of the nation, and 2. For a cataloging of different definitions, see Peter du Sautoy, The Organization of a Community Development Programme (London: Oxford U. Press, 1962), pp. 121-129; and William W. Biddle and Loureide J. Biddle, The Community Development Process (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 282-283. 3. For elaboration on the ideas of self-help, emotional commitment, and attention paid to people's felt needs and to the community context, see, for example, T. R. Batten, Communities and Their Development (London: Oxford U. Press, 1957), pp. 48-61; Arthur Dunham, 'The Outlook for Community Development', in The Social Welfare Forum, 1958 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1958), pp. 33-52; and Sautoy, pp. 21-46 and 78-90.

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to enable them to contribute fully to national progress. This complex of processes is, therefore, made up of two essential elements: the participation by the people themselves in efforts to improve their level of living, with as much reliance as possible on their own initiative; and the provision of technical and other services in ways which encourage initiative, self-help and mutual help and make these more effective. It is expressed in programmes designed to achieve a wide variety of specific improvements. 4 The text agrees with Dunham's assertion that technical assistance can come from voluntary as well as governmental sources and also with Hendriks' view that the community development process is flexible enough to be applied in a wide variety of community contexts and to a wide range of community needs. 5 The view of this text that community development is a process differs from views that it is a program, a method, or a movement. 6 The rationale for considering it a process is that it begins before there are any specific substantive activities that represent program; it can occur in the absence of consciously applied procedures that would represent method; and even though its participants may have emotional commitment similar to that found in a social movement, its operation at the community level does not have the scope usually associated with social movements. Furthermore, considering community development as process tends to focus upon the dynamics inherent in the interaction among community members who seek 4. United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on Community Development, Community Development and National Development (New York: United Nations, 1963), p. 4. 5. Arthur Dunham, 'Community Development in North America', Community Development Journal, 7 (1972): 13; Gradus Hendriks,'Community Development in Western Europe', Community Development Journal, 7 (1972): 81. 6. For description of all four views of community development — as process, program, method, and movement — see Irwin T. Sanders, The Community (2nd ed.; New York: Ronald, 1966), pp. 520-521. For the view as program, see Charles E. Hendry, 'Implications for Social Work Education in Community Planning, Community Development, and Community Organization', Education for Social Work, Proceedings of Council on Social Work Education, 1961 (New York: Council on Social Work Education, 1961), pp. 50-53; for the view as movement, see Selz C. Mayo, 'An Approach to the Understanding of Rural Community Development', Social Forces, 32 (1958): 95-101. For an entire book treating community development as a process, see Lee J. Cary (ed.), Community Development as a Process (Columbia: U. of Missouri Press, 1970).

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to deal with community change, and such interaction is present whenever community development occurs. So far as this text is concerned, the terms community development and community organization can be used interchangeably, if the latter term is conceived as having applicability to all facets of community life in all communities of the world rather than with restricted reference to only, or mainly, the social welfare subsystem in relatively modernized communities. 7 And the term community development is seen here as having reference to essentially the same process as that labeled community organization and social planning by Perlman and Gurin in their description of a newly emerging professional practice which builds on social work's earlier community organization approach, the power bloc approach developed by Alinsky and his followers, the community action approach used in the war on poverty in the United States, the social planning approach, and the approach used in the community self-help programs sponsored by the United Nations and/or the governments of newly modernizing nations. 8

THE VALUE BASIS OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Regardless of the label under which they operate, persons who make application of the community development process proceed from certain value-laden assumptions. For example, they assume that they can and should organize to bring about or to block some community change. They disregard laissez-faire values that favor leaving social conditions alone lest interference prove harmful, and similarly they reject the acceptant attitudes of a fatalistic philosophy that makes no effort to alter the status quo. Furthermore, they act on certain values and subjective judgments 7. For an inclusive view of community organization that equates it with community development, see Murray G. Ross, Community Organization (2nd ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1967), especially pp. 7-8, 17-18. For the view that community development is more inclusive than community organization, see Sanders, pp. 506-509. 8. Robert Perlman and Arnold Gurin, Community Organization and Social Planning (New York: John Wiley and Sons and Council on Social Work Education, 1972), pp. 3-7.

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they hold about what is desirable. These values and judgments affect their recognition of needs they select as targets for community action as well as the objectives and procedures they adopt. Since the same values are not likely to be shared by all the people of a community, the way is opened for dissatisfaction, disagreement, and change. The fact, too, that values themselves change leads to a sort of continuing réévaluation of objectives and procedures, as has been the case, for example, among city planners who have been shifting their emphasis from such values as neatness, order, convenience, and beauty in the physical features of the community to emphasis upon such humanistic values as concern for people's physical and mental health, education, employment, and recretion.9 The particular broad values that influence participants in a community action can be expected to vary in relation to the particular political, economic, or religious ideology that prevails in the society of which the community is a part and in relation to whatever variations in values may characterize the different social classes and/or subcommunities that are affected by such an effort. The specific value positions that people take in a community action likewise vary, reflecting combinations of different degrees of motivation arising from personal interests, interest in behalf of an organization, and a concern for the community's overall wellbeing. In the course of the social interaction that occurs as an action effort proceeds, values are translated into decisions and actions and a continuing process is set in motion whereby some values at least are modified and given different priorities. 10

THE COMMUNITY CONTEXT OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT The value basis on which the community development process is applied is but one aspect of the total community context in which the process becomes operative. It is within the setting of the par9. Robert B. Mitchell (ed.), 'Urban Revival: Goals and Standards', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 352 (1964): viii. 10. See, for example, Perlman and Gurin, pp. 83-89.

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ticular combination of sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of a community that needs for action arise, from it resources for taking action can be obtained, and out of it obstacles to taking action can emerge. The sociocultural features of the community, i. e., groups, stratification patterns, subsystems, and normative structures, supply a network of social relationships and guides for action through which the community development process is set in motion. Each of the groups in each of the subsystems has its own positions with their associated roles, its own rankings, norms, and goals that can affect and be affected by the course that application of the process takes in a given action effort. Whatever part of the community's social organization is not involved in the effort is there impinging on the effort either by virtue of its potential involvement for or against what is taking place or by virtue of its indifference to, or lack of direct concern with, the undertaking. Furthermore, the individuals who are active in the community action are also performing roles that are associated with the positions and ranks they have in the different informal and formal groups to which they belong and that are under the norms and goals of their respective groups. The same circumstances exist for the community members who are not among the participants. If the application of the community development process proceeds, the participants develop an organizational structure of their own that is fitted with varying degrees of smoothness into the community's existing structure of social organization. The newly forming organizational unit has its own division of labor, roles, norms, values, and leadership — and its own goals that are consistent with what the unit's members consider to be the well-being of the community. Spread of participation in the unit's effort is effected through social relationships that the unit's members have or form with other people in the community. Formal groups, such as business enterprises, labor organizations, religious associations, civic and social clubs, and government agencies, have specific channels of communication that can be utilized in establishing relationships. They also have informal communication networks that can facilitate or thwart the group's involvement in the effort. In traditional communities, the primary relationships of family and kinship groups constitute the main media through which par-

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ticipants in an effort's organizational set-up are recruited. In relatively modernized communities, participants are more typically recruited through their place of employment or their membership in an organization that is cooperating in the action effort. The motivation for participation comes about, according to Coleman, through two quite different mechanisms. One is a strong identification each person has with others, giving him the feeling that their fate is his fate and propelling him to carry out action to assure what he perceives to be their well-being. Though found to some degree in relatively modernized communities, identification like this is much more general in small, close communities where the local people have known one another for a long time and have formed bonds of loyalty to one another and to their shared way of life. The second mechanism motivating to collective action is what Coleman calls the interdependence of self-interests, and it is typical in relatively modernized Gesellschaft-like communities. Each person's participation or failure to participate is perceived by him as having consequences for him; thus, he and others who join the action effort do so in the pursuit of their respective self-interests. Whatever common similar activities and interests the people pursue can be usually expected to give them similar self-interests as well as possible opportunity for developing identification with one another. Their different activities and interests can be the basis for cooperative community interaction if the people's different self-interests happen to be served by the same action; otherwise they tend to foster inaction or opposition. 11 The exchange model formulated by Weissman extends Coleman's basis for motivation beyond self-interest to interest in obtaining valued outcomes for an organization or even for the community. Individuals, organizations, and informal groups, according to his model, are willing to invest resources of time or money, for example, hoping that, in exchange, the outcomes of the effort will benefit them or their organization or their community. 1 2 The development of cooperative relationships and the flow of 11. James S. Coleman, 'Community Disorganization', in Contemporary Social Problems, Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (eds.) (3rd ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1971), pp. 665-671. 12. Harold H. Weissman, Community Councils and Community Control (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), pp. xvii-xviii.

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communication along intergroup networks in the community tend to be impeded to the extent that groupings of community residents are separated by different norms and life styles of different social class and minority subcultures. For example, if participants in a collaborative effort are drawn from the whole range of the community's social class and power hierarchies, differences in norms and life styles make it difficult to get agreement on needs for, and goals of, action and on procedures to be used in trying to attain accepted goals. On the other hand, if the whole range of participants is not included, it may be easier to reach agreement, but lack of input from the excluded segments of the community may increase the difficulty of selecting and achieving appropriate goals and may reduce the chances of getting achieved goals put effectively into continuing use. Under any circumstances, different subcultures of different social classes and ethnic groups represent points for which adaptations in a given action effort are likely to be appropriate or even necessary. These adaptations may range from adjustments in the language and deference used in communication to recognition of basic differences in norms and values that have to be reconciled with the norms and values that dominate the community action. Each subsystem of the community constitutes a sphere of community life that given actions may attempt to change and each has its own hierarchies of prestige and power that have potential for initiating, supporting, modifying, or opposing specific actions. The economic and governmental subsystems are particularly likely to get involved at top levels of decision making in community action efforts, since such efforts usually have at least some economic and political impact. From the standpoint of the community's demographic features, the larger the size of the local population and the more heterogegeneous it is in its composition, the greater the scope of the needs it can be expected to have and the less likely it is that there will be consensus among local residents on what needs should be the target of community efforts or what resources should be made available for meeting needs. High percentages of children and elderly persons in a community cut down on the proportion of persons who can be expected to supply financial support for collaborative community efforts and at the same time constitute target segments of population

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for whom such efforts characteristically seek to provide services or facilities. The worldwide trend in population movement from rural to urban communities supplies a potential labor force for expanding urban industry and a potential market for goods and services. At the same time, however, it intensifies needs for housing, water supply, sewage disposal, transportation, and such services as education, health care, recreation, and other social welfare provisions. Those needs call for, but do not guarantee, collaborative community planning and action to get them met. The newly arrivedpeoplemay create demands for change that evoke antagonisms and resistance, or they may supply the motivation required to initiate community change. In communities where collaborative efforts have been directed toward decreasing death rates, the ensuing population growth has usually obstructed the community's goal of raising its standard of living, especially in places where developed resources are scarce in relation to population. This situation has figured in the increase of community efforts to control population, particularly in communities of Asian nations. From the standpoint of the community's ecological features, community action efforts affect and are affected by the particular ecological conditions that prevail in the community. The geographic location, for example, with its climate, natural resources, and topography can generate needs for action and set limits for certain types of action, such as those related to providing transportation, locating industry, and increasing agricultural productivity. Furthermore, the technology that can be used to develop a community's natural resources and beauty can also be used in ways that are damaging to the natural environment, polluting its air and water and/or desstroying its resources and beauty. Community actions may be needed to foster the former uses and prevent the latter from occurring. Different ecological types of rural communities and different ecological areas of urban communities tend to vary in the degree to which they lend themselves to the objectives of particular collaborative efforts. In nucleated types of rural communities, for example, it is easier than in dispersed types to contact people and to get them together to discuss and formulate plans for action. It is also easier to provide services in the nucleated types.

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The fact that people in different ecological areas of urban communities tend to be segregated by race, ethnic background, income, social class, and life style increases the difficulty of getting them to work together in collective community efforts. Middle- and upperincome residential areas tend to overshadow lower-income areas both in leadership and participation in community efforts. The alienation and the lack of participation prevalent in low-income residential areas have been receiving special attention of collaborative actions in communities in the United States. Other targets are the deficits in employment, housing, education, and health and other welfare services, which, according to Cohen, are usual in slum ghettos of large cities. 13 The establishment of multi-functional neighborhood service centers represents a collaborative community effort to get services decentralized and delivered more evenly and promptly to the people who need them.

COMMUNITY ACTIONS Community actions, representing, as they do, the community development process in operation, provide the basis for analyzing what goes on as the people of a community engage in a collaborative attempt to make or block a change that is of communitywide significance and that in their judgment affects the well-being of their community. The analysis that follows delineates and describes the six components of a completed community action, cites some of the variations among community actions, and points up the interrelatedness of the two aspects of every community action: (1) task performance, i.e., the activities that the people engage in collectively as they move from recognizing a need for action toward attaining and institutionalizing their chosen goal of action, and (2) the effects that the task-performance activities have upon the ability of the people to go on working together for what they consider to be the well-being of the community.

13. Nathan E. Cohen, 'The Los Angeles Riot Study', Social Work, 12 (October, 1967): 15.

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COMPONENTS OF A COMMUNITY ACTION

A community action can be analyzed in terms of certain components that characteristically occur (Cf. Table 1). The beginning of any given action is the recognition of the need to make or block some community change. A completed action gets to the point that its objective is achieved and institutionalized, i. e., made an ongoing part of the community's normative and social structures. Between beginning and completion there are four other components which occur in à developmental sequence, but any one of which can be terminal in an incomplete community action. These components include: a move to get action started; an attempt to pinpoint the conditions that give rise to the need to make or block change and to identify the means by which those conditions can be modified; adoption of a specific goal and plan of action; and implementation of the plan to achieve the action goal. Each of the six components is described below in greater detail. 14 The six community action components described here are presented in a logical chronological sequence. However, it is conceivable that they will not all occur in a fixed order in all community actions. Furthermore, different components of a particular action can be going on at the same time and the relative emphasis placed upon given components can vary so much that some components may become more or less consequential than others for the action effort. Recognition

of Need for

Action

Recognition of need for action begins with the dawning awareness 14. Similar components have been identified b y other students of community development, though sometimes in different terminology. See, for example, James W. Green and Selz C. Mayo, 'A Framework for Research in the Action of Community Groups', Social Forces, 31 (1953): 320-327; Ross, pp. 139154; Christopher Sower, et al., Community Involvement (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 18, 309-314; and Ronald Lippitt, et al., Dynamics of Planned Change (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), pp. vi and 6-9. They have also been systematically analyzed on the basis of data from some reported community action efforts. See, for example, Green and Mayo, pp. 326-327; Charles R. Hoffer, 'Social Action in Community Development', Rural Sociology, 23 (1958): 44-51; and Paul A. Miller, Community Health Action (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953), especially pp. 11-44.

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in a community that something should be different from what it is and either ends there or develops into a more widely shared awareness, which provides incentive both for the initiation of action and for the drive to carry the action to completion. If the recognition originates outside the community, the community development process does not become operative until at least some community members share that recognition. The need may range from a relatively broad one, for example, the need to develop a higher level of living in a given community, to such a limited and specific one as the need to establish a new community hospital. The more complex desired changes embrace a number of narrower, more specific changes, as the need to get a higher level of living may be broken down into the needs for increased production, reduced illiteracy, more adequate housing, and more opportunities for employment. Furthermore, needs for action may have reference to conditions that are anticipated as well as those that already exist. Recognition of need for action is a component of community action that has to be present in some degree before the other components can occur, but it can increase and spread among community members throughout the entire action episode. Such spread, according to Ross, is more likely to occur when the people are dissatisfied with existing community conditions and want to get them changed. 15 In consensus strategy, efforts would be made to get a convergence of interest among the people who have different dissatisfactions and who represent quite different networks of social relationships in the community. One feature of this effort would be to state the recognized need for action in such a way that it harmonizes with the dominant sentiments, beliefs, and practices of the people and at the same time appeals to residents whose interest is motivated by decidedly different concerns. A situation like this is illustrated, for instance, when a group of persons seeking to spread interest in a recognized need for action to legalize abortion state that perceived need to fit such different sentiments and values as those of persons desiring to check population growth, those wishing to spare women the stigma of unwed motherhood, and those favoring any move to increase personal freedom. 15. Ross, p. 137.

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Conflict strategy, on the other hand, in soliciting recognition of need for action would bypass or minimize effort to get agreement among diverse groups and interests and would instead engage in controversy, contesting values which deny that the need for action exists. Initiation of

Action

The scope of initiation of action is from the first move made to develop the idea that 'something must be done' up to the point that next steps are planned for the community to consider taking action. Belief on the part of at least some community residents that something can be done and their exercise of some initiative in the direction of seeing to it that something is done are key elements. The initiating act may be taken by an individual or by a group or by some combination of individuals and groups. Miller reported that, in 218 successful community actions to acquire hospitals, one person was credited with initiation in 32 percent of the cases, several persons working together in 28 percent, an organized group in 12 percent, and some combination of individuals and organized groups in the remaining 28 percent. 1 6 Though it may be a single individual who makes the first move, an initiating group is usually formed early in the process. From the viewpoint of cooperative strategy the 'right' people to have in an initiating group are those who have prestige in the community or have access to persons of prestige and power; those who have knowledge of the community's sociocultural situation, especially its dominant values; those who possess 'know-how' about the action they are seeking to initiate; and those who are recognized by local residents as persons who represent the interest of the community. From the viewpoint of conflict strategy, the 'right' people are those who are dedicated to the cause and who will not be intimidated by conventional social controls; those who are able to get publicity for their demands, especially through the mass media; and those who know how to arouse and channel discontent in support of demonstrations, strikes, picketing, and similar activities. 16. Miller, p. 21.

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Factors that favor initiation of a community action include: a network of social relationships emanating from the initiators to a wide range of kinship, age, sex, occupational, geographic, and organizational groupings in the local social class and power hierarchies through which interest in the action can be spread; 17 a shared feeling that the action will meet an immediate or anticipated need for change; a crisis situation; the knowledge that a similar community action has been achieved in another community, 1 8 and a new awareness of alternatives injected by newcomers or by former residents who have returned to a community. 1 9 On the other hand, impediments to the initiation of action can be found in nearly any community. Potential initiators may be impeded by the fear that something they cherish in the status quo will be threatened or destroyed by what takes place. Uncertainty about the outcome of the action to be initiated may deter other potential initiators from risking possible failure and the personal embarrassment that could accompany failure. Some potential initiators may hesitate to start an action that could add to their already heavy load of responsibilities. Lack of lines of communication and/or failure to use available communication channels between the persons who recognize need for action and the persons and groups potentially affected by that action constitute other impediments to the initiation process. Frustration of efforts to initiate action can also result from such ineffective use of communication that the initiators do not get across to others the ideas and objectives that might elicit supporting response. Impediments to initiation of community action that stem from prevailing traditionalism, fatalism, or apathy — while present to some degree in all communities — are likely to be greater in relatively nonmodernized than in relatively modernized communities. The intensity of these impediments varies, however, both 17. Sower, et al., pp. 71-72. For detailed analysis of initiation in a community action that employed a consensus strategy to organize and conduct a health survey in a midwestem community, see pp. 201-211. 18. Charles P. Loomis, 'In Praise of Conflict and Its Resolution', American Sociological Review, 32 (1967): 886-889. 19. See, for example, Hoffer, p. 44; Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old (New York: Morrow, 1956), pp. 212-241.

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among communities and among groups within the same community.^ The interplay between factors favoring and impeding community action is evident in those situations where 'newcomers' initiate action to get 'better' school, recreation, and health facilities and then encounter obstructions from established residents who are satisfied with things as they are or who resent what they consider to be the 'intrusion of outsiders' and who are so situated that they can frustrate action, at least temporarily. The first procedures the newcomers follow are likely to be based upon cooperative strategy to elicit backing from, and to avoid antagonism of, the long-time residents. Should this strategy fail, next attempts are likely to employ a moderate conflict strategy that presses for action even at the expense of antagonizing the local power structure. (See, for example, the Arlington school case described below, page 157.) Study and Diagnosis of the Need for

Action

This component of a community action is concerned with assessing the nature of the need for action. Whether the strategy approach is that of cooperation or of conflict, it can make use of a factuallybased diagnosis of the need for action, the conditions that underlie the need, and the resources available for meeting the need. The study involved in assessment may be undertaken by the initiating group, by a special group organized for the purpose, by professional research personnel, or by some combination of these three. Community members who participate in the study have a chance to become informed about the diagnosis of the situation and to use that information in any later role that they play in the community action. Professional consultants may provide degrees of competence and objectivity that increase the soundness of the diagnosis. Establishment of facts through study and diagnosis provides a basis for further action, though it does not insure that further action will be taken.

20. For discussion of differences between relatively nonmodernized and relatively modernized societies with respect to traditionalism and fatalism, see Marion J. Levy, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1966), I: 61, 107-110;II: 725-726.

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The part that various types of research play in relation to community development and the use of research to get feedback on, and evaluation of, community actions are described in Chapter 8. Selection of a Goal and Plan for

Action

Selecting the goal and plan for action to be taken to meet the studied and diagnosed need for action is a decision-making process that involves choosing from alternatives after assessing the goals'respective potentials for eliciting community acceptance, for accomplishing the specific outcomes desired, and for producing other desired or undesired consequences for the community. A goal may have a single, clearly defined objective that is complete in itself or it may posit a broad, complex objective that is supported by longrange and/or short-range goals each of which is a specific end to be attained in attaining the overall goal. For example, in the Model Cities program in the United States, the overall goal is 'to improve the quality of their (cities') physical and social environment'. 2 1 Intermediate coordinated goals contributing toward that end include goals to reduce juvenile delinquency and crime and goals to improve housing, transportation, education, facilities and services for health and for recreation, as well as people's employment capabilities and opportunities. It is usual for a group rather than an individual to have the responsibility for selecting the goal of action. Such a group may be composed partially or entirely of the persons who have participated in study and diagnosis of the need toward which action is to be directed, or it may consist of persons who have not been previously involved. When particular community actions take place as parts of broad national community development efforts, it is likely that certain predetermined goals, such as improvement of agriculture or reduction of illiteracy, have been adopted as nationwide objectives and are presented to localities by agents in the employ of the national government. The goals become incorporated into a community action when they are accepted by members of particular com21. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Programs of Housing and Urban Development (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1969), p. 8.

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munities, as goals of action for those communities, even if coercion, manipulation, persuasion, or other pressures figure in getting that acceptance. Goal-setting in the context of cooperative strategy will interpret the selected goal as consistent with the community's prevailing beliefs and values, will seek to alleviate the fears of vested interests, and will bargain with those who are in a position either to assure success or to block the projected action. Democratic goal-setting procedures include having as goal-setters persons who are representative of all those affected by the action effort, keeping the community at large informed about the need and the goals being proposed for its solution, and modifying a selected goal to take into account reactions and suggestions made by concerned community residents. In the context of conflict strategy, selection of an overall goal is likely to reflect the mood of challenge and confrontation; intermediate goals will probably emphasize easily obtained, highly visible, and practical results that can be expected to attract public attention, demonstrate power, and attract new recruits. (See Chapter 6 for fuller discussion of conflict strategy.) Selection of a goal is automatically tied up with selection of a plan of action when the goal is one for which an established legal procedure is required, as in a bond election, for example. In other cases there may be linking of goal and plan of action that derives from the participants' having chosen a particular goal in the belief that a particular plan of action can attain the desired goal. In any case, the selection of a plan of action sets up a procedure for attaining the selected goal. Ross describes an effective plan of action as one that takes into account the probable reaction of the community, the customary procedure by which similar goals are achieved, the persons who will have to support the plan if it is to be implemented, the costs involved together with the possible means for meeting these costs, the reasons why the goal is essential and why arguments offered against it are not considered valid, and the appropriate ways of approaching leaders and others about the goal. 22

22. Ross, p. 154.

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156 Goal

Development

Achievement

The active work of transforming intentions and plans into actual achievement of a goal constitutes this component of a community action. It involves getting access to the needed resources of money, materials, and people and, in cooperative strategy, establishing linkages with what Sower and his collaborators call 'the fund of goodwill' in the community. 2 3 Banfield says that 'a more or less elaborate system of influence must be created'. 2 4 In cooperative strategy, the usual ways of influencing the persons in the local power structure are through contacting them personally and through getting them to participate directly or indirectly in the action effort. In conflict strategy, influence on the power structure will likely be brought to bear through demands that are reinforced by such measures as demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and riots. If persons in the power structure foresee possible loss of income or community disruption, they may be willing to negotiate with the challengers. The work of goal achievement may rest primarily with the persons who decided on the goal or it may be shared with, or even delegated to, other persons. In cooperative strategy an effort is made to see that the group sponsoring a given community action is representative of, and acceptable to, the community and is able to enlist the support of all agencies and elements of the community whose backing is necessary to the achievement of the action's goal. Depending upon the nature of the need and the action, support in varying degrees may be required from public officials, politicians, newspaper editors and reporters as well as television and radio personnel, professional experts in the particular area of action, leaders in business and industry, labor leaders, club leaders, and such professional groups as physicians, lawyers, ministers, social workers, and teachers. Widespread community involvement, or participation, in an action effort is an implied purpose in the use of the community development process, though it may be more cumbersome, more expensive, slower, and less efficient than action handled by a limited group of experts, for example. 23. Sower, et al., Community Involvement, pp. 313-314. 24. Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), p. 3.

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There are some community actions that cannot be consummated except through widespread involvement of the people, as is the case when laws or ordinances must be enacted and implemented as part of an action effort. This point is well illustrated in a community action taken by residents of Arlington, Virginia, to expand that community's educational facilities after World War II. The initiators of the action took steps to inform and involve voters throughout that community: first, to get a law through the state legislature that would permit local election of the school board, next to elect a school board that was in favor of improving local educational facilities, and then to vote for a bond issue through which the needed facilities could be financed. The activities just described were part of a conflict strategy that was adopted after cooperative strategy failed to produce the desired results. Having made repeated unsuccessful attempts to work through the local school board to secure the school improvements they felt were needed, the citizens of Arlington who had organized for the purpose campaigned successfully to get the members of that board displaced by new members who were favorable to the proposed changes. 25 Some community actions employ a conflict strategy from the outset. This is particularly true for actions directed toward goals that are unpopular in the community, goals that the community's power structure is not likely to accept readily, and goals for which there are no established procedures whereby an action group can get its demands considered by the power groups that have authority to act. Use of conflict strategy is also more likely if the conditions that have produced the need for action have also produced a reservoir of latent frustration and hostility. Institutionalization

of the Achieved

Goal

The final component in a completed community action, whether a cooperative or a conflict strategy has been employed, consists of getting the attained goal incorporated into the normative and social 25. 'Citizens Organize to Reform their Schools', Arlington, Virginia, No. 2 of 'The People Act' Series broadcast nationally by CBS and distributed by The People Act Center, State College, Pa., 1952.

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structures of the community in such a way that the innovation becomes an established, regularized, 'permanent' feature of community life. 26 When the achieved goal represents a new service, the requirements for getting established may involve securing appropriate facilities, adequate staff, effective liaison with the community, and continuing financial support if that has not already been assured. When the achieved goal represents a change in community norms or practices, institutionalization will depend upon the degree of accommodation and acceptance the action group can get from persons who opposed the change and who are affected by it. If the antagonists can be incorporated into policy-making committees concerned with planning procedures to implement the innovation or into workingcommittees engaged in taking the first steps of implementation or if they are kept informed about developments in the implementation process, the cohesiveness of the community tends to be reestablished. Since the persons most active in attaining the goal of a community action are ordinarily not qualified or available to administer the innovation, it is necessary to terminate their action roles and to set up a new administration. Professional administration is usually required if a specialized professional service is to be rendered. However, persons active in goal achievement may continue to be active after institutionalization by serving on advisory boards to help formulate general policies and to interpret the professional service to the community as well as the community's needs to the professional staff. Institutionalization of an achieved goal can be impeded or even prevented if financial resources are not adequate to maintain the innovation; if the innovation requires personnel who are not available or who cannot be attracted to the community, even though ample funds are available to pay them; if the community members withdraw their interest and support because they expected faster or more concrete results than the change could produce; or if the residents of the community become alienated from the project either by their distaste for, or their misinterpretation of, the procedures used in its implementation. After the achieved goal of a community action is institutionalized, 26. Lippitt, etal., pp. 141; 410.

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its effects may prove to be different from what its proponents had expected or intended. This is the case, for example, when a new hospital is built through a community action effort and the people of the community turn out to be unwilling or unable to take full advantage of its services and facilities either because its charges are higher than they can afford or because they do n o t understand clearly the benefits it can be expected to provide or because they feel more comfortable using a health facility with which they are familiar. Community actions that involve cross-cultural contacts are especially likely to produce unanticipated outcomes if the culture or subculture of the target group keeps the people from perceiving the action objective realistically and the outsiders involved do not have an accurate idea either of the residents' perceptions or of the appropriateness of the innovation for the recipient culture or subculture. It is also possible that the institutionalization of an achieved goal will set in motion developments that call for further community action. This is the case, for example, when scientific medical technology introduced into a traditional community lowers the death rate dramatically, thereby increasing the population and leading to a decline in living standards unless action is taken t o lower birth rates through institution of family planning. A similar type of situation occurs when a school is racially integrated through a community action and then community demands develop for action to change the school's name, colors, and songs so that they will not reflect the racial identity the school had before its enrollment became racially mixed.

VARIATIONS IN COMMUNITY ACTIONS

Typically, a given community will, at any given time, be carrying on more than one community action. The larger the community, the greater the number of projects that are likely to be under way. Sutton found 70 community actions going on at once in a community of about 120,000 population and 20 to 30 in communities of about 5,000 population. 2 7 27. Willis A. Sutton, Jr., 'The Sociological Implications of the Community Development Process', in Community Development as a Process, Lee J. Cary (ed.) (Columbia: U. of Missouri Press, 1970), p. 76.

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The different actions that communities undertake can be expected to vary in several ways. One kind of variation is essentially temporal. Some community actions take a long time to complete — others are of relatively short duration. Some occur only once in a generation, as in a project to celebrate a community's two-hundredth anniversary; some recur at regular intervals, as is the case with united fund drives and religious fiestas celebrating the birthdays of saints; and some make continuing application of the community development process, for example, in a community's effort to maintain a volunteer fire department or to keep a community council in operation. Another kind of variation is in the relative emphasis that different community actions place upon getting specific tasks accomplished as compared with helping people acquire ability to take collective action in behalf of their community. A given community action may give equal emphasis to these two aspects of the community development process or it may emphasize one more than the other. The consequence may or may not be what was expected from the particular emphasis given. For example, a community action giving major emphasis to task achievement might accomplish even more in increasing the people's ability to work together than it accomplishes in the way of achieving tasks. Still another kind of variation among community actions is in the extent of participation by lay and professional persons, respectively. The variation may be in the numbers of each who participate, and it may be in the relative importance given to lay and professional leadership. Community actions also vary in the extent to which they have extracommunity involvement, by the number and kinds of people who are affected by the action outcomes, and by the total number of people who take part as well as the proportion they constitute of the community's total population and the degree to which they are representative of that population. The different kinds of actions can be expected to vary in the appeal they have for different members of the community and in the difficulty they pose for sustaining interest and esprit de corps.

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INTERRELATEDNESS OF TASK ACHIEVEMENT AND ABILITY TO WORK TOGETHER

According to the United Nations Group of Experts on Community Development, the positive attitudes, values, and ways of thinking the people acquire as they learn to work together in community actions are as important as the tangible material results obtained from those actions. 28 The rationale for such an assumption is that communities keep on having needs that call for collective action and that successful efforts to deal with such needs depend upon the ability of the people to keep on working together in behalf of their community. 29 The base of cooperative social interaction and the networks of linkages among informal and formal groups within and among the various subsystems that are already in the community when an action effort begins cannot escape the effects produced by the effort. Generally, they are rendered more or less able to engage in further collaborative community undertakings. The opportunity for collaborative activity occurs as the members of a community's groups engage in person-to-person dialogue; communicate information, ideas, feelings, and suggestions; carry on problem-solving activities; and, through networks of social relationships, exert influence on one another and probably on nongroup members with whom they are directly or indirectly connected. These same situations also present opportunities for disagreement and conflict to arise. Generally speaking, failure to achieve goals in a community action effort tends to weaken the esprit de corps of participants and to leave the community's members less able to work together in subsequent actions. Conversely, the achievement of goals tends to boost community morale and increase the participants' facility for working together. However, task and goal accomplishment can be associated with the weakening of a community's ability to engage in collective action if, in the course of attaining this accomplishment, factions develop among the people, hostilities are engendered, 28. United Nations ad Hoc Group of Experts on Community Development, p. 39. 29. Curtis and Dorothy Mial, 'Community Development — U.S.A.', International Review of Community Development, No. 4 (1959): 14.

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people's feelings get hurt, or the civic energies of participants are exhausted by their vigorous involvement in the community action. It is also possible that the people of a community can increase their ability to work together in community actions even though they fail to accomplish desired tasks and goals in a given action effort. This happened, for example, in the Talladega health project described more fully in Chapters 7 and 8. In that case, the participants did not attain most of the goals that they had set up for the project. Nevertheless, through taking part in the project's self-survey, serving on committees, and engaging in various project activities they came to know one another better, learned more about their community, found out the main channels they needed to work through if they were to accomplish the changes they desired, and ultimately obtained legitimation in the eyes of the community at large for the Community Council that they had created to deal with the task of improving local health conditions. 30 Indications are that the community development process is applied with greater effectiveness when community actions take into account the effects they can be expected to have on the ability of the people to go on working together in behalf of their community. The relative emphasis appropriately given, respectively, to these effects and to task-achievement varies in relation to local circumstances. For example, the effects on the ability of community residents to work together probably need to be emphasized more if preoccupation with task achievement has permitted interpersonal tensions to reach proportions that threaten the whole action effort, and task achievement probably needs to be emphasized more if excessive concern about interpersonal relations has taken attention away from activities that would lead to concrete accomplishments needed to encourage and boost the morale of participants.31

SUMMARY Community development is a process in which people of a given 30. Solon T. Kimball and Marion Pearsall, The Talladega Story (University, Alabama: U. of Alabama Press, 1954), pp. 196-200. 31. Sutton, pp. 62-63.

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community collectively take action they believe will promote the community's well-being. The process may be used either to try to effect a desired community change or to block a proposed change. It may employ either a cooperative or a conflict strategy. Persons who make application of the community development process proceed from the value-laden assumptions that they can and should organize to make or block some community change, and they articulate values and subjective judgments about what constitutes the well-being of the community. A base of cooperative interaction and a network of linkages among groups within and among the various subsystems is already present in a community before a community action begins. The action typically uses these groups and linkages and always exerts effects upon them, leaving the community more or less able to go on engaging in collaborative community activities. Other sociocultural as well as demographic and ecological features of the community constitute the setting within which needs for action arise, from which resources for taking action can be obtained, and out of which obstacles to taking action can emerge. The process of community development is applied in real-life situations through community actions, i. e., unitary efforts that represent collective attempts the residents of a community make to effect or to block some community change that they believe affects the well-being of the community. The two interrelated aspects of a community action are the taskperformance aspect, i.e., the problem-solving activities that the people engage in collectively to set and attain a goal of action, and the effects that the task-performance activities have upon the ability of the people to go on working together in behalf of their community. Each completed community action consists of the following components: (1) recognition of a need for action; (2) initiation of action; (3) study and diagnosis of the need for action; (4) selection of a goal and plan for action; (5) goal achievement; and (6) institutionalization of the achieved goal. Community actions vary in the length of time it takes to complete them, in the frequency with which they are undertaken, in the relative emphasis they give to task achievement and to the effects of the action on the people's ability to go on working together for

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the community, in the relative amounts of lay and professional participation they have, and in the degree to which they have extracommunity involvement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Batten, T. R. Communities and Their Development. London: Oxford U. Press, 1957. A comparative analysis of the differences in aim, in method, and in organization found in work related to community development. Each point is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the countries of tropical Africa. Biddle, William W.; and Biddle, Loureide J . The Community Development Process. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965. A practical description of the community development process. The book contains case studies of a rural and of an urban community action with which the authors were associated and Appendices that provide a listing of community action activities in the United States and Canada as well as a selected bibliography of published and unpublished materials on community development. Cary, Lee J . (ed.) Community Development as a Process. Columbia: U. of Missouri Press, 1970. The work of seven authors who deal with community development as a process, discussing the sociological and psychological implications of that process and the roles that citizens and the community development professional have in applying the community development process. Miller, Paul A. Community Health Action. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953. A series of five case studies of rural community efforts to gain health goals, and a questionnaire study of 218 community health projects. Emphasis is on community action process. Ross, Murray G. Community Organization. 2nd ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1967. An analysis of the community organization process and certain tentative principles that can be applied to its operation. As used by Ross, the term community organization is basically equivalent to the term community development employed in this text. His orientation is largely to the welfare field in the United States. Sanders, Irwin T. 'Theories of Community Development', Rural Sociology, 23 (1958): 1-12. An article conceptualizing community development as process, method, program, and movement. United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on Community Development. Community Development and. National Development. New York: United Nations, 1963. A report defining the concept of community development and suggesting how application of the process can be improved and extended.

CHAPTER 5

Leadership and Community Development

Application of the community development process in specific community action efforts depends heavily upon leadership. The potential for this leadership exists within the community both in persons already active in community decision making and in persons who can become activated to serve in that capacity. Any leadership that originates outside the community is dependent upon the emergence of local leaders before the process of community development can become operative. When community leadership takes place, it does so through a network of interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup relationships along which leaders pass and receive information and secure cooperation or incite opposition. To the extent that a community is unified, the network reaches out to give different local groups and groupings some part in influencing decisions on issues with which they are concerned. Lack of such unity isolates certain segments of the community from decision-making processes. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the concept of community leadership in its relation to the process of community development, to describe the usual community leadership base that supplies the sources from which leaders in community actions emerge, to consider factors that affect motivation for leadership in community actions, and finally to present illustrative material on the leadership that was operative in four selected community actions. This chapter is oriented primarily toward a consensus approach to community action. The conflict approach, employing protest and confrontation, is the central theme of Chapter 6.

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CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP Leadership, as conceived here in relation to community development, refers to the influence that community members exercise upon one another in making decisions that initiate, mobilize, and coordinate their collective efforts to deal with community change. Influence in this context is what BanfielH describes as the ability to get others to act, feel, or think as one intends in the sphere of making and executing decisions that are communitywide in impact. 1 The person who exhibits leadership is, according to McFarland, someone who makes things happen that would not happen otherwise. 2 The person whose style of leadership is democratic intends only that the people will act, feel, or think in ways that they themselves consider to be for the best interest of their community. He does not have preconceived directions of action that he coerces or manipulates community residents into accepting and pursuing. What he makes happen that would not happen otherwise is the motivation of the people to participate in collaborative action that they believe will promote their community's well-being. Leaders who approximate the democratic style to the greatest degree take into account the ideas, wishes, and feelings of the persons who are affected by their decision-making activities so that their decisions reflect majority will in a given matter. Conversely, leaders who approximate the authoritarian style to the greatest degree neglect consideration of people's ideas, wishes, and feelings and proceed in their decisionmaking activities in a controlling, managing, directive, and taskoriented manner. 3 In community situations generally, style of leadership varies along a continuum between democratic and authoritarian poles. A given leader may be consistently more authoritarian than democratic or more democratic than authoritarian or his degree of authoritarian and democratic behavior may vary from one situation to another 1. Edward C. Ban field, Political Influence (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 3. 2. Andrew S. McFarland, Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1969), p. 155. 3. Fred E. Fiedler, A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 37.

