ABSTRACT
Earlier chapters have focused on the redesign of structures and the introduction of imposed mechanisms designed to develop the labour collective. The essential characteristic of the labour collective is that it is created externally from above and established through the process of normative regulation. The labour community, which this chapter considers, may develop internally from below and emerge from the labour collective. Analysis of this process requires clarification of the concept of labour community and consideration of how its emergence may be illustrated empirically. The concept of community has a long tradition and an important place in western sociological writing. Nisbet (1966: 47) claims that: ‘The most fundamental and far-reaching of sociology’s unit-ideas is community. The rediscovery of community is unquestionably the most distinctive development in nineteenth-century social thought.’ The main focus of recent western academic discourse on community, however, has been in relation to social groupings in territorial or ethnic units, that is, on community outside rather than within the workplace. Flanders (1975: 89), however, referred to:’ “The Plant Community” which evolves from below out of face to face relations based on shared interests, sentiments and beliefs, and relations among various groups of employees’, but he did not seek to relate the concept of community to criteria which could show empirically its presence or development. Lee and Newby (1983: 57–8) suggest that there are two main sociological definitions of community (they reject the purely territorial definition as geographical rather than sociological): the first is community as a ‘local social system – that is as a set of social relationships which take place wholly or mostly within a locality’; the second is community ‘as a type of relationship – more particularly “community” is defined as a sense of identity between individuals’. A recent Bulgarian discussion of types of social community is to be found in Tilkidzhiev’s work on ‘social groups’. His approach is a contribution to a debate among Bulgarian sociologists which emerged in the late 1970s about the nature of social groups and social communities and the differences between them. The essential difference was considered to be that whereas social communities were integrated by common activities, social groups were not. One type of community discussed by Tilkidzhiev is the ‘community of interests’ integrated by a common value system, but he did not link his consideration of groups and community to the workplace (Tilkidzhiev 1989). Earlier Petkov and Kolev (1982) had discussed social relations in the labour collective and pointed to the potential for the development of community in the brigade organisation of work, and Petkov had discussed the labour community in the Sociology of work (1985: 318–26).
