Introduction

One of the main problems concerning the study of community is that it has little or no substantive sociological theory of its own. A branch of sociology called 'the community' cannot be considered in the same way as, say, 'the family', 'stratification', 'organizations', and so on-we can only concern ourselves with a number of community studies. This reflects the non-cumulative nature of most community studies: whilst it might justly be said that they have contributed a a good deal to sociology, they have nevertheless contributed very little to each other. Thus we cannot draw upon a body of theory of the community-rather we must fall back upon a list of individuals who have written about the concept of community itself.