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or from one time to another in similar situations. Both communities and community actions vary in the degree to which greater use is made of one style of leadership over the other. However, the nature of the community development process requires at least enough democratic leadership to elicit some degree of community participation. Operational definitions of leadership that have been used for purposes of research have assumed that leadership at the community level is evidenced in one or more of the following ways: (1) by the numbers of decisions a person participates in making on matters that have communitywide relevance; (2) by the amount of formal authority a person has through some official position he holds in the community; (3) by the number of voluntary associations he participates in and the part he plays in each; and (4) by the extent to which informed local people cite him as being a leader. 4 Even though, theoretically, all members of a community can exercise influence, different people exercise it in different degrees and some more consistently and widely than others in the various facets of community life. To the extent that different persons participate in making and implementing decisions in different community actions or the same persons exercise different degrees of influence in different actions, different leadership structures develop around different community issues. Each leadership structure consists of the persons exercising influence in a particular community action and each becomes a focus for unifying people's feelings and actions on one side or the other of the particular change issue.

THE LEADERSHIP BASE OF THE COMMUNITY The leadership existing in a given community, at a given time, comes from one or more of the following: the community power structure; the local social class structure; the organizational hierarchies in the various subsystems; the customers, clients, or members of local organizations; and a reservoir of individuals whose personal qualities 4. Linton C. Freeman, Patterns of Local Community Leadership (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 6-8.

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give them potential for exercising influence, regardless of what positions or ranks they have in the community. Generally speaking, high leadership potential is associated with high rank in the power, social class, and subsystem hierarchies.

COMMUNITY POWER STRUCTURE AS A SOURCE OF LEADERSHIP

The hierarchy of persons who are involved in making top-level and lesser decisions on community matters constitutes, as shown in Chapter 2, the community's power structure. These persons are, in popular phraseology, 'the people who are running the community'. They may be relatively few in number and representative of only a few subsystems, such as the economic and the governmental, or they may include numerous persons from all or most of the subsystems. Who they are is likely to change, at least to some extent, as issues change. Just what degree of centralization of power in a few leaders or what degree of decentralization of power among numerous leaders is favorable for community action efforts cannot be ascertained from available research. 5 The community power structure is meaningful to community actions in various ways. For example, it is a logical source of leaders who recognize the need for a particular community action and/or who initiate action to deal with community change. When it does not supply the leaders, the persons who emerge as leaders in the action effort can be expected to move into the power structure themselves either replacing some of its members or supplementing its membership. This is especially likely to happen when the action effort has strong popular support and/or ample resources available to it. If a consensus strategy is used, participants in a community action typically seek to get the power structure's support or at least to neutralize its opposition. If conflict strategy is used, they confront the power structure and challenge any indifference or opposition that is offered.

5. For citation of contradictory evidence on this point, see Roland L. Warren, 'Toward a Non-Utopian Normative Model of the Community', American Sociological Review, 35 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 2 2 5 .

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SOCIAL CLASS STRUCTURE AS A SOURCE OF LEADERSHIP

While in any given community there may be considerable overlapping of the social class structure and the local power structure, the two structures are, in some degree, independent and potentially separate sources of community leadership. In traditional communities, the highest potential for leadership is characteristically associated with high social class ranking. This potential tends to shift to middleclass levels as modernization proceeds and community values place more stress upon democratic than upon aristocratic elitism. In some situations, as in antipoverty projects in the United States, opportunity for leadership has been specifically provided to persons of the lower social class levels. In the People's Republic of China, since the Communist Revolution, landless peasants and those with small landholdings have been given greater voice in decision making and owners of extensive landholdings have been largely excluded from positions of community leadership.

SUBSYSTEM HIERARCHIES AS SOURCES OF LEADERSHIP

Persons whose leadership is linked with the community power structure or with the social class structure of the community are, of course, linked also with the community's organizational structure, which embraces all the informal and formal groups in the familial, economic, governmental, religious, education, and social welfare subsystems. There is overlap in leadership among the three structures to the extent that people's positions in the subsystem hierarchies determine their rankings in the power structure, to the extent that ranking in the social class structure directly or indirectly affects the positions people occupy in the subsystem hierarchies, and to the extent that positions people attain in the subsystem hierarchies affect their ranking in the social class structure. Despite the overlap, the subsystem hierarchies constitute a source of leadership that goes beyond whatever degree of social prestige occupants of positions in the hierarchies possess and beyond any influence on decision making that they have previously exercised as members of the community power structure. Within the subsystems there are two sources from which influence and authority can come.

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One source consists of the occupants of all the administrative, staff, and supervisory positions in all the various organizations in the different subsystems. The other source consists of professional persons whose authority and influence are associated with their specialized technical knowledge rather than with a position in an organizational hierarchy to which is attached legitimate power of command over subordinates. Though the persons involved here are not necessarily different ones, the sources of influence and authority are distinct. 6 The term bureaucratic leader is applied to the person who exercises leadership by virtue of the fact that he occupies a position in a hierarchically structured and rationally designed organization that requires him to mobilize, guide, or coordinate the efforts of subordinates. Just what organizational positions in which subsystems will be drawn more prominently into the arena of community decision making depends upon the nature of the community action and upon sociocultural, demographic, and ecological features of the community. The degree of influence a position carries is, according to Nuttall and his associates, in direct relationship to the amount of, and the need for, the resources to which that position has access. Resources include money and other capital goods, privileged information, and friendship networks as well as authority or power to apply positive and negative sanctions. 7 Generally speaking, religious officials exert a greater degree of influence in communities that have a stronger religious than secular orientation; positions in subsystems that serve the elderly can be expected to carry more influence where there are relatively large proportions of residents over age sixty and community norms prescribe attentions for older residents; and positions in the governmental subsystem usually increase their leadership functions in community actions that call for public funds and for official planning to rehabilitate such ecological areas as the central business district or low-income slum sections. The subsystem hierarchies not only supply leaders from the of6. Peter M. Blau, 'The Hierarchy of Authority in Organizations', in Organizational Systems, Koya Azumi and Jerald Hage (eds.) (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1972), pp. 294-295. 7. Ronald L. Nuttall, Erwin K. Sheuch, and Chad Gordon, 'On the Structure of Influence', in Community Structure and Decision-Making: Comparative Analyses, Terry N. Clark (ed.) (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), pp. 352-356.

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ficial positions that exist within each hierarchy, they are also a source of leaders who emerge as opponents of occupants of official subsystem positions to engage in specific community actions, such as efforts to desegregate local schools or to fluoridate the local water supply. This leadership, which characteristically relies on conflict strategy, is examined more fully in Chapter 6. Professionals, who constitute a further source of leadership within the subsystems, exercise influence to the extent that their knowledge and technical competence are respected and sought in community matters. The roles that are played in community actions by such professionals as community development agents, social workers, planners, health care personnel, educators, and extension service personnel are described in Chapter 7.

CUSTOMERS, CLIENTS, OR MEMBERS OF LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS AS SOURCES OF LEADERSHIP

Potential for community leadership resides not only in community power, social class, and subsystem hierarchies, but also in persons who as customers, clients, or members of local organizations are not ordinarily in roles that directly affect decision making. Actual leadership from this source comes about when these persons take independent or collective action to oppose or support an organization's policy that has communitywide ramifications. Customers, for instance, by trading with, or by boycotting, particular stores can influence store policy on such matters as the handling of imported merchandise or the use of discriminatory employment practices. Clients of social welfare agencies, though relatively powerless as a rule, are becoming increasingly able to influence agency policies and practices as they aie becoming increasingly informed about their rights and confident about requesting or demanding that their rights be guaranteed. They are also achieving influence through collective action in welfare rights organizations. Parents of school children exercise influence on school policies, for example, regarding desegregation, busing of pupils, school curricula, and hiring or firing of school personnel by removing their children from the school or by volunteering to have their children participate in school arrangements that support a particular school policy. They exercise

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further influence through such organizations as parent-teacher associations and 'concerned parents' groups. Members of voluntary organizations acquire their potential for leadership by virtue of the fact that they can influence decision making by giving or withdrawing their financial support, by attending or staying away from meetings, by agreeing or refusing to hold office, and by retaining or resigning from membership in the organization. For the unorganized actions of members to have communitywide impact, either sizable numbers or sizable financial support must be involved. Otherwise, individuals must arrange to act collectively through forming a counter-group to oppose or support particular policies or actions.

INDIVIDUALS WITH PERSONAL POTENTIAL FOR LEADERSHIP

Within the leadership base of the community there are usually some persons who exercise leadership by being able to evoke more than ordinary emotional response and confidence from people of the community. Their ability to do this derives from their having, or being perceived as having, particular acquired personal characteristics that they possess in greater degree than other people in the situation and that enable them to be more influential than others. 8 Leaders of this sort are referred to as charismatic leaders. 9 The characteristics associated with this personal type of leadership are acquired and related to specific situations. Apparently, a person functions as leader by virtue of meeting fairly specific role requirements rather than by having innate qualities common to all persons who exercise influence. Some persons, for example, serve as leaders by possessing the characteristic of being able to supply ideas, some by having acquired the ability to play a supportive or reassuring role, some by having learned the knack for reconciling individuals who have opposing ideas, some by having learned the skill of squelching ideas that are deemed detrimental to the com8. See, for example, Fiedler, pp. 10-12; and Murray G. Ross and Charles E. Hendry, New Understandings of Leadership (New York: Association Press, 1957), pp. 42-43. 9. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1947), pp. 358-392.

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munity, and some by having acquired a sense of humor that they can use in relieving interpersonal tensions. No connection has been established empirically between leadership and such inherited personal characteristics as mental capacity, height, and other inherited features. Ross and Hendry, examining a 'large' (unspecified) number of research studies on leadership, found substantial agreement that leaders were distinguishable by their keener sensitivity and responsiveness to the emotional needs of group members, by their fuller identification with group goals and values, by their greater ability to show concern for group members through helping them in practical ways, by their more contagious enthusiasm, by the greater consistency of their behavior, by their greater ego strength, by their greater alertness to what goes on in the group, and by the greater degree to which they enable group members to work together. 10 Communities beginning to modernize, Meier found, are especially likely to respond to charismatic leadership that promises to bring more stability to patterns of life that are being disturbed by the clash between old and new norms, values, and practices. 11 Charismatic leadership in relatively modernized communities is generally exercised in community actions to initiate change in spheres of community life for which there are no existing institutional provisions, to stimulate bureaucratic leaders in the various subsystems to align their programs to meet community needs, and to challenge any leaders who neglect or refuse to make desired changes in existing institutional arrangements. It may also be used to block or modify any actions taken in these directions. Sometimes charismatic leadership derives from the fact that the person has achieved or inherited a charismatic position, i. e., a position to which charisma has been ascribed — probably because it has been held by one or more charismatic leaders whose extraordinary influence is popularly perceived as invested in the office. According to Etzioni, virtually any position can be made charismatic, even positions at different levels of a bureaucratic hierarchy. 12 Greatest 10. R o s s a n d H e n d r y , p p . 4 1 - 8 0 . 11. R i c h a r d L . Meier, Developmental Planning (New Y o r k : McGraw-Hill, 1 9 6 5 ) , p p . 51-52. 12. A m i t a i Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (New Y o r k : Free Press, 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 2 0 6 - 2 0 7 .

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potentiality for leadership exists when a high level bureaucratic position is endowed with position charisma and is occupied by someone who has personal charisma. 13 Weber's analysis of charismatic positions, or 'routinized charisma' as he referred to it, suggests that this kind of leadership is particularly important in traditional communities where the social organization is either minimally differentiated or is in the pattern of a caste system or of a feudal system in which certain positions by long tradition are invested with charisma. 14

DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERSHIP IN COMMUNITY ACTIONS The leadership base of the community provides, as shown, various sources of potential leaders to serve in community actions. The actual emergence of leaders, however, is not assured — especially leaders who are representative of the various racial, ethnic, age, and subsystem constituencies in the community. The process by which leadership develops is typically a gradual one. The individual who has not been active in mobilizing, coordinating, or inspiring group efforts gets involved in such activities when someone asks him to or when he belongs to an organization that becomes involved or, in rarer cases, when he volunteers to become involved. If his involvement increases his skill in collaborating with other people to attain shared goals, the people tend to look to him for leadership. If he derives satisfaction from his involvement, for example, through task accomplishment and/or the experience of working with others, he tends to become more responsive to opportunities for leadership. Generally speaking, persons from the higher levels of the social class structure have more opportunity to become leaders than persons in the lower levels, since higher proportions of them belong to organizations and higher proportions of them hold offices in the organizations to which they belong. Furthermore, their greater 13. See Jane W. Dabaghian, Introduction to Chapter 11, 'Power and Revolution', in Mirror of Man, Jane W. Dabaghian (ed.) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 264-265. 14. Weber, pp. 341-381.

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educational advantages serve to give proportionately more of them high ranking positions in the subsystem hier4rchies and in this way greater opportunities for bureaucratic leadership. Alienated segments of the community's population, i. e., people not involved or represented in community decision making, get opportunities for leadership through organizing to accomplish some common objective or through becoming affiliated with local units of extracommunity organizations that are trying to help them attain some objective. To the extent that they are not initially in organizations, alienated persons who become leaders are likely to start out as charismatic leaders. Once they get involved in community committees and policy-making boards, they have a basis for exercising bureaucratic leadership that may either enhance or impair their personal effectiveness in exerting influence. Just which people are likely to become involved as leaders in community actions depends upon their being motivated to take part in a particular action as well as upon their having positions in the subsystem organizations, personal traits, and/or professional competences that fit the demands of the action and the particular situational context in which the action takes place. Personal motivation to engage in leadership functions varies directly with the degree of relevance that the individual perceives a community action has for him personally, for the organizational positions he occupies, for one or all of the groups in which he participates, and/or for the community as a whole. Relevance may be assessed in such terms as the personal power, prestige, or financial gain to be derived; the impact to be made on the image or the wellbeing of the groups in which the person participates; and/or the consequences the action is perceived as having for the well-being of the community. While an individual's or his group's involvement in other activities does not necessarily reduce motivation for participation in community action efforts and while, in fact, the busiest people and the most active organizations tend to be the most responsive to requests for participation, there is a point at which preoccupation with other activities precludes substantial involvement in any new undertaking. Spinrad concluded from a review of research that business groups tend to intervene in issues that have some direct association with

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the maintenance or enhancement of their area of power, their direct economic interests, or the business values they hold. The individual businessman tends to intervene, according to Spinrad, because intervening either fits in with the job he is expected to do or enables him to advance his career. 15 Sills pointed out that certain community members, especially young lawyers and aspiring politicians, got their motivation to head March of Dimes drives, at least in part, from their feeling that leadership in such a socially approved activity would help them to increase their prestige in the community. 1 6 Banfield found that initiative regarding civic proposals was taken by organizations whose maintenance or enhancement needs were involved. After action was initiated, representatives of other organizations then supported, opposed, or sought modification. Businessmen were less active in decision making in Chicago when they did not have vital interests at stake in a given proposal or when the 'costs' of intervening seemed to them too great. Political leaders tended to be relatively inactive when issues were controversial, but to assume an active role when agreement had been reached. 17 Motivation is also stimulated in proportion to the degree and extent of dissatisfaction and sense of crisis perceived in an actual or anticipated community situation. This type of motivation tends to elicit leadership from community members who ordinarily do not take part in top-level decision-making activities in the community. For example, people in an Italian subcommunity in Boston's North End were extremely dissatisfied with an urban renewal plan that would have destroyed their dwellings. Though these people characteristically engaged in divisive factional quarreling among themselves, they were spurred by their common crisis to form a strong coalition of their factions through which they blocked the planned effort to redevelop their neighborhoods. 18 In somewhat similar vein, black leadership in Crescent City emerged from efforts of the local blacks to present a consistently 15. William Spinrad, 'Power in Local Communities', Social Problems, 12 (1965): 3 4 4 - 3 4 5 , 3 4 8 . 16. David L. Sills, The Volunteers (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 92-93. 17. Banfield, pp. 253, 263; and 286-303. 18. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 174 and 298.

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solid front to the white community on issues that they considered crucial to their welfare. 19 Actually, the motivation to assume a leadership role in a community action tends to vary in relation to the different components of an action, since persons with different competencies and contacts are likely to be needed more in some components than in others. For example, persons with research skills tend to be attracted to leadership roles in the component that involves study and diagnosis of the need for action, persons who have contacts with the local mass media or who are skilled in public relations tend to have leadership roles in the goal achievement component, and professionals tend to have leadership roles in the component that involves institutionalization of the achieved goal. Martin and his associates found in Syracuse that the exercise of leadership in initiating action came most frequently from the professional members of such government agencies as the health department, the city probation office, and the City Planning Commission; persons in charge of the news media exercised the greater degree of influence in publicizing change issues; final decision making for or against proposed action was in the hands of the local governing officials. 20 At the same time that different people assume leadership roles in different components, there may be some persons who are active in several or all components of a particular action. For example, Mann has emphasized the influence that planners exercise in identifying problems and opportunities for change, in proposing changes, in formulating plans for specific changes, in publicizing proposals to government officials and to presumed influentials, and in implementing publicly-sponsored changes. 21 It is easier to motivate persons to assume leadership functions in any component of a community action when the initiators have professional personnel available to supply technical information 19. M. Elaine Burgess, Negro Leadership in a Southern City (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 190-191. 20. Roscoe C. Martin, Frank J. Munger, et al., Decisions in Syracuse (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 323-331. 21. Lawrence D. Mann, 'Studies in Community Decision-Making', in Readings in Community Organization Practice, Ralph M. Kramer and Harry Specht (eds.) (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 74.

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and professional insights that potential leaders can use in mobilizing and guiding the efforts of community residents; when the initiators share their decision-making responsibilities with potential local leaders; when they establish, or use already established, organizations as a medium through which community members can have experiences in exerting leadership; and when they take a personal interest in actually training local people to accept responsibilities, weigh alternative courses of action, and form meaningful relationships that enable them to communicate with one another. The present trend, in both rural and urban communities, is for community actions to have some extracommunity involvement either of personnel or material resources or both. The outside agency supplying the aid either works through local leaders or develops new leadership by selecting local persons who appear to have leadership potential and enabling them to use their skill and knowledge in getting members of the community to work together to achieve or block proposed community changes.

LEADERSHIP IN SELECTED COMMUNITY ACTIONS The following summaries of four community actions carried on in four different parts of the world illustrate: the conditions and motivations that affected the ability of people to function as leaders, the nature of the leadership exercised, and the working relationships developed between extra- and intracommunity leaders and between professional and lay leaders.

A COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITY ACTION IN VICOS, PERU

The community action initiated in the hacienda community of Vicos, Peru, by a team of anthropologists from Cornell University involved leadership from a relatively modernized society in a collaborative effort with leaders from a relatively nonmodernized community. The goal of the Cornell team was to test the effects that change toward modernization would have on the lives of the 1,850 Indians who inhabited the remote Vicos hacienda in an interAndean valley about 250 miles northeast of Lima. Three years of

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research preceded the initiation of the community action in 1952, when the Cornell team took over the hacienda lease that the patron had just vacated. The Indigenous Institute of Peru and the Peruvian government cooperated with the Cornell staff, and funds from a private foundation in the United States provided financial support. 22 The leadership structure that the anthropologists found in Vicos was typical of that in hacienda communities generally. The patron, who had left the community after giving up his lease, had exercised a role much like that of a feudal baron and had been virtually the only person who exercised leadership in secular matters — economic, political, and judicial. Direct supervision of work on the hacienda had been handled by six Indian foremen, elderly men who had previously occupied important positions in the community's governmental and religious subsystems and who were traditionally appointed by the patron to represent his interests. Religious matters were in the hands of the parish priest and an indigenous body consisting of a leader, who was selected annually by a loose sort of election process, and several assistants appointed by that leader. The anthropologists tried, early in the community action, to develop indigenous leaders who would use a democratic style of leadership. They chose as the nucleus of leaders the six men who had been the foremen on the hacienda under the patron. They met in weekly sessions with these men, gradually gave them increasing responsibility for decision making, and encouraged them to take a community rather than an individualist outlook on local affairs. Decisions that the anthropologists and foremen arrived at were discussed with the labor force as a whole and modified as needed to serve the interests of the whole community. Over the first five years of the project, the anthropologists also organized other local groups in such areas as economic development, nutrition and health, education, and political affairs. They then trained members of these groups to function as leaders. Participation in the various efforts to improve community life increased as in22. For a brief description of this project, see Allan R. Holmberg, 'Changing Community Attitudes and Values in Peru: A Case Study in Guided Change', in Social Change in Latin America Today, Richard N. Adams, et al. (eds.) (New York: Knopf and Random House, 1960), pp. 78-88. Research aspects of this project are discussed in Chapter 8 of this text.

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creasing numbers of adults as well as young people achieved literacy and as productive roles were developed for the less traditional community members who had been working away from the sierra. The attainment of project goals to increase the production of potatoes, to build a local school, and to improve the housing and the health of the people provided the motivation for more and more people to become active in supporting and using the new nutrition and health services, the new school program, and the new farm practices. At the end of the five years, an elected body of indigenous leaders assumed complete responsibility for directing and managing community affairs and the Cornell staff withdrew from active leadership.

A DEMONSTRATION COMMUNITY ACTION IN VADALA, INDIA

Whereas in the Vicos case community change was initiated by leaders from outside the nation as well as outside the community, the Vadala case to be described next shows leadership originating within the nation and providing extracommunity resources of personnel, know-how, materials, and money that were combined with local village leadership, participation, and resources to enable the people of Vadala to raise their level of living and to increase their capacity for self-help and decision making. 23 National leaders in India, as in other modernizing nations over the world, have used nationally sponsored programs to help communities move toward modernization. Through such a national program, a village level worker was assigned, in 1956, to initiate a demonstration community action in the village of Vadala, in the state of Gujarat in western India. The village worker, who was already an acquaintance of the villagers and trusted by the village leaders, took up his residence in Vadala. As his first step in initiating action, this professional leader held a series of group meetings with lay village leaders to find out what conditions they felt needed to be changed. He complimented 23. For a description of the Vadala project, see Sushila Mehta, Working with Village People (New Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training, 1965), pp. 81-89.

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those leaders for their enterprising spirit, listened attentively to their ideas, and answered their questions frankly. The lay leaders were interested in the planning, but more interrested in finding out how plans could be put into operation. After full discussion — pro and con — they decided to begin by making a survey of the village's needs and resources. The professional worker then compiled the leaders' findings and presented them to a called meeting of all the adult males in the village. The survey revealed that there were 89 families in Vadala living in small plastered houses that were crowded into narrow, dirty streets. A total of 7,345 manpower days a year were being lost by lack of employment. There were no provisions for drinking water, electricity, or health services. The small primary school was open intermittently. No household was producing cash crops, like fruits and vegetables, mainly because of the lack of irrigation. The village men and the village worker held numerous meetings and engaged in much consultation. Gradually, they worked out a one-year plan that enabled them to double the amount of their land under irrigation, to increase their wheat yield by 21 percent and their vegetable production more than ten times what it had been, and to employ about 17 percent of the unemployed villagers in the spinning and weaving of khadi, using improved spinning wheels they had obtained inexpensively from the All-India Khadi Board. By the time Mehta prepared her study, the villagers had formulated and carried out six one-year plans. The professional leader had from the outset involved the lay village leaders in fact finding and decision making. Village residents generally had engaged in cooperative endeavors designed to raise the level of living of the whole community. Individual families were making monthly payments for medicines and for upkeep of a health center that had been built with funds collected by the villagers and staffed with a nurse and midwife supplied by the health department. The professional leader and the local lay leaders, with some help from the area office of the National Community Development Program, had managed to get an electric power grid system extended into the village and water piped to some of the dwellings, and they had completed construction of a primary school, a children's park, and a community production center. Members of the panchayat (village council) were playing more active leadership roles, and leaders in

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the local cooperative were enabling individual villagers to get credit to use in buying seeds and fertilizers and had secured equipment, such as an electric flour grinding mill, profit from which was being put into the panchayat treasury. Through a special volunteer effort, the villagers had built houses for six Harijan (outcaste) families who at the time had no place to live. Mehta felt that the community action had enabled the residents of Vadala to gain self-confidence, to exert initiative, and to work cooperatively with one another to achieve common goals. The cases of Vicos and Vadala show leadership applied to the community development process in small, relatively nonmodemized communities toward the rural pole of the rural-urban continuum. Initiation of action in both cases came from the outside but promptly involved local leaders. In both cases, the action was taken toward changes that were readily visible and measurable. The technical knowledge supplied by professionals was used in formulating goals and designing procedures with which lay and professional leaders were in basic agreement. Quite different milieus for leadership are illustrated in the next two cases: that of a health services project conducted by the Family Welfare Center in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1946 to 1960, and that of the Bristol Social Project, a delinquency-control effort carried on in the Upfield housing estate in Bristol, England, from 1953 to 1958. These projects were initiated in relatively modernized urban communities by local leaders who drew on outside resources of personnel and funds. Instead of having the entire community as their direct focus for change, they sought to bring about change for a limited segment of the population. Furthermore, the behavioral changes that were the goals of the two urban projects were more difficult to measure than the changes in level of living sought in Vicos and Vadala. In neither urban project was leadership in the target group developed beyond a rudimentary level; and neither gained enough support from the community at large to be put on a continuing basis, even though both were accepted by the target groups. In the Johannesburg case, to be taken up next, government officials eventually closed the project on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the nation's apartheid policies. In the Bristol case, the steering committee — not convinced that the professionals' accepting and permissive approach would be effective

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in reducing crime and delinquency — failed to secure funds for continuing the action effort.

A HEALTH SERVICE COMMUNITY ACTION IN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

Leaders who initiated the health education project in Johannesburg, in 1946, were members of the Board of Management of the University Clinic, which, with the Alexandra Health Center, furnished all the health services available to the 60 thousand or more African residents of Alexandra Township. 24 They received financial support for the project from two private sources, with some subsidy from the state. A professional leader was brought in from the outside to be the director of the Family Welfare Center, established by the Board as the administrative agency for the project. The staff of the Center, in addition to the white director, consisted of an assistant director, three nursery school teachers, three social workers, and a nutritionist cookery demonstrator — all Africans, and all females except the three social workers. In the interest of cultivating leadership among the staff members, the director held weekly meetings with the entire staff to discuss and evaluate procedures, activities, and policies and to consider together any special problem families being served by the Center. She also had an individual conference each week with each staff member to deal with personal and intrastaff problems. Once a month, the staff members met specifically to discuss what was being done or needed to be done in each special sphere for which he or she was responsible. All staff members were encouraged to initiate new ideas, to discuss their problems freely, and to express independent judgments and opinions. The director found that some of her colleagues and some of the members of the Center felt that, because she was young and unmarried and a female, she was too inexperienced for them to trust her judgment fully. And because she was white they viewed her 24. For an account of the operation of this project from 1946 to 1949 prepared by its director, see Violaine Junod, 'Entokozweni: Managing a Community Service in an Urban African Area', in A Casebook of Social Change, Arthur H. Niehoff (ed.) (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), pp. 137-154. The roles of professionals in the project are discussed in Chapter 7 of this text.

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through the African stereotype of whites as an authoritarian exploiter whose offers of help had ulterior motivation. Even though she did not subscribe to the white supremacy attitudes prevailing in the community and even though she was not authoritarian in her procedures, her whiteness continued to be a source of tension and ambivalence. Her staff members thought (with some realism) that she had her position of authority because she was white, not because of her professional qualifications. They resented the fact that by virtue of being white she could exercise influence with local authorities that no African could hope to exercise. Yet they realized that the Center's effectiveness depended in large measure upon her ability to deal with the white power structure, and they gladly accepted her interventions on their own behalf when they were in trouble with the law or trying to get admitted to a hospital. The director sought to relieve the tensions by giving the staff members maximum responsibility for their special fields of activity and by offering new ideas as suggestions rather than as orders. The staff worked responsibly and in relative harmony, though there was one occasion when one member 'put a curse' on another. And, as will be shown later, the assistant director's latent hostility erupted when a white person was chosen over her to replace the director, who had resigned. Three sets of problems confronted the project staff in their efforts to cultivate leadership in the African target group: (1) the attitudes of seeming hopelessness and indifference that prevailed among the Africans in the face of their extreme poverty, overcrowding, illiteracy, substandard housing, and generally poor health conditions; (2) the Africans' casual attitudes about time, which played havoc with project schedules, and their unfamiliarity with democratic procedures, which made it difficult or impossible for them to take over the leadership of committees without continuing help from the project staff; and (3) the white supremacy attitudes in the community at large, which limited the opportunities through which Africans could exert leadership. The project leaders dealt with the attitudes of hopelessness and indifference by offering the Africans such practical services as day care, adult education, recreation, and instruction innutrition, from which results could be readily observable. They also put the Center program on an intensive basis, which, though it severely limited

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the number of clients who could be reached, did serve to promote firm and meaningful relationships between clients and staff members. Both the practical services and the relationships helped to arouse interest and enthusiasm. As the project proceeded, in fact, interest became so widespread among the residents of the location that the demand for services was far greater than the Center could supply. The staff tried to include more clients, but they realized then that they were diluting the quality of their services. Even at that, they were reaching less than three percent of the township's population. The culturally rooted habits of the Africans that handicapped them in assuming leadership roles in the project became less handicapping as the first director learned to accept and cope with them. She found, for example, that if she advertised meetings for an hour earlier than they were scheduled the African participants were more likely to be on hand to assume their responsibilities. She and her staff also tried having an advisory committee composed of African representatives from each of the activity groups at the Center, but the members of that committee were entirely unfamiliar with democratic procedures and could not conduct meetings without the continuing help of staff members. The Center's approach to the racist attitudes in Johannesburg was largely accommodative. The director took responsibility for handling any negotiations that had to be carried on with whites. This was done to spare the African staff members the indignities and frustrations they would have encountered and to provide an entree to resources the Center would otherwise have been denied. The staff members generally expected this approach and grudgingly recognized its validity. The Board of the Center also accommodated to the reality of the racial situation in choosing a successor to the first director. Convinced that an African, no matter how competent, would be unable to deal effectively with the whites on whose cooperation the Center depended, the Board members appointed a highly qualified white applicant for the post, instead of the assistant director, whom the director had encouraged to apply. The director tried to explain exactly the basis of the Board's action, but the assistant director responded with highly emotional accusations of racism against both the Board and the director. In 1960, the project was closed by the Nationalist Government

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as an operation not acceptable under the prevailing government policy. At the time it was closed, the project effort was still growing. A small beginning had been made toward drawing the township residents into decision-making roles and toward helping them learn how to function democratically in a committee situation. The staff itself had had experience in working together on a relatively free, democratic basis. Center activities, insofar as reasonable, had been scaled to the real-life situations of the members. And though the Board, and generally the staff members, had accommodated to the prevailing racism, they were still able to work comfortably in an interracial setting.

A DELINQUENCY-CONTROL COMMUNITY ACTION IN BRISTOL, ENGLAND

Leaders who initiated the action-research delinquency-control project in Bristol and who formed the steering committee for that project were city officials and other civic leaders. 25 They obtained funds from an outside foundation and engaged a professional team of social workers and sociologists to carry on the effort, using research to evaluate their procedures. The Upfield housing estate, in which the target population resided, was an area of the city that had higherthan-average rates of delinquency, crime, and vandalism. The objective of reaching the 'social misfits' in that subcommunity and enabling them to become productive and conforming citizens was shared by the community leaders and the professional staff. These two sets of leaders as well as leaders in the housing estate agreed that meeting places, playgrounds, and group activities were needed, and these were secured with relative ease and unanimity. Lack of unanimity emerged, however, over some of the procedures used by the professionals in their work with the alienated Upfield youth. When the professionals found that the needs of these youth were not being met through the conventional club programs being operated in Upfield and that the behavior of the youth tended to disrupt normal club activities, they separated the troublesome 25. For an analysis of the Bristol Social Project prepared by its director, see J o h n Spencer, Stress and Release in an Urban Estate (London: Tavistock, 1964). Research aspects of the project are discussed in Chapter 8.

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from the 'respectable' youth and tried to reach the former through accepting and permissive attitudes. The aggressiveness and nonconformity of the youth were interpreted by the professionals as symptoms of deeper social and psychological stresses generated by the irregular employment, lack of routine, marital tensions, and absence of a clear and coherent set of moral norms that characterized their family situations. The crippling effects of these stresses made it illogical, in the professionals' view, to try to hold the difficult youth to the regulations and group demands which were readily acceptable to the conventional youth. But when the permissive approach of the professionals was associated with outbursts of destructive, irresponsible, or unorthodox behavior, the civic-minded leaders insisted upon firm disciplinary measures and refused the use of meeting places to those whose behavior was out of line with conventional standards. The professionals persisted in their accepting relationships with the youth and tried to develop leadership among them by helping them to form trusting and stable relationships with one another and by giving them responsibility for deciding how to conduct their club. Though their club received a succession of rebuffs from 'respectable' citizens of the community in reaction to the recurring outbursts of rowdiness connected with its activities, the club members were, in the professional judgment of the social worker, gradually beginning, when the project ended, to accept leadership responsibilities and to stabilize their relationships. The accepting and permissive approach to the so-called 'social misfits' of the community was not institutionalized through the project effort, but it was offered in the Bristol situation as a possible alternative to the orthodox and authoritarian approach that prevailed in the community. The conventional approach was effective with 'respectable' youth who expected and accepted and worked comfortably with regulations; it did not reach effectively the troublesome youth who were too aggressive, too irresponsible, or too lacking in motivation to be able to participate in conventionally organized group life. The project ended before the group work approach could be adequately tested. The Mobilization for Youth project in New York's lower East Side and similar multi-faceted delinquency-control projects in other large cities of the United States that have been attempting to develop

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leadership among alienated community members resemble the Bristol Social Project in their focus upon what are considered to be causative factors underlying antisocial behavior. The former projects have tried to reach more different age groups and have developed a wider range of organizations and activities, such as block associations, consumer aid clinics, voter registration campaigns, and rent strikes, that involve the target population in different levels of leadership. The leadership in the community actions described above was in a context of consensus. Even where there were basic ideological differences and differences in points of view — as there are, of course, in virtually all communities — the differences were accommodated and no attempt was made to challenge or change fundamentally the institutional structure of the community. The typical strategies for change relied on persuasion and education to present 'better' ways of attaining commonly desired objectives. When — as in Johannesburg and Bristol — the accepting approach that the project staff used in trying to reach the target population was interpreted by the community's top-level leadership as cultivating unacceptable expectations or behavior, the projects were not continued. The next chapter picks up where this chapter leaves off and considers leadership related to community development in the context of conflict. Confrontation replaces accommodation, and efforts to achieve consensus are subordinated to protest and challenge. The two chapters need to be considered together to get a realistic picture of most communities, especially those in relatively modernized societies.

SUMMARY Leadership in relation to community development refers to the influence that community members exercise upon one another in arriving at decisions that initiate, mobilize, and coordinate their collective efforts to deal with community change. Even though, theoretically, all members of a community can exercise influence, different people exercise it in different degrees and some more consistently and widely than others in the various facets of community life.

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Style of leadership varies along a continuum from democratic to authoritarian, the former being more concerned with making decisions that take into account and reflect what the community's residents want and the latter being more controlling and task-oriented in its focus. The nature ojLthe community development process requires at least enough democratic leadership to elicit some degree of community participation. Sources of leadership in the community are: the community power structure; the local social class structure; the organizational hierarchies in the various subsystems; the customers, clients, or members of local organizations; and a reservoir of individuals whose personal qualities give them potential for exercising influence, regardless of what positions or ranks they have in the community. Development of leadership in community actions depends upon the persons being motivated to take part in a particular action as well as upon their having positions in subsystem organizations, personal traits, and/or professional competences that meet the needs of the action and of the particular situational context in which the action takes place. Motivation to perform leadership functions in a community action varies directly with how relevant the person considers the action to be for himself personally, for the positions he occupies, for any one or all of the organizations in which he participates, and/or for the whole community. Such motivation is also stimulated by dissatisfaction and sense of crisis experienced in connection with an actual or anticipated community situation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Banfield, Edward C. Political Influence. New York: Free Press, 1961. A study of leadership in Chicago using the decision-analysis approach. Six proposals for civic action are examined to find out the degree of influence exercised by different individuals on the decisions made, the motivations these individuals had for favoring or opposing any proposal, and the pattern of interaction that led to each decision. Biddle, William W. Encouraging Community Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. A training guide for nonprofessional personnel who are trying to get people in their own communities to serve as leaders in community actions.

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Fiedler, Fred E. Theory of Leadership Effectiveness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. A theory of leadership effectiveness that attempts to integrate findings from a fifteen-year program of empirical research on leadership. Freeman, Linton C. Patterns of Local Community Leadership. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. A study of community leadership conducted in Syracuse, New York, from 1959 through 1961. It was aimed at identifying operational definitions of community leaders, the degree to which leadership is concentrated, and factors that affect differential access to leadership roles by various segments of the population. Martin, Roscoe C.; Munger, Frank J.; Burkehead, Jesse; Birkhead, Guthrie S.; Herman, Harold; Kagi, Herbert M.; Welch, Lewis P.; and Wingfield, Clyde J . Decisions in Syracuse. Bloomington: U. of Indiana Press, 1961. A study of leadership in the Syracuse metropolitan area, using the decisionanalysis method. The decisions examined covered the twenty-five-year period preceding the date of the study. Ross, Murray G.; and Hendry, Charles E. New Understandings of Leadership. New York: Association Press, 1957. A summary of research on the nature and meaning of leadership presented in functional terms to have applicability for practitioners.

CHAPTER 6

Community Conflict

Leadership in the context of some degree of cooperation and consensus is essential to the continuity of community life. However, varying degrees of competition, disagreement, and conflict are always present as inevitable concomitants of the community's dynamic nature. And some leadership uses conflict deliberately as a strategy for obtaining the desired objectives of community actions. The focus of this chapter is on conflict that has communitywide impact. It may be either within community action efforts or among groups who, though not engaged in such efforts, have broad enough influence to affect whatever is undertaken. Conflict within community actions may arise out of endeavors that started in cooperative spirit and with reliance upon consensus strategy or it may be intentionally generated through a conflict strategy used by the proponents or the opponents of the given actions. The purpose of the chapter is to describe the nature of community conflict, analyze its origin and course in relation to sociocultural conditions that affect them, and finally to evaluate the use of conflict strategy as a means of obtaining community action goals.

