ABSTRACT
The previous chapter described a progressive movement in the sociological analysis of local social situations, away from the idea of ‘community’ as a matter of relationships grounded in interaction at the local level, towards the examination of increasingly remote and determining sets of processes and structures. This was aimed at meeting the objection that old-style studies of community, by treating communities as if they were free-standing entities, failed to deal adequately with the constraints put upon them by their wider context. The answer was to situate them instead within broader frameworks of social and economic relations, like those of capitalism, class, and power. At certain points in this development, as during the heyday of structuralist Marxism, the resulting accounts were inclined to become excessively impersonal and mechanistic, leaving little scope for much of significance or interest to happen at local level. Harvey (1989a: 148) hints at this, when he suggests that for the idea of community as an autonomous entity we should substitute the notion of a ‘set of processes which produce a geographical product’. The processes in question are those of capitalist accumulation, regarded as extraordinarily powerful forces which local social formations find it difficult to withstand. On the whole, Harvey consigns local actors to a merely defensive role, in ill fated struggles to protect home, territory and community against continual disruption (1989b: 238). Otherwise it is clear that he sees ‘communities’ as the end-product of a long chain of causal influences.