NATURE OF COMMUNITY CONFLICT DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY CONFLICT

Community conflict refers here to a process of interaction in which two or more groups are so engaged in thwarting each other's purposes that their opposition makes itself felt throughout the com-

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munity. Two action systems arise before the issue can be resolved. On one side are persons or groups who are responsible for formulating or implementing a certain objective, policy, and/or practice. On the other side, are concerned persons or groups who are in disagreement with what the other groups have decided or with the actions they are taking. Within this disagreeing group there may be persons who had the opportunity for participating in the controversial decision but did not get what they wanted, as well as persons who had no opportunity for making or for influencing the decision. Leaders in the community's power structure and in its various subsystems may be on either side; however, their decision-making responsibilities make it likely that they will usually be on the side that is challenged. SELF-GENERATING CHARACTER OF CONFLICT

Coleman has described what he calls the inner dynamics of community conflict, one feature of which is its self-generating character, a feature balanced to some extent by the tendency of conflict to invoke community constraints for its own containment. The selfgenerating capacity derives (1) from the spiraling antagonistic actions that participants on one side take in response to antagonistic actions of their opponents and (2) from the mutual reinforcement of attitudes and feelings that occurs when participants on each side of the conflict issue limit their associations to persons who think and feel as they do about both the issue and the opposition. 1 SELF-CONTAINING CHARACTER OF CONFLICT

The self-containing character of conflict has also been noted by Etzioni, who has given the label 'encapsulation' to the process by which conflicts are modified so that they become limited by a set of agreed upon rules. In 'self-encapsulating' conflicts, according to Etzioni, controversy is curbed by rules that the participants devise in lieu of established rules. 2 1. James Coleman, Community Conflict (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 9-14. 2. Amitai Etzioni, Studies in Social Change (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 112.

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DOUBLE-EDGED ROLE OF CONFUCT IN COMMUNITY ACTIONS

Conflict has the potentiality for performing a double-edged role in community actions. On the one hand, it can facilitate change by focusing community attention upon need for change and by 'shaking up' institutions in such a way that they become more relevant to community needs. On the other hand, it can obstruct a desired change by diverting energies and resources from the change effort and by arousing opposition through a backlash reaction to the disruption it has produced. Until conflict develops, situations that need change may be ignored by the community. According to Nieburg, the threat of violence and the occasional outbreak of real violence to give the threat credibility are essential elements in peaceful social change.3 Oppenheimer has pointed out that conflict is often essential to realistic negotiation of change in that it enables the antagonists to assess each other's strengths — a necessary prerequisite to negotiation. 4 Conflict may also facilitate the community development process by increasing social cohesion. Community unity may be increased, for example, when dissensions call attention to the need for new leadership or new procedures that serve all groups in the community and draw them all together; when conflict brings to light divisive sources of dissatisfaction that once recognized are then eliminated; and when in conflict interaction aggrieved groups find an outlet for siphoning off their tensions. Furthermore, it tends to unite likeminded members of different groups on each side of the issue and thus draws together people who had not previously engaged in cooperative effort. Cohesion is also promoted when the contending groups establish communication and relations where no relations previously existed, when they accept or develop common norms for the conduct of their hostilities, and when they reach an agreement that is mutually acceptable. 5 3. H. L. Nieburg, 'The Threat of Violence and Social Change', American Political Science Review, 56 (1962): 865. 4. Martin Oppenheimer, 'The Southern Student Sit-ins: Intra-Group Relations and Community Conflict', Phylon, 27 (1966): 23. 5. See, for example, Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe: Free Press, 1956), pp. 121-125.

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Despite its potentiality for bringing about desired change in the community and for increasing community cohesiveness, conflict may thwart a community action effort when it so polarizes attitudes and feelings on the change issue that rational consideration and action are impossible; when hostile and antagonistic actions so alienate opposing groups that they develop into factions which not only are unwilling to work together, but are inclined to work against each other's proposals; and when it repels from participation in the effort neutral residents of the community who are unwilling to be involved in local controversy.

ORIGIN OF COMMUNITY CONFLICT The origin of community conflict is considered here from two perspectives, one focusing on the background conditions that make some communities more susceptible to conflict than others or the same community more susceptible at some times than at others, and the second focusing on factors that trigger the readiness for conflict into actual conflict. PREDISPOSING FACTORS

Among the background factors that predispose a community toward conflict are the following: (1) cleavages among community members created by antagonisms carried over from previous conflicts; (2) competition among different occupational and ethnic groups in the community; (3) absolute and/or relative deprivation experienced by community residents; (4) failure of the community's agencies to be responsive to its people's needs; and (5) exclusion of residents of the community from participation in decision making. The relative influence that these factors exert in initiating a particular conflict varies with the nature of the conflict issue and the circumstances under which the issue arises. Antagonisms from Previous Conflicts According to Coleman, antagonisms carried over from previous conflicts predispose against cooperative solution of later issues and

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keep community residents continually open to new disputes in any spheres of community life. The smoldering hostilities motivate community residents to take sides on an issue even when they have little or no interest in the issue itself. 6 Competition Associated with Differentiated

Groupings

Antagonisms may be perpetuated along lines formed by the differentiation of occupations, life styles, and ethnic groupings. Furthermore, the differentiated groupings may foster new antagonisms and conflict when some groups in the community resent others who, in their view, are depriving them of such resources as desired jobs, housing, or political participation or when groups in the community compete with one another for any type of resource. Competition tends to increase as the visibility of intergroup differences is increased through more widespread physical and social mobility and through wider use of mass media — conditions that become more typical as communities industrialize. 7 The particular groups that compete with one another vary in relation to the social structure of the community. For example, the college community may have competition between 'town and gown', the industrialized community between management and labor, the metropolitan community between city and suburban residents, and the towncountry community between farmers and merchants. 8 Feelings of Relative Deprivation Generally among the differentiated groupings in a community there are some whose life styles represent a state of absolute deprivation, i.e., actually not having basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Dissatisfactions arise in such a situation when the affected people and the people who identify with their dilemma become 6. Coleman, pp. 6-7. 7. Joseph Boskin, 'The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964-1967', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 382 (1969): 8; and Raymond W. Mack, 'The Components of Social Conflict', in Readings in Community Organization Practice, Ralph M. Kramer and Harry Specht (eds.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 335. 8. See Coleman, pp. 6-7.

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aware that conditions can be different. At the same time, visible differences in life styles may lead to feelings of relative deprivation, i. e., feelings of dissatisfaction experienced by people at any level of living when they compare what they have with what others have. A community's predisposition to conflict is in direct proportion to the prevalence of such feelings of dissatisfaction. 9 As a group's level of living rises, the people's expectations tend to rise even faster, thus accentuating rather than reducing feelings of relative deprivation. In prosperous communities, according to Rosenthal, the crucial factor predisposing to violence is the realization on the part of some groups that, though they work hard and do the 'right' things, they are not closing the gap between the 'good life' they see others leading and the life they can expect to lead. Their failure breeds not only frustrations but also low self-esteem and alienation that can be expressed in such overreaction as rioting. 10 Nonresponsiveness

of Community

Institutions

One barrier to achievement that has particular import for disadvantaged groups is the nonresponsiveness of community institutions. In this situation, organizations in the economic, political, education, and social welfare subsystems do not take account of the needs and preferences of community residents in rendering services or they do not offer certain services to which residents are entitled under law. The failure to respond may stem from lack of sensitivity, from lack of resources, or from lack of flexibility in making or implementing rules. The inadequacies and inequities that it produces especially for low-income and minority groupings in such spheres as employment, housing, education, health, welfare, recreation, law enforcement, and other municipal services create a readiness for community conflict. 11 Beck has pointed out that nonrespon9. See, for example, Lewis A. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 66-71; and Daniel C. Thompson, 'The Rise of the Negro Protest', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 357 (1965): 18-29. 10. Robert A. Rosenthal, Riots? (Westport, Conn.: Pendulum Press, 1969), pp. 27-28. 11. See, for example, Community Values and Conflict, 1967: A Conference Report, sponsored by the City of New York Commission on Human Rights, the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, Brotherhood-in-Action, and

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siveness predisposing to conflict can affect all institutions and all people regardless of class, economic status, or ethnicity. 12 Exclusion from Decision Making One factor that explains in part why institutions do not respond to certain community members' needs and desires is that those persons are excluded from participation in making decisions. Such exclusion also in itself generates community susceptibility to conflict when it has frustrating, ego-damaging, and anxiety-provoking effects for those who experience it. This tends to happen, according to Coser, to new groups that seek to have a part in the decisionmaking processes, because the channels of the community's political subsystem are usually open only to groups that have previously succeeded in making their voices heard. The actual or threatened use of violence by the new groups is indication, Coser said, that they wish and intend to be included when decisions are made. 13 The collective violence in communities of the United States can be expected to continue, according to Spiegel, until power is shared with groups that are excluded. 14 Tucker has identified ghetto residents as members of one of the segments whose powerlessness predisposes to violence.15 And among ghetto residents Ransford found that for racially isolated Los Angeles Negroes interviewed shortly after the Watts riot a sense of powerlessness was a characteristic strongly associated with a willingness to use violence. 16 Variations in Community

Susceptibility

to Conflict

Communities differ not only in the degree of their susceptibility the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice, p. 14. 12. Bertram M. Beck, 'Community Control: A Distraction, Not an Answer', Social Work, 14 (October, 1969): 14. 13. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, pp. 96-97. 14. John P. Spiegel, 'Psychosocial Factors in Riots — Old and New', American Journal of Psychiatry, 125 (September, 1968); 283-285. 15. Sterling Tucker, Why the Ghetto Must Go (New York: Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 423, 1968), pp. 1-5; 17. 16. H. Edward Ransford, 'Isolation, Powerlessness, and Violence: A Study of Attitudes and Participation in the Watts Riot', American Journal of Sociology 73 (1968): 581-591.

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to conflict, but also in the kinds of conflict to which they are susceptible. For example, Coleman concluded that economically selfcontained communities in the United States are more likely than other communities to have economic disputes, while suburban communities are likely to have conflicts over educational issues, political beliefs, and patriotic concerns. 17 Furthermore, certain spheres of community life may at certain times create susceptibility to conflict more readily than other spheres. Among the currently more sensitive spheres in communities of Western society are those of economic interests, local politics, educational policies, public health and welfare practices, interracial relations, interfaith relations, and relations among different ethnic groups. In communities of non-Westem societies — particularly those that are relatively nonmodernized — colonialism, nationalism, tribalism, population control, and land reform may also be sensitive spheres.

PRECIPITATING FACTORS

Conditions predisposing to community conflict are triggered into actual conflict by incidents that may be intentional or unintentional, designed to arouse conflict or to pursue some purpose in which an outcome of conflict is not anticipated. The response evoked may be out of proportion to the seeming importance of the incident, and different people in the community even on the same side of the issue may respond from quite different motivations. For example, a community's governing body may trigger conflict by submitting a proposal for fluoridation to a local referendum. Opponents of the proposal may get into the ensuing controversy for such diverse motives as: desire to play a leadership role in the community, especially one opposing the local officials; fear that adding fluoride to the water will have unfavorable medical effects; apprehension that fluoridationists have subversive intentions and connections; suspicion that fluoridation is just a scheme to make profits for the commercial firms that sell the equipment and supplies; objection to adding any expense item to the 17. Coleman, pp. 6-7.

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community's budget; and disapproval of the 'compulsory medication' in fluoridation arising out of general moral resistance to government infringement of individual rights and freedom. 18 Triggering incidents have been documented in published studies of a number of specific conflicts. Refusal of the company's general superintendent to meet with representatives of the workers set off the labor-management conflict described by Chase in his account of the strikes in Bayonne, New Jersey, at the Standard Oil refinery, 1915-1916. 19 A state highway patrolman's stopping a Negro youth for a traffic violation marked the onset of the riot in the Watts-Los Angeles community in August, 1965. 20 A charge against the 'progressive education' methods being used in the public schools made by the president of the County Council of the Parent-Teachers Association at a meeting of the Council touched off a school conflict in Denver, Colorado. 21 A police peace-keeping raid on a neighborhood drinking spot followed by the circulation of rumors that the police had used excessive and brutal force sparked the riot in Detroit in the summer of 1967. 22 While no triggering incident is meaningful except in the context of the particular conditions that have created the readiness for a particular conflict, there are types of incidents that do recur as precipitating factors. These include the following: (1) an intended or unintended rebuff or an action perceived as a rebuff or insult expressed toward some key member or members of one dissenting party by some key member or members of the other dissenting party; (2) an official action that from the standpoint of the opposing group crystallizes the issue or shuts off its chances for having its side heard; (3) a move on the part of one dissenting group to trespass into the jurisdiction or area of responsibility of the other group; 18. See, for example, Benjamin D. Paul, 'Fluoridation and the Social Scientist: A Review', Journal of Social Issues, 17 (No. 4 , 1 9 6 1 ) : 5; and Arnold L. Green, 'The Ideology of Anti-Fluoridation Leaders', Journal of Social Issues, 17 (No. 4 , 1 9 6 1 ) : 13-25. 19. Stuart Chase, A Generation of Industrial Peace (New J e r s e y : Standard Oil C o m p a n y , 1947), p . 9. 20. Anthony Oberschall, 'The L o s Angeles Riot of August 1 9 6 5 ' , Social Problems, 15 ( 1 9 6 8 ) : 3 3 3 - 3 3 4 . 2 1 . Lawrence Martin, 'Denver, Colorado', Saturday Review, 3 4 (September 8, 1 9 5 1 ) : 9. 2 2 . Rosenthal, p p . 52-53.

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(4) an administrative action that indicates, or is interpreted as indicating, injustice, unfairness, favoritism, or discrimination; and (5) the circulation of some rumor or a leaflet, speech, or news medium report which fits in with the fears or suspicions that one side has of the other side or which increases one side's aggravation of the other.

THE COURSE OF COMMUNITY CONFLICT Once predisposing and precipitating factors have combined to start community conflict around a specific issue, they go on operating with other potentially identifiable factors to influence the interactional process that has been set in motion between the opposing parties. When more than two groups are involved, each with different strengths and interests, a stalemate may result from the ability of some of the groups to block action if their interests are not satisfied. Such a situation occurred, for example, in Washington, D. C., when five groups became concerned about projects for a subway, a freeway, a bridge, and highway construction. Although no group was opposed to the subway, some of the groups blocked action on it until their interests in the other projects were satisfied. 23 If the more numerous dissident groups become aligned to form two action systems — one for and one against a proposed change — resolution of conflict can usually proceed. Each side develops its own leadership structure, gains adherents, and intensifies its effort to win out over the opposition. When the two sides have had a chance to assess each other's strengths, a process of settlement provides the basis for resolving the conflict issue. Each aspect of the course of community conflict — spread, intensity, and settlement — will be analyzed next in relation to sociocultural factors by which each is affected. SPREAD OF CONFLICT

Spread refers here to the number of persons who participate in a 23. Henry Bain, Nigel Howard, and Thomas E. Sasty, 'Using the Analysis of Options Technique to Analyze a Community Conflict', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2 (1971): 133-144.

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community conflict by taking any part in upholding one side or the other. Their participation may be indicated by such behavior as: assuming active leadership, serving on committees, attending meetings, rendering volunteer services, taking part in demonstrations, contributing money or resources, soliciting participation, engaging in boycotts or strikes, and voting on the conflict issue. The most obvious effect of spread is demonstrated when the issue is one that is decided by voting. In that case, the sheer numbers supporting the respective sides constitute the determining factor. More often, outcome is determined not only by number of participants but also by the contribution that each participant makes. It is usual for community residents to become involved in a local conflict through their linkages to established organizations or to new partisan organizations formed in connection with the controversy. To the extent that a community issue touches on the interests of many different types of local groupings, the range of organizations likely to take sides is increased and the spread of conflict is facilitated. As already mentioned earlier, animosities and alignments carried over from previous conflicts also serve to draw organizations and their supporters into new conflicts. Along a similar line, conflict spread is likely to be increased to the extent that the community's leadership structure is decentralized. Extending decision making away from the top to lower levels of the social structure tends to broaden the opportunity for persons of all shades of opinion on an issue to feel encouraged to participate. The social class structure of a community affects the spread of conflict in that smaller proportions of members of the lower than of the upper and middle classes participate in organized groups. Thus, the larger the proportion of lower-class residents in a community, the smaller the proportion of community members active in organizations and the smaller the proportion likely to become involved in community conflict. 24 These influences that operate on spread of conflict from the social structure of the community are interrelated with influences that emanate from the community's normative structure. Norms that stigmatize participation in conflict can be expected to have 24. Coleman, p. 22.

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the short-run effect of limiting and the long-run effect of increasing spread, since conflict in some form is a normal feature of community life and when suppressed in one sphere seeks expression in other spheres. 25 On the other hand, norms that are tolerant toward protest and dissent have the short-run effect of increasing and the long-run effect of decreasing the number of participants. The more permissive norms provide for release of tensions and the airing of grievances — two factors that tend to minimize conflict. Coleman noted that the more people there are in a community who identify with a norm that places concern for the community above concern for special interests, the more widespread participation in controversies will be. 26 Spread of conflict is also likely to be increased when the issue is related to norms that are of widespread concern to community residents. Furthermore, participation increases when use of violence leads previously neutral or indifferent residents into taking sides either for or against the extremist behavior. Boskin cites evidence from riots in cities of the United States which suggests that violence, by evoking a sense of power and pride, has encouraged some ghetto residents to participate with the rioters, while Coser points out that uncommitted persons may get into a controversy to oppose the users of violence. 27

INTENSITY OF CONFLICT

Intensity of community conflict refers here to the degree that participants commit their time, energies, resources, and feelings to thwarting or attacking the opposition. Intensity increases as personal involvement in the conflict increases and as feelings heighten. One indicator of increasing intensity is the extent to which each side in the conflict is increasingly dominated by extremists. A high level of intensity is likely to be associated with explosive and exceedingly destructive physical aggression — behavior that Spiegel 25. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1959), pp. 224-225. 26. Coleman, p. 21. 27. Boskin, pp. 12-13; Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, pp. 90-91.

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has classified as collective violence. 28 However, there can be a high level of intensity without violence as well as violence without a high level of intensity. 29 For example, high intensity may be concentrated in using legal suits or vehement debate rather than violence, while violence may be employed by persons who care little about the issue but who are accustomed to using physical aggression as their mode of expressing opposition. Interrelated influences from the social and normative structures of the community and from the patterns of interaction among community residents operate either to hold down or intensify community conflict. Generally, communities have such formalized provision as tribal councils, panchayats, conciliation boards, or court systems for regulating the types of conflict with which they are familiar. Usually local norms prescribe that the parties in a conflict make use of the established provisions. But familiar types of conflict can occur with new features not covered by existing structures or norms, and new types of conflict can occur as social changes take place before provisions are made to cover them. In both cases, the absence of community controls leaves the course of conflict open to increasing intensity and to violence unless there are other features of the social and normative structures that intervene. The degree of normative regulation, according to Coser, is different for different types of conflict. 3 0 It also varies for the same type of conflict from one type of community to another and from one time to another in the same community. For example, newly industrializing communities tend to lack norms governing labormanagement relations, whereas relatively industrialized communities usually have established norms for regulating such aspects of the conduct of a strike as the use of physical violence, the importation of strike breakers, or the issuance of injunctions to regulate the behavior of either management or workers. To the extent that regulatory norms are accepted by the opposing parties the intensity of conflict is restrained. On the other hand, norms are associated with an increase in intensity of conflict when the opposing parties 28. Spiegel, p. 282. 29. For example, see Dahrendorf, pp. 210-213. 30. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, p. 40.

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subscribe to contradictory norms that are highly valued and that are considered seriously challenged. In closely knit communities where interaction is personal and informal and has high personality involvement there is a tendency, according to Coser, either to suppress conflict or to prescribe traditional norms for its conduct. But once conflict gets beyond the prescribed norms, it is likely to become particularly intense, expressing accumulated grievances previously denied expression. 31 In large, relatively modernized communities where there is a multiplicity of organizations there are segments of the population whose social participation is severely limited. When these people are involved in conflict, their involvement is likely to be characterized by high degrees of both intensity and violence. Thus Coser accounts, in part, for the 'peculiar violence and the peculiar intensity' of urban ghetto riots on the grounds that ghetto residents do not have the multi-faceted group life, the availability of associational ties, and the opportunities for social participation that are characteristic of middle-class and, to some extent, working-class life styles. 32 Those community residents who do take part in numerous organizations are less likely to become intensively involved in a community conflict, if their different organizations have interests in the controversy that crisscross in such a way that they neutralize one another. 3 3 Conversely, insofar as people have memberships in organizations that have similar interests in the controversy, the intensity of their involvement is increased, since in this case, attitudes of the various groups are mutually reinforcing. 34 When people on opposite sides of an issue belong to the same community groupings and repeatedly confront one another in each of the organized groups to which they belong, their separate associational clashes, according to Dahrendorf, build up into one overriding cleavage of interests that intensifies their response to the controversial issue. 35 At the same time, if various organizations clear dissidents from their membership, the resulting likeminded31. See Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, p. 152. 32. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, pp. 94-95. 33. Coleman, pp. 21-22; Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social

p. 94.

34. Coleman, pp. 14 and 22. 35. Dahrendorf, pp. 214-215.

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ness has reinforcing effects that increase the intensity with which their remaining members react to the issue. This procedure further increases intensity by increasing the polarization of the community. Coser has also offered the axioms that: (1) the greater the common involvement in a group, the more intense the hostility that follows schism — each side viewing the other as traitorous to the original group; and (2) the mpre the persons on one side of an issue through their interaction with likeminded persons become convinced of the justice and morality of their position on the issue, the more intense and bitter their participation in the conflict is likely to be. 3 6

SETTLEMENT OF CONFLICT

Settlement of conflict is a process whereby the opposing parties accede to a set of conditions which they use as the basis for ceasing their mutually thwarting behavior. The particular conflict is resolved, but this does not mean that conflict will not continue over other issues even in the same sphere of community life. 37 The outcomes produced by settlement range from those in which community members emerge from the conflict better able to handle future disputes to those in which antagonisms and hostilities engendered by the conflict carry over into subsequent relationships among community residents and increase the difficulty of settling other issues that arise. In the first case, persons on each side have had the chance to air their point of view, they have increased their understanding of the opposing point of view, and they are relatively satisfied with the terms to which they have acceded. Moreover, the leaders on each side have discovered ways of dealing with the other side, and they have also so enhanced their position among their supporters that they can more readily enter into negotiations for settling other issues. At the opposite end of the spectrum, settlement of particular issues may involve such capitulation of one side to the other or such 36. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict, pp. 67-69; 113. 37. See, for example, Dahrendorf, pp. 223-224.

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compromises on the part of both sides that the consequent dissatisfactions decrease the community's capability for resolving other issues. In this case, the leaders on one or both sides have lost prestige in the process of settling the conflict and are less able than formerly to carry on negotiations in future disputes. If they have been replaced by more militant leaders who are unwilling to compromise, the likelihood of settling other issues is further reduced. The norms of a community may call for either institutionalized or noninstitutionalized procedures to be used in the settlement of conflict. The usual institutionalized procedures include: submitting the issue to a council, to a court, to an arbitration or mediation board, or to some other local or extracommunity b o d y that has jurisdiction in the matter; seeking to get the issue resolved through enactment or interpretation of legislation; engaging in formally structured negotiations; and submitting the issue to a vote, as in elections and referenda. The noninstitutionalized procedures involve finding some informal way to get the disputing groups together to clarify demands, to examine those demands in terms of the reality of the situation and of the willingness for meeting them, and to establish institutional procedures for dealing with similar conflicts that may arise later. Coser has suggested that one avenue to settlement of community conflict may be through use of violence on the part of alienated residents w h o do not have channels within the framework of political legitimacy through which they can assert their interests. When the violent acts serve to communicate to the opposing side both the needs from which the conflict arises and the seriousness with which the needs are regarded, that side may be jolted into taking the steps that will eventuate in settlement. In Coser's view, communities in Western democratic societies, but not in most other contemporary societies, generally have legitimized channels through which most groups can proceed on a nonviolent basis to assert their interests. 38 This view is not currently shared b y extremist groups of either the 'left' or 'right'. Ease in settling conflict is increased when the community has institutionalized procedures for dealing with the conflict issue, 3 8 . Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, p p . 96-110.

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when the norms governing those procedures are respected by both parties to the dispute, when the respective sides have enough internal consensus to present a unified front in negotiations for settlement, and when each side recognizes the other side as legitimate representative of the opposition. For example, the settlement of labor-management disputes has been facilitated where labor has obtained the legal right to organize and has had that right recognized by management and wherp/negotiation and conciliation procedures have been established and have been used by labor and management. 3 9 On the other hand, settlement of racial conflicts has been impeded where there is a lack of consensus on the goals to be achieved and on the means to be used in pursuing desired goals, where it is unclear who are the legitimate spokesmen for each side, and where there are no institutionalized provisions for representation of both sides in the local decision-making bodies. 40 Another obstacle to settlement occurs when the interest of leaders on either side is centered in carrying on conflict for the sake of disruption rather than for the attainment of substantive goals. Effort being directed toward increasing antagonisms not only bypasses opportunities to negotiate, but also intensifies the cleavages in the community so that chances for settlement are reduced. 41 On the other hand, settlement is facilitated in situations where the activities of a partisan group seeking change are perceived by the community at large as protest, i. e., justifiable outrage against injustice, rather than as civil disorder. Such a reaction, according to Turner, indicates that the community's concern is focused on providing legitimate and nonviolent means for relieving the conditions that are considered unjust; and this attitude makes it easier to settle conflict. 4 2 Biddle has taken the position that 'community development workers' have a responsibility for reconciling community conflicts. The aim pursued is not agreement, but attitudes of understanding 39. Frederick H. Harbison and John R. Coleman, Working Harmony in 18 Companies (Washington, D. C.: National Planning Association, 1953). 40. See Donald R. Matthews, 'Political Science Research on Race Relations', in Race and the Social Sciences, Irwin Katz and Patricia Gurin (eds.) (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 115-122. 41. See Lyle E. Schaller, Community Organization: Conflict and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), p. 82. 42. See Ralph H. Turner, "The Public Perception of Protest', American Sociological Review, 34 (1969), 818-822; 829.

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that encourage people to search for ways of living together in the midst of the differences and mutual antagonisms that can always be expected in community life. The 'community development encourager' pursuing Biddle's approach would help local people to form a 'community-serving nucleus' who mediate between opposing factions by getting members from both sides to collaborate in community action efforts, by bringing antagonists into the nucleus and by using the nucleus group as a sounding board before which the disputing parties can air their respective grievances. 43

CONFLICT STRATEGY The consensus strategy described by Biddle as a means of settling community controversy is in marked contrast to the conflict strategy that may be employed in community action efforts. This type of strategy replaces collaboration with confrontation and consensus with dissent. Power is used to coerce rather than to persuade. Those who employ it may emphasize either collective nonviolence or collective violence, and they may shift from one emphasis to the other as well as from emphasis on coercion to emphasis on cooperation. Characteristically, as already mentioned, community action efforts over the world have been carried on in consensus situations and through use of collaborative strategy. However, increasing numbers of communities have within recent decades experienced change efforts that involved use of conflict strategy both on the part of those seeking the change and on the part of established authorities, i. e., local governing officials, the police, business enterprises, school officials, religious bodies, and social welfare agencies, who were antagonistic to the change demand. This has been the case not only in the United States, but also, for example, in France, Spain, West Germany, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Mexico, and Japan. And, according to Rosenthal, it has generally been associated with protests against the nonresponsiveness of established authorities in communities. 44 Similarly, the Gandhian pro43. William W. Biddle, Encouraging Community Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp. 174-188. 44. Rosenthal, pp. 58-59.

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tests in communities of India and of South Africa and those in the early stages of the civil rights movement in the United States are said by Killian to have occurred in situations where legitimate institutional means of seeking relief from injustice were deemed to be inadequate. 4 5 The sources of dissent have been located in diverse segments of the community's social structure. There have been strikes by doctors, teachers, tenants, sanitation workers, farm workers, and transportation workers; there have been demonstrations by opponents of the draft and of the war in Vietnam, by civil rights proponents, by slumdwellers against 'slumlords', by angry school patrons, and by members of welfare rights organizations contesting public welfare policies and practices; and there have been riots on the campuses and in the ghettos. The diversity of these protest groups reflects the increased differentiation of occupations and interests that occurs in industrializing communities as well as the migration of rural people to urban communities and of more affluent urbanites from central cities to suburbs that has led to the concentration of lowincome groups in ghettos of the central cities. It also reflects the feelings of relative deprivation that accompany the increased visibility of differences that results from increased mobility and the spread of mass media communication.

PROCEDURES USED IN CONFUCT STRATEGY

The typical situation in which conflict strategy is used in connection with community action efforts is one that begins with protesters confronting the established authorities. They may be making a demand for some change or they may be objecting to some change that the established authorities have proposed or initiated. In the ensuing activity, the protest may proceed peacefully or it may become associated with varying degrees of violence. Etzioni, who analyzed 216 protests that took the form of demonstrations occurring during one month, in the fall of 1968, in communities of the United States, found that 62 percent of them were carried out 4 5 . Lewis M. Killian, The Impossible Revolution? Black Power American Dream (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 74-77.

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peacefully. Of the 64 cases in which initiators of violence could be identified, the initiators were the police in 9 cases, opponents of the demonstrators in 17 cases, and the demonstrators themselves in 38 cases. 46 Usually when a protest begins, law enforcement personnel are available. They may be nonpartisan or partisan in their attitudes and method of operation. In the nonpartisan role, they are equally concerned with protecting the rights of the protesters and those against whom the protest is directed. In the partisan role, they are generally on the side of the established authorities unless those authorities are in opposition to national policies. Against demonstrators using violence they may respond with more violence than is needed to maintain control. The specific procedures that have been used in communities of the United States in community actions that have employed conflict strategy fit into three categories: procedures used by established authorities in the community, those used by protest groups that operate essentially within the community's prevailing structure of norms and institutions, and those used by revolutionaries who advocate destruction of these norms and institutions. Each of these types of procedures is described below, mainly as they have been associated with the civil rights movement and with efforts to engage low-income residents of the community in getting community changes that are specifically to their self-interest. Procedures Used by Established

Authorities

The established authorities in a community make use of conflict strategy to block some proposed change to which they object, to counter opposition that is made to some change they wish to make, and to control or retaliate against protest groups whose use of conflict strategy is perceived as threatening. In the face of confrontation, they may, according to Turner, follow one of three procedures: they may ignore the confronting groups and take no action, assuming that the groups are not strong enough to present a serious challenge; they may assume a 'law and order' stance and 46. Amitai Etzioni, Demonstration Breach, 1970), pp. 3-9.

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take steps to suppress the opposition, interpreting the confrontation as civil disorder; or they may make a compromise offer of conciliation, accepting the confrontation as justifiable protest. 4 7 All three procedures constitute use of conflict in that they are intended to thwart the opposition at least to some extent. The procedure of ignoring and the procedure of compromising represent peaceful confrontation. The latter procedure tends to limit spread and intensity of the conflict and facilitates its settlement. The effect of the former procedure is to increase spread and intensity to the extent that the issue is unsettled and frustrating and to the extent that the protesters have the capability for escalating the conflict. The 'law and order' procedure, in relying on constraining or repressive tactics and in not coming to grips with the underlying conditions from which the protests have arisen, tends to increase both spread and intensity; and even if it effects early settlement of the issue, it leaves the community predisposed to further conflict. Some of the tactics used by established authorities who take the 'law and order' stance include getting court injunctions to thwart such protest activities as mass marches or strikes, securing administrative rulings or legislative enactments to back up their position, and calling on the police to enforce the legal decisions obtained or to quell protest disturbances. According to Misner, the police in communities of the United States generally responded to the protests of the 1960's just as the political leaders wanted or directed them to respond. This meant that they showed a disposition to blame troublemakers for starting the protests and that they put emphasis upon suppressing outbreaks of riot or civil rebellion through acquiring the equipment and military skills believed necessary to maintain control. 4 8 Where such attitudes prevail the tactic of violence, or unnecessary use of force, may be employed either intentionally or inadvertently. From his analysis of the 216 demonstrations he studied, Etzioni concluded that prompt, prudent employment of well-trained law enforcement personnel can extinguish a civil disorder in its incipi47. Turner, p. 824. 48. Gordon E. Misner, 'The Response of Police Agencies', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 382 (1969): 119.

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ency, but that the use of excessive and illegal force by authorities is always a dangerous and usually an ineffective tactic. A long-run effort to prevent violence, he said, would need to include protection of the rights of citizens to engage in peaceful protest and concrete attempts to deal with the problems that face disadvantaged groups and individuals. 49 Procedures Used by Protest Groups Protest groups that use conflict strategy within the community's prevailing system of values and institutions employ a variety of procedures that differ in such respects as the amount of change they are intended to produce in the community's institutional structure, the degree to which they encourage the threat or use of violence, the extent to which they operate within the law, and the extent to which they involve use of means that are judged unethical by prevailing community norms. Procedures used in the civil rights movement. The first thrust into use of conflict strategy in the civil rights movement was made through litigation procedures, mainly court suits initiated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to test the legality of discriminatory and segregation practices of schools, transportation systems, and facilities serving the public. The use of nonviolent direct action procedures dates from the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Similar procedures were employed by leaders in the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They were based on Gandhi's technique of satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) and made use of such tactics as freedom rides, sit-ins, wade-ins, mass marches, strikes, boycotts, and voter registration campaigns. 50 The litigation and satyagraha procedures were used by civil rights leaders who were seeking to secure complete elimination of racial 49. Etzioni, pp. 94; 100; and 106-108. 50. James H. Laue, 'The Changing Character of Negro Protest', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 357 (1965): 119126.

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discrimination and segregation — a drastic change in the institutional structure of most communities in the United States. The choice of those two particular procedures committed their users to nonviolence, though tactics used in the satyagraha procedure sometimes evoked violence from the opposition. The tactics of litigation were legal, of course; some of those in satyagraha were illegal, for example, those that violated local ordinances against mass marches or state laws prescribing segregation. In the eyes of citizens who accepted the national norms opposing discrimination and segregation the nonviolent procedures of both court suits and satyagraha were generally considered ethical protest measures; but for those who subscribed to the values of white supremacy or who feared drastic change in the status quo, the whole civil rights movement was unethical and dangerous. The violent responses that the nonviolent procedures received from established authorities in some communities and the nationwide coverage those responses received in the mass media served not only to polarize the memberships of local organizations on the civil rights issue, but also through the community's systemic linkage with the larger society helped to spread and intensify conflict reactions in other communities. One outcome at the national level was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also favoring this Congressional action was the fact that some change toward desegregation had taken place in local communities without disrupting community life. The promise of greater changes implied in the new legislation and in a succession of court decisions outlawing specific segregation policies fostered rising expectations among blacks and their white sympathizers. However, as community agencies failed to change their policies and practices as rapidly or as radically as anticipated, new civil rights groups emerged — some under the name of Black Power — who, lacking faith in the local government and being convinced that white leadership in the community is incapable of making more than token changes unless coerced to do so, rejected the procedures of the traditional black leadership and put their reliance on coercive public protests. 51 To whatever extent these protests have involved rioting and violence, they have been judged 51. Killian, pp. 78-79.

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unethical by prevailing community norms even when such behavior was viewed as understandable reaction to deprivation and injustice? 2 The nonviolent procedures of civil rights groups, and even more the violent procedures employed in the conflict strategy of the more militant of those groups, were met with a 'white backlash' manifested in the revival of Ku Klux Klan groups and the rise of such organizations as White Citizens Councils, and also in the opposition emanating from the rank and file membership of political, business, labor, religious, and educational organizations whose officials had come to endorse the goals and achievements of the civil rights movement. Opposition originally was directed against the principle of desegregation. As token desegregation in the schools has been giving way to full-scale desegregation, new groups have emerged to challenge such policies as those on assignment and busing of school children. Procedures used by Alinsky and in Mobilization for Youth. The procedures used in conflict strategy associated with community action efforts designed to get low-income residents to 'fight' for changes that would be to their self-interest are described here from the work of Saul Alinsky and his colleagues in the Industrial Areas Foundation and of workers in the Mobilization for Youth project. The usual procedure followed by Alinsky was to establish an organization, such as The Woodlawn Organization in Chicago, and through that organization with its representative cross section of local leaders to assist the people in taking the kind of direct action that would get them relief from specific objectionable conditions, give them a sense of accomplishment and power, and cultivate local leaders to whom the professional organizers could relinquish responsibility for carrying on the effort. Some of the dramatic and highly visible tactics typical of Alinsky strategy are illustrated in the Woodlawn case, initiated in 1960. They included a 'Square Deal' campaign in which a parade, handbills, and a checking station were used to publicize and get correction for such cheating practices of local businesses as overcharging on purchases, giving short weights, and collecting excessive interest on credit; a voter registration campaign in which on one day 2,000 voters were transported 52. See, for example, Turner, p. 816.

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to City Hall and registered to vote; a 'truth squad' project in which black mothers went to schools and got photographic proof that the schools had room for pupils from Woodlawn's overcrowded black schools (many of the women were jailed for trespassing); and actions against 'slumlords' that involved rent strikes, picketing, and the decoration of substandard buildings with signs advertising their neglect. 53 Although Alinsky stressed his concern for enlisting the rank and file of the disadvantaged in all-out attack and counterattack on the opposition with the aim of 'social surgery and not cosmetic coverups', 5 4 he and his followers have not advocated basic changes in the community's institutional structure. Instead, his procedures have been used to force the existing structure to be more responsive to the needs of disadvantaged groups and to give those groups more opportunities for participating in decisions that affect them. And while the procedures tend to rely on dramatic and highly visible tactics, they do not encourage either violence or illegality. Their ethical quality has been challenged by their critics, to one of whom a supporter of Alinsky is said by Schaller to have offered the following justification: 'Lying, cheating, duplicity, and villification (sic) are tools we use to get the job done in my world'. 5 5 In Alinsky's words, 'The real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, "Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Many of the tactics employed in the Alinsky conflict strategy, for example, rent strikes, voter registration campaigns, and demonstrations demanding improvements in the schools, were also used in Mobilization for Youth, the anti-delinquency experimental project carried on among low-income residents of New York's Lower East Side, between 1962 and 1967. Furthermore the procedures used by Mobilization for Youth followed Alinsky in relying on organization 53. Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 329-331. 54. Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 154-155. 55. Schaller, p. 111. 56. Saul D. Alinsky, 'Of Means and Ends', in Strategies of Community Organization, Fred M. Cox, John L. Erlich, Jack Rothman, John E. Tropman (eds.) (Itasca, 111.: Peacock Publishers, 1970), p. 199.

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as a means of getting social action and in stressing participation of the target population. However, Mobilization for Youth workers used less dramatic and less visible tactics than Alinsky and his followers; kept their conflict strategy more closely aligned with collaborative strategy; and made more use of paid employees, such as legal aid personnel, social workers, and indigenous community organizers, to serve as advocates for the poor in confronting public welfare agencies, landlords, and other established authorities. 57 The protest procedures used in Mobilization for Youth sought enough change in the institutional structure to permit participation of low-income people in the community's decision-making activities, did not encourage the threat or use of violence, and did not make use of illegal tactics. Though subjected to numerous attacks and several investigations between August 16, 1964, and January 15, 1965, it had no charges of unethical procedure substantiated against it. 5 8 Procedures Used by

Revolutionaries

Revolutionaries who advocate destruction of the community's prevailing system of values and institutions have a stance and espouse procedures that distinguish them from other protesters, though the line between them and groups committed to radical change within the existing social order is often hard to draw. Groups using satyagraha, for example, employ tactics that violate the law and go so far as to usurp the functions of government and set up parallel governing arrangements. They do this, however, according to Specht, in public actions with public explanations of those actions offered in the name of a morality believed to be higher than that of the es57. For discussion of these features of Mobilization for Youth, see, for example, Richard A. Cloward and Richard M. Elman, 'Advocacy in the Ghetto', in Strategies of Community Organization, Fred M. Cox, et al. (eds.) (Itasca, 111.: Peacock Publishers, 1970), pp. 209-215; and Harold H. Weissman, 'Social Action in a Social Work Context', in Community Development in the Mobilization for Youth Experience, Harold H. Weissman (ed.) (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp. 182-184. For the role of professionals in the Mobilization for Youth project, see Chapter 7 of this text. 58. Alfred Fried, 'The Attack on Mobilization', in Community Development in the Mobilization for Youth Experience, Harold H. Weissman (ed.) (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp. 137-162.

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tablished law. They expect legal action to be taken against them and they express faith in the value of the existing legal-political system. Protesters seeking to destroy the community's institutional structure, on the other hand, though they may claim moral justification for their acts, are committed to destruction of even the legal structure on which the community rests. 59 Such revolutionaries are described as incorrigible absolutists who make the one grand claim that the entire system is in error. 60 But since they have no alternative system of values and institutions to substitute for the one they seek to destroy, their procedures can be expected to lead only to escalation of violence. Representatives of the most militant Black Power groups, according to Killian, advocate guerrilla warfare and sabotage in the major metropolitan centers of the United States. 61 Their procedures involve such tactics as amassing caches of small arms and Molotov cocktails in the ghettos; encouraging participation in riots as a means of fostering black pride and self-respect; rejecting any alliance with whites; using violence or the threat of violence to gain local control over the ghettos' police, schools, and business establishments; and promoting plans for an all-out guerrilla warfare designed to sabotage the machinery that provides the community's essential services. 62 Coser, writing of the revolutionaries, says their demand for instant gratification and their intolerance of postponement have given them a basic distrust of, and alienation from, other people. They feel themselves surrounded by hostile forces, and so, he explains, they engage in terrorist activities to destroy the prevailing system before it destroys them. 6 3

59. Harry Specht, 'Disruptive Tactics', Social Work, 14 (April, 1969): 10-12. 60. Carol Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 145. 61. Killian, pp. 144-145. 62. See, for example, Killian, pp. 154-166; and Alan A. Altshuler, Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities (New York: Western, 1970), pp. 56-61. 63. Lewis Coser, 'Indeed They Did Grow Up Absurd', Dissent (May-June, 1970): 199-200.

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EVALUATION OF CONFLICT STRATEGY

The effectiveness of conflict strategy for carrying on community actions — whether in accomplishing specific tasks or in increasing community residents' ability to work together — is difficult to assess, since it is not possible to control all of the variables other than strategy that could be affecting the outcomes under study. Lacking empirical evidence, evaluation rests largely on observations that assess the results of particular procedures employed in specific projects that have made use of conflict strategy. Generally, community action efforts begin with a collaborative approach. Conflict strategy is adopted when the results being achieved are judged to be unsatisfactory and little hope is held for improving the situation through collaborative measures. The first conflict means employed are usually nonviolent. However, violence may break out even when the strategists do not anticipate it; and, in some instances, it may be used by the strategists specifically to replace nonviolence that is deemed to be too slow or ineffectual. Warren and Hyman, who analyzed published studies of thirty-five community actions, found that eight of the eleven projects that used conflict strategy as compared with eight of the twenty-four that used collaborative strategy failed to accomplish their objectives. However, the projects using conflict strategy were ones directed toward securing basic structural change rather than expansion of already existing types of facilities or behavior, projects for which collaborative strategy was generally used. Furthermore conflict strategy was always in a dissensus situation, i. e., one in which there was basic disagreement or conflict of interests and likelihood of reaching consensus seemed remote, whereas collaborative strategy was used with only three exceptions in consensus situations. This suggests that the favorable outcomes could have been related as much to the favorable nature of the situation as to the type of strategy used. 64

64. Ronald L. Warren and Herbert H. Hyman, 'Purposive Community Change in Consensus and Dissensus Situations', in Community Structure and DecisionMaking: Comparative Analyses, Terry N. Clark (ed.) (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), pp. 407-422.

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The community actions described above in connection with the civil rights movement, The Woodlawn Organization project directed by Alinsky and his associates, and Mobilization for Youth generally took place in what Warren and Hyman would call a dissensus context. The common goal of these efforts was to get the disadvantaged members of the community into a more participatory and selfrespecting role in the community's institutional structure. The thwarting of actions to attain that goal came from established authorities and from pressure groups in the community whose vested interests motivated them to oppose such change. The respective procedures of opposition devised by the two action systems are evaluated in the light of outcomes that actually occurred. There is no certain way of knowing, however, what the outcomes would have been if the procedures had been different. The procedure of nonviolent protest has been successful in attaining specific objectives that had not previously been attained through use of collaborative strategy. For example, court litigation resulted in judicial decisions granting blacks the right to use schools and other public facilities on an equal basis with whites; the advocacy activities of the neighborhood center social workers and the legal aid counselors in Mobilization for Youth effected changes in the policies and practices of the public welfare department that increased the awards and self-respect of public assistance recipients; voter registration campaigns succeeded in making Woodlawn one of the most highly registered sections of Chicago and in increasing the proportions of registered black voters in communities of Alabama and Mississippi and other Southern states. Such break-throughs had the effect in some communities of opening the way for public officials and operators of business enterprises to adopt nondiscriminatory practices they had previously avoided merely because they were not in line with local laws and mores. Nonviolent protest is also credited with arousing public interest in specific change issues on a broader and more intense scale than is generally possible in the use of collaborative strategy. Dramatic and highly visible tactics have the effects of pointing up the declared need for change and of polarizing the members of the community around either the protesters or the preservers of the status quo. However, though Alinsky's tactic of identifying 'the enemy of the people' in the form of a 'slumlord' or a Board of Education tended

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to mobilize the affected groups in the community — 'victims' and 'victimizers' alike — as well as the protagonists of these opposing groups, it also, according to Schaller, alienated from the action effort those persons who objected to having enmity and hatred fostered among community members; and it led critics of Alinsky to conclude that the solving of local problems was inhibited by the antagonisms that he and his followers engendered. 65 In numerous communities, nonviolent protest procedures proved to be tantalizing to the opposition and to the authorities responsible for maintaining order in the community. For example, some of the tactics used in the satyagraha procedures of the civil rights efforts invited arrests that were in themselves means of gaining supporters for the protesters. Use of what was perceived as unnecessary use of force by law enforcement personnel tended particularly to win sympathizers. However, illegal tactics in the face of restraint on the part of authorities tended to alienate persons who were unwilling to support lawbreakers. Inadvertent eruption of violence in the ranks of the protesters and intended use of force that was intentionally or unintentionally escalated to violence as a means of restraining protesters generally intensified bitterness on both sides of the issue. It also served to vivify the issue and to increase the sense of power among the participants. Any attainment of specific community changes achieved through use of nonviolent procedures usually set in motion rising expectations on the part of the groups for whom the changes were made. The effect of these rising expectations was to generate acute frustrations when follow-up practices did not occur as fast or as fully as anticipated. At the same time, those who had engaged in granting the changes and those who felt they had sacrificed their own interests in having the changes granted tended to exert their remaining power in holding the line against making further concessions. In this situation, more militant procedures emerged including procedures that advocated threat and use of violence. These more militant procedures are, according to Nieburg, based on the assumption that they will gain attention and action not otherwise obtainable. Their intended effect is to establish the credibility of their capacity for disrupting the social order of the community 65. Schaller, pp. 94; 106-107.

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and not to exhaust the protesters' capacity for continuing the conflict.66 Violent procedures, in some communities, have had the effect of jolting the established authorities into granting such immediate changes as increased employment opportunities, representation on official bodies, and larger appropriations for programs that served the protesters' aims. Usually these were temporary changes and did not involve recognition and. remedy of underlying causes. 67 More often, since the late 1960'$, 'law and order' tactics and increasing resistance to granting demands for change have characterized the community's response to increasing use of violence. The frustrating effects of such a response have influenced some people to abandon the goal of integration and others to reject the entire prevailing system of values and institutions. Those who have taken this latter stance can be characterized as revolutionaries. The procedures that the revolutionaries have employed are aimed at destroying the system on which the community rests. Caches of weapons have been assembled and plans for guerrilla attacks have been devised. So far revolutionary procedures have been supported by only a small proportion of the residents of communities in which they have been used. The possibility has been suggested by Killian, however, that further support could be rallied through the Revolutionary Action Movement or a more violent Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for example. 68 While the countervailing power of the established authorities is sufficient in all communities of the United States to quell an organized uprising by the revolutionaries, it is not sufficient to prevent their destructive terrorist acts. Spread of support for such acts might be prevented, Altshuler says, if large urban communities would grant to their constituent neighborhoods the right to govern themselves in such spheres as law enforcement, education, and public welfare. 69

66. H. L. Nieburg, 'Violence, Law, and the Informal Polity', The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 13 (1969): 195, 207. 67. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), pp. 84-85. 68. Killian, p. 163. 69. Altshuler, pp. 192-199.

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SUMMARY Community conflict, a process in which two action systems arise in the community and attempt to thwart each other's efforts, is a usual accompaniment of community action efforts. It is in the nature of community conflict that it spreads and intensifies until the issue at stake is settled, unless it is contained by a set of rules that the opposing parties accept. Conflict performs a double-edged role in relation to community actions. On the one hand, it may facilitate the community development process by bringing needs to the attention of the community, by siphoning off tensions, and by uniting likeminded members of different groups on each side of the conflict issue in such a way that new patterns of cooperation are established and the community is left better prepared for dealing with subsequent issues. On the other hand, it may obstruct the community development process by leaving a reservoir of antagonisms and suspicions that predispose to later conflict and by diverting attention and resources from the goals of the community action effort. Community conflict has its origin in a combination of potentially identifiable conditions that generate among community residents a readiness to engage in mutually thwarting actions which are set off by some incident that is itself likely to be meaningful only in the context of those conditions. The spread, intensity, and settlement of community conflict depend upon factors operating in the normative and social structure of the community. Norms and established arrangements for settlement are likely to exist for types of conflict with which the community is familiar. The use of conflict strategy in community actions relies on power to coerce rather than to persuade. This type of strategy is employed by the established authorities in a community, by protest groups who seek changes within the system of prevailing values and institutions, and by revolutionaries who seek to destroy that system. The trend toward modernization in communities over the world has been accompanied by an increase in the use of conflict strategy, especially in protest against the unresponsiveness of institutions in meeting community needs. Some of the conflict strategy procedures, such as satyagraha,

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advocate nonviolence; others advocate violence, especially when nonviolent procedures have not attained desired objectives. Violence can also occur inadvertently when nonviolent procedures are being employed. Any occurrence of violence tends to escalate the intensity of the conflict, but it may also be a means of alerting the community to the urgency of the need for change. To the extent that the conditions creating such need continue to be ignored likelihood of recurring violence is iricreased. When conflict is interpreted as protest, the protesters are viewed as having legitimate grievances that require community action; when it is interpreted as civil disorder, the legitimacy of the protesters' action is denied and suppressive measures are employed instead of corrective action.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alinsky, Saul D. Reveille for Radicals. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1945. A candid exposition of a type of conflict strategy practiced and advocated by the author. —, Rules for Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971. A discussion of the ideology and tactics of protest employed within the system. It is based upon the author's years of experience in organizing community groups to change nonresponsive institutions but not to destroy them. Boskin, Joseph; and Rosenstone, Robert A. (eds.) 'Protest in the Sixties', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 382 (1969): 1-144. An issue devoted entirely to the various forms of protest characteristic of the 1960's. Its articles deal with such protest activities as those arising out of the civil rights movement, the hippie subculture, the generation gap, the student revolt, and political extremism — 'left' and 'right' — as well as with the responses made by the police and the federal government. Coleman, James S. Community Conflict. Glencoe: Free Press, 1957. A brief b u t thorough treatment of community conflict that provides a basis upon which a theory of community conflict might be developed. Coser, Lewis A. Continuities in the Study of Conflict. New York: Free Press, 1967. Relates the concept of social conflict to a theory of social change. Attention is directed specifically to the role of violence in social conflict. , The Functions of Social Conflict. Glencoe: Free Press, 1956. A clarification of the concept of social conflict. Drawing on Simmel, there is more concern with functional than dysfunctional aspects of the process.

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Dahrendorf, Ralf. Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1959. A critical examination of Marxian theories of class and class conflict used as a basis for formulating a tentative sociological theory of conflict. It emphasizes conflict as an essential ingredient of social change. Killian, Lewis M. The Impossible Revolution? Black Power and the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1968. A sociological analysis of Black Power, including the reactions of whites and blacks to the rise of that movement. The analysis builds toward an assessment of the likelihood of a black revolution in the United States. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1968. The report of an investigation of civil disorders occurring in the summer of 1967. Basic causes of the disorders are cited and recommendations for action are proposed. Rose, Arnold M. 'The Negro Protest', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 357 (1965): 1-126. An issue devoted entirely to black protest efforts in the United States. It discusses the different procedures employed in the use of conflict strategy by leaders of different civil rights organizations. Rosenthal, Robert A. Riots? Westport, Conn.: Pendulum Press, 1969. A brief probing of the meaning that riots have for the people who engage in them. It also analyzes why riots occur and discusses peaceful protest as an alternative for rioting. Schaller, Lyle E. Community Organization: Conflict and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966. An evaluation of conflict strategy in relation to the role of the church in community actions. U. S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility. Washington, D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1969. A broad-scale assessment of the causes of violence in the United States, with recommendations for the alleviation of those causes. It is based upon extensive research as well as hearings, conferences, and working sessions held by members of the Commission. Weissman, Harold H. (ed.). Community Development in the Mobilization for Youth Experience. New York: Association Press, 1969. A description and evaluation of conflict strategy employed by workers in Mobilization for Youth, the anti-delinquency experimental project carried on in New York's Lower East Side. It covers the period 1962-1967. The project's significance stems largely from the fact that many of its methods have been borrowed by the antipoverty program, Model Cities, and professional social work practitioners.

CHAPTER 7

Professionals and Community Development

The community development process has been and is being applied in a wide variety of projects, in widely differing communities, in every part of the world. In all cases, it becomes operative through the residents of a community who are acting together in behalf of what they consider to be the community's well-being. The residents may be joined or led by one or more outsiders who enter the life of the community for the specific purpose of enabling the people to achieve their change objectives. Included among either the local or the outside participants there are likely to be professionals who take an active part in initiating or serving the community action effort. Some of these professionals function as paid personnel employed to direct or to serve on an interdisciplinary team that is directing or assisting with projects in their fields of special competence. Others serve as volunteers, contributing their knowledge and skill as needed in particular projects. Professionals are especially likely to be associated with institutionalized arrangements that communities have established for carrying on continuing community actions. Such arrangements may be centered mainly in one subsystem of the community, as is the case, for example, with councils of social agencies and with public health programs in the social welfare subsystem. Or they may be focused on the total community, as is being done in increasing numbers of newly modernizing countries where special personnel are employed by the government to stimulate local interest and action in broadscale community action efforts and to help communities use the services of appropriate specialized professionals in carrying on these efforts.

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The purpose of this chapter is to describe the roles that professionals play in community actions and to point up some of the difficulties they may encounter as a consequence of the special status and competence they acquire from their advanced training. The various roles that are described are for the newly emerging community development professional and for professionals in social work, planning, health care, education, and the extension service — five fields that are characteristically involved in helping community residents act collectively in relation to community change. Not specifically covered in this chapter are the roles performed by persons of paraprofessional status and by nonprofessional persons indigenous to the target areas of community actions. These are two types of personnel who are being increasingly involved in local change efforts to handle duties that professionals can delegate or are not available to perform.

THE SPECIAL POSITION OF PROFESSIONALS The professional who participates in a community action effort usually has a key, or central, position and he always brings to the effort knowledge and skills not possessed by lay participants. From his central position he typically has to interact with persons who are above him in the community's social class, power, and subsystem hierarchies — the people who have the influence over decision making and the control over economic resources that are important to the effort. Similarly, he typically has to interact with persons below him in the various hierarchies; these are usually the people who represent the effort's target population. The upward and downward communication called for here requires considerable versatility in forming and maintaining interpersonal relations. This is due to the fact that his contribution to the community action depends upon his expertness in increasing the people's ability to work together as well as upon his technical competence for helping the people to select and attain task achievement goals. 1 To accomplish both of 1. See, for example, United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on Community Development, Community Development and National Development (New York: United Nations, 1963), pp. 7-8.

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these functions, professionals, according to Morris, need to have in addition to their special competence and status an effective respect for the perceptions and desires of the people of the community and a genuine conviction that the only meaningful community change will be change the people themselves want and can join actively in trying to achieve. 2 The position of the professional in addition to being central to a project is unique also in that it presumably is the source from which the goals and procedures developed by project participants can receive the most objective and rational scrutiny. To the extent that the people trust and rely on this professional competence, the position of the professional acquires a sort of authoritative quality that is not inherent in other positions in the project. This sort of situation opens up opportunities for rendering service; but it can also, as shown later, create difficulties for the professional. The fact that professionals have the competence to render services lay people cannot provide tends, too, to make their position special. For example, professionals may be the only persons qualified to screen, train, assign, or supervise the individuals who perform certain functions in the community action. They may also be the only ones qualified to diagnose accurately the conditions that give rise to specific community needs or to evaluate action outcomes at different points in the effort and when the action has been ended. The position of the professional is very much affected by whether he is relying on a cooperative or conflict strategy and by whether he is involved in actions seeking incremental changes in, or radical transformation of, the policies and practices of organizations in the various subsystems. A cooperative strategy is usually associated with community actions that use gradual means to attain moderate objectives, while conflict strategy is typically employed in actions that have more revolutionary objectives. However, a conflict strategy may be used to pursue moderate objectives if there are no channels through which the desired goals can be achieved or if attempts to use available channels have been unsuccessful. And a 2. Robert Morris, 'The Role of the Agent in the Community Development Process', in Community Development as a Process, Lee J. Cary (ed.) (Columbia: U. of Missouri Press, 1970), pp. 172-173.

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cooperative strategy has been used in some community actions that had rather radical civil rights or women's lib objectives.

ROLES OF PROFESSIONALS Professionals whose careers are oriented toward applying the community development process may perform their roles under the generic title of community development agent, or worker, or under a title that is linked to their field of specialization. Whatever their title, they can be expected to perform their various roles by serving as enablers, consultants, and/or advocates. As enabler, the professional concentrates his expertise on helping the people of a community become collectively 'do-it-yourself' experts on dealing with community change. As consultant, the professional brings to the community action his expertise in identifying community needs, diagnosing the underlying conditions that give rise to the needs, and interpreting in understandable terms alternative courses of action that can be taken to get the needs met. Though not responsible for making decisions on goals and procedures, the professional as consultant may be expected to provide recommendations to the persons who are the decision makers. As advocate, the professional's expertise in organizing people to achieve specific goals of a community action effort is aligned with some cause in which he is a partisan participant. While the cause may be of any type, for example, one that seeks to protect or advance middle-class interests and values, it is perhaps more likely at present to be one that is in behalf of people who have low-income and/or minority status.

ROLES OF THE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AGENT

Eventually, the key professional in community action efforts may be a specially trained professional whose roles resemble those generally performed at present by so-called community development agents. While some beginning has been made in this direction, there are still relatively few professionals whose educational preparation is for a total career orientation to community development. Com-

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munity development agents, with some exceptions, are usually prepared through in-service training or they come from the ranks of professionals in various fields, such as those described later in this chapter. Their distinctive characteristic is that they have added to whatever formally acquired training they have had an ability to motivate self-help behavior among the people with whom they engage in community actions. The roles of the community development agent are typically generalist in nature. This means they involve him in working with more facets of community life than is the case with the specialists from the different professional fields. Since he cannot have highly specialized knowledge in all the various spheres, it is likely that his roles will call for him to bring specialized professionals into the community action as needed and to serve as the link between them and the residents of the community. His roles can also be expected to involve him in more immediate and continuous communication with community residents than is usual in the roles of the specialized professionals. At the present time, the position titled community development agent, or worker, is found most widely in newly modernizing countries that have what they call national community development programs. In communities of such countries, the agent has the role of 'opening the eyes' of the indigenous residents to the way of life characteristic of communities that have moved further toward modernization. He also has the linked roles of trying to get the national program adopted in the community while seeing to it that the objectives and procedures advocated by that program are adapted to the needs and value system of the community and are realistic in terms of the resources that are available. When community residents object to any or all features of the national program as it affects them, the agent's role may call for him to help them communicate to an outside agency their objections and their own goals and needs and to join with them in resisting what they consider to be inappropriate externally initiated change. The community action in Vadala, India, described in Chapter 5, was served by a community development agent — referred to in that case as a village level worker.

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SOCIAL WORKER ROLES

The roles that social work professionals perform in relation to community development are linked typically with either continuing or recurrent activities in which the community development process is applied mainly within the social welfare subsystem. They are also found in specific shorter-range community actions that are in the social welfare or some other subsystem. 3 Roles in Continuing or Recurrent Community

Action

Social worker roles in continuing or recurrent community actions are usually associated with such coordinating agencies as community and neighborhood councils, federated fund-raising agencies, and organizations for recruiting and preparing volunteers for assignment to service in the social welfare subsystem. Social work professionals are typically sought for the chief executive position in each of these types of organizations and, in large cities, also as staff members. The roles characteristically involve the social worker in the central task of facilitating the formation of relationships among the staffs and/or board members of the different social welfare agencies in the community so that they can work with one another and with local residents to: identify local social welfare needs, develop services to meet those needs, assure prompt delivery of services, cut out duplicating or outmoded services, provide continuing support for local social welfare programs and activities, and secure volunteers who can serve the social welfare subsystem. Roles in community and neighborhood councils. Social workers serving community and neighborhood councils can be expected to work with representatives of both voluntary and tax-supported agencies in the fields of social services, health, and recreation and probably also with representatives of civic, business, labor, religious, 3. For the idea that the community organization activities of social workers have wider applicability than to the social welfare subsystem and that the process referred to in social work circles as community organization is synonymous with community development, see Murray G. Ross, Community Organization (2nd ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1967), especially pp. 7-8; 17-18.

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education, and legal interests in the community to try to get a collaborative approach for meeting the community's social welfare needs. The social worker serves as an enabler, helping both council representatives and members of the community to sustain an interest in taking joint action to identify and deal with community needs, helping member agencies to increase their understanding of one another's purposes and functions, enabling persons serving on council committees to acquire confidence and competence in making decisions and formulating policy, enabling residents of the community to get suggestions and complaints before the council, and enabling the council representatives to increase their ability for helping the people of the community to take initiative in dealing with local needs. Social workers on the staff of a neighborhood council in a large eastern metropolis in the United States were successful in helping the people of the council's neighborhood to reduce local vandalism and violence, operate a Little League athletic program, publish a council newspaper, secure a grant for a remedial-reading program, and develop — with the cooperation of the City Planning Department — an urban renewal plan. They did not find that they could solve major social problems primarily from a grassroots neighborhood base; but they could, through the neighborhood council, help integrate schools, politics, and housing into the neighborhood and the community. 4 Roles in federated fund-raising agencies. Social work professionals who are employed with a community's federated fund-raising agency have year-round roles to perform even though there is a recurring seasonal climax of work when the annual fund-raising campaign is held. During most of the year, there is a public relations role to be filled, which involves the social worker in making talks before local groups and in supplying information to the mass media about the agencies that get funds from the federated fund-raising agency — all of this directed toward creating a favorable image of the united way of raising money to finance the work of local voluntary (private) 4. Harold H. Weissmann, Community Councils and Community (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), pp. 125, 155-166.

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social welfare agencies. There is also an advisory role to be filled as consultant in working with committees of the federated-fund agency to screen the agencies that apply to be included in the annual fund drive, to scrutinize the budget requests of each participating agency, and to formulate an overall fund goal. At the time of the annual fund drive, the public relations role is intensified as volunteers and mass media have to be prepared to present to the community the goals of the approaching campaign as well as human interest appeals that attract attention to the services rendered by participating agencies. The role of coordinating the activities of volunteers who will conduct the fund solicitations is added to other roles. The skill of the social work professional, so far as community development is concerned, is measured by the adequacy of the financial support obtained for meeting the community's social welfare needs, by the perceptiveness with which funds are equitably distributed among the social welfare agencies, and by the degree to which the federated fund-raising approach unites the people of the community and, despite unavoidable frictions and irritations, leaves them more knowledgeable about community needs and better able to work collectively in solving community problems. In 1971, there were 2,107 communities in the United States and 134 communities in Canada that conducted federated fund-raising campaigns. 5 Such drives, according to Ford, have been able to raise more money for member agencies at less cost and with less expenditure of time and effort than is possible in separate fund-raising efforts, though a limited number of drives with current popular appeal and strong leadership may be successful. 6 Roles in recruitment of volunteers. The main roles performed by social workers in the recruitment of volunteers are a public relations role, a coordinating role, and a training role. The public relations role involves the social worker as an enabler, helping community residents become aware of the need for volunteers to serve the social 5. Summary Campaign Data, 1971 (New York: United Way of America, February, 1972). 6. Lyman S. Ford, 'Federated Financing', in Encyclopedia of Social Work, Harry L. Lurie (ed.) (New York: National Association of Social Workers, 1965), p. 331.

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welfare subsystem and of the nature of the responsibilities the volunteers would carry. It also calls for the social worker to assist social welfare agencies in identifying ways in which volunteers can be used constructively either in supplementing the roles of agency staff members so that larger numbers of clients can be served or in rendering services the agency cannot render with the staff it has available. The coordinating role involves the social worker more as a consultant, conferring with the different social welfare agencies as they decide jointly the number of volunteers each agency needs and for what purposes and then how the volunteers can be assigned appropriately to the various agencies. The training role calls for the social worker to join with the agency and agency clients to decide what types of preparation the volunteers need to have in the placements to which they are assigned and to either provide that preparation or see that it is provided by competent personnel. The roles that social workers perform in recruiting volunteers for the social welfare subsystem prove rewarding to the extent that the volunteers contribute meaningfully to the work of an agency, gain an understanding of social welfare needs and resources, and experience a sense of satisfaction from their involvement. Failure to attain these ends tends to result when volunteers get only a sense of participation rather than meaningful involvement, their services do not promote the well-being of clients or the work of the agency, and their contacts with the agency are disheartening or disillusioning. Negative volunteer experiences such as these also tend to be disenchanting for the social work professionals involved. 7 In an effort to make the experiences of volunteers more positive for them, for the social welfare subsystem, and for the community new approaches are being tried in communities of the United States under the auspices of the United States Office of Voluntary Action, established in 1969. This organization works with the privately financed National Center for Voluntary Action, founded early in 1970, to encourage local communities to make more active use of volunteers. Some cities have changed their central volunteer bureaus 7. For a report of research findings on negative effects that volunteer programs can have for volunteers, agency personnel, and clients, see Esther Stanton, Clients Come Last (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1970).

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into centers for voluntary action that have broader functions and representation. Local social service and health departments have organized new programs that use volunteers, for example, to supply transportation for clients, tutor school children, and provide friendly visiting services to elderly or house-bound persons. 8 Roles in Shorter-Range

Community

Actions

In addition to performing regularized roles in continuing or recurrent community actions, social workers perform roles in particular shorter-range community action projects. Generally speaking, the roles are of an innovating nature and are employed in new and relatively unstructured programs. Since the 1960's, interest has been increasing in social worker roles that call for more active social intervention than was traditional in United States social work circles after World War I. These roles are used mainly in community actions undertaken in behalf of low-income families and persons of minority status, groupings of people designated by traditional social work practitioners as 'hard-to-reach' clients. Social workers performing in the new roles characteristically assume that people in the lower social strata need concrete forms of help rather than the intensive psychiatric type of therapy usually offered to clients in the middle and upper social strata. The economic difficulties and self-defeating attitudes of low-income and minority status persons are viewed as rising mainly from the sociocultural circumstances under which the people live rather than from innate factors within the individual's personality. The offending sociocultural circumstances are perceived to be in such forms as inferior schools, substandard housing, discrimination in employment, lack of opportunity to participate in community decision-making activities, and homes characterized by 8. For more detailed discussion of the activities of social workers who serve coordinating agencies, see Genevieve W. Carter, 'Social Work Community Organization Methods and Processes', in Concepts and Methods of Social Work, Walter A. Friedlander (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958), pp. 201-228; and 'Techniques and Methods of Coordinating Public and Voluntary Services at the Neighborhood Level: I. in Japan', by Yuichi Nakamara; '... II. in the United States', by Abner D. Silverman;'... III. in the United Kingdom', by Elizabeth R. Littlejohn, in Urban Development: Proceedings of the XHIth International Conference of Social Work (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1967), pp. 319-337.

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economic and psychological insecurity. Social workers attempting to deal with the effects of these conditions may try to get the conditions themselves changed, even if this means having radical changes made in the subsystems of the community. The Mobilization for Youth delinquency-control project inaugurated in New York's Lower East Side, in 1962, provided the blueprint for many of the new and innovating social worker roles that have emerged since that time in communities of the United States. Similar roles have been developed in some of the community actions initiated by local action agencies operated under the Office of Economic Opportunity and in neighborhood service centers established in Model Cities programs. The following illustrations, taken from Mobilization for Youth social work assignments in neighborhood service centers and in the schools, give an idea of what the roles are like. The school assignments included a casework service program, a home-visiting program, and a suspension-hearing program. Social work professionals on the staffs of the MFY neighborhood service centers were expected at first to perform in the dual capacities of 'social planner' and 'social broker'. As social planner, the social worker would have long-term contact with the client in a therapy-type relationship that was intended to change the selfdefeating attitudes and behavior of the project's low-income target population. As social broker, the social worker would concentrate on seeing to it that the client received such immediate concrete services as homemaker help, legal aid, and emergency loans where these were needed to relieve environmental pressures that obstructed the client's use of therapy or sapped energies that might be devoted to family or job activities. As the need to increase caseloads became more acute and the overwhelming need for concrete services became more obvious, the social workers gave up the long-term counseling services to concentrate on their social broker activities. Their roles took on a function new to contemporary social work practice, the function of intervening with local organizations, such as schools and social agencies, on behalf of clients instead of working with clients to enable them to act in their own behalf. This led into roles in which social workers were expected to serve as advocates, challenging and seeking changes in agency policies that were believed to be unfair

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to the target population. Their activities included writing letters and making telephone calls to request changes in the handling of specific cases as well as the more activist functions of organizing welfare rights groups to demand changes in agency policies and practices that in themselves tended to obstruct opportunity for, or dull the motivation of, the individuals and families being served. 9 Social workers who were in the MFY school casework service program were in the traditional position of caseworkers, but they performed their caseworker roles in more flexible ways than usual. For example, they limited the caseload to ten or twelve pupils — a far smaller load than is typically carried by caseworkers — and they worked only with children referred by the school guidance counselor on the basis of their having serious problems that were not classifiable as psychiatric in nature. Visits with families were held in the home or in a restaurant or some other informal setting rather than in the office. Stress was placed upon taking immediate and concrete types of action, including direct intervention with school authorities and local social agencies when the children or their families seemed to need such intervention. The same social workers who handled the caseworker roles also developed the home-visiting program. In this program, interested teachers, if they wished to participate, could earn credits and a stipend, by making visits to the homes of their pupils and by attending a series of lectures given by specialists on such subjects as 'Family and Culture Patterns of the Community' and 'Patterns of Puerto Rican Life'. The social workers accompanied fearful teachers on their initial home visits and performed such additional roles as interpreting to the teachers the meanings that certain features of lower-class life styles could be expected to have for the children 9. Hettie Jones, 'Neighborhood Service Centers', in Individual and Group Services in the Mobilization for Youth Experience, Harold H. Weissman (ed.) (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp. 33-53. For fuller discussion of the social worker's broker, advocate, and activist roles, see Charles F. Grosser, 'Community Development Programs Serving the Urban Poor', Social Work, 10 (July, 1965): 17-20; John H. Behling, 'The Radicalization of Social Work', New Perspectives: The Berkeley Journal of Social Welfare, 1 (Fall, 1967): 87-94; and Martin Eisman, 'Social Work's New Role in the Welfare-Class Revolution', Social Work, 14 (April, 1969): 80-86. For discussion of the Mobilization for Youth project in relation to community conflict, see Chapter 6 of this text.

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and helping the families to accept and understand the unexpected visits of the teachers. More than a hundred teachers participated in the home-visiting program over the four years it was in operation, and about six thousand families were visited. The social worker in the suspension-hearing program served as an advocate. When a child was suspended from school, the board of education notified the social worker of the scheduled hearing date and the social worker then worked up the case in detail. This involved: holding conferences with the guidance counselor, teacher, principal, and possibly other school personnel; making a home visit to the family; contacting any social agencies working with the family or the child; and preparing a social history, with recommendations for action. At the hearing, the social worker acted as liaison person for the family pointing out the child's rights in the situation and interpreting to the hearing panel from the board of education the meaning of the information in the social history and the differences between cultural norms in the school and those in the child's family and neighborhood background. After the hearing, the social worker assisted the child and the family in following through on the official recommendations or decisions made. This might involve helping the child get adjusted in another school or helping the family to get needed services from a local social agency. Panel actions considered by the social worker to be unfair to the pupil were typically referred to the Legal Division of MFY. The main difference between traditional roles of school social workers and the new roles social workers played in the schools for the MFY project was that the new roles called for changing the education subsystem to fit the needs of students instead of helping the students and their families adjust to the demands of the school. The social workers' efforts were resisted by school authorities and by many, but not all, of the teachers. After four years the MFY program in the schools was terminated, but this was not before the social workers felt assured that the value of developing closer relationships between schools and their slum neighborhoods had been demonstrated convincingly. 10 10. Hettie Jones, 'School-Community Relations', in Employment and Educational Services in the Mobilization for Youth Experience, Harold H. Weissman (ed.) (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp. 136-147.

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Besides the innovative types of social worker roles just illustrated f r o m the Mobilization for Youth project, a n u m b e r of other examples of such roles may be cited f r o m other c o m m u n i t y action efforts. The roles of social workers in the Bristol Social Project (discussed also in Chapters 5 and 8) were distinctive for their marked degree of flexibility and permissiveness. In that project, social workers were engaged in an action research e f f o r t testing the effectiveness of a group work approach in trying to reach alienated low-income y o u t h and to gain their acceptance by 'respectable' residents of the c o m m u n i t y . 1 1 The roles of social work c o m m u n i t y organizers w h o have followed the Alinsky model are distinctive for the activist and c o n f r o n t a t i o n tactics they employ, for example, in organizing rent strikes, marches, picketing of social welfare agencies, and other demonstrations. 1 2 Social worker roles in the Community Service Society, New York, were changed markedly in 1971 when that agency abandoned its traditional individual counseling and therapy orientation in favor of a new kind of continuing c o m m u n i t y action e f f o r t to attack the sociocultural circumstances under which low-income people live. In their new roles, social workers are expected to serve as advocates working directly with neighborhood groups in delivering services, putting pressure on agencies in the governmental subsystem to get changes they believe will relieve environmental stresses on lowincome slum residents, and seeking ways to coordinate the work of public and private agencies in the social welfare subsystem. 1 3 Most of the social worker roles described here are having their fullest use in urban c o m m u n i t y development efforts in relatively modernized communities. Some are spreading t o efforts in rural communities, for example, in projects with migrant farm workers. 11. John Spencer, Stress and Release in an Urban Estate (London: Tavistock, 1964). 12. For fuller discussion of Alinsky's methods, see Chapter 6 of this text; for description of the organization of Woodlawn neighborhood led by Alinsky staff members, see Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York: Random House,1964), pp. 308-355;and for description o f t h e FIGHT project in Rochester, New York, see Joan Levin Ecklein and Armand Lauffer, Community Organizers and Social Planners (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972), pp. 64-78. 13. Mildred Pratt, 'Partisan of the Disadvantaged', Social Work, 17 (July, 1972): 68-69.

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In communities of newly modernizing societies, in countries of Asia and Africa, for example, social worker roles have typically been and still are more social action oriented than is true of traditional social work practice in communities of Western countries. These roles involve social workers in community action efforts to improve housing, health, and education as a means of raising levels of living of economically depressed people and in the hope of preventing many of the personal problems believed to be generated by disadvantaged life ways. 14

ROLES OF PLANNERS

The planning aspects of community action efforts in modernizing and relatively modernized communities are increasingly being handled by professional planners. These professionals share with lay participants and with professional participants from other fields their expertise for bringing together specialized knowledge from a variety of fields to produce a rational and practical design for promoting what the different participants collectively consider to be the community's well-being. While planning has typically been in relation to such specific environmental features as water supply, housing, waste disposal, and street or road lay-out, the current trend is toward a more comprehensive type of social planning that reflects concern for people as well as for the physical environment. 15 The professional planner's link with community development is likely to be established in one of two ways: he may be in the regular employ of the community, on the staff of a planning department or a housing authority, for example, and in this position responsible for seeing that community action efforts are continually initiated 14. See, for example, Jan F. Dejongh, 'Western Social Work and the AfroAsian World', Social Service Review, 43 (1969): 50-58. 15. See, for example, Roy Lubove, 'A Community-Planning Approach to City-Building', Social Work, 10 (April, 1965): 56-57; Elizabeth Wood, 'SocialWelfare Planning', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 352 (1964): 119-128; and Norton E. Long,'Planning for Social Change', in Planning, 1968 (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1968), pp. 67-79.

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and implemented as needed; or he may be on the staff of a private planning firm and either employed or engaged as a volunteer participant in a given community action project. In Communist countries, planners are exclusively in government employ. In any case, plans developed by professional planners are subject to the approval not only of the employing group, but also of whatever governmental authority has jurisdiction in the spheres of community life that are dealt with in the plans. The typical roles that professional planners play in applying the process of community development involve them in working with the people of the community to: gather and analyze data that are used in formulating plans for community actions; prepare long-range master plans that can guide overall purposeful community change; draft short-range, detailed plans for specific action efforts; and devise plans for the development of new communities. These roles are usually performed through the approaches of the enabler and the consultant, though there is a trend toward greater use of the advocate approach. The current trend in the fact-finding role of planners is to bring together data on the sociocultural as well as the ecological and demographic aspects of the community. Research on the income levels, consumer practices, employment status, attitudes, and values of a target population may, for example, be fused with research on such environmental conditions as housing, street lighting, and accessibility of needed services. 16 A somewhat different use of sociocultural research is for the purpose of determining the unique heritage of a community so that the planning for its change can preserve its distinctive 'personality' in such forms as the architecture and ecological arrangement of its residences and public buildings. 17

16. See, for example, Donald H. Webster, Urban Planning and Municipal Public Policy (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 124, 127. 17. F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., 'Foundations of Urban Planning', in Urban Life and Form, Werner Z. Hirsch (ed.) (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 245; and Henry Fagin, 'The Evolving Philosophy of Urban Planning', in Urban Research and Policy Planning, Leo F. Schnore and Henry Fagin (eds.) (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1967), pp. 309-328.

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Preparing Master Plan The role of preparing a master plan involves the planner in making comprehensive and long-range projections for inaugurating a broadscale community action effort or for providing a blueprint by which plans and actions of a more limited and short-range type can be developed. For a given community or for a metropolitan region embracing a number of communities, the planner would identify in the master plan the sites for government buildings, schools, churches, parks, recreation areas, and airports, as well as for business, industrial, and residential land uses. And he would project in the plan the lay-out for streets and roads, water and sewerage systems, and arrangements for other public utilities to accommodate anticipated changes in the size and composition of the population. He might also, in line with a current trend, incorporate provisions intended to control air and water pollution, traffic congestion, and crime. In countries that have national planning programs, an attempt is made to coordinate planning at all levels. For instance, in the National Community Development Program in India and the Village Agricultural and Industrial Development Program in Pakistan there is a hierarchy of planners who design plans to cover specified time periods and specified geographic areas, ranging from the nation as a whole to districts composed of 20 to 100 villages. At the bottom of the hierarchy, village level workers assist the members of a community in formulating plans that are meaningful for the locality and at the same time compatible with the plans of the national program. Similar set-ups exist in Communist countries where centralized, broad-scale planning is emphasized. Planners use the master plan in helping the people of a community to make the physical environment more functional, healthful, beautiful, interesting, and efficient; to promote concern for the community as a whole over concern for personal or special group interests; to achieve a democratic kind of participation in deciding on, and carrying out, community changes; to coordinate the technical and political aspects of community action; and to inject longrange considerations into the determination of short-range actions. 18 18. T. J. Kent, The Urban General Plan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964), pp. 25-26.

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The futility of developing detailed piecemeal plans without the guiding framework of a master plan has been emphasized by the Goodmans, who have also stressed the importance of planning for the community as a whole, of making maximum use of the geographic features of the locality, of considering various alternatives before formulating a master plan, and of designing the plan in such a way that it enhances the values held by residents of the community. 19 Preparing Short-Range Plans for Specific Community

Actions

Typical shorter-range community action efforts involve planners in the preparation of detailed plans for specific arenas of community life, such as housing demolition and construction, and for specific ecological areas, such as the slums or central business district. The professional planner's roles are likely to call for close collaboration with the governmental and economic subsystems and, to an increasing extent, with the subsystem of social welfare. The governmental subsystem may need to use its power of eminent domain to acquire property that is to be changed in an urban improvement project, its power of taxation to finance the community's part of the costs of the project, and its powers of legislation and law enforcement to enact and enforce zoning laws, ordinances for subdivision control, building codes, fire prevention regulations, and sanitation codes. The economic subsystem may be relied upon to finance particular projects, such as the development of new shopping centers or industrial parks, and, in collaboration with civic leaders, to provide support for bond issues and for political candidates who favor the planning effort. Either the governmental or the economic subsystem or both may be needed to construct new housing, to modernize dilapidated or deteriorating structures, to beautify city streets, to establish recreation areas, museums, or art galleries, and to supply needed health and social services. Three types of programs that make use of the community development process and that engage planners in preparing short-range plans are illustrated in urban renewal, housing programs, and the Model Cities program. 19. Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas (2nd ed.; New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 6.

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Planning for urban renewal. Urban renewal programs in various parts of the world represent community actions fostered by local and central governments toward the goals of reconstructing the deteriorating portions of the inner city and relieving traffic congestion in and around the city. From 1954 to 1973, the federal government of the United States made funds available to cities to help them finance such undertakings. Planners served prominently at the community level in the urban renewal projects. They worked first with the city's governing body in preparing the plan of action that was basic to the application for federal funds. This application had to show that the city could assure up-to-date housing and building codes that were competently enforced; financial resources to cover the local share of the costs of the project; an effective local public agency, with power of eminent domain, that was responsible for administering the local urban renewal effort; neighborhood analyses identifying the extent and intensity of blight; adequate organization and plans for rehousing the people displaced by the slum clearance or rehabilitation activities; and citizen participation through an officially designated advisory committee. Once the project was approved, planners worked with an officially designated local agency in perfecting the plan and getting it implemented. This agency had the legal power — lacking to private enterprise — that enabled it to acquire whatever blighted areas had to be taken from private owners. It also received from the federal government most of the financial means needed to pay for the project, i. e., the major part of the difference between what it cost to buy and clear the slum property and the amount obtained from resale of that property. The usual sales were made to government for public buildings or parks and to private investors for apartments, office buildings, and commercial establishments. The outlay of public funds, according to Stewart, was more than matched by private investment. 20 Planners have been praised for taking advantage of the urban renewal program to replace cluttered, unsightly, and obsolescent downtown areas with wide avenues, attractive parks, handsome 20. Maxwell S. Stewart, Can We Save Our Cities?, Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 374 (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1965), p. 9.

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housing, and monumental buildings. 2 1 On the other hand, they have been severely criticized for displacing families without making provision for their relocation in adequate housing 2 2 and for 'unnecessarily' uprooting whole blocks of urban dwellers, destroying the basic relationships that the people had developed with one another. 2 3 Abrams, while recognizing the failure to provide substantial low-cost housing as a part of the earlier urban renewal projects, concluded, nevertheless, that the urban renewal program stimulated support for public housing and in addition achieved such accomplishments as correction of traffic problems, provision of playgrounds, encouragement of aesthetic design in d o w n t o w n areas, provision of high-rental housing in central locations, and assurance of increased tax revenues. 2 4 The displacement of families was alleviated, to some extent, by the adoption of strengthened federal machinery for supervising relocation; by provision of federal oneyear rent subsidies, up to $500, to help families move into new and more expensive quarters; and by increased emphasis u p o n rapid rehabilitation that requires only temporary relocation of residents. The earlier urban renewal programs elicited minimal c o m m u n i t y participation. The legislation on which they were based called only f o r a public hearing to be held before a specific piece of property was acquired. A t t e m p t s beyond this to get local residents involved were addressed mainly to middle-class persons whose backing was sought for specific project proposals. However, as opposition to urban renewal projects became more militant, the programs became more responsive to the protesters, who were usually low-income residents and their middle-class allies; and they gradually made 21. Carter McFarland, 'Urban Renewal', in Urban Housing, William L. C. Wheaton, Grace Milgram, and Margy Ellin Meyerson (eds.) (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 428. 22. Gans, for example, pointed out that data from a 1961 study of urban renewal projects in 41 cities of the United States showed that 60 percent of the dispossessed tenants had obtained housing in other slums and that those who had secured better housing were having to pay more rent than they could afford. Herbert J. Gans, 'The Failure of Urban Renewal', in Urban Renewal, James Q. Wilson (ed.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 539-540. 23. Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 136-137. 24. Charles Abrams, 'Some Blessings of Urban Renewal', in Urban Renewal, James Q. Wilson (ed.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 559-580.

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provisions for having more representative participation of community groups in the policy-making bodies of the local urban renewal agencies. Urban renewal in Western European countries has differed from that in the United States in that it has directed its largest projects toward the rebuilding of war-damaged cities, has placed more reliance upon private initiative, has exercised much less frequently the governmental right of eminent domain, has invested more tax money in expanding mass transit facilities, and has been more recently confronted with problems that stem from widespread automobile ownership. 2 5 Planning for housing. Planners, within and independently of urban renewal, work with community action projects in the field of housing — planning for at least five purposes: to keep housing construction abreast of population growth; to provide replacements for dwellings lost by fire, deterioration, or any other natural or man-made causes; to keep housing in good repair to prevent its deterioration; to get standard housing within the reach of even the lowest income groups; and to experiment with aesthetic and functional housing design that can satisfy a wide range of tastes and supply a wide range of housing conveniences. The current trend is toward integration of plans for housing with plans for the overall development of the community. Furthermore, governments over the world are assuming increasing responsibility for housing through such media as ownership and operation of public housing projects, provision of long-range and low-interest housing loans as well as mortgage guarantees for loans obtained through private credit agencies, and provision of building and rental subsidies for low-income, elderly, and handicapped persons. This increasing government involvement is supported by empirical findings on the large-scale extent of substandard housing and by the assumption that substandard housing is conducive to crime and delinquency, ill health, mental illness, low morale, low self-esteem, low social participation, poor school performance, and family break25. Leo Grebler, Urban Renewal for European Countries: Its Emergence and Potentials (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 11, 16, 23-31.

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down. Discriminatory housing practices directed toward certain minority groups have also been the basis for government intervention. Planners have been involved mainly with housing development planning efforts in three ecological areas: the suburban fringe, where most new housing generally is added piecemeal or through extensive subdivision developments at the edge of existing built-up areas; areconstructed central site, such as a former slum area cleared through urban renewal; and a site selected for a complete new community, in which varied types of housing, industry, commerce, and services are combined to form a new and relatively self-sufficient urban entity. In the United States, planners work with both private enterprise and local housing authorities. Their roles call for them to see that building codes are observed and that sites chosen for housing are readily accessible to public utilities, transportation, employment, shopping areas, schools, and other services. Private enterprise supplies most of the new housing at the community level, but it is almost entirely limited to groups in the middle and upper income brackets. Nearly all of the new housing that has been constructed for families with lowest incomes has, since 1937, been provided by local public housing authorities. Yet, by 1964, low-cost public housing constituted less than two percent of all the housing in the United States. 26 New housing for families in lower-income strata whose incomes are just high enough to disqualify them for low-cost public housing has not been substantially developed by either private enterprise or government sources. In community actions to establish low-income public housing projects, planners in some communities have roles that involve them in planning for services and facilities that will be provided with the housing. These roles call for the planners to work with people who live near the new housing site to find out and decide on what types of services and facilities are needed and desired; to offer recommendations regarding the physical arrangements to be made in the housing project for locating the desired facilities; and to bring into the planning process representatives of whatever 26. Scott Greer, 'Problems of Housing and Renewal of the City', in Social Problems, Howard S. Becker (ed.) (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 532.

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public or private agencies agree to provide particular services, such as recreation, day care, family counseling, or health clinics. Planners also have roles in servicing public housing projects that have already been established. In cases of this sort, the planners are expected to keep abreast of demographic changes in the tenant population, for example, in age composition, and to help arrange for modifications of services and facilities in ways that will meet the needs and wishes of the occupants of the housing project. This calls not only for collecting and analyzing up-to-date statistical data on the occupants, but also for maintaining regular and open channels of communication with them and with the project's administrative or decision-making bodies. It is likely, furthermore, to call for the planners to be in continuing communication and collaboration with the personnel of social service, health, church, education, and similar agencies who have their own programs in the area of the housing project. Typical policy decisions about which planners are concerned have to do with requirements affecting eligibility to live in the housing project or to receive services and use facilities. Planners may also be involved in making suggestions about the sizes and spatial arrangements of apartments in new housing projects that are being planned. 2 6 Planners perform other types of community action roles in aiding such sponsoring organizations as civic groups, labor unions, churches, veterans' groups, and private foundations to locate sites and design plans for cooperative housing. The usual pattern is for the planners and the sponsoring organization to assume responsibility for arranging land purchase, architectural design, financing, incorporation, organization, and construction. Members save from 15 to 20 percent on housing costs through the nonprofit basis of the operation and in addition may deduct from taxable income their share of the co-op's interest and property tax payments, just as individual homeowners do. When a member leaves, the co-op resells his share to the incoming owner at a price determinable under the bylaws. No change is needed in the title, mortgage, or insurance. The nature of the housing cooperative makes it easy for members to plan together for joint purchases of fuel, milk, equipment, and 26. Robert Perlman and Arnold Gurin, Community Organization Planning (New York: J o h n Wiley and Sons, 1972), p p . 241-242.

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landscaping as well as for such joint ventures as libraries, swim clubs, insurance groups, camps, credit unions, nursery schools, sitter swaps, health plans, and social clubs. 27 In Western Europe, planners who are associated with community actions in the field of housing are likely to be linked with the so-called nonprofit sector, i. e., with cooperative housing, publiclyowned housing, and housing owned and operated by nonprofit foundations and by associations. Nonprofit housing, according to Medmore, constitutes at least two-thirds of the new building in the Netherlands and in Sweden and one-third of that in West Germany. Cooperative housing supplies a significant part of the total housing in some countries, for example, 45 percent in Switzerland, 25 percent in Belgium, 19 percent in Norway, and 12 percent in Finland.28

In the Scandinavian countries, planners working with large-scale nonprofit housing associations apply the community development process in making long-range plans for housing and in providing housing for families of low and moderate income. By using a mass production technique, these associations achieve economies in the purchase of land, building materials, and services, and pass on the savings to the consumer. 29 In Great Britain, community action efforts involve planners associated with the local housing authority in planning for new housing, and slum clearance where necessary; in seeing that adequate standards are maintained in newly built and existing houses; and in insuring, as far as possible, that housing conditions are satisfactory in the local area. Planners in the public sector work closely with planners in the private sector to construct new housing, to eliminate slums, to modernize older buildings, and to assure that low-income families receive the government rent subsidies that can enable them to have adequate housing. 30 27. Cooperative League of the U. S. A., 'Cooperatives U. S. A.', in Housing — The Cooperative Way, Jerome Liblit (ed.) (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 64. 28. J. F. Medmore, 'Housing Cooperatives in Europe', in Housing — The Cooperative Way, Jerome Liblit (ed.) (New York: Twayne,1964), pp.114-115. 29. Jerome Liblit, 'Scandinavian Pattern and Our Housing', in Housing — The Cooperative Way, Jerome Liblit (ed.) (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 235. 30. Social Services in Britain (New York: British Information Services, rev., February, 1969), pp. 64-69.

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Planning in demonstration community actions. Since the early 1960's, the federal government of the United States has sponsored and financed a variety of experimental-type community actions in which planners have occupied key positions. Typical of these actions are projects developed in the war on poverty and in the Model Cities program. The roles of the planners have been distinctive, in calling for the preparation of highly comprehensive plans, the use of new and imaginative approaches, the maintenance of a wide range of local contacts and coordination across social-class and racial lines, and the formulation of means for evaluating the actions to determine their effectiveness and desirability. The Model Cities program, inaugurated in 1966, assisted (up to 80 percent of the local share of costs) a limited number of selected small and large cities in making and carrying out plans for demonstration community actions directed toward specific ecological areas. The idea was to rehabilitate not only the city's slums and blighted sections, but also the people whose social functioning is presumed to be impaired by the lifeways of those sections. Planners played a key role in preparing a city's application for a Model Cities award. The application had to describe the areas of the city to be developed and had to show detailed plans for a development program that could be completed within six years. If the city was selected to receive Model Cities funds, the planners' roles through the first year of the six-year period involved them in working closely with residents of the target neighborhoods, the city planning commission, elected city officials, professionals in the social welfare subsystem, and influential members of the community to formulate specific and detailed plans for all the various projects and activities to be included in the comprehensive demonstration community action. Usually, they started off with a broad plan for housing and physical development and moved from that to plans for a variety of services designed to open up opportunities for low-income residents in such spheres as job training, employment placement, education, health care, social services, and political participation. Over the five-year period of implementation, the roles of planners called for them to assist the city in: using such existing federal aids as those already established under urban renewal, public housing, housing for the elderly, mortgage insurance programs for lowincome and moderate-income housing, and the rent supplement

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program; coordinating the Model Cities community action with governmental and nongovernmental programs in the fields of social work, health care, social security, employment, transit, highways, and education; assigning out the portions of the Model Cities action that could be carried on by such groups as neighborhood cooperatives, tenants' organizations, and indigenous nonprofit neighborhood corporations; contracting with local or extracommunity agencies or personnel to perform certain specialized services needed in the community action; and seeing to it that the various facets of the action effort were evaluated so that plans could be modified as needed. Demonstration community actions, such as those developed in Model Cities programs, are intended to try out new approaches in dealing with community change. The new approaches are then to be evaluated for their effectiveness and desirability. Those found to be effective and desirable are expected to be continued on a permanent basis in the community and/or duplicated in other communities. Such demonstrations, however, face at least two major sets of related difficulties. One involves the difficulties that are associated with getting a new approach fully and fairly tried and the other involves the difficulties of structuring and conducting the action in such a way that its effectiveness and desirability can be evaluated. One obstacle to getting a full and fair trial of the experimental approach is the failure to get the personnel who are qualified to carry on the demonstration action in the manner that is intended. Even when qualified personnel are obtained pressures may develop to interrupt or modify the effort. These pressures tend to come from the target population and/or their advocates, from citizens of the community at large, from the staff of the sponsoring organization or of local organizations that have long been serving the target area, and/or from politicians. In some cases, the pressures can be resisted if there is sufficient support from other sources. Sometimes the action can be changed in minor ways that do not interfere with trying out the new approach or the pressure may result in such major modifications that the new approach cannot be tested. In an extreme situation the whole action may be terminated. Difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness and desirability of the new approach arise first from failure to incorporate in the planning

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for the action an adequate design for evaluation. A second difficulty develops when goals are not formulated in terms that can be measured. A third difficulty develops if the action is changed in any way that can affect the outcomes substantially. A fuller analysis is given in Chapter 8 of the difficulties and potentialities of project evaluation research. Planning for New

Communities

Another role of professional planners in relation to community development is in projects to establish whole new communities. Since such communities are at the outset unpeopled, the use of the community development process in their creation is relative to the extent to which the people of existing communities work together with government or private enterprise toward the goal of getting a new community established and even more to the extent that the people who settle in the new locality work together to develop a social organization that transforms the mere residential settlement into a community. A program to establish new communities has been under way in Great Britain since 1946. Community action efforts to accomplish such an objective involve professional planners and local authorities in selecting a suitable site and preparing a master plan for transforming the site into a new community. The plan usually includes provisions for houses, apartment houses, factories, schools, shops, churches, health centers, libraries, streets, water supply, sewerage, gas and electricity, postal, telegraph and telephone facilities, parks and playing fields, parking facilities, and such public buildings as the town hall, law courts, police, fire, and bus stations. The capital cost of developing the new community is advanced from public funds.31 Three objectives are inherent in the British pattern: (1) to provide new dwellings in pleasant surroundings for workers residing in the slums of large cities, their relocation relieving the pressure on urban housing; (2) to get a balanced economy for the new community from the relocation of industrial and commercial firms from the large cities; (3) to reduce commuting to, and congestion in, 31. Ibid.., pp. 58-60.

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the large cities. New communities also serve as real-life laboratories for urban design within which planners can experiment with architecture, traffic management, and social engineering. In the United States, planners who are active in the development of new communities are almost exclusively associated with private enterprise. This type of urban development requires large capital investment and involves long-range risk as well as heavy carrying costs. 3 2 Despite these obstacles, actions are being taken in many parts of the country t o develop new communities. The case of the new c o m m u n i t y of Reston, opened in 1965 in Fairfax C o u n t y , Virginia, near Washington, D. C., shows h o w planners and developers combined physical and social planning in an effort to facilitate development of the attributes that create a c o m m u n i t y . For example, they designed a physical lay-out that would encourage close-knit social interaction. They arranged streets, driveways, and residential sites so that the residents would be within easy walking distance of shops, c o m m u n i t y activities, and fellow residents. They made swimming pools, tennis courts, hiking trails, and golf courses readily accessible; and they encouraged the organization of music, craft, art-study, and similar groups. The planners, furthermore, arranged for the establishment of schools, stores, restaurants, office space, and religious facilities that n o t only permitted the people to meet the full range of their daily needs, b u t also gave t h e m ready opportunities to pursue c o m m o n interests and engage in shared activities that foster a sense of belonging. T o reduce the artificiality of the c o m m u n i t y situation, the planners developed a variety of housing styles and a mix of residential, recreational, civic, commercial, and industrial land uses that would make Reston attractive to people of all ages and markedly different income levels. The transformation of the plans into the reality of c o m m u n i t y life began as people, somewhat under the surveillance of the planner, t o o k up residence in Reston, formed friendships, made shared use of the shops and other facilities located around the plaza at the edge of Lake Anne, and pursued c o m m o n interests in the recreation 32. Emanuel M. Cartsonis, 'New Towns: A Challenge to Partnership of Private and Public Enterprise', in Planning 1967 (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1967), pp. 175-176.

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areas and at school or religious activities. Between 1 9 6 5 and 1 9 6 9 , the population of the community remained stable at about 5 , 0 0 0 . Its life style was described as 'urbane, sophisticated, activist, and artsy-craftsy' — just what the original planner had wanted. Hard-pressed financially, however, Reston was bought out in 1969 by Gulf Oil Company. Since then the population has grown rapidly — to 1 8 , 0 0 0 by mid-1972 — and is projected to grow even more rapidly to 7 5 , 0 0 0 by 1 9 8 0 . New industries have located in the community, recreation and school facilities have been expanded, ¿ i d highly varied housing types have been added in newly developed residential areas. The residents have formed several organizations mainly for the purpose of planning and carrying on activities of community wide interest, and they also engage in numerous volunteer activities that reach out to the whole community. For example, volunteer residents operate a free minibus service to assist Reston's elderly citizens in getting around without cars and also to help bridge geographical and psychological gaps that might otherwise separate residents of different neighborhoods. Reston residents also do volunteer work in the community snack and coffee shop on Lake Anne plaza and join forces in such recurring community actions as their annual spring festival. As the population has grown and the pioneering atmosphere of the community's earlier years has become overlaid with a more firmly established way of life, a different aspect of community experience has appeared in the form of teen-age drug use, vandalism, and one teen-age homicide victim. 33 Planners are also active in assisting with community actions to develop predominantly black communities in the United States. For example, plans were initiated in 1969 for Soul City — a community to be developed in eastern North Carolina for a projected population of lS.OOO.34 Israel, almost since its founding as a nation in 1 9 4 8 , has engaged planners in the planning of new towns that are intended to be sociocultural centers for their rural hinterland and industrial centers that provide employment away from the large urban communities. 33. Ken Ringle, 'Reston at Eight Years: New Town Loses Its Innocence', Washington Post, July 16, 1972, pp. A-l and A-8. 3 4 . John Morton, 'Soul City, N.C.: How a New Town Is to Be Created', National Observer, January 30, 1969.

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As of 1966, 30 towns had been developed. These towns contained 16 percent of the nation's population; and, according to Spiegel, they had had the added effect of encouraging population growth in peripheral areas and in smaller towns in their vicinity. The planers in every case located the new towns on sites that had little or no agricultural value so that they would not impair the country's agricultural resources.35 Among the world's more spectacular new cities developed by planners are Brasilia, officially installed as the new capital of Brazil in April, 1960; Chandigarh, capital of the Punjab in India; and Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, started in 1959. The planners who designed Ciudad Guayana, in emphasizing agricultural-industrial integration, located the city near potentially arable land that could be farmed and close to mineral and oil resources that could be developed and used industrially. The nearby Orinoco River provides a source of electric power as well as means for transporting industrial products, mainly steel, petrochemicals, and machinery.36 Planning in Rural

Communities

The roles that professional planners typically perform in urban communities are likely to be performed in rural communities, at both relatively modernized and modernizing levels, by other types of professional personnel, for example in extension service, health care, education, and social work. These professionals are likely to have responsibility for the planning aspects of community action efforts that are undertaken in, or that overlap with, their particular fields. Generally speaking, the plans they develop with the residents of a community are expected to be compatible with goals for community change that are formulated at a regional or national level. A distinctive feature of the planning situation is the complex of community improvement incentives provided by the government in such forms as loans and grants of money to upgrade housing, conserve soil and water resources, and establish community facilities for sewerage and water supply or for recreation. In modernizing 35. Erika Spiegel, New Towns in Israel (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 19-25. 36. Lloyd Rodwin, 'Ciudad Guayana: A New City', in Cities, Board of Editors, Scientific American (eds.) (New York: Knopf, 1966), pp. 88-104.

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communities, the incentives also include free or low-cost fertilizers, insecticides, and seeds.

ROLES OF HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS

Professional practitioners in the field of health care who are likely to be associated with community action efforts include physicians, dentists, hospital administrators, nurses, and sanitation engineers. Typical community actions they engage in are directed toward conducting communitywide inoculation campaigns, securing safe water supply for a community, training midwives as a means of reducing infant and maternal mortality, clearing swamps and taking other steps to control the spread of communicable diseases, arranging for fluoridation of a community's water system, developing new or expanded health services or facilities, and establishing programs in family planning. In relatively modernized communities, projects designed to extend or improve local mental health services and facilities are increasing in number and scope and are making use of such professionals as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers, and, in some cases, psychiatric nurses. The positions that health care professionals have in community actions are typically administrative, supervisory, or service delivery positions in a continuing, or in a specific short-range, action that is directed solely toward a community health objective or they are consultative positions in comprehensive community actions that have improvement of health as one of their multiple objectives. The activities of health care professionals in a community action are characteristically concerned with: (1) planning and coordinating health care services with one another and with related nonmedical services; (2) recruiting and training personnel for varying levels of health care service; and (3) delivering health care services directly to a target population either to demonstrate some health care measure or to prevent or treat some health problem that the action is trying to attack. Planning and Coordinating Health Care Services The roles of health care professionals in planning and coordinating

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health care services call for working with community residents to help them to assess local health needs, to get some understanding of the conditions that give rise to the needs, to make informed decisions about the priorities they will give to dealing with the various needs, to coordinate the community's existing health services so that they can complement rather than duplicate or compete with one another, and to link the health services and related agency services so that maximum joint effort can be directed toward common community objectives and fuller use can be made of available resources. Planning and coordinating activities are well illustrated in comprehensive health planning advisory councils, such as the one in Baltimore, Maryland, described by Hissock. Health care professionals and consumers of health care services collaborate in councils like this to carry on a continuing kind of community action, the objective of which is to plan and coordinate local provisions for health care. The health care personnel help the community's residents to set the priorities for the health services to be developed or stressed in the community over a specified time period, to decide on strategies to use in meeting local health needs, and to supply information that agencies and neighborhood groups can use in making decisions about local health matters. The consumers supply the professionals an inside view on local health needs, on weaknesses in existing provisions for health care, and on breakdowns in delivery of services. The professionals, in turn, apply their specialized knowledge to the consumers' first-hand perceptions and together the two sets of participants develop rational plans that suggest just what services can realistically be offered within given budgetary limits, that indicate the order of urgency among local health needs, and that specify the minimal competence that should be assured in any services that are offered. 3 7 Provisions of services for the mentally ill are being increasingly coordinated with other medical services through comprehensive community-based mental health centers that carry on a continuing sort of community action to upgrade health care in localities. Professionals from the field of medicine play a major part in integrating 37. William McC. Hissock, 'Urban and Regional Foundations for Health Planning', Public Health Reports, 85 (March, 1970): 274-275.

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psychiatric treatment with other types of medical and social work treatment.38 An effort to plan and coordinate delivery of health care services with delivery of other related social welfare services has been made in the neighborhood service centers, operated under Model Cities programs in communities of the United States. The centers serve as neighborhood bases from which local agencies can function, offering a more accessible and familiar setting than that of the agency's headquarters. Referrals can be made easily among the representatives of the various agencies based in the centers, neighborhood needs can be observed first-hand by agency personnel, and families needing multiple services can get them with relative ease and promptness. The part played by health care professionals in the planning and coordinating activities of a shorter range community action is exemplified in the Talladega, Alabama, project that was carried on in the 1950's. That project was centered around a community selfsurvey designed to identify local health needs and resources as a basis for improving health services and facilities in Talladega. Physicians, dentists, and nurses collaborated as volunteers with lay participants and a research team from the University of Alabama and contributed their specialized knowledge in the planning of the project's fact-finding activities. The county medical association, the public health officer, and the staff of the Citizens Hospital helped set the tone of coordination by giving their endorsement to the project. A local physician served as chairman of the Community Council, the coordinating organization that was formed to plan and carry out the project. A local dentist headed the Council's Committee on Dental Health, two physicians headed the Committee on Public Health, another physician was co-chairman of the Committee on Rural Health, and a group of nurses composed the Committee on Nursing. The health care professionals also collaborated with lay residents in developing plans for action following the survey. For example, a dentist helped with formulating a plan for fluoridating the city's water supply.39 38. National Commision on Community Health Services, Health Is a Community Affair (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1966), pp. 118-120. 39. Solon T. Kimball and Marion Pearsall, The Talladega Story (University:

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Working with Paraprofessionals, Indigenous Workers, and Volunteers Some of the responsibility of health care professionals in community actions is likely to involve them in helping to recruit, train, and/or supervise indigenous paraprofessionals who can take over some of the tasks ordinarily performed by professionals. Arrangements developed to a high degree in continuing types of community actions in communities of the People's Republic of China illustrate what is being done to a lesser degree in increasing numbers of communities in other countries. Under the system in China, professional medical personnel train and supervise three types of paraprofessional personnel — barefoot doctors, Red Guard doctors, and worker-doctors. The barefoot doctors, and Red Guards, in turn, train and have responsibility over health-workers, a fourth type of paraprofessional. The fully trained professionals give three to six months of formal training to the barefoot doctors, who are peasants who are paid as full-time agricultural workers but who devote half of their time to serving as medical workers in rural communities. They give ten days of training to the Red Guard doctors, who are usually housewives who work unpaid in urban neighborhood health centers under the supervision of fully trained physicians. And they give one to three months of training to the worker-doctors, who are factory workers who devote half time to production work and half time to rendering medical services to other factory workers. The formal training is in immunization, health education, and treatment of minor illnesses. On-the-job training picks up as soon as the formal training ends. Considerable emphasis is placed upon having the medical workers continue to function in their original roles as peasants, housewives, and factory workers so that they are not separated from the people they serve. Health workers are recruited from each lane (a subdivision of a community containing a health clinic, a branch department store, food markets, and a resident population of 2,000 to 8,000), and they work closely with the lane cadre and the residents of the lane who are their neighbors. 40 U. of Alabama Press, 1954), pp. 54-91. Research aspects of this project are described in Chapter 8 of this text. 40. Ruth Sidel, 'Social Services in China', Social Work (Nov., 1972): 1 0 , 1 2 .

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Delivering Health Care Services Professionals who participate in community actions that are designed to improve the health of community residents generally get involved in direct delivery of health care services. Their involvement is typically either to test out and demonstrate the effectiveness of some health care procedure or to assist in the institutionalization of some health service or facility that has been added to a community through a community action effort. An experimental health education community action carried on in Alexandra Township, a poverty-stricken and overcrowded African location at the edge of Johannesburg, South Africa, illustrates the delivery of health care services in a demonstration project. This project involved the medical staff of the Alexandra Health and University Clinic in working with the staff of a newly established family welfare agency, the personnel of which included social workers, nursery school teachers, and a nutritionist cookery demonstrator. The goal of the project was to test out the effectiveness of an intensive, multiple-service health education program that was designed to increase the Africans' use of the medical services available at the Health Center and the Clinic and to encourage their adoption of more modern health and nutrition practices than those they traditionally followed. The project personnel developed a nursery school for children in the target population and used interventive measures in seeing to it that children in that nursery school went for monthly checkups at the Clinic and for prompt treatment of any illness. Social workers and the nutritionist saw to it that homemakers in the target population got in-the-home instruction on how to prepare more nutritious meals than their usual maize and meat menus provided and on how to budget their small incomes in ways that would enable them to raise their level of living. 41

41. Violaine Junod, 'Entokozweni: Managing a Community Service in an Urban African Area', in A Casebook of Social Change, Arthur H. Niehoff (ed.) (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), pp. 137-154. For more detailed description of this project and leadership difficulties it encountered, see Chapter 5 of this text.

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ROLES OF EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS

Professionals in the field of education tend to be active in community actions directed toward such goals as reducing adult illiteracy, increasing functional literacy, providing job-training programs that enable unemployed and underemployed community residents to acquire the skills they need to upgrade their employment situation, and developing compensatory educational programs for those segments of the local population who are not able to compete in regular school programs. Projects for increasing functional literacy may focus on citizenship training, acquisition of communication skills, training in money management, and a variety of programs and activities intended to promote creative and constructive use of leisure time. The roles the education professionals play in the projects involve them in locating target populations, interpreting the goals of a given project to its target population and to the community at large, using their professional judgment to help lay participants select and obtain needed materials and facilities, and serving as instructors in demonstration programs established to increase the ability of the target group to participate in the mainstream of community life. There may also be roles that call for working with local civic, business, and political leaders to coordinate the education goals or activities of a given project with the goals and activities of the community's various subsystems. Assisting in Basic Education

Projects

Mass literacy campaigns have characteristically accompanied the establishment of nationalist or revolutionary governments in countries over the world. The program developed in Ghana as that newly independent nation began to modernize indicates the kind of community action that was typical. The chief roles of paid education professionals called for them to assist community residents in making arrangements for the literacy project and to hold short training sessions for the volunteers who were to do the actual teaching. Much publicity was given to the undertaking, and the community's tribute to successful participants was paid on Literacy Day at a gala celebration when badges and certificates were awarded to new

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literates and other special badges were presented to the teachers who had taught a specified quota of persons to read. 42 Assisting in Education Projects for Disadvantaged Persons The current emphasis of community actions in relatively modernized communities calls for roles that focus upon discovering innovative ways of meeting the educational needs of disadvantaged persons who are in or who are getting ready to enter or who have dropped out of regular school programs. Some of the projects, such as those organized under Head Start programs for preschool children from low-income families in the United States, seek to correct educational deficiencies. Others attempt to deal with emotional difficulties that are blocking educational achievement and that are assumed to be directly associated with the life style of low-income minority groups. The latter type of problem was tackled in a demonstration community action undertaken by the public school system and the Children's Clinic of the Institute for Living in Hartford, Connecticut The Board of Education supplied three public school teachers and the part-time services of a school social worker; the Clinic furnished its chief psychologist as director for the project, its clinic director — a psychiatrist — as the project's mental health consultant, and a psychiatric social worker to work with the children and to deal with crises. In addition there were nine first-year residents in general psychiatry, three student social workers, one intern psychologist, and two other staff members who worked under the supervision of the Clinic's four senior staff members as the children's psychotherapists. The goal of the project was to combine the three approaches of individual psychotherapy, special education, and environmental intervention in trying to find ways of meeting the needs of inner-city school children who could not conform to life within the classroom. School appraisal teams selected and referred pupils from grades one through three — fourteen children considered to be emotionally disturbed, but not psychotic or mentally retarded. Two classrooms 42. T. R. Batten, Communities and Their Development U. Press, 1957), pp. 125, 132-133.

(London: Oxford

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were set up on the third floor of the Clinic building, and the children attended classes there as if they were in the regular public school. They had regularly scheduled sessions with the psychotherapy staff, and all the clinical staff members were 'on call' as needed by the teaching staff to deal with the recurring difficulties presented by the children. Particular attempts were made to work with the children's parents to change their attitudes of suspicion and covert resentment toward the public school to more accepting and cooperative attitudes. Teachers were in traditional teaching roles, but they were encouraged to help parents see positive features in their children's performance and refrain from punishing a child at home for behavior he had already been punished for at school. A convincing discovery of the project was the need for protective services that exists among children from low-income family situations. The teachers and Clinic staff encountered some difficulty in working together. The teachers were inclined to stress ego control as necessary for the well-being of the class as a whole and to view destructive, aggressive behavior as taboo. On the other hand, the Clinic staff considered such behavior to be symptomatic and probably necessary to a given child's emotional growth. As the project continued, the teachers gradually learned to try to understand the children rather than to look for immediate means of solving their problems. And the clinicians found out how hard it is to teach emotionally disturbed children and how it is necessary at times to have direct solutions for disruptive behavior. 43 Mobilization for Youth attempted a demonstration community action to find ways of enabling low-income youth to overcome the economic, psychological, and scholastic obstacles to getting a college education. Education professionals participated in the project as supervisor, full-time teachers, and part-time tutors. The supervisor's role called for getting colleges to cooperate in the project and for arranging to locate and elicit the interest of low-income youth whose high school records were not good enough to get them scholarships or give them hope that they could go on for the post-high school study that would enable them to develop their po4 3 . Robert M. Leve, Paul N. Graffagnino, and Sara A. Avallone, 'An Attempt to Combine Clinical and Educational Resources: A Report on the First Year's Experience of a Therapeutic School', Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 10 (January, 1971): 108-123.

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tentials and secure the remunerative employment higher education could open up for them. The participating youth received weekly stipends and payment of school costs that helped to overcome the economic obstacles to their taking part as nonwage earners in a long-term program of study. The roles of the full-time teachers involved them in operating an orientation program that ran for five months, five days a week, from 9:00 to 5:00. They taught a variety of classes, which were used mainly to stimulate the students' interests and build skills in reading, comprehension, and study; worked closely with individual students, encouraging them to express their ideas and feelings freely; and tried in any way they could to build up each student's selfconfidence and self-esteem. It was also their responsibility to assist in evaluating the student's readiness to matriculate in college and to engage in any follow-up work needed both with those who did matriculate and those who had to continue in orientation. The part-time tutors served with the college enrollees, each of whom was required to put in a minimum of ten hours a week at the project center in studying and getting tutorial help. As the project developed, its dropout rate fell from 46 percent for the first three groups coming through to 24 percent for the last two groups.44 ROLES OF EXTENSION SERVICE PROFESSIONALS

Farm agents, home economists, agricultural and family life specialists, nutritionists, and youth club leaders are typical of the extension service professionals who participate in community actions. Extension service workers have been the key personnel in the rural part of India's National Community Development Program. They have also been active in ongoing types of community improvement programs in most other nations of the world where they might be in the employ of a national government agency or of a local-state/provincialnational agency set-up, such as that found in the United States. The two typical broad and interrelated community action goals toward 44. Henry Heifetz, 'The Higher Education Program', in Employment and Educational Services in the Mobilization for Youth Experience, Harold H. Weissman (ed.) (New York: Association Press, 1969), pp. 199-205.

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which their work is directed are: (1) raising the community's level of living by getting the people informed about, and interested in applying, new scientific techniques to their farm practices and homemaking activities and (2) enabling the people to take collective action to identify and meet community needs in ways that will increase the attractiveness of rural life. 4 5 The task-performance activities that extension service personnel are expected to engage in as a means of attaining the two goals are usually specified in a prescribed program that comes to the community-level worker from higher-level personnel in the extension service organization. Local personnel vary considerably in the degree to which they try to adapt the prescribed program to the needs of the community and the extent to which they make the program responsive to the reactions of local residents and thereby bring the community development process into operation.

Promoting Adoption of New Scientific Techniques The roles of extension service professionals in community actions designed to promote adoption of new scientific techniques call for them to keep abreast of the scientific knowledge and resources available from their own as well as other professional fields and to pass along such information to local individuals and groups, assisting as needed in establishing contacts between them and the sources of technical assistance. 46 In getting the information to individuals and groups, the extension service personnel usually perform roles in organizing community actions that demonstrate how specific new scientific techniques are used and/or how effective those techniques can be in the community. They may also have roles in organizing clubs, discussion groups, and study tours that are intended to increase the people's understanding and appreciation of new scientific techniques. 47 4 5 . Harry A . Cosgriffe, 'Critique: History or Speculation?' Journal of Extension, 8 (Fall, 1970): 18-20. 4 6 . J . D. Mezirow, 'Community Development as an Educational Process', in Forces in Community Development, Dorothy Mial and H. Curtis Mial (eds.) (Washington, D. C.: National Training Laboratories, National Education Association, 1961), p p . 17-24. 4 7 . B. Rudramoorthy, Extension in Planned Social Change (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), p. 33.

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The farm agent who played an active part in initiating a community action in a New Mexico community of Spanish-American farm families found his roles complicated by the fact that he had not extended them to include consulting with the women as well as the men in the community. In focusing with the fanners on the goal of getting a higher corn yield through adoption of a hybrid corn seed, he had neglected to see that the homemakers were involved in the decision making. The farmers adopted the new seed, the crop yield increased, and the farm agent concluded the project had attained and institutionalized its goal. However, when he checked three years later he found that the farmers had given up the new seed and gone back to planting the less productive seed they had formerly used. The women of the community, he learned, had not liked the meal made from the hybrid com, and they had prodded the men into resuming use of their traditional seed. 48 Helping the People to Take Collective Action While all the task-performance activities that extension service personnel take part in during a community action exert effects upon the ability of the community's residents to go on working together, some roles of extension service personnel are directed specifically toward the goal of helping the people to take collective action in behalf of what they consider their community's well-being. These roles call for considerable ingenuity and flexibility in helping the people of a community establish organizations in which they participate democratically in decision-making activities, learn to recognize needs that affect the whole community, and acquire skill in establishing priorities for taking action to get those needs met. As the following case Study shows, the role of extension service personnel in handling public relations may be crucial in a community action that is trying to enable all the segments of a community's population to collaborate in a common endeavor. This particular community action was initiated by professionals on the Extension Service staff of West Virginia University at Morgantown and the 48. Anacleto Apodaca, 'Corn and Custom: The Introduction of Hybrid Corn to Spanish American Farmers in New Mexico', in Human Problems in Technological Change, Edward H. Spicer (ed.) (New York: Russell Sage, 1952), pp. 35-39.

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county agent in Cove, a community in Southern Appalachia. The project was part of a pilot program that sought to discover ways in which the Extension Service could work with people who live in relatively isolated rural nonfarm communities. Cove was chosen because it was considered typical of Appalachia, a sector of American society made a special target of the war on poverty. Its typicality was manifest in its lack of community facilities and services and of any organized effort toward community improvement. The forty families who composed Cove's population lived along a dirt road in a hollow within a narrow valley that opened out upon an industrialized area where many of the community's residents were employed. The aim of the extension service personnel was to help these people determine together the needs facing their community and to decide what they wanted to do about meeting those needs. The initial move was directed toward interesting the people in doing something collectively that would be advantageous for their children. Toward this end the extension service professionals established in an old house a pre-school 'experience center' where pre-schoolers could have a variety of new experiences that would contribute to their physical, mental, and social development. Mothers had responsibilities for working with the children, and fathers made furniture and equipment for the center. The extension service workers also assisted the people in organizing a 4-H Club, for which parents served as leaders; in instituting a weekly recreation program featuring arts and crafts, home economics, athletics, and archery for older youth and parents; in carrying out a clean-up campaign; and in setting up health, safety, and firstaid classes for local mothers. As a follow-up of these specific community actions, the extension service personnel aided the people in forming a Community Improvement Council, the members of which went on to lead the community in securing natural gas services, an improved road, school bus service, and health improvements. Through these efforts the people learned to work with one another and with outside agencies to make desired changes in their community. It was through the role they had in public relations that the extension service professionals encountered difficulty. A news release they permitted and a documentary film they arranged to have made gave a 'before-and-after' portrayal of what the Cove community

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had accomplished in its community action efforts. The implications of earlier 'backwardness' and of poverty among the people elicited negative reactions from some of the residents. A later news story with which extension service personnel had no connection contained more offensive language and stirred up more widespread objections, which were rather logically but unjustifiably directed against the university extension service staff. Misunderstandings were cleared up through conferences with the outside church group whose interest in Cove had led to the offending news story. Nevertheless, the university extension service personnel withdrew from Cove, assuring the local residents that their services would be available whenever they were desired. At this point, the general tone of the situation reflected mutual understanding. 49

DIFFICULTIES THAT FACE PROFESSIONALS The complications that confronted the extension service professionals in applying the community development process in the Cove community indicate that the professional practitioner who participates in community actions can expect to experience difficulties. Paradoxically, the difficulties that recur tend to arise from the very sources that otherwise enable professionals to make unique contributions to a community action, i. e., the central sort of position the professional occupies in the action effort and the special technical competence that he brings to the effort. The central position of the professional cited earlier in this chapter generally makes it necessary for him to work with persons who are higher and with persons who are lower than he is in the power, social class, and subsystem hierarchies of the community. Thus, he tends to be caught between groupings of people whose ideas on what constitutes the well-being of the community are in conflict with one another and possibly with his own. Similarly, he tends to be caught between different ideas on how the goal of community well-being can be achieved, between quite different interests the 49. Thomas E. Woodall and Beryl B. Maurer, 'A Case Study in Community: Cooperative Creativity by Community, University, and Church', inAppalachia in Transition, Max E. Glenn (ed.) (St. Louis: The Bethany Press, 1970), pp. 93108.

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people are trying to protect or promote, and between different sets of sociocultural-demographic-and ecological circumstances from which to find means for achieving the action goal. Typically, the persons higher in the hierarchies control the resources needed in a given effort and have the power to facilitate or block the action. Those lower in the hierarchies usually, though not always, constitute the action's target population. A major recurring difficulty is for the professional to find ways of relating to the different sets of people without alienating them from the community action or from one another. Such interpersonal relationships are especially hard to develop when people in the higher strata, for example, are willing to support and cooperate in an effort only on terms that in the professional's judgment go against the well-being of the target population and the community or if people in the lower strata call for objectives or procedures that will, in the professional's judgment, either produce a backlash against the people who advocate them or in some way work out adversely for the well-being of the community as a whole. The difficulties are intensified by the professional's need to reconcile the technical and scientific factors that make a particular plan of action appropriate with the diverse personal and cultural factors that affect the willingness of the different sets of people to pursue that particular plan. From his central position, the professional can feel the pressure of the self-interest rather than the community-interest motivating community residents to seek his services for, or in, a community action. If the goals of vested interest groups seem to him to be compatible with the community's well-being, he finds it less difficult to collaborate with these groups. The difficulties arise more for the professional who sees the goals as being contrary to the well-being of the community. In this dilemma, he may pursue one of three courses of action: refuse to cooperate and keep out of the issue, engage in active opposition to the vested interest groups, or ignore the issue of community well-being and supply his services as requested on the assumption that his roles in the situation are completely neutral. The special technical competence that the professional brings to a community action is a source of recurring difficulties when there are people in the community who fear or distrust his professional status and his scientific techniques. Such a situation handicaps him in getting the acceptance he needs if the community is to make use

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of the knowledge and skills he can provide and the cooperation that is required if the community action is to be completed. Negativistic reactions to professional technical competence generally arise from a traditionalistic value system and a people's habituation to fatalistic attitudes or to religious convictions that are antithetical to the scientific value system with which professionals are identified. While more typical of traditional and newly modernizing communities, anti-scientific values and attitudes are also found in segments of relatively modernized communities. Since the professional engaging in a community action is committed to move with the people concerned toward mutually determined goals, he is limited by both practical and ethical considerations from resorting to coercion or undue persuasion. One approach he can follow is to find ways of working within the existing value system. Another more prolonged approach is to find ways of changing the value system so that it becomes acceptant of his professional services. Those professionals who follow the course of working within the existing value system without making direct attempts to change it may begin with one of two main procedures. They may try to educate members of the community in the direction of eliminating ignorance and misconceptions about the consequences that use of professional services can be expected to produce; or they may try to gain an understanding of the local culture or subculture that enables them to fit their professional knowledge into the prevailing value system in such a way that it enhances the system's important values or at least does not threaten them. Attempts to superimpose goals and programs may be temporarily successful if the professional has the means for implementing action, as can be the case, for example, when a health team goes into a community and accomplishes its goal of inoculating a target population, or if the professional can offer enough reward or punishment to neutralize potential opposition. Such procedures, however, do not usually prepare the community to institutionalize the achievements of the effort. Similarly, persuasion may produce temporary and superficial compliance with professionals promoting particular efforts, but not the longrange, authentic acceptance of professionally designed goals that would sustain local interest and participation. 50 50. See, for example, Mezirow, pp. 21-23.

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Even in community situations where professionals find their services are highly respected and readily accepted they can encounter difficulties in applying the community development process. This happens, for example, when the lay participants in an effort depend so heavily upon the professionals that they do not increase their ability to deal with community changes on their own. People tend to exhibit such dependence when they are accustomed to having authority figures make decisions for them, when they have the opinion that only persons with specialized knowledge are qualified to make appropriate decisions in the situation, or when professionals assume decision-making responsibilities without trying to share them with lay members of the community. Professionals also get into difficulties when in becoming identified with certain groups in the community who are highly responsive to their technical competence they thereby become alienated from other local groups. This sort of situation is likely to occur in communities where there are strong local factions or cleavages along lines of race, religion, social class, or political affiliation. Under the circumstances, the professional is hard put to convince partisans on either side of an issue that his knowledge and skills are to be used in such a way that the given community action will serve the well-being of the whole community. In cross-cultural situations where sociocultural conditions are unfamiliar to the professional either in the whole community or in target neighborhoods that have their own distinctive subcultures, professionals face the problem of not knowing whether their special competence will be effective in a sociocultural setting different from the one in which it has been tested. The assumptions that programs that work effectively in one culture will work equally well in other cultures and that the technology of relatively modernized communities can be readily and effectively transferred to less modernized communities are not supported by the experiences that professionals have had in cross-cultural community actions. For example, the introduction of modern medical technology, as shown in discussion of the demographic transition in Chapter 3, led to decline in death rates, but it also produced sudden growth of population that increased greatly the difficulty of raising levels of living. Social welfare services and compensatory education programs initiated in low-income neighborhoods to 'benefit'the disadvantaged

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have created embarrassments and loss of self-esteem by marking their recipients as different from, and less capable than, other people. Both their special position in the community action and their special technical competence can be sources of difficulties for professionals who find that their scientific knowledge and judgment do not permit them to agree with the goals and/or practices of the organization which has given them their central position in the action effort. Their dilemma is in choosing and acting upon one of the following alternatives: working within the organization to get its goals and/or practices changed; taking a stand against the organization at the risk of being dismissed and of losing the chance to obtain the changes; resigning and either withdrawing from the situation or moving ahead to organize an effort to contend for the changes; or capitulating to the organization's policy on goals and/or practices, either accepting them or rationalizing them to the point they seem satisfactory. 51 If he chooses to work against the agency from the outside, he then finds himself aligned with the contending organizational set-up and constrained by its goals and strategies. 52

SUMMARY Professionals have a distinctive relationship to community development in that their specialized knowledge and skills constitute a potential resource that lay participants cannot be expected to supply. Some professionals perform their roles under the generic title of community development agent, while others do so under a title that is linked to their field of specialization. They can all be expected to serve as enablers, consultants, and advocates. The profession of the community development agent is a newly emerging one and is currently practiced more widely in modernizing than in relatively modernized communities. It calls for roles that are generalist rather than specialized and that involve collaboration with specialized professionals who work in special facets of com51. For discussion of strategy for securing agency changes from within, see Rino J. Patti and Herman Resnick, 'Changing the Agency from within', Social Work, 1 7 (July. 1 9 7 2 ) : 4 8 - 5 7 . 52. Perlman and Gurin, p. 85.

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munity action efforts as well as with residents of the community for whom they serve as catalysts, stimulators, and enablers in bringing about community change. Social work professionals have roles in such continuing types of community actions as community council coordinating activities and federated fund-raising as well as in shorter-range community actions that need the services of social workers. The current trend is toward use of more flexible and more activist roles than have been typical in social work practice in the period since World War I. While professionals in the field of planning have characteristically performed roles connected with planning for changes in such physical aspects of community life as housing, street lay-out, and water and sewerage supply, the current emphasis is on their engaging in a more comprehensive type of social as well as physical planning for specific ecological areas, for and with the people residing in those areas. Planners also have active roles in planning whole new communities. Professionals in the field of health care are typically associated with community actions directed toward demonstrating what can be accomplished through preventive health care measures or with projects designed to improve the quality and the delivery of a community's health services. Professionals in the field of education tend to have active roles in community actions focused on such goals as reducing adult illiteracy, increasing functional literacy, providing job-training programs that enable unemployed and underemployed persons to acquire skills they need to improve their employment situation, and developing compensatory or innovative educational programs for segments of the community's population not able to take full advantage of regular school programs. Professionals in the extension service are involved in a continuing sort of community action to improve communities' levels of living through helping people to achieve more productive and economical farm and homemaking practices and through improving the ability of people to take collaborative action. Difficulties arise for professionals from conflicting views local people have of what the goals and procedures for community action ought to be, from the pressures that people apply in trying to make or block changes for reasons of self-interest, from the distrust or

Bibliography

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over-dependence some people have for scientifically oriented services, from the problem of not being able to tell what consequences know-how proven in one cultural situation will have when it is applied in a different cultural situation, and from the dilemma professionals face in trying to work for an organization whose goals and practices are not compatible with their own.

BIBLIOGRAPHY American Society of Planning Officials. Planning 1971. Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1971. Latest in a series of annual reports, giving information and points of view on current developments in city and metropolitan planning. Dunham, Arthur. The New Community Organization. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. A general treatment of community organization and community development, which includes a discussion of professional roles (Chapters 13 and 14). Kahn, Alfred J . Theory and Practice of Social Planning and Studies in Social Policy and Planning, 2 vols.; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969. The first volume, which is largely theoretical, discusses the roles of planners as technicians and as agents of change. The second volume considers the roles played by planners in the six fields of the antipoverty war, children in trouble, income security, city planning, community psychiatry, and the delivery of social services. King, Clarence. Working with People in Community Action. New York: Association Press, 1965. A casebook for the community worker, using cross-cultural illustrations. Miai, Dorothy; and Miai, H. Curtis (eds.). Forces in Community Development. Washington, D. C.: National Training Laboratories, National Education Association, 1961. A collection of articles on community development, some of them dealing directly with the roles of professionals. Niehoff, Arthur H. A Casebook of Social Change. Chicago: Aldine, 1966. A series of case studies that show the roles of change agents in a variety of community actions in different parts of the world. Perlman, Robert; and Gurin, Arnold. Community Organization and Social Planning. New York: J o h n Wiley and Sons, 1972. A t e x t b o o k prepared by the Community Organization Curriculum Development Project for the Council on Social Work Education summarizing f r o m the practice field and from the literature on the subject information and insights t o be used in preparing people for social work practice in the area of community organization.

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Ross, Murray G. Community Organization. 2nd ed.; New York: Harper and Row, 1967. A thorough analysis of the process of community organization, equated here with community development, discusses the four roles of professionals as guide, enabler, expert, and therapist. Spicer, Edward H. (ed.). Human Problems in Technological Change. New York: Russell Sage, 1952. Fifteen case studies of cross-cultural situations in which outside change agents attempt to introduce some type of social change into a community. It emphasizes the reciprocal relation between the change being introduced by a professional and the value system of the community that is the target of the change. Weissman, Harold H. (ed.). Employment and Educational Services in the Mobilization for Youth Experience. New York: Association Press, 1969. Description of the efforts attempted in the Mobilization for Youth project to get the public school program more attuned to the needs of low-income families and to devise procedures for training and helping low-income y o u t h to improve their opportunities for employment. It stresses the roles of education professionals in promoting and blocking the innovations. Individual and Group Services. New York: Association Press, 1969. Description of the innovative roles of social workers in experimental efforts t o improve the delivery of social services to low-income families. Wilensky, Harold L.; and LeBeaux, Charles N. Industrial Society and Social Welfare. New York: Free Press, 1965. An incisive analysis of the impact of industrialization on social welfare services and social worker roles.

CHAPTER 8

Research and Community Development

This chapter focuses its attention on community development research, i. e., research conducted specifically in conjunction with a community action effort. The same types of professionals as those discussed in the previous chapter and another set of professionals — social scientists whose career commitments are partially or wholly research-oriented — are likely to be involved. Their research represents a systematic attempt to secure information that is used in identifying and diagnosing needs for community action, in planning and implementing means for promoting or blocking a community action, in evaluating the procedures and the outcomes at any point in an action effort, and in formulating principles that explain how the community development process takes place. Both task-performance activities and the effects of these activities on the people's ability to go on working together are subjected to study. In relatively modernized communities there is increasing reliance upon research in planning and evaluating community action projects and procedures, a growing demand that projects be designed in such a way that their procedures and outcomes can be analyzed scientifically, and increasing use of electronic data-processing techniques in research activities. These trends, especially the first two, are spreading to modernizing communities, particularly those that participate in national programs that rely upon the community development process. The chapter begins by considering community development research in the light of scientific method and the norms and values that govern the work of scientists. It then analyzes the unevenness in the scientific character of current community development re-

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search and cites some of the means that are being used to reduce that unevenness. Three major types of research — the survey, action research, and the project evaluation — are described, illustrated, and assessed.

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH The idea of research held here implies reliance upon the precision, objectivity, and systematic analysis that characterize the scientific method. The norms and values governing the research operation are viewed as being the norms and values that are expected to govern the work of scientists. These include the assumptions that it is allimportant to rely upon reason (rationality) in establishing knowledge, that the accuracy of assumed truths should be tested for their validity no matter how much they have been sanctified by tradition or by the prestige of the authorities who espouse them, that people should pursue truth without regard for the effects their findings will have in raising or lowering their status in the community, and that people should accept valid knowledge even if they do not approve of the political or racial or religious connections of the persons whose scientific work made that knowledge available. Though scientists from widely different disciplines may conduct research in specific community actions, the social science fields — especially sociology — tend to supply most of the personnel associated with community development research. Outside these fields and to some extent within them, doubts have long been raised about the ability of social scientists to attain the objectivity and precision that scientific method requires. Partly to combat these doubts and partly out of concern for attaining scientific character in their research, social scientists have generally operated under norms that call for them to dissociate themselves from activities that savor of social reform, to maintain a neutral or value-free position, and to assume no responsibility for getting scientific knowledge applied to the formulation or attainment of community goals. Moderate variations from these dominant norms are found in two other sets of norms. One calls for the scientist to avoid all partisanship in the conduct of research except for refusing to engage in research that is

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related to unethical or immoral purposes and for actively opposing use of research findings for such purposes. The other expects the scientist to take responsibility for informing the community about alternative courses of action and the probable consequences of each, but to avoid advocating or opposing any particular course of action. In recent decades, new norms have been emerging that call for the scientist to join his research role with an activist role by getting directly involved in community actions as a partisan participant. Out of the concern arising around these newly emerging norms, attention has been attracted anew to the doubts about the ability of social scientists to attain objectivity and a value-free approach to their research. It is pointed out, for example, that values influence the choice of subjects for research, that financial support can be obtained more readily for research related to some values than to others, and that values are at the root of the constraints which a sponsor may place upon research activities and upon the uses to which research findings are put. If the scientist's work cannot be value-free, the question then arises: can more depth and precision be obtained if he engages in research as a partisan participant in community actions, openly acknowledging his values? It is the view of this text that scientists, including social scientists, can achieve a high degree of accuracy and objectivity in their research and that the opportunity for this is increased to the extent that research personnel recognize and take account of values and biases that enter into their research. So long as that recognition and accounting are sustained, valid research can be conducted from the perspectives of all different kinds of values.1

1. See, for example, Stephen E. Deutsch and John Howard (eds.), Where It's At: Radical Perspectives in Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Howard S. Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz, 'Radical Politics and Sociological Research: Observations on Methodology and Ideology', American Journal of Sociology, 78 (1972): 48-66; Duncan MacRae, Jr., 'A Dilemma of Sociology: Science versus Policy', and Elbridge Sibley, 'Scientific Sociology at Bay?' American Sociologist, 6, Supplementary Issue (June, 1971): 2-7 and 13-17; and Gresham Riley, 'Partisanship and Objectivity in the Social Sciences', American Sociologist, 6 (February, 1971): 6-12.

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UNEVENNESS IN THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

Research carried on in relation to community action efforts varies considerably in the degree to which it achieves scientific character. For one thing, research personnel vary in competence from those who have had little or no training or experience in conducting research to those who are highly trained and highly skilled research technicians or experts. There are also marked differences among measuring techniques in the extent to which they can detect precisely what change has occurred in a community action effort. Furthermore, community action projects vary in the degree to which shifts in their goals and procedures hamper scientific study of what is taking place and in the degree to which their goals are formulated in such broad or imprecise terms that it is difficult to measure either the movement that is made toward their attainment or the effects that their attainment has produced. It is especially hard to get precise and objective means for measuring the effects that a given project has on the people's ability to go on working together in community action efforts and the influences that this ability and task-performance activities exert upon each other. Departure from use of the scientific method can also occur when there are political pressures put upon research personnel to alter or obscure unpleasing findings; when research personnel have such emotional commitment to certain desired outcomes of a project that their research is distorted by their bias; and when there are antagonisms or lack of communication between research and action personnel that keep the former from securing accurate data or from interpreting findings with scientific objectivity. Even when the research used in a given community action effort has adhered rigorously to the scientific method, it may fall short by failing to deal with the central concern of the persons carrying on the effort. This can happen, for example, if research personnel are expected to assess attainment of objectives that have not been formulated in measurable terms or if they do not get from action personnel a clear understanding of the outcomes intended for both short-range and long-range goals of the project and as a result measure outcomes that are not central to the project's purpose. The degree of precision acceptable to the users of research in

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community action is affected by such matters as the purpose to which the research is to be put; the relative costs of attaining different degrees of precision; and the relative availability of money, personnel, or data that could increase the degree of precision. Research used, for example, as a basis for making decisions in a project that could jeopardize human lives demands a higher level of precision than research used in a project on community beautification. Investment in research tends to hinge on the degree of confidence the potential investors have in that activity and on their relative commitment to research in comparison with practical action.

WAYS OF INCREASING THE SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

It is the position of this text that precision in community development research can be increased if community action goals can be formulated in measurable terms, if accurate instruments can be devised for assessing goal achievement, and if greater use is made of control groups and of a process-oriented research procedure. The development of accurate measuring instruments and stress on stating goals in measurable terms go hand in hand in increasing precision. Williams and Evans assert that such methodological tools have already reached the point at which they can provide useful information for decision-making purposes. 2 The use of control groups provides an objective means of pinpointing the results that can be attributed to a particular factor or set of factors. The increase in precision thus obtained argues convincingly for much wider use of control groups in community development research. The failure to extend the use stems partly from the difficulty involved in locating and studying simultaneously more than just the groups with which the community development effort is being tried. There are also the limitations that controlled experiments are usually not designed to reveal the steps by which 2. Walter Williams and J o h n W. Evans, "The Politics of Evaluation: The Case of Head Start', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 385 (1969): 131.

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the observed results occur or to permit changes while the experiment is going on. 3 Process-oriented research, though perhaps less objective than the controlled experiment, is more likely to pick up the reactions that individuals and institutions make to, and the consequences they experience from, a project's activities and outcomes. It is also more flexible in that it is not disrupted, as controlled-experiment research is, if the aims of the project change. However, if it is used with projects that have multiple and broad objectives, it encounters great difficulty in tracing all the forces set in motion by a given project as well as inputs from other sources the effects of which could become mingled with, or erroneously credited to, the effects from the project.

TYPES OF COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH The principal types of research employed in relation to the application of the community development process are community surveys, action research, and project evaluations. A given community action may make use of research in any one or all of these forms, and it may engage technical experts to conduct highly specialized research in one or more facets of its effort or to handle some or all of its research activities. Large relatively modernized communities can be expected to have various types of technical experts in their employ. There are also specialized consulting firms that make technical studies and appraisals for communities that do not have their own experts. Technical studies by experts tend to have the qualities of competence, objectivity, and prestige — attributes valued by agencies that grant funds or other resources to projects. But they generally do not elicit from community members as much understanding of, or as much emotional commitment to, the community development effort as is true of research activities in which lay people participate more fully. 3. Carol H. Weiss, 'Planning and Action Project Evaluation', in Learning in Action, June L. Schmelzer (ed.) (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, 1966), pp. 12-13; and Carol H. Weiss, 'The Politicization of Evaluation Research', Journal of Social Issues, 26 (1970): 59.

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The task-oriented aspect of a community action is usually measured in terms of accomplishment achieved in relation to the specific stated goals of the project. For example, in projects to increase crop yields or local people's participation in recreation activities, the measures might be the number of bushels of potatoes produced or the number of people using the community's recreation facilities as compared with the base number at the time the project began and the number specified in the goal of the project. Measures of the other aspect of every community action, i. e., the effects produced on the people's ability to continue collaborative activities in the community are hard to reduce to quantitative terms. Furthermore, they may need to be applied after the community action is ended, perhaps by noting the extent to which subsequent actions are undertaken and/or prove successful in attaining their goals or by measuring people's participation in subsequent actions. The indicators of participation might be formulated in terms of number of local persons taking part in a given effort, how representative they are of the total local population, the time or money or effort they invest in the project, and the number who exhibit increased competence for assuming leadership roles. To assess the effects at the time of the community action, a representative sample of participants might be interviewed to find out how many of them say, for example, that they would like to continue taking part in collaborative community activities and that they have a better understanding of community needs and of how to go about dealing with those needs. The illustrations in this section of the chapter portray various uses of research in selected community actions. The practical results deriving from each type of research are checked against the theoretical assumptions on which each type is based. The illustrations are also used to indicate something of the role that community development research plays in building up a body of tested knowledge about the community development process.

THE COMMUNITY SURVEY

A community survey is a fact-finding device used in applying the community development process for the purpose of enabling the

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people of a community to identify local needs and become familiar with available resources. While it does not usually entail as sophisticated scientific methodology as action research and project evaluations do, it does require some know-how for deciding the kinds of data that will be relevant in given projects, for designing ways of collecting, tabulating, and organizing the data, and for making accurate interpretations of the data that are collected. For these reasons, some direct or indirect professional guidance is needed. Sometimes direct guidance is provided by such professionals as those whose roles were considered in the previous chapter and sometimes by professional research personnel. Indirect guidance is usually in the form of some sort of manual that has been prepared either for some specific project survey or for surveys in general. Kinds of Community

Surveys

Three different kinds of community surveys have been used in community action efforts: the self-survey, which is undertaken by community residents largely on their own; study-group surveys, such as those used in the Montana Study Program; and social reconnaissance studies, developed by the Bureau of Community Service at the University of Kentucky, in which specially trained professional research personnel conduct the survey at the request of, and in some degree of collaboration with, community residents. Community self-surveys. A characteristic way of getting the people of a community involved and active near the beginning of a community action is by organizing and conducting a community selfsurvey. Such a survey was carried out by the residents of Greenville, South Carolina, 1949-50, under the sponsorship of the Greenville County Community Council, using technical advice supplied by the staff of the Southern Regional Council. About two hundred persons, including whites and blacks, were organized into twelve fact-finding committees, which studied local needs, especially those of the black subcommunity, and made recommendations that were later submitted for the approval of the entire survey group. The final report presented findings and recommendations regarding health, sanitation and safety, education, law enforcement, recreation, transportation, welfare, industry and employment, religious resources,

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community participation, and housing. The self-survey was organized in such a way that local officials served on the committees that were studying their particular areas of work. These officials acted directly on many of the survey group's recommendations and thus eliminated the usual necessity for getting proposals for action placed before the authorities. 4 Twenty-one communities of varying sizes widely scattered over the United States conducted self-surveys, 1964-66, with technical assistance from the National Commission on Community Health Services. The residents took inventories of existing health services, identified unmet needs for services, and suggested methods for getting plans for action implemented. 5 Study-group surveys. A special approach to the use of the community self-survey is exemplified in the study-group procedure employed in the Montana Study program. A professional staff at the State University of Montana made themselves available to local communities, on request, to lead study groups in discussions of local needs and resources. Emphasis was placed upon having the study group composed of a representative cross section of local residents. A schedule of ten sessions was arranged, each one focused on a different area of community life. Committees of the study group collected and presented facts about the community that were relevant to the identification of needs and resources. When the ten sessions were concluded, study group members appraised their findings, formulated goals for meeting some of the needs they had identified, and set up committees to work toward attainment of the goals.6 Social reconnaissance surveys. A third kind of community survey has less action involvement of the community's residents than the other kinds discussed. The term social reconnaissance survey has 4. Community Council of Greenville County, Greenville's Big Idea (Greenville Community Council, 1950). Also published by Southern Regional Council as April-May, 1950, issue of the New South. Community self-surveys were also conducted in the Talladega and Salem projects discussed later in this chapter and in the Vadala, India, project discussed in Chapter 5. 5. National Commission on Community Health Services, Health Is a Community Affair (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1966), pp. 229-334. 6. Richard W. Poston, Small Town Renaissance (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 32-121; 145-164.

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Development

been applied to this research. An outside research team trained to do relatively quick and concentrated community studies goes in at the request of local residents, gathers data from interviews and observations and from published and unpublished materials on the community, prepares a preliminary report of its findings, presents that report to local citizens for their reactions, then prepares a final report that takes account of those reactions and offers recommendations for action. Implementation is left entirely to the community. 7 Assessment

of Community

Surveys

The use of the community self-survey in community actions rests on the theoretical assumptions that community residents are themselves capable of surveying their local needs and resources and of using their findings to plan and carry out a community action effort; that their familiarity with the community can be expected to yield more meaningful findings and assessments than would be likely with outside research personnel; and that participation in the survey will tend to increase and spread interest in, and support for, the action effort. When research of the self-survey type is conducted by untrained people, it is likely that the findings will lack the objectivity and precision that better qualified persons could provide. However, even though questionnaires may not be constructed with complete validity and analyses may be limited to simple tabulations of data, the researchers through their familiarity with the community are able to collect information that is useful in identifying community needs and facilitating action. Warren found that in the community health self-surveys which he analyzed, research was used at all stages of the survey undertaking for the specific purpose of providing guides to action. He concluded that this purpose is the self-survey's main reason for being, since its findings are likely to have little meaning except for the locality. 8 7. Irwin T. Sanders, Preparing a Community Profile: The Methodology of a Social Reconnaissance (Lexington: Bureau of Community Service, U. of Kentucky, Kentucky Community Series No. 7, 1952). 8. Roland L. Warren, Social Research Consultation: An Experiment in Health and Welfare Planning (New York: Russell Sage, 1963), p. 70.

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The Greenville case shows that a self-survey was effective in attaining the goals of that community action. Miller found that selfsurveys had been used by over half of the communities in his sample of eighteen communities which had reached their goal of establishing cooperative prepayment plans for medical care. 9 The National Commission on Community Health Services identified through community self-surveys the variations in health problems from one community to another and obtained suggestions of effective ways to deal with the health problems of different communities. 10 And Poston reported that all of the fourteen communities that used the Montana Study plan succeeded in carrying more than fifty community actions to completion. Community surveys of the social reconnaissance type rest on two assumptions: (1) that an outside research team trained to do such studies and having ready access to published and unpublished materials on the community can carry out a prompt and an accurate enough assessment of the local situation to provide a sound basis for initiating or blocking a community action and (2) that a study by outside experts can be expected to have greater objectivity and prestige than comparable information gathered by rank-and-file members of the community. Though relatively superficial, this type of research, checked out as it is with local people, can be expected to provide useful information about needs and resources and in less time than is possible with a self-survey. However, the lack of follow-up by the study staff and the fact that local residents do not have sin active part in making the study may leave the community without a group of people committed to setting and moving toward goals of action. While the community survey has not played a major role in building a body of knowledge about the community development process, it has been used to test out the theoretical assumptions on which this type of research is based. The Montana Study program, for example, was used specifically to test Baker Brownell's theory that people can find out for themselves how to enrich and improve their community life and can increase their ability to work together 9. Paul A. Miller, Community Health Action (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953), p. 42. 10. National Commission on Community Health Services, pp. 181-183.

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if situations are developed in which a representative cross section of local residents meet together and study their community's needs and resources. 11

ACTION RESEARCH

Action research is distinguished by its dual commitment to practical and theoretical purposes, by the fact that it is structured to permit research and action to go along together, and by the way its findings can be fed back to guide task-performance activities and to take account of the effects those activities are having on the ability of community residents to go on working together for their community. A given project's research personnel may be actively engaged, to varying degrees, in carrying on the community action or they may restrict their roles to observing what takes place in the action, to collecting other relevant community data, to getting information from persons engaged in the project's task-performance activities, and to feeding back interpretations of the findings to task-performance participants. The task-performance personnel may help with the research in varying degrees of involvement or they may be connected with the research only through supplying information to the project's research personnel. Whatever the case, a high degree of cooperation between research and action personnel is needed if full and accurate information is to pass from one to the other. Flexibility is inherent in the research set-up in that action procedures can be changed in response to research results and research procedures can be changed to take account of changes in action programs. Benefits accrue to both the community action and the research, according to Shostak, if research personnel will do what certain sociologists have done in several community action projects they have described, i. e., they will use their scientific know-how not only in conducting research but also in becoming involved in any or all of the components of a community action. 12

11. Richard Poston, Democracy Is You (New York: Harper, 1954), pp. 2225,187-188. 12. Arthur B. Shostak (ed.), Sociology in Action (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey, 1966), pp. vii-ix, 15-21, 39-44, 108-114, and 158-165.

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Projects Illustrating Action

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Research

Four community action projects that made use of action research are described below. They are not presented as a representative sample of such projects but as means of illustrating the contributions that action research can make both to the project effort and to the formulation of principles that can be applied in subsequent projects or incorporated into the broad body of sociological theory. In the first two cases described — Vicos and Bristol Social Project — the research personnel were more closely and actively involved in the project activities than was true in the other two cases — the Talladega and Salem projects. The Vicos Project: a comprehensive community action. The team of Cornell University anthropologists who were responsible for getting a community action effort started in the remote hacienda community of Vicos, Peru, carried on action research throughout that project, 1952-57. 13 They used their research findings to help them determine how ready local leaders were to take responsibility for planning and implementing on their own the various project actions that were intended to modernize the community. As increasing readiness was detected, increasing responsibilities were handed over until eventually the team had transferred full leadership to local persons. Research was also used to measure movement toward the action goals of raising economic and educational levels and 'improving' the health of the people. Economic level was indicated by amount of production of such farm products as potatoes and cattle ; educational level, by number of persons attending school, by number of school grades completed, and by number of trained teachers in the schools; health, by the rates of infectious diseases and by use of a newly established clinic. The Bristol Social Project: a delinquency-control effort. Action research was also used in the Bristol Social Project, a community 13. Allan R. Holmberg, 'Changing Community Attitudes and Values in Peru: A Case Study in Guided Change', in Social Change in Latin America Today, Richard N. Adams, et al. (eds.) (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 63-107. For discussion of leadership in this project, see Chapter 5 of this text.

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action conducted in Bristol, England, from 1953 to 1958. 14 A project team, composed at peak strength of eleven professionals qualified mainly in the fields of sociology and social work, had the major responsibility for carrying on the project. They worked in collaboration with the committee of leading Bristol citizens by whom they were engaged and with rank-and-file members of the community toward the goal of identifying and treating the stresses and strains believed to exist in families and neighborhoods that have a high incidence of delinquency and similar 'problems'. Since limitations on funds and personnel made it impossible to implement the project over the entire city, the first research was in the form of surveys that were used to locate the areas that had the highest rates of delinquency, truancy, child neglect, and adult crime. Up field, a working-class housing estate, became the major target for the community action. One field worker and a sociologist resided in this estate and supplied the rest of the team members information based on their firsthand observations of the local attitudes and lifeways. The selected goal of the project, i. e., to correct the family and neighborhood conditions assumed to give rise to delinquency and similar nonconforming behavior, guided both the action and the research. While some team members were mainly responsible for action and others mainly for research, the two sets of personnel worked closely to share the insights they gained from their contacts with the residents of the estate. As the action aspect moved along, with local people joining forces to build playgrounds and meeting rooms and to form new groups — for example, of mothers and of adolescents — the team members became increasingly aware that the conventional and the 'anti-social' residents of the estate had difficulty in using the same facilities and in accepting one another in group relationships. This finding was used as a basis for modifying the action procedures in such a way that the 'antisocial elements' could have their own group worker and own groups. The research personnel measured 'improvement' for these alienated persons by such criteria as changes in their demonstrated ability to plan, attend, 14. For a full report of the Bristol Social Project prepared by its director, see John C. Spencer, Stress and Release in an Urban Estate (London: Tavistock, 1964), especially pp. 7-10, 19-69, 312-322. For discussion of this project in relation to leadership, see Chapter 5 of this text.

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and take responsibility for managing group activities and in their ability to trust others and form personal relationships with their peers or with the group worker assigned to their 'clubs'. Both research and action team members maintained an objective and understanding attitude toward the destructive and aggressive behavior frequently exhibited by the youths, interpreting it as evidence of the youths' need to test out the workers and the 'respectable' people of the community before feeling confident that they were really accepted. The 'respectable' persons active in the project, however, interpreted the destructiveness as evidence that the team's permissiveness was ineffective and should be replaced by sterner measures. Despite these generally negative attitudes, despite the turnover in team personnel, and despite the conclusion of the team that its ideas for treatment had not had a full chance to be tried, the final report on the project indicated that no record of delinquency had been found for any youth while he/she was participating in the project's group program. There were, however, records for delinquency before the program started and after it had ended. The Talladega project to improve community health. A group of sociologists from the University of Alabama constituted the research team in a community action conducted in Talladega, Alabama, 1951-53, toward the overall goal of improving the city's health conditions. 15 The central action group in the undertaking was a Community Council made up mainly of representatives from respected professional groups in the community and middle-class persons who were employed in local social welfare agencies or who were active in local civic organizations. Members of the research team assisted with the community survey which the Community Council initiated as a means of identifying Talladega's health needs and resources and devoted the rest of their attention to gathering data on the community's social structure and to relating those data to what was taking place in the survey and other project activities. They stood ready to supply research findings when requested. But, because their main interest was in identifying general principles 15. For full description of this project, see Solon T. Kimball and Marion Pearsall, The Talladega Story (University: U. of Alabama Press, 1954), especially pp. 186-202. The roles of health care professionals in the project are discussed in Chapter 7 of this text.

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that are operative in the process of community development, they avoided all responsibility for determining project policy or organization and all involvement in local controversies so as to minimize any distortion of the local situation by extracommunity influences. In assessing outcomes of the Talladega project, the research personnel noted that the community action to get more people vaccinated had been relatively successful, while the actions to get sewer lines extended into an area occupied mainly by industrial workers and to get the city's water supply fluoridated had not achieved their goals when the final research on the project was reported. The broader goal of the project covering the various community actions undertaken was to get a community council established and working to improve the community's health care provisions. Such a council had been established and its members were working together effectively. However, it had excluded from its membership three major segments of the local population — blacks, industrial workers, and persons connected with Talladega College. The effects of the project on the ability of Talladega residents to work collaboratively on community endeavors, the research personnel identified as follows: the cooperative interaction on the Community Council suggested that the local people could go on working together to promote what they considered to be the community's well-being; but effective lines of communication and cooperation needed to be opened between Council members and the three excluded segments of residents and between participants in community actions and local elected political officials. The research personnel's findings on principles operative in the community development process are taken up below in the sections on assessment of action research. The Salem project

to establish

a local health center.

Action research

was also used in a community action conducted in Salem, Massachusetts, 1952-53, toward the goal of establishing a local health center. 16 A group of sociologists from the University of North Carolina constituted the research team in this project. There were several parallels between the Salem and the Talladega projects. For 16. For detailed description of this project, see Floyd Hunter, Ruth Connor Schaffer, and Cecil G. Sheps, Community Organization: Action and Inaction (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1956), especially pp. 211-258.

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example, in both, the research personnel assisted the local citizens in conducting a community survey and otherwise played relatively detached roles while they concentrated on identifying principles that operate in the community development process. A long-established Community Council in Salem was the central group in the community action. Its members and other project participants worked well with persons in the local leadership structure, but made no attempt to involve either the old families of the upperupper class or the working-class segment of the local population. The goal of securing a local health center was achieved expeditiously with virtually no opposition. This achievement, however, the reresearch personnel attributed in large part to a timely combination of circumstances that occurred independently of the project effort but fitted well into that effort: a public building that could be used for the health center became vacant, its use for health purposes was more acceptable to people in Salem than other uses that had been proposed, the cost was considerably lower than had been anticipated, and money was available to more than cover the cost. Assessment of Action

Research

To assess action research in relation to community development, it is necessary to consider two related but separate points. One is the contribution that this type of research makes to the specific community actions in which it is used, and the other is the contribution that it makes to the formulation of principles that can be applied in subsequent community actions or that can be added to the general body of sociological knowledge. The overall rationale for using action research in a community action is that close linking of research and action is mutually beneficial: the project obtains from research a feedback of accurate information that can be used to facilitate goal achievement; and research obtains from its built-in, close-up vantage point a greater precision and depth of insight than might otherwise be possible. The feedback function also tends to elicit from action personnel a more cooperative attitude toward research than is the case when research personnel are engaged solely in observations that are not shared with action personnel.

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Contribution of action research to the community action. In both Vicos and the Bristol Social Project the research was conducted by active members of the project staff. This set-up permitted almost continuous feedback of research findings, which in turn were used in the action phase of the projects. However, in both the Talladega and the Salem cases the project activities were handled by community residents, while research activities were conducted mainly by professional research teams whose members were not local residents. Though a working relationship developed between the action and the research personnel, many research findings were not shared. Except as it focused community attention upon health needs, the research used in Talladega and Salem made no obvious contribution toward goal achievement in either community action. The research carried on in the Vicos project kept the action personnel informed about the readiness of local leaders to assume increasing responsibility in project activities and about the level and spread of participation of community members in various phases of the program. Actions were then planned in realistic response to changes in demand and to changes in leadership potential. Achievement of the project's goals of developing indigenous leaders and raising the economic, educational, and health levels among the people can be attributed, at least in part, to the use of action research. It can also be explained in part by the stimulation the people got from seeing for themselves the 'advantages' of modernization introduced to them through the project in such forms as a high-yielding and blight-free potato, new schools, well-qualified teachers, and relatively modern health services. The research in the Bristol Social Project was also competent and pertinent, and its findings were fully shared with action personnel; but they were not communicated well enough to agencies that served the housing estate or to the sponsoring committee of leading citizens to gain their support for having the project continued. Contribution to formulation of principles.The research teams in the Talladega and Salem projects started out with the goal of identifying principles that explain how the process of community development operates, and both concluded that they made some progress toward attaining that goal. The University of Alabama sociologists who constituted the research team in the Talladega project identified

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such principles as the following: (1) community development involves an action group's getting legitimation, i. e., recognition from the community that it has the right to pursue action in a particular sphere of community life; (2) in order to hold that recognition, it has to achieve validation, i. e., produce results that show its ability to accomplish its purposes; (3) the values that motivate an individual determine whether or not he will initiate or participate in a community action; and (4) these values may range from desire to enhance personal or group profit or prestige to a basically altruistic concern for community welfare. To this list of principles formulated by the Talladega team, the University of North Carolina sociologists who took part in the Salem project added another principle to the effect that the outcome of any given community action effort is determined not solely by careful application of specific community development principles, but also by coincidental events or conditions that occur in the community situation. For example, they found during the project that obtaining accurate information through research, having capable leadership for the project, and being careful to involve the local leadership structure impel the community development process toward goal achievement but do not insure that the desired goal will be achieved. The intervening variable they discovered in the Salem project was the coincidence that an acceptable public building for a health clinic happened to be available. Both research teams found that communities tend to delegate responsibility for action and that community action goals can be attained without participation of a majority of local residents. From the standpoint of theory-building, evidence that is relevant to these principles can be cited from Vicos and the Bristol Social Project as well as from Talladega and Salem. Evidence showed that the Talladega action group, i. e., the Community Council, achieved legitimation by virtue of having membership from established agencies and organizations that were already legitimated and validated, by getting endorsement from such locally respected groups as the Chamber of Commerce and the County Medical Association, and by conducting a community self-survey in which there was widespread participation and from which numerous facts about the community's health needs were secured. The action group in Salem was an established Community Council that had already obtained legitima-

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tion and validation. In Vicos, the action group got its legitimation mainly from the facts that the anthropologists in the group were working cooperatively with national governmental agencies, that they had funds for the project, and that they were collaborating with local persons who were to some extent at least accepted as leaders. It got its validation mainly from the increases in agricultural production, from the educational and health improvements that the project achieved, and from the increasing assumption of responsibility by local leaders. In the Bristol Social Project, the action group obtained legitimation in the community from the fact that it had been engaged by a committee of leading citizens; in the housing estate it was legitimated by its association with established local agencies. The degree of validation it achieved in the larger community came mainly from the competence of its research, and in the housing estate from the funds it made available for building new facilities and establishing new services. Its validation by the alienated youth came from the action group's accepting attitudes, the very factor that subsequently figured in the loss of community approval of the project. Evidence is also available from all four research projects to support the principle formulated by the Salem research team to the effect that the community development process cannot be separated from its community context. The Vicos research team worked from the beginning of that project with the idea that the indigenous members of the Vicos community could assume the leadership and the responsibility needed to raise their level of living; that it was their sociocultural situation, not any inherent traits of theirs, that had kept them so long at a precarious subsistence level. The changes in Vicos suggested that the idea was an accurate one. Evidence from the Bristol Social Project indicated that, in a sociocultural situation where some persons in a community are alienated from others by different life styles and norms and values, efforts at change which are effective with one group cannot be expected to have comparable effectiveness with the other group and that, furthermore, the norms and values of the dominant group may thwart professional efforts that make use of unapproved methods of serving alienated community residents. In the Talladega case, the Community Council faced a community situation in which they would likely have defeated their project outright if they had tried to integrate

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the Negroes and the Talladega College 'Northern liberals' and the working-class segment of the population into the project effort. At the same time, failing to involve those groups more fully may have been a factor in the failure of the project to achieve its objectives more completely. Assessment of the theory-building role of the research aspects of these four community actions suggests several limitations that make conclusions difficult. For one thing, the principles were so broad and the factors that could have affected outcomes were so numerous that specific factors could not be linked with specific outcomes. Furthermore, all four projects had so much better qualified leadership than is typical in community action efforts that it is not possible to determine whether comparable outcomes can be expected when leadership is less capable. PROJECT EVALUATION

The third type of research to be described in this chapter is designated here as project evaluation. This research may be done by participants in the action aspect of the project, by personnel assigned to the research aspect, or by research personnel engaged specifically to make the evaluation. It involves finding and using valid quantitative and/or qualitative measures of task performance and of the effects produced by a given community action on local people's ability to go on working together. Projects that have narrow, limited aims have generally been more successful in stating anticipated outcomes, and their outcomes have usually been easier to measure than has been the case with projects directed toward broader aims. As a rule, the broader the aims of a project, the more likely it is that some of its relevant outcomes will not be anticipated, and the greater the likelihood that outcomes that are anticipated will be hard to state in terms that can be readily and accurately measured. This is particularly true for measures of the outcomes that affect people's ability to work together. Examples of Project Evaluation The following illustrations of project evaluations that have been

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made of community action efforts give an idea of the procedures that have been tried and suggest some of the difficulties that are confronted in this type of research. Evaluation of Title V Training Programs. The first illustration is of a standardized evaluative design, or model, developed by Bateman to be used in assessing the effectiveness of the various training projects carried on in the Work Experience and Training Programs financed under Title V of the Economic Opportunity Act in the United States. The model, which is ready for use before a project starts, is designed to assess project effectiveness with an index composed of four measures: percent of trainees who obtain employment, percent of trainees who get employed in semi-skilled or high-level occupations, the average monthly wage earned by trainees, and the proportion of trainees who go on to more advanced training programs. 17 The criteria of effectiveness chosen by Bateman can be measured readily and objectively; their being set up ahead of time makes it relatively easy to carry out the evaluation; and the findings obtained on one project can be compared with findings on other similar projects. However, the Bateman model does not attempt any assessment of less tangible changes that the training program might have been intended to produce, for example, in the attitudes and motivations of the trainees or of the target population from which the trainees came; and they do not measure any changes that the project brought about in the ability of the community's residents to work together toward meeting the needs of such groups as those for whom the project was developed. To ascertain with greater precision whether or not the measured outcomes can be attributed to the training projects, the index Bateman devised would also be used on a control group so that the trainee group could be checked against a group not exposed to the training project experience. Evaluation of Head Start. A project evaluation that did employ control groups was made by the Westinghouse Learning Corporation — University of Ohio research unit — which was engaged by the 17. Worth Bateman, 'Assessing Program Effectiveness', Welfare in 5 (February, 1967): 1-10.

Review,

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Office of Economic Opportunity to evaluate Head Start programs in communities of the United States. 18 The research unit was given the assignment to find out the extent to which first, second, and third grade children who had attended Head Start programs differed in intellectual and socio-personal development from comparable children who had not attended Head Start. Even though the findings of this study were pooled to produce an overall evaluation of Head Start rather than an evaluation of separate local programs, the research that was done is relevant for community development purposes in that the programs were developed and operated in communities and the data on them and on the control groups were collected on a community basis. In its attempt to answer the question it was assigned, the Westinghouse research unit chose a random sample of 104 Head Start centers across the nation and then administered a series of tests intended to measure various aspects of cognitive and affective development to a sample of children from these centers who had gone on to the first, second, or third grade in local area schools and to a matched sample of control children from the same grades who had not attended Head Start. It was the conclusion of the study that the Head Start children were not appreciably different from their non-Head Start counterparts in the kinds of development measured in the study, except for a slight but significant superiority that full-year (not just summer-program) Head Start children showed on some of the measures of cognitive development. Members of the research unit were criticized, among other things, for: (1) narrowing their focus to cognitive and affective outcomes and excluding health, nutrition, and community objectives; (2) using test instruments — about the only kind available — that in not being developed for disadvantaged populations might have failed to detect many of the desired changes that Head Start had produced in the children; (3) employing a research design which was not geared to take into account numerous factors that might have led to the selection of a superior non-Head Start control group whose higher capabilities could obscure the 'improvements' that Head Start had 18. For ail assessment of this research, see Walter Williams and John W. Evans, 'The Politics of Evaluation: The Case of Head Start', The Annals of the American Academy of Politican and Social Science, 385 (1969): 118-132.

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produced in its children; (4) failing to recognize the likelihood that the 'gains' the children had achieved through Head Start might have been wiped out by the impoverished environment and the poorly qualified teachers they had been exposed to after their Head Start experience; and (5) overlooking the possibility that the 'improvements' the children had attained through Head Start spread in the classroom situation to the non-Head Start children and thus reduced or eliminated evidence of what the true changes had been. Though granting the validity of some of the criticisms, Williams and Evans considered the methodological and conceptual base of the Westinghouse study a 'relatively good one' and concluded that its findings could be used to advantage in making future decisions about Head Start policies and procedures. They suggested, however, as did Weiss and Rein on the basis of their case study of another project evaluation employing the controlled experiment method, that community action efforts directed toward broad aims be evaluated through a process-oriented approach. 19 This type of research, which will be described in the next illustration taken from the Etawah Community Development Project in India, relies heavily upon first-hand observations to find out just what is happening as a project effort proceeds so that answers can be obtained not only to the question of what effects occurred, but also to the question of why the planned effects did or did not occur. Evaluation of the Etawah Project in India. The evaluation of the Etawah Project was directed by Albert Mayer, who also participated in the action aspects of that demonstration community action effort initiated in late 1948 by the provincial government of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. 20 The project's operation over the period 1948 to 1952 was evaluated. Mayer and his colleagues, in collaboration with government officials, had selected Etawah District as the site of the pilot project because their research data indicated that Etawah's physical, social, 19. Robert S. Weiss and Martin Rein, 'The Evaluation of Broad-Aim Programs: A Cautionary Case and a Moral', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 385 (1969): 133-142. 20. For detailed description and analysis of the effort, see Albert Mayer, et al., Pilot Project, India (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1958), especially pp. 235-287,308-309.

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and economic needs and resources were reasonably representative of the needs and resources of rural communities throughout India, thus suggesting that the project's procedures would have wide applicability to other localities. The project staff kept records on changes in food crop production and observed other changes that were taking place in the various villages. Assessing the situation eight years after the project started, Mayer noted that agricultural production had increased about six times over what it had been in the first year of the project; roads connecting the villages to the outside world had been transformed from virtually impassable ruts and mud holes into smooth, easily traveled roads that were well drained by brick or cement culverts; lanes within the villages had been widened and similarly drained; other drainage systems had been constructed to provide more sanitary conditions around the dwellings; previously unsafe wells had been chlorinated; sanitary wells with hand pumps had widely replaced open wells; latrines had gained very limited acceptance; the number of brick dwellings and brick school buildings had increased; such agricultural implements as the moldboard plow and the Olpad thresher had been widely adopted, and local blacksmiths had been trained to service the new implements; a cooperative brickkiln industry had been established; and from the standpoint of community integration, factionalism in some villages had decreased and increasing numbers of villagers of different status levels were working together to reclaim wasteland and prepare it for cultivation, to establish local libraries and literacy classes, and to organize and operate cooperatives. The evaluators maintained close touch with what was going on in the change effort so that they knew reasonably well when the activities were and were not in line with what the project intended and so that they could usually recognize influences which were producing changes that might be mistakenly credited to the project. The ability of the people to work together in the project was assessed partly in terms of the task accomplishments and partly in terms of the extent to which high-status and low-status community residents collaborated in efforts that were intended to benefit the whole village or raise the level of living of the less advantaged villagers. The research team found at the outset of the project that the villages generally did not have leaders who were concerned for the

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overall welfare of the community. Even the councils, or panchayats, elected to look after village affairs, frequently failed to supply communitywide leadership because they were either inactive, factionridden, or did not have the real local leaders in their membership. The project evaluation revealed that, in the villages where project programs succeeded in attaining their objectives, village level workers had been catalysts in increasing the people's cooperative interaction by choosing for targets of action needs on which there was widespread local consensus, being careful to confer with members of different factions, holding communitywide meetings at which members of all local groups were encouraged to speak their minds, initiating programs that would give satisfaction and encouragement to a broad range of villagers, and working directly with persons of high and of low status to get the programs implemented. Assessment

of Project Evaluation

Research

Using research to evaluate community actions either in their entirety or at some point at which there are outcomes that can be evaluated is based on the assumption that outcomes can be measured with enough accuracy to justify a decision to continue, expand, terminate, or repeat a given project. It is not inherent in this type of research that it will exert direct effect on action, though it may be expected to have indirect effects on action personnel who, made aware that their efforts are being or will be evaluated, respond with such reactions as resentment, feelings of insecurity, or motivation to increase their contribution to the project. Evaluation is expected to affect future projects if it influences decisions about resources to be assigned to those projects or if it leads action personnel to modify goals or procedures. The Westinghouse evaluation of Head Start described above did not provide a factual basis for wholehearted endorsement of that nationwide program. While the value of the summer-only program was more seriously questioned, the findings of the research revealed successes and failures in both the summer-only and the year-round programs. The evaluation was criticized for not being accurate enough in measuring changes in the Head Start children, criticism that might not have been made if the evaluation had been more favorable or if Head Start had been less popular. Nevertheless, to

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the extent that the evaluation did not provide satisfactory answers to the question of why some local programs succeeded and others failed, it did not provide a clear-cut basis for making decisions as to whether Head Start should be expanded or discontinued. It did, however, point to the need for further research that would probe for answers to that question. The highly favorable evaluation of the Etawah Pilot Project gave encouragement to the national leaders in India who were interested in establishing a National Community Development Program that would eventually serve all areas of India. One warning note in Mayer's evaluation indicated that rapid increase in the number of villages carrying on community action projects can create conditions that have adverse effects in the villages. The conditions were found to arise mainly when there was not sufficient time to select and train qualified village level workers and when the different levels of workers and different specialists serving a village did not have the time or the chance to communicate freely with one another and with the villagers. The adverse effects took such forms as superficial programs and pursuit of activities that were motivated toward selfish rather than communitywide objectives. Taylor and his colleagues, evaluating the National Community Development Program, found that it was experiencing such effects in its rapid expansion. 21 The role of project evaluations in adding to the body of knowledge on the community development process tends to be focused on the testing of more limited hypotheses than is typical in action research. Thus the findings from project evaluations that maintain a higher degree of control over the factors studied can be used to test some aspect of a broader-range theory of community development examined in action research. The Head Start evaluation was focused almost entirely on the pragmatic purpose of assessing the value of that program so that decisions could be made about expanding or discontinuing it. The Etawah evaluation was used by Mayer to test out assumptions he had made that people can be encouraged to work together for the general improvement of their community if an outside person comes in and through democratic procedures points out a way by which observable improvements 21. Carl C. Taylor, et al., India's Roots Longmans, 1965), especially pp. 169-476.

of Democracy

(Bombay: Orient

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can be achieved, sees that needed resources are made available, and gradually convinces the local people that they are capable of raising their own and at the same time the whole village's level of living.

SUMMARY Research is used in community action projects to identify community needs and resources, to guide the selection of goals and the procedures adopted for a given project, and to evaluate the outcomes of specific projects. It is also used to identify principles that govern the operation of the community development process. Though uneven in its precision and objectivity, community development research is having its scientific character increased through the increasing emphasis that is being placed upon: devising precise ways of measuring various facets of a community action effort, defining goals in terms that can be measured, obtaining competent research personnel and adequate financial support for research activities, and avoiding biases or political pressures that may distort findings. The three principal types of research used in relation to community development are the community survey, action research, and the project evaluation. The community survey — especially the selfsurvey — is least likely to attain a high degree of scientific character, but it gives community residents experience in working together and helps to increase their familiarity with local needs and resources as well as their emotional commitment to the community action effort. Action research is structured to permit research and project activities to go along together, and research findings are fed back to guide task-performance activities and to assess the effects those activities are having on the people's ability to go on working together. They may also be used to identify principles that explain how the community development process operates. The project evaluation calls for getting valid quantitative and/or qualitative ways of measuring achievement of task activities in a community action and the effects of those activities on the ability of the community's people to work together in community action efforts. The measurements may be made for a project in its entirety or at

Bibliography

303

whatever points there are outcomes that can be appraised. A given project may make use of any one or all of these three types of research. National governments and increasing numbers of other organizations that give financial support to community action efforts are requiring that outcomes be evaluated, and they are usually willing to finance competent evaluation research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hunter, Floyd; Schaffer, Ruth Conner; and Sheps, Cecil G. Community Organization: Action and Inaction. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1956. A research study of a community self-survey and the resulting community action. Special attention is given to deriving generalizations which will be generally applicable. Kimball, Solon T.; and Pears all, Marion. The Talladega Story. University, Alabama: U. of Alabama Press, 1954. A report of the action research conducted in relation to Talladega's effort to identify local health needs and set in motion measures for getting the needs met. Findings are used to formulate principles that are theorized as being operative in the community development process. National Commission on Community Health Services. Health Is a Community Affair. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1966. A report of research procedures used in a nationwide study of community health needs, resources, and practices. It includes self-studies made in twenty-one communities of different size, located in different parts of the United States. Shostak, Arthur B. Sociology in Action. Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey, 1966. A collection of thirty-eight essays written chiefly by sociologists who are reporting on action research in which they have participated. The reports are generally enthusiastic about the researcher's taking an active and partisan role in community actions. Spencer, John. Stress and Release in an Urban Estate. London: Tavistock, 1964. A report of the Bristol Social Project in which action research was employed by a team of social scientists and social workers to diagnose needs, guide the community action effort, and to evaluate the procedures used. Warren, Roland. Studying Your Community. New York: Russell Sage, 1955. A successor to Joanna Colcord's Your Community (3rded., 1947). It contains practical and detailed instructions for conducting a comprehensive community survey. Weiss, Carol H. 'Planning and Action Project Evaluation', in Learning in Action, ed. June L. Schmelzer. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, 1966. A discussion of practical problems connected with the use of control groups.

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Williams, Walter; and Evans, John W. "The Politics of Evaluation', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 385 (1969): 118-132. An examination of the scientific and political aspects of a research evaluation of the Head Start program. Young, Pauline V. Scientific Social Surveys and Research. 4th ed.; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Chapters 18 and 19 deal with procedures for making scientific studies of rural and urban communities. Chapters 4-9 and 13 describe specific techniques for designing a study, preparing schedules and questionnaires, conducting interviews, and presenting data in graphic form.

Index of Names

Abrams, Charles 244 Adams, Richard N. 35, 179, 287 Aldous,Joan 59 Alinsky, Saul D. 141, 214, 215-216, 219-220,223,238 Altshuler, Alan A. 217, 221 Anderson, Nels 108 Apodaca, Anacleto 92, 265 Avallone, Sara A. 262 Azumi, Koya 170 Bain, Henry 200 Banfield, Edward C. 52, 53,156,166, 176,189 Barber, William J . 100 Bateman, Worth 296 Batten.T. R. 139,164, 261 Beals, Alan R. 49 Bebout, John E. 16 Beck, Bertram M. 196-197 Becker, Howard S. 246, 277 Behling, John H. 236 Bell, E ari H. 93 Bellah, Robert 71 Bensman, Joseph 47, 70, 96 Berger, Bennett M. 130 Biddle, LoureideJ. 139,164 Biddle, William W. 139, 164, 189, 207-208 Birkhead, Guthrie S. 190 Black, Cyril Edwin 31

Blau, Peter M. 43, 170, 220 Blumberg, Rae Lesser 57 Blumer, Herbert 64 Bodersen, Arvid 48 Bogue, Donald J . 128 Bonjean, Charles M. 54 Boskin, Joseph 195, 202, 223 Boskoff, Alvin 131, 135 Bottomore, T. B. 49, 95 Bredmeier, Harry C. 16 Breese, Gerald 69-70,105 Brennan, T. 133 Brownell, Baker 26, 285 Brunner, Edmund de S. 22 Brush, John E. 125 Burgess, Ernest W. 131, 132 Burgess, M. Elaine 177 Bur kehead, Jesse 190 Butler, Edgar W. 105-106 Cancian, Frank 92 Caplow, Theodore 125, 133 Carter, Genevieve W. 234 Cartsonis, Emanuel M. 252 Cary, Lee J . 140, 159, 164, 227 Chapin, F. Stuart, Jr. 240 Chase, Stuart 199 Chilman, Catherine S. 78 Clark, John P. 13 Clark, Kenneth B. 60 Clark, Terry N. 54, 95, 170, 218 Clemmer, Donald 14

306 d o ward, Richard A. 85, 216 Coates, Charles H. 51 Cohen, Nathan E. 147 Coleman, James S. 77, 96, 1 4 4 , 1 9 2 , 194-195, 198, 201, 202, 204, 223 Coleman, J o h n R. 207 Coleman, Richard P. 46 Cone, James H. 74 Cook, Robert M. 31 Cooley, Frank L. 67 Coser, Lewis 2 2 , 1 9 3 , 1 9 6 , 1 9 7 , 202, 203,204,205,206,217,223 Cosgriffe, Harry A. 264 Cottrell, W. F. 19 Cox, F r e d M . 2 1 5 , 2 1 6 Dabaghian, Jane 174 Dahl, Robert 52 Dahrendorf, Ralf 22, 202, 203, 204, 205,224 Davies, A. F. 133 Davis, Allison 46 Davis, Kingsley 25 Davis, Richard H. 80 Dejongh, J a n F. 239 Denney, Reuel 42 Deutsch, Stephen E. 277 Dickson, William J . 43 Dobriner, William M. 6 9 , 1 3 0 Dotson, Floyd 126 Dotson, Lillian Ota 126 Douglas, J . W. B. 79 Duncan, Otis Dudley 23, 28, 29, 78 Dunham, Arthur 1 3 9 , 1 4 0 , 273 Dürkheim, Emile 90 Ecklein, J o a n Levin 238 Eckstein, Harry 27 Edwards, Allen D. 1 1 4 , 1 3 6 Eells, Kenneth 47 Eisman, Martin 236 Eldredge, H. Wentworth 105, 127 Elman, Richard M. 216 Encel, S. 133 Epstein, Irwin 85 Erlich, J o h n L. 215

Index of Names Etzioni, Amitai 173, 192, 209-210, 211-212 Evans, J o h n W. 279, 296-297, 304 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 67 Fagin, Henry 240 Fantini, Mario 76 Fava, Sylvia Fleis 25, 5 9 , 1 2 6 , 1 3 6 Fiedler, Fred E. 1 6 6 , 1 7 2 , 190 Firey, Walter 133 Fischer, J o h n 69 Fiser, Webb S. 69 Fitzgerald, Edward 14 Ford, Lyman S. 232 Ford, Thomas R. 123 Forrester, J a y W. 1 0 9 , 1 3 6 Fortes, M. 67 Freeman, Linton C. 167, 190 Fried, Alfred 216 Friedlander, Walter A. 234 Gans, Herbert J . 1 7 6 , 2 4 4 Gardner, Burleigh B. 46 Gardner, Mary R. 46 Gibbard, Harold A. 123 Gilbert, Claire W. 53, 54 Gist, Noel P. 126 Gittell, Marilyn 76 Glasser, William 81 Glazer, Nathan 42 Glenn, Max E. 267 Goode, William J . 1 4 , 5 7 Goodman, Louis Wolf 96 Goodman, Paul 242 Goodman, Percival 242 Gordon, Chad 170 Graffagnino, Paul N. 262 Grebler, Leo 245 Green, Arnold L. 199 Green, James W. 149 Greer, Scott 246 Grosser, Charles F. 236 Gurin, Arnold 141, 142, 247, 271, 273 Gurin, Patricia 207 Gusfield, Joseph 32

Index of Names Hage,Jerald 170 Harbison, Frederick H. 207 Harris, Chauney D. 131,132 Hatt, Paul K. 29 Hawley, Amos H. 2 2 , 1 0 8 Hawley, Willis D. 52 Hedgepeth, William 121-122,136 Heifetz, Henry 263 Hendriks, Gradus 140 Hendry, Charles E. 140,172,173,190 Herberg, Will 73 Herman, Harold 190 Herring, Harriet L. 123 Hillery, George A., J r . 13, 14, 26, 28, 29,38,58 Hirsch, Werner Z. 240 Hissock, William McC. 256 Hoffer, Charles R. 149, 152 Hollingshead, August B. 46, 78 Holmberg, Allan R. 3 5 , 1 7 9 , 287 Holmes, Lowell D. 62 Horowitz, Irving Louis 277 Howard, John 277 Howard, Nigel 200 Hoyt, Homer 2 4 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 2 Hunter, Floyd 51, 290, 303 Hyman, Herbert H. 218, 219 Infield, Henrick F. 121 Inkeles, Alex 48 Irelan, Lola M. 7 9 , 9 2 Isaac, Barry L. 92-9° Jacobs, Jane 244 Jennings, M. Kent 53 Jensen, Philip K. 80 Jerome, J u d 121 Jones, Hettie 236, 237 Jones, Maxwell 14 Junek, Oscar Waldeman 122 Junod, Violaine 183,259 Kagi, Herbert M. 190 Kahn, Alfred J . 273 Kaiser, Edward J . 105,106 Kasarda, John D. 106

307 Katz, Irwin 207 Kent, T . J . 241 Killian, Lewis M. 208-209, 213, 217, 221,224 Kimball, Solon T. 162, 257, 289,303 King, Clarence 273 Koentjaraningrat 67 Kolaja, Jiri 138 Kolb, John H. 22 König, René 14 Kramer, Ralph M. 177, 195 Laue, James H. 212 Lauffer, Armand 238 Lebeaux, Charles N. 83, 274 Lee, J . Oscar 74 Lenski, Gerhard 72 Lerner, Daniel 31, 38 Leve, Robert M. 262 Levin, Henry M. 76 Levy, Marion J., Jr. 2 3 , 2 7 , 3 1 , 6 3 , 7 1 , 75,96,153 Lewis, David T. 105 Lewis, Oscar 72 Liblit, Jerome 248 Lineberry, Robert L. 54 Lippitt, Ronald 149, 157-158 Lipset, Seymour Martin 14 Littlejohn, Elizabeth R. 234 Litwak, Eugene 59-60 Long, Norton E. 239 Loomis, Charles P. 1 4 , 2 1 , 2 7 , 3 9 , 1 5 2 Lo wie, Robert H. 75 Lubove, Roy 239 Luecke, Richard Henry 73 Lunt, Paul S. 46 Lurie, Harry L. 232 Lynd, Helen Merrell 47 Lynd, Robert S. 47 Maclver, Robert M. 20 Mack, Raymond W. 195 MacRae, Duncan, Jr. 277 Magot, Richard 76 Mann, Lawrence D. 177 Martin, Lawrence 199 Martin, Roscoe C. 6 8 , 1 7 7 , 1 9 0

308 Matthews, Donald R. 207 Maurer, Beryl B. 267 Mayer, Albert 298-300,301-302 Mayo, Selz 140, 149 McAllister, Ronald J . 105,106 McElrath, Dennis C. 133 McFarland, Andrew S. 166 McFarland, Carter 244 McKenzie, Roderick D. 132 Mead, Margaret 35,152 Medmore, J . F. 248 Meeker, Marcia 47 Mehta, Asoka 105 Mehta, Sushila 180-182 Meier, Richard L. 173 Merton, Robert K. 20, 23, 144 Meyerson, Margy Ellin 244 Mezirow, J . D. 264, 269 Miai, Curtis 161,264,273 Miai, Dorothy 161, 264, 273 Milgram, Grace 244 Miller, Paul A. 149,151,164, 285 Miner, Horace 26, 39,100 Misner, Gordon E. 211 Mitchell, Joyce M. 69 Mitchell, Robert B. 142 Mitchell, William C. 69 Moe, Edward O. 14 Moerman, Michael 68 Moles, Oliver C., Jr. 78, 79 Moore, Wilbert E. 23, 31, 64, 69 Morgan, David R. 106 Morland, Kenneth 123 Morris, Robert 227 Morse, Chandler 31, 36 Morton, John 253 Munger, Frank J . 177, 190 Nakamara, Yuichi 234 Neenen, William 106 Neill, A. S. 81,82 Nelson, Lowry 69 Neugarten, Bernice L. 46 Nieburg, H. L. 193, 220-221 Niehoff, Arthur H. 183, 259, 273 Nisbet, Robert A. 26, 144

Index of

Names

Norbeck, Edward 36,118 Nuttall, Ronald L. 170 Oberschall, Anthony 199 Ogburn, William F. 23 Oglesby, Carol 217 Oppenheimer, Martin 193 Page, Charles H. 43 Pahl, R. E. 108 Park, Robert Ezra 108, 132 Parsons, Talcott 60 Patti, Rino J . 271 Paul, Benjamin D. 199 Pearsall, Marion 162, 257, 289, 303 Pederson, Harold A. 91 Pellegrin, Roland J . 51 Penalosa, Fernando 125 Perlman, Robert, 141,142, 247, 271, 273 Petersen, William 104 Pope, Liston 73 Poplin, Dennis 13, 39 Poston, Richard W. 283, 285, 286 Pratt, Mildred 238 Pryor, Robin J . 131 Quinn, James A. 127 Rainwater, Lee 60 Ransford, H. Edward 197 Redfield, Robert 26, 28, 33, 39 Rein, Martin 298 Reiss, Albert J., Jr. 29 Resnick, Herman 271 Riesman, David 42 Riessman, Frank 79-80 Riley, Gresham 277 Ringle, Ken 253 Rodwin, Lloyd 254 Roethlisberger, Fritz J . 43 Rose, Arnold M. 224 Rose, Peter I. 57 Rosenstone, Robert A. 223 Rosenthal, Robert A. 196,199, 208, 224

Index of Names Ross, Murray G. 141, 149, 150, 155, 164,172,173,190,230,274 Rothman, Jack 215 Rudramoorthy, B. 264 Sanders, Irwin T. 14, 39, 140, 141, 164,284 Sasty, Thomas E. 200 Sautoy, Peter du 139 Schaffer, Ruth Connor 290, 303 Schaller, Lyle E. 207, 215, 220, 224 Schemmel, Bill 53 Schmelzer, June L. 280,303 Schneider, Louis 73 Schnore, Leo F. 129-130, 240 Schoenherr, Richard A. 43 Schottland, Charles I. 87 Seiler, Lauren H. 13 Shanas, Ethel 59, 60 Shaull, Richard 217 Sheldon, Eleanor Bernert 69 Shepherd, Muriel Corley 123 Sheps, Cecil G. 290, 303 Sheuch, Erwin K. 170 Shostak, Arthur B. 286, 303 Sibley, Elbridge 277 Sidel, Ruth 258 Silberman, Charles E. 215, 238 Sills, David L. 176 Silverman, Abner D. 234 Simmel, Georg 223 Sirjamaki, John 93 Sjoberg, Gideon 25, 39, 57 Smith, T. Lynn 117 Sofen, Edward 69 Sower, Christopher 149,152, 156 Specht, Harry 177, 195,216-217 Spencer, John 1 8 6 , 2 3 8 , 2 8 8 , 3 0 3 Spicer, Edward H. 92, 265, 274 Spiegel, Erika 254 Spiegel, John P. 197,202-203 Spinrad, William 96,175-176 Spiro, Melford 120,121 Srinivas, M. N. 49 Stanton, Esther 233 Stein, Maurice R. 18

309 Stephenson, John B. 58 Stewart, Maxwell S. 243 Stock, Dennis 121-122 Streib, Gordon F. 59, 60 Stryker, Sheldon 125 Summers, Gene F. 13 Sussman, Marvin B. 59, 114, 136 Sutton, Willis A., Jr. 138, 159,162 Taylor, Carl C. 67, 301 Thometz, Carol Estes 51 Thomlinson, Ralph 100,126,133, 136 Thompson, Daniel C. 196 Thompson, Warren S. 105 Tonnies, Ferdinand 27-28, 39 Tropman, John E. 215 Tucker, Sterling 197 Turner, Ralph H. 207, 210-211, 214 Turner, Roy 125 Ullman, Edward L. 127, 131, 132 Vidich, Arthur J . 47, 70, 96 Vucinich, Alexander 36 Wagner, Gunther 67 Wallace, Samuel 125 Warner, W. Lloyd 46, 47, 54 Warren, Roland L. 14, 15, 39, 168, 218,219,284,303 Webber, Carolyn C. 105 Webber, Melvin M. 105 Weber, Max 172,174 Webster, Donald H. 240 Weiner, Myron 31 Weiss, Carol H. 280, 303 Weiss, Robert S. 298 Weissman, Harold H. 144, 216, 224, 231,236,237,263,274 Welch, Lewis P. 190 Welty, Thomas 72 Wheaton, William L. C. 244 Whiteford, Andrew H. 126 Wickenden, Elizabeth 96 Wilensky, Harold L. 83, 274 Wilkie, Raymond, 119-120,136

310 Williams, Walter 279, 296-297, 304 Williamson, Robert C. 50 Wilson, Brian 73 Wilson, James Q. 244 Winch, Robert F. 57, 96 Wingfield, Clyde J . 190 Winter, Gibson 73 Wirt, Frederick M. 52 Wood, Elizabeth 239 Woodall, Thomas E. 267

Index of Names Yazaki, Takeo 126 Young, Pauline V. 304 Yuan, D. F. 29 Zald, Mayer N. 85 Zarate, Alvin O. 104 Zentner, Henry 13 Zimmer, Basil G. 108 Zimmerman, Carle C. 33

Subject Index

accommodation 71, 111 achieved status 16 action research assessment of — 282,291-295,301; related to community development process 276, 280, 286-295, 302; used in community actions: Bristol Social Project 186, 238, 287-289, 292, 293-294; Salem Project 287, 290-291, 292, 293295; Talladega Project 287, 289290, 292-295; Vicos Project 287, 292,293,294 activist roles 72, 236, 238, 253, 272, 277 advocate roles 86-87, 216, 219, 228, 235-238, 240, 271 Africa apartheid in — 113 ; Bushmen in — 62; community actions in — 137, 182, 183-186, 188, 259; modernizing communities in — 100, 126, 239; political systems in — 67 (fn.); rural communities in — 62; traditional communities in — 32 Alabama nonviolent protest in — 219; Talladega Project in — 1 6 2 , 257, 287, 289-290, 292-295 alienation 35,50,90,147,175,186,188, 196, 206, 217, 220, 238, 288, 294

Allang (Indonesia) 67 (fn.) American Indians 55 American Society of Planning Officials 273 Amish communities 91, 115 Andaman Islanders 62 anomie 90 (also see alienation) antipoverty programs (see war on poverty) apartheid 20, 113, 182 Argentina: town-country community in — 115 Arlington (Virginia): education subsystem in — 153, 157 ascribed statuses 16, 20, 28, 44 Asia community development in — 137; farm villages in — 119; modernizing communities in — 100,126, 239; population control i n — 146; rural communities in — 62; traditional communities in — 32 Atlanta (Georgia): power structure in — 51, 53 Australia aborigines in — 62¡relatively modernized communities in — 32, 62 autonomy 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 5 , 1 7 , 1 8 , 25, 26, 2 7 , 3 7 , 130 backlash 193, 214, 268

312 Baltimore (Maryland): comprehensive health planning advisory councils in — 256 Bayonne (New Jersey): community conflict in — 199 Belgium: housing in — 248 birthrates 34,97,102,103,133,134, 159 Black Power 74, 213, 217, 224 blacks — and community conflict 213, 217, 219, 224; — and community leadership 53, 74, 176-177; —and community participation 70, 290; — and education subsystem 76, 81, 99, 102; — and minority status 55,60,183-186; — and population movement 105-106, 107, 113; — and religious subsystem 72, 73-74; — and social welfare subsystem 183-186 Boston (Massachusetts) land use in — 133 (fn.); Italian suburb in — 176 boundaries of community 14,15, 2122,114,117 Brazil line villages in — 117; new community (Brasilia) in — 254; towncountry community in — 115; urban birth rates in — 104 (fn.) Bristol Social Project 60 (fn.), 182, 186, 238, 287-289, 292, 293-294, 303 broker role 236 (fn.) Brotherhood-in-Action 196 (fn.) Buddhist wat 72 bureaucratic organization described 43; in education subsystem 76, 95; in government subsystem 68, 70; in social welfare subsystem 83; informal groups in — 17; leadership in — 173-174; — and urbanism 25, 26, 27 Bureau of Community Service (U. of Kentucky) 282, 284 (fn.)

Subject

Index

Burma: education subsystem i n — 72 Caliente 18-19, 23 Cambodia: education subsystem in — 72 Canada federated fund raising in — 232; line village in — 117; relatively modernized communities i n — 32; town-country communities in — 115 caste system 20, 29, 44, 45, 48-49, 113,125,174 Catholic affiliation and community behavior 72;communitiesin Latin America 72; social service agencies 84 central business district 112,124,126, 127, 129,132, 135,170, 242 central city 99, 106, 107, 130 centralization as ecological process 108,112, 114, 134 Chandigargh (India): new community 254 Chan Kom (Mexico): on folk-urban continuum 28 Charlotte (North Carolina): population pyramid 100-102 Chicago (Illinois) growth pattern of — 132; power structure in — 53, 176, 189; The Woodlawn Organization i n — 214215,219 Chicanos: minority status o f — 55 Chile: modernizing communities in — 104 (fn.) Ciudad Guyana (Venezuela): new community 254 Civil Rights Act of 1964 213 civil rights movement conflict strategy in — 209, 210, 212-214, 219, 220, 223, 224,228; — and religious subsystem 74 Cleveland (Ohio): blacks in government subsystem of — 107

313

Subject Index collaborative approach/strategy (see consensus approach/strategy) communes (see cooperative communities) Communist communities economic norms and values in — 65; planners' roles in — 240, 241; — and social class structure 4 4 , 4 8 community autonomy of — 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 5 , 1 7 , 1 8 , 25-26, 27, 37, 130; boundaries of — 1 4 , 1 5 , 21-22,114,117;change in — 12, 23-36, 37, 39, 89, 100102, 137; cohesion in — 17, 20, 21, 158, 193-194; conflict theory on — 22, 23; definition of — 9, 12-14, 36-37; diversity of — 11; fragmentation of — 68-69; functional theory on — 23; interaction in — 15-21, 22, 25, 26, 37, 42, 140-141, 144-145, 203, 204, 205; leadership i n — 165-190;life cycle of — 109; linkages/interrelatedness in — 12, 13, 15, 16-21, 22, 30, 3 7 , 4 2 , 4 3 , 1 4 3 , 1 6 1 , 1 6 3 , 201; locality-orientation of — 11, 12, 13, 14, 25; locality-relevant functions in — 1 5 , 3 7 ; normative structure of — 21, 89-93, 95; power structure i n — 50-54,70,167,168, 1 8 9 , 1 9 2 ; self-sufficiency of — 13, 1 5 , 2 6 , 2 7 , 37,130;socialstructure of — 15, 16, 21, 37, 41, 73, 89, 9 0 , 1 4 9 , 1 9 5 , 209, 222, 289; social system analysis of — 12, 14-23, 37, 39, 41; subsystems in — 15, 17, 18, 19, 30, 31, 33-34, 34-35, 37, 38, 51, 53, 55-93, 94, 9 5 , 1 4 3 , 1 4 5 , 1 6 1 , 1 6 3 , 1 6 7 , 168,169-171, 173,174,175,189,226,227,235, 260, 267-268 community action — and community conflict 191, 193-194, 208-223; —andcommunity context 10, 41, 50, 140, 142147, 163, 168, 239, 294; compo-

nents of — 147-159, 163; continuing type of — 225, 230-234, 2 3 8 , 2 5 3 , 2 5 6 , 2 5 8 , 2 7 2 ; definition of — 1 3 8 , 1 4 7 - 1 6 2 , 1 6 3 ¡examples of — 35, 178-180, 180-183, 183186, 186-188 and 287-289, 289290, 290-291, 298-300; — and leadership 53, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174-188, 189; professionals' roles in — 229-239, 239255, 255-259, 260-263, 263-267, 272; research related to - - 275279, 281-284, 286-295, 295-300, 302-303; short-range type of — 230, 234-239, 272; strategies used in — (see conflict strategy and consensus strategy); targets of — 36, 38, 50, 95; task and working together aspects of — (see community development process) community change community attitudes toward — 50, 99; directions of — 12, 23-36; rates of — 35-36, 38; related to community development 50, 137164 community conflict 191-224; course of — 200-208; definition of — 191-194,222; double-edged role of — 193-194; origin of — 194-200, 222; — and population movement 106; self-containing character of — 192; self-generating character of — 192; theory on — 22, 23, 37 community council 160, 162, 230231, 257, 272, 289-291, 293-294 (also see panchayat) community development agent 171, 228-229, 271 community development encourager

208

community development process community context of — 10, 41, 50, 140, 142-147, 163, 168, 239, 294; conflict and — 191,193-194,

314

Subject

Index

208-223; definition of — 9, 24, comprehensive mental health centers 256-257 138-141, 162-163; distinguished from method, movement, program concentration as ecological process 111,134 140-141 ; manifested in community actions 147-161, 163-164; norms concentric zone theory 131-132, 135 and values related t o — 90-91,141- conflict strategy 10, 138, 163, 191 142,163;research and — 275-304; description of — 151, 165, 208roles of leaders and — 165-190, 223; evaluation of - 218-221, 223, 293, 294; roles of professionals 224; leadership and — 168; proceand — 225-274; task performance dures used in — 209-217: by Alinsky and working together aspects of and MFY 214-216; in civil rights — 147, 160,161-162, 163 movement 212-214;by established community organization 141 (see authorities 210-212, 222; by revocommunity development process) lutionaries 216-217, 222; roles of community power structure 50-54, professionals in — 227-228, 231; 70 types of community actions used in — 192, 227-228; — in various pluralistic model 52-53,54; pyramcomponents of community action idal model 51-52; as source of 151, 153,155, 156,157, 163 leadership 168, 189, 192 Community Service Society (New Congress of Racial Equality 212 consensus in community 99,188,191, York City) 238 207, 300 community survey 276, 280, 281289,291,293,302 consensus (collaborative/cooperative) assessment o f — 284-286; types of strategy 10, 138, 145, 146, 147, self-survey 282-283; social recon163, 165, 191, 208, 216, 219; denaissance survey 283-284; studyscription of — 150; leadership and group survey 283 — 168; roles of professionals in competition — 227-228, 231; used in Bristol Social Project, Johannesburg Health as concomitant of community life Service Project, Vadala Project, 17, 191; — and conflict 194, 195; Vicos Project 178-188; in various as ecological process 108,110-111, components of community action 114,134; — and religious subsystem 151,153, 155, 156, 157 71,94 components of a completed commu- consultant roles 153, 228, 232, 233, nity action 240, 255, 271 goal achievement 148, 156-157, control groups in research 279, 296, 297 163; initiation of action 148, 151153, 163; institutionalization of cooperative communities 119-122,136 achieved goal 148, 157-159, 163; cooperative housing 247-248 recognition of need for action 148, Cornell University: community action 149-151, 163; selection of goal in Vicos, Peru 35, 178-180, 287 and plan for action 148, 154-155, course of community conflict 163; study and diagnosis of need intensity 202-205,222;settlement for action 148, 153-154, 163 205-208,222; spread 200-202,222 comprehensive health planning ad- Cove community (Southern Appalavisory councils 256 chia) 266-267

Subject Index Crescent City (Greensboro, N. C.): black leadership in — 176-177 Czechoslovakia: community conflict in — 208 Dade County (Florida): merger with Miami 69 Danish communities (Wisconsin) 91 day care services 59, 60, 61, 84, 86, 247 death rates 34, 97,103,104,133,134, 146,159,270 decentralization in decision making 52, 53, 54; as ecological process 108, 112, 114, 134; in education subsystem 76, 81 ; of social services 147 decision-analysis method: of identifying community leaders 52-53, 96,189,190 decision making — and community action 139,145, 154, 216, 279, 301; — and community conflict 175,194,197, 234; — and leadership 95-96,165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172; participation i n — 31,50,53,94,170,178,179, 180, 181, 186, 201, 265, 270; — and religious subsystem 72-73 demographic features of community birth rates 34, 97, 102, 103, 133, 134, 159; — and community change 37, 100-102; in community context 9, 1 2 , 4 1 , 9 7 , 9 8 - 1 0 7 , 1 0 8 , 113, 135-136; — and community development 137, 139, 143, 145146, 163, 240, 247, 268; composition of population 99-102, 133; death rates 34, 97, 103, 104, 133, 134, 146, 159, 270; population movement 102,104-107, ^ ¡ p o p ulation pyramid 100-102; population size 98-99,133; — and ruralurban continuum 28-29; — and social welfare subsystem 86; variations by social class 45

315 demographic transition 34, 103-104, 134, 270 Denver (Colorado): conflict in education subsystem of — 199 Detroit (Michigan) socio-religious membership 72; subsidies to suburbs 106 discrimination 20, 44, 49, 54, 102, 111, 171, 200, 212, 213, 2 3 4 , 2 4 6 dispersed settlement patterns open-country type of — 115,134135; town-country type o f — 114115, 134-135 dispersion as ecological process 108, 111, 112, 114, 134 Dzitas (Mexico): on folk-urban continuum 28 ecological features of community — and community context 9, 12, 37, 97, 107-136; — and community development process 137, 139, 143, 146, 147, 163; — and education subsystem 77-78; — and leadership 170; patterning of — : by natural areas 131-132; by religion 73; by social class 45, 73, 77-78, 111,131; planning for — 240, 242, 246, 249, 268, 272; of rural communities 114-123; of urban communities 124-133; of villages 115117, 119-123 ecological processes centralization 108, 112, 114, 134; competition 108,110-111,114,134; decentralization 108, 112,114,134; dispersion 108,111-112, 114,134; invasion 108, 113-114, 134; segregation 20-21, 78, 108, 112-113, 114, 129, 131, 1 3 4 , 1 4 7 , 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 ; specialization 108, 112-113, 114, 134; succession 108,113-114, 134 economic subsystem — and community action 145; — and community conflict 196; — and community leadership 169;

316 — and community power 51; as component of social structure 15, 17, 19, 37, 61-67, 94; in modernizing communities 34, 57-58, 63-65, 94; — and planning 242; in relatively modernized communities: rural 65, 94; urban 66-67, 94; — and social welfare 82, 89; in traditional communities 62-63, 82 education professionals: roles in community actions 1 7 1 , 2 5 4 , 2 6 0 - 2 6 3 , 272 education subsystem — and community actions 137, 157, 236-237; — and community issues 81-82; as component of social structure 15, 37, 74-82, 93; functions of — 74, 76-77, 80, 95; inequalities in — 77-80; in modernizing communities 75-76; — and power hierarchy 44, 78; in relatively modernized communities 75-76; — and social class 77-80; — and social mobility 80; in traditional communities 75 Egypt community conflict in — 208; urban birth rates in — 104(fn.) ejido 119, 120 'Elmtown' (Morris, Illinois): social classes in — 46, 78 enabler role 2 2 8 , 2 3 1 , 2 3 2 , 2 4 0 , 2 7 1 , 272 established authorities: role of — in community conflict 209,210-212, 219, 221, 222 Etawah Project (India) 298-300, 301 extension service professionals: roles of — in community actions 137, 171,254,263-267,272 extracommunity involvement in community actions 160, 175, 1 7 8 , 1 8 2 , 2 5 0 , 290;linkages 12, 13, 17-18, 23, 31, 38, 63, 67, 68, 70, 175; resources 9, 180, 182,206

Subject

Index

family planning services 60, 61, 86 family subsystem components of — 55-56; as component of social structure 15, 37, 93; as focus of community concern 60-61; functions of — 57, 58, 59, 62, 94, 96;in modernizing communities 57-60, 66; in relatively modernized communities 57-60, 66; — and social control 57; — and social welfare subsystem 82; as source of leadership 169; in traditional communities 33, 56-57; values in — 66, 92-93; variations in — 28, 29, 55-60, 91-92 Farm Security Administration and cooperative communities 121 federated fund-raising 230, 231-232, 272 Finland: cooperative housing in — 248 folk community 26-27, 29, 33 formal groups in social structure of community 1 5 , 1 6 , 1 7 , 4 1 , 4 3 , 5 3 , 93, 95, 143, 161, 169 fragmentation of community 68-69 France community conflict i n — 208; line village in — 117; urban structure in — 133(fn.) functional theory 23, 27 Gandhi, Mahatma 208-209, 212 Gary (Indiana): blacks in government subsystem o f — 107 Gemeinschaft 26-27, 87 Germany line village in — 117; West Germany: community conflict in — 208; nonprofit housing in — 248 Gesellschaft 27-28, 144 Ghana: community action in — 260261 ghettos — and conflict 197, 217; isolation of black i n — 107; riots i n — 202,

Subject

Index

204, 209; schools in — 79¡targets of community actions 147 goal achievement 148, 156-157, 163, 177,279,291,292 Gopalpur (India): caste system in — 49 government subsystem — and community action 145,170, 238; — and community conflict 196; — and community leadership 167, 170; as component of social structure 15, 37, 93, 94; — and economic subsystem 67; fragmentation in — 68-69; functions of — 67, 94; in modernizing communities 34, 64, 66, 67; organization o f — 67-69; in non-nucleated rural communities 68; participation in — 69-70, 179; — and population movement 107; professional planners and — 242, 243-245; — and social welfare 83, 85-86; in traditional communities 67; in urban communities 68-69 Great Britain new communities in — 251-252; planning in — 248,251-252; values and norms in — (by social class) 91 Greenville (South Carolina): self-survey 282-283,285 Guadelajara (Mexico): ecological trends in — 126(fn.) hacienda 118-119 Vicos (Peru) Project on — 35,1781 8 0 , 1 8 2 , 2 8 7 . 2 9 2 , 2 9 3 , 294 Hartford (Connecticut): community action in — 261-262 Head Start community actions in — 80, 261; evaluation of — 296-298; 300-301 health care professionals — and leadership 171; roles in community actions 254, 255-259, 272

317 Hindus — and caste system 20, 125; — and minority status 55 Holland (see Netherlands) income maintenance programs 66, 87, 88 India All-India Khadi Board 181; caste system in — 20, 45, 48-49, 113; community actions in — 180-182; 298-300, 301-302; minority status in — 55; National Community Development Program in — 181, 241, 263, 301; protests in — 208-209; urban ecology in — 124-126; village ecology in — 112-113¡village government in — 67 (fn.) Indigenous Institute of Peru 179 Industrial Areas Foundation 214 industrialization 12, 24, 25, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 44, 63, 64-65, 80, 83, 124, 126, 135, 195, 203 industrial parks 128, 242 informal groups 15, 16-17, 37, 41, 42, 43, 93, 95, 144, 161, 169 initiation of action 148,151-153,163, 168, 180, 182, 186 inner city: religion and — 73, 243 institutionalization of achieved goal 157-159, 163, 177 intensity of community conflict 202205, 211, 213, 222 intermediate settlement pattern 115117, 134, 135 invasion as an ecological process 113, 134 Israel circular line village in — 117; kibbutzim in — 119, 120-212; new communities in — 253-254

Japan community conflict in — 208; relatively modernized communities

318 in — 32, 36, 62; urban ecological patterns in — 126 Jewish status — and social behavior 72; — and social service agencies 84 Johannesburg (South Africa): community action in — 182,183-186, 188,259 'Jonesville' (Morris, Illinois): social classes in — 46 Kalahari desert: subsistence communities in — 62 Kansas City (Missouri): social classes in — 46 'Kent* (York, South Carolina) and mill village ecology 123 (fn.) Kibbutz 119, 120-121 King, Martin Luther, J r . 212 Kiryat Yedidim (Israel): cooperative village 120 kolkhozen 119 Laos: religious subsystem in communities of — 72 latifundium 118-119 Latin America community actions in — 137; farm villages i n — 119; fiestas i n — 72; nucleated communities in — 118119; urban ecological patterns in — 125, 126, 133 law-and-order stance 210-211, 221 leaders/leadership in community actions 174-178, 178-188, 1 8 9 , 2 3 2 , 2 6 6 , 2 8 7 , 2 9 1 , 295, 299-300; — and community development process — 64, 138, 165-190, 192, 242, 260, 301; — and community conflict 198, 200, 201, 205-206, 207, 212, 213, 214; definition of — 166-167, 188; methods of identifying — 51-53,96; motivation for — 111, 189, 281; need f o r — 1 9 1 , 1 9 3 , 2 9 3 ; sources of — 167-174, 189; styles/types

Subject Index o f — : authoritarian 166-167, 184, 189; bureaucratic 170-171, 173174, 175; charismatic 172, 173174,175; democratic 166-167,179, 189 legal aid 86, 216, 219, 235 Leiston (England): Summerhill School 81-82 Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence 196 (fn.) Levittown (New York): community fragmentation in — 68-69 life cycle of community 109, 136 line village 114, 115-117 locality-relevant functions 15 Lorien (New Mexico) : cooperative community 121-122 Los Angeles (California): Watts riot in — 197, 199 Louisiana: line village in — 117 Mando Chiefdom (Sierra Leone): agricultural innovation in — 92 Manus community (Admiralty Islands) community change in — 35 master plan 240, 241-242 Matamoros (Mexico): cooperative village in — 120 Menda (Mexico) and folk-urban continuum 28 metropolitan communities/regions 69, 70, 108, 130, 241 Mexico community conflict in — 208; cooperative villages i n — 119-120; demographic transition in — 103104 Miami (Florida): merger with Dade County 69 'Middletown' (Muncie, Indiana): social classes in — 47 mill village 123 Minneapolis (Minnesota): metropolitan government in — 69 (fn.) minority status — and community ranking 54-55;

Subject Index — and education 79, 261; — and family 60; — and government subsystem 70, 246; groupings by — 196; — and neighborhood residence 78; — and population movement 106-107; — a n d power structure 54-55; — and social class structure 54-55; subcultures related to — 9 4 , 1 4 5 ; target of community actions 228, 234 Mississippi: nonviolent protest in — 219 mobility within communities 105-107 Mobilization For Youth 79, 187-188, 214, 215-216, 219, 224, 235-238, 262-263 Model Cities Program 106-107, 154, 224, 235, 242, 249-250, 257 modernization described 31, 103; as direction of community change 12, 24, 37, 57, 96, 178, 180, 229, 292; effects on community linkages 18; levels of — 10, 11, 32-35, 38, 45, 86, 134; relation to: conflict strategy 222; demographic patterns 86,134; ecological patterns 124; economic subsystem 63-65, 94; education subsystem 75; family subsystem 55, 57, 58, 94; formal and informal groups 43; leadership 69; normative structure 95; religious subsystem 94; rural communities 27; — and social class structure 45, 49, 63; social welfare subsystem 83, 86 modernizing communities 10, 12 community development in — 138, 225, 229, 254-255, 271; community development research in — 1 8 1 , 2 8 3 , 2 8 7 ; — and demographic factors 99, 105, 134; description of — 33-34; ecological factors in — 109, 126; economic subsystem in — 63-65, 94; education subsystem in — 75, 76, 81; family sub-

319 system in — 57-60; formal groups in — 43; leadership in — 173; location of — 32; norms in — 90; planners roles in — 239-240; political participation in — 69; religious subsystem in — 58, 66, 71; social welfare subsystem in — 83, 87; values in - 136, 269 Montana Study Program 282, 283, 285-286 Montgomery (Alabama): bus boycott in — 212 Mormon villages (Utah): farm villages 119 Moslems: minority status of — 55, 125 multiple-nuclei theory 131, 132, 135 Muncie ('Middletown', Indiana): social classes in — 47 Natchez ('Old City', Mississippi): social classes in — 46 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 212 National Center for Voluntary Action 233 National Commission on Community Health Services 283, 285, 303 National Opinion Research Center 54 natural areas of cities 131-132 Navajo community: community action in — 93 neighborhood service centers 147, 219, 235,257 Netherlands housing in — 248; line village in — 117 Newark (New Jersey): blacks in government subsystem of — 107 Newburyport ('Yankee City', Massachusetts) : social classes in — 4p new communities examples o f — : Brasilia 254;Chandigargh 254; Ciudad Guyana 254; Reston 252-253; Soul City 253; planning for — 240, 251-254, 272

320 New Haven (Connecticut) : power structure in — 52 New York (New York) education subsystem of — 76, 79; minority status in — 55; MFY community action in — 79, 187188, 214, 215-216, 219, 2 2 4 , 2 3 5 238,262-263 New Zealand economic subsystem in communities o f — 62 ¡relatively modernized communities in — 32 nonresponsiveness of 'the establishment' 194,196-197,208-209,222, 223 nonviolence 206, 207, 208, 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 218,219,220,223 normative structure 21, 37, 41, 8993, 95, 143, 149, 201-202, 203204,222 norms — and community change 90-93, 158; — and community conflict 193, 201-202, 203, 204, 206-207, 210, 212, 213, 214, 222; — and community leadership 170, 173; — and economic subsystem 6466; — and education subsystem 237; — and family subsystem 61; in Gemeinschaft communities 27; in Gesellschaft communities 2728; — and government subsystem 67; influence on community interaction/integration 15, 17, 20, 63, 74, 95, 113, 170; in modernizing communities 34, 37-38, 64; pluralism in — 31, 90, 91-92, 95, 99, 143,145,187, 294; — a n d religious subsystem 74, 94; in rural Communist communities 65; — and science 275-277; — and social mobility 46, 4 9 ; — and social welfare 82 Norway: cooperative housing in — 248 nucleated settlement pattern 117-123, 134,135

Subject

Index

Office of Economic Opportunity 86, 235,297 'Old City' (see Natchez) open-class system 29, 44, 45-46 open-country community 22, 114, 115, 118, 135 Orientals: minority status of — 55 origin of community conflict 194-200, 222 Pakistan minority status in — 55; Village Agricultural and Development Program in — 241 panchayats 181, 203, 300 Peace Corps 92 People's Republic of China cooperative villages in — 119; community leadership in — 169; health care in — 258 Peru (see Vicos Project) planning — and community development process 137, 142; — and ecology 133, 146, 246; health care professionals and — 255-257; research and — 275; — and social class structure 50 planning professionals 171, 239-255, 272 — and demonstration community actions 249-251; fact-finding roles of — 181, 240; — and housing 242, 245-248; — a n d new communities 246, 251-254; in rural communities 254-255; in urban renewal 242, 243-245 plantation 12, 22, 114, 117-118, 135 pluralism — of norms and values 2 1 , 3 1 , 54, 87, 90, 95, 9 9 , 1 1 0 ; in power structure 52, 53, 54 polarization 194, 205, 219 Polish communities in Wisconsin 91 population composition 24, 27, 28,29,37, 48,

Subject

Index

96, 98, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 1 0 3 , 1 3 3 , 1 3 4 , 1 4 5 ; control 60, 61, 86, 146, 150, 198; density of — 29, 110, 111, 124; growth of — 34, 3 6 , 9 8 , 1 0 3 , 1 4 6 , 245, 270; movement of — 29, 61, 97, 100, 102, 103, 104-107, 111112, 113, 115, 128, 134; pyramid 100-102, 134; size of — 24, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37-38, 48, 97, 98-99, 103,111,133, 134,145 poverty: war on — 86, 249, 266 (see Office of Economic Opportunity) power structure — and community actions 145, 152, 153, 156, 226, 267-268; in communities of Soviet Russia 48; — and community decision making 95-96; as dimension of social stratification 41, 44, 45; — and education subsystem 78; — and family subsystem 60; — and minority status 54, 55; pluralistic model of — 52-54; population movement and — 107; as source of leadership 167, 168-169, 171, 189 process-oriented research 279, 280, 298 professionals — and community development 137, 1 3 8 , 1 6 0 , 1 6 4 , 1 8 2 , 1 8 3 , 2 2 5 274; in government subsystem 69; mobility of — 105; in research 275, 282-284, 288-291, 292; specific roles of — : education professionals 171, 254, 260-263, 272; extension service professionals 171, 254, 263-267, 272; health care professionals 171, 254, 255-259, 272; social work professionals 171, 182-183, 186-187, 230-239, 254, 272; as sources of leadership 170, 171, 177-178, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 , 1 8 9 project evaluation 2 7 6 , 2 8 0 , 2 8 2 , 2 9 5 302 protest groups 6 9 , 2 0 9 , 2 1 0 , 2 1 2 - 2 1 4 , 219,220,221,222,223

321 Puerto Ricans minority status of — 55; — and succession 113 pyramidal/monolithic power structure 51-52, 53-54 Questa (New Mexico): cooperative village n e a r — 121-122 recognition of need for action 148, 149-151, 163 relative deprivation 194, 195-196, 209 relative modernized communities community actions i n — 138,141, 144-145, 152, 182-188, 238, 254, 255-257, 271; — and community development research 275, 280; conflict in — 204; demographic characteristics of — 100,103,136; description o f — 34-35; ecological features of — 109, 124, 126-131, 133, 135,136;economic subsystem in — 65-67; education subsystem in — 75-82; 261-263; family subsystem in — 57-60; government subsystem in — 70; leadership in — 173; location of — 32; planners' roles in — 239-240; religious subsystem in — 71; rhythm of life in — 110; social welfare subsystem in — 83-89, 93; transfer of technology f r o m — 270; urban growth in — 131-133, 136; value system in — 269 religious subsystem blacks and — 73-74; as component of community structure 15,37, 7074, 94; functions of — 70-71, 7273; hierarchy in — 71; leadership in — 169, 179; in modernizing communities 58, 66; norms in — 90; — and social class 71, 73; — and social welfare subsystem 83; in traditional communities 90; variations in — by level of modernization 71-73

322 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 221 (fn.) reputational method of identifying community leaders 51-52 research — and community development 154, 275-304: assessment of — 276-280, 284-286, 290, 291-295, 300-302; definition of — 275; purposes for which used — 225, 281-282, 287, 289, 290, 302; types of — used in community actions: action research 2 8 0 , 2 8 6 - 2 9 5 , 3 0 2 ; community surveys 280, 281-286, 302; project evaluation 280, 295302,302-303 Reston (Virginia): new community 252-253 Revolutionary Action Movement 221 revolutionaries conflict strategy used by — 210, 216-217, 221,222; — a n d religious subsystem 74 r h y t h m of community life 109-110 riots 156, 196, 197, 199, 202, 204, 209,211,213,217,224 rising expectations 196, 213, 220 roles in bureaucratic organizations 25; changes in — during modernization 27, 31, 34, 38, 58, 61-62, 64; performance o f — 70, 75, 77, 82, 89; — of professionals and community development 225-275; in religious subsystem 71; — of research professionals in community actions 275-304 Rome (Italy): social areas of — 133 rural communities black church in — 73-74; change in — 24-30, 36, 37, 62;demographic features of — 98, 99, 100; ecological types of — 108, 114-123, 134,136,146; economic subsystem in — 62, 65; government subsystem in — 68; health care in —

Subject

Index

(People's Republic of China) 258; norms and values in — 65; planning in — 254-255; population movement and — 104, 112, 146; rhythm of life in — 110; social class structre in — 47, 118, 123; social structure of — 43; social worker roles in — 146, 178, 238239, 299; succession in — 65 rural-urban continuum 26-30, 34,182 rural-urban fringe 127, 130-131, 135 Saint Paul (Minnesota): Metropolitan Council in — 69 (fn.) Salem Project (Massachusetts) 287, 290-291, 292, 293-295 San Miguel (Mexico): cooperative community 120 Santiago (Chile): social classes in — 49 satyagraha 212-213, 216, 220, 222223 scientific method 276-280, 302 sector theory 131, 132, 135 segregation 20-21, 78, 108, 112-113, 129, 131, 134, 147, 212, 213 selection of goal and plan of action 148, 154-156, 163 self-help 9, 96, 137, 139, 140, 141, 180, 228, 229 settlement of conflict 205-208, 211, 222 settlement patterns of rural communities dispersed types 114-115, 134; intermediate types 115-117, 134; nucleated types 117-123, 134 Shiloh (Southern Appalachian community): family subsystem in — 58 slums 105, 128, 129, 132, 147, 170, 209, 215, 219, 2 3 7 , 2 3 8 , 2 4 2 , 2 4 3 , 246, 248 social change theory 23, 37 social class structure — and ecology 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 2 4 ,

Subject Index 128, 129-130, 131, 134; — and education subsystem 7 7-80 ; groupings in — 73; hierarchies in — 9, 41, 44, 4 5 , 4 6 , 4 7 , 48, 49, 50, 51, 58, 60, 63, 71, 74, 78, 79, 91, 92, 93, 94, 111, 121, 125, 126, 129, 147, 164, 169, 1 7 0 , 1 7 4 , 1 9 6 , 2 0 1 , 210, 2 1 4 , 2 1 6 , 2 2 8 , 2 3 4 , 2 3 6 , 2 3 8 , 244, 245, 2 4 6 , 2 4 8 , 2 4 9 , 2 6 1 , 2 6 2 , 2 7 0 , 2 9 9 , 3 0 0 ; i n I n d i a 48-49,125, in latifundium communities 118119; in mill villages 123; — and minority status 54, 55; norms and values related to - 74, 90, 91-92; in plantation communities 118; — and population movement 106107; —and religious subsystem 73; in Soviet Russia 48; subcultures in _ 49-50, 78, 90, 94, 145; in United States 45-48 social mobility — and community conflict 195; education and — 80; religion and — 71,72 social reconnaissance surveys 282, 283-284 social stratification 41, 4 3 - 5 0 , 5 5 , 8 9 , 93-94, 95, 118, 123, 143 (see also social class structure and power structure) social structure of community 1 5 , 1 6 , 21, 37, 41, 73, 89, 90, 93, 149, 195,209,222,289 social system theory 14-23 social welfare subsystem community actions in — 230; as component of social structure 15, 37, 84-85, 93; - and conflict 196; functions and services o f — 60,82, 84, 85, 86-87,95, 225; in modernizing communities 83; professionals in — 242, 249; in relatively modernized communities 83-8 7; — and religious subsystem 83-84; social workers in — 230-239; in traditional communities 82-83, 87; val-

323 ues in — 66, 87-89; volunteers in — 232-233 social workers' roles in community actions 171 as activists 236 (fn.); as advocates 23 5-23 6; in continuing community actions 230-234; as coordinators 233; as consultants 233; in shorterrange community actions 234239: in Bristol Social Project 186188, 238, 287-289; in Johannesburg Health Services Project 182, 183-186, 259; in Mobilization for Youth 215-216, 219, 224, 235238; as social broker 235-236; as social planner 235; as training expert 233 sociocultural features of community 41-96 — and community conflict 191; — and community development 137, 139, 143-145, 151, 163, 234235, 238, 240, 268; - and community leadership 170; as component of community context 9,12,41-96, 97, 102, 108, 113, 131, 163; — and religious subsystem 71 ; — and social class strata 45; — of traditional communities 33; variations in — among communities 3 7 Soul City (North Carolina): new community 253 South African communities apartheid in — 20, 55, 78, 182, 183-186; community action in J o hannesburg 182, 183-186, 259; protests in — 209 Southern Christian Leadership Conference 212 Soviet Russia community conflict in — 208; kolkhozen in — 119; peasant communities in — 36; social classes in — 44, 45, 48; urban communities in - 62 Spdin: community conflict in — 208

324 Spanish-American communities community action in — (New Mexico) 9 2 ; farm villages (Utah) 119 specialization as an ecological process 1 0 8 , 1 1 2 , 134 spread of conflict 2 0 0 - 2 0 2 , 2 1 1 , 2 1 3 , 222 Springdale (New York) government subsystem in — 70; social classes in — 4 7 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMS A) 127 status (see achieved status, ascribed status, minority status) Stockholm (Sweden): ecological pattern of — 133 strategies used in community actions conflict strategy 1 0 , 1 3 8 , 1 5 1 - 1 5 7 , 163, 165, 1 9 1 , 2 0 8 - 2 2 4 ; consensus strategy 10, 138, 145, 146, 147, 1 5 0 - 1 5 7 , 163, 168, 1 7 8 - 1 8 8 , 1 9 1 , 208,216,219,227-228,231 stratification (see social stratification) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 2 1 2 , 221 study and diagnosis of need for action 148, 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 , 163, 177 study-group surveys 2 8 2 , 2 8 3 subcommunities as barrier to community interaction 20-21, 129, 1 8 6 ; — a n d leadership 176-177; mill villages as — 1 2 3 ; variations in values among — 142 subcultures — of minorities 9 0 , 9 4 , 1 4 5 ; — of social classes 47, 4 9 , 5 0 , 7 8 , 8 0 , 9 0 , 9 4 , 145 subsistence community 62-63, 82 subsystems of community — and community conflict 192, 1 9 6 ; — and community development 9 5 , 1 4 3 , 1 4 5 , 1 6 1 , 1 6 3 , 227; as components of community structure 15, 17, 55-89, 9 3 ; definition of — 5 5 ; hierarchies in — 4 4 , 51,

Subject

Index

9 4 , 2 2 6 , 2 6 7 - 2 6 8 ; linkages: among — 18-19, 30, 37, 38; within — 1617, 37; in modernizing communities 31, 34, 63-64, 69, 71, 75-76, 8 3 ; in relatively modernized communities 57-60, 65-67, 70, 71, 7576, 83-86; sources of leadership in — 167, 168, 169-171, 173, 174, 175, 189; spread of decision making among — 51, 53; in traditional communities 33-34, 55-57, 62-63, 64, 71, 75, 82; types of — 1 2 , 1 5 , 55-93: economic 61-67, 94; education 74-82, 95, 2 6 0 ; family 55-61; 9 4 ; government 67-70,94; religious 70-74, 94-95; social welfare 82-89, 95, 2 3 5 suburbs — and community conflict 195, 198; — and demographic variables 73, 9 9 , 1 0 6 , 1 1 2 , 2 0 9 ; — and ecology 99, 100,127,135; — and government fragmentation 68; planning housing for — 2 4 6 ; social classes in — 4 6 succession as an ecological process 108, 113-114, 134 Summerhill School 81-82 Sweden demographic transition in — 103104; housing in — 2 4 8 Switzerland: cooperative housing in — 248 Syracuse (New York): decision making in — 1 7 7 , 1 9 0 Taiwan: rural-urban continuum in — 29 Talladega Project 162, 257, 2 8 7 , 2 8 9 290, 292-295 task performance aspect of community development 138, 147, 160, 161-162, 163, 2 1 8 , 2 2 6 , 2 6 4 , 2 6 5 , 2 7 5 , 2 7 8 , 2 8 1 , 286, 295, 2 9 9 , 3 0 2 Tepoztlan (Mexico) — and religious subsystem 72 (fn.);

Subject Index — and folk-urban continuum 26, (in.) Thailand and religious subsystem 72 Tokyo (Japan): ecological pattern of —

126

Toronto (Canada): metropolitan form of government in — 69 Torreon (Mexico): cooperative community near — 120 town-country community 22,114-115, 118,119,135,195 Town-gown division 50, 195 traditional (relatively nonmodernized) communities 10, 12 — and community actions 92-93, 143-144, 159, 178-180, 180-182; — and community conflict 198; demographic characteristics of — 99, 100; description of — 11, 25, 33, 93; ecology of — 124-125,135; economic subsystem in — 62-63, 64; education subsystem in — 75; family subsystem in — 56-57; government subsystem in — 67; leadership in — 169, 174; location of — 32;religious subsystem i n — 71, 90; rhythm of life in — 110; segregation in — 20; social welfare subsystem in — 82,87;subsystem organization i n — 55; value system in — 2 6 - 2 7 , 3 3 , 8 2 , 9 0 , 9 2 - 9 3 , 2 6 9 Tungus of Siberia: subsistence communities in — 62 Tusik (Mexico) and folk-urban continuum 28 Twin Cities Metropolitan Council (St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota) 69 (fn.) TWO (The Woodlawn Organization, Chicago) 2 1 4 - 2 1 5 , 2 1 9 United Nations 130-140, 141, 161, 164 United Nations Ad Hoc Group of Experts on Community Development 140,161,164,226

325 United States Department of Housing and Urban Development 154; National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence 224; Office of Economic Opportunity 86, 235, 297; Office of Voluntary Action 233 united way/united fund 17, 84, 231232 urban communities boundaries of — 22; bureaucratic organization in — 17; community change toward — 24, 25, 36, 3738; — and community development 146, 178, 182-188, 253; described 11, 34-35; — and demographic variables 98, 99-102, 104105, 106-107, 136; — and ecological variables 108, 110, 111-114, 124-133, 135, 136, 147; — and economic subsystem 62, 66-67; — and education subsystem 76-80; — and extracommunity linkages 43, 68; — and government subsystem 68-70; growth patterns of — 108, 131-133, 135; — and industrialization 30, 37; population movement and — 134, 146, 209; religious subsystem in — 72-74; — and rural-urban continuum 2630 urban growth computer simulation of — 136; concentric zone theory of — 131132, 133, 135; control of — in Stockholm 133; multiple-nuclei theory of — 131, 132, 133, 135; sector theory of — 1 3 1 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 3 , 135 urbanism 25, 28, 29, 98 urbanization 12, 24-30, 31, 35, 37, 136 urban renewal 106,176, 231,243-245, 246, 249 Utah: farm villages in — 119

326 Vadala Project (India) 180-182, 229 values attacked by revolutionaries 216-17, 221; as component of normative structure 15, 21, 37, 41, 93, 212, 222, 229, 242; — and demographic factors 99, 103; — and ecology 110; in economic subsystem 61, 65-67, 176; in modernizing communities 34,38; pluralism i n — 31, 99; related to: community change 89, 90-93; community development process 141-142, 143, 151, 155, 228, 240; community development research 275-277, 293, 294; leadership 169, 173; social mobility 46; in religious subsystem 74; in social welfare subsystem 82, 87-89; subculturai variations in — 145; in traditional communities 2627,33,82,90,92-93,269 vested interest groups 155, 219, 268 Vicos Project (Peru) 35,178-180,182, 287,292,293,294 Vietnam: community conflict issue in United States 209 villages boundaries of — 2 2 , 114-115; community actions i n — 180-183, 241, 298-300, 301-302; ecological types of — : cooperative — 119122, 135; farm — 1 2 , 119, 135; fishing — 11, 122, 135; mill — 123, 135; mining — 122-123, 135; government subsystem in — 67-68

Subject

Index

village level worker 180-182,229,241, 300 violence 193, 196, 197, 202-203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211-212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 2 1 8 , 2 2 0 , 2 2 1 , 223,224 volunteers 174, 182, 201, 225, 230, 232-234, 240, 253, 260 Voting Rights Act of 1965 213 war on poverty 141, 249, 266 Washington, D. C. community conflict in — 200; education subsystem in — 76 welfare rights groups 171, 209, 236 Westinghouse Learning Corporation 296-298, 300-301 West Virginia University (Morgantown, W. Va.): sponsor of Cove community action 265 wholesale trade and light manufacturing district 127, 128, 131, 135 Wisconsin: Danish and Polish communities in — 91 working together/integration aspect of community development 138, 147, 160, 161-162, 163, 174, 182, 186, 194, 226, 2 6 5 , 2 6 6 , 2 7 5 , 2 7 8 , 281, 285, 286, 290, 2 9 5 , 2 9 6 , 2 9 9 , 301,302 Yucatan (Mexico): communities in — 28 (fn.) zone of transition 1 2 7 , 1 2 8 , 1 2 9 , 1 3 3 , 135 zoning 113, 133, 242

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The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development MOUTON PUBLISHERS • THE HAGUE • PARIS