ABSTRACT
The community has been the subject of an acrimonious debate that has involved a significant proportion of professional political and social scientists. This debate, about ‘community power’, so called, has been full of both sound and fury. A characteristic of communities as social systems is that established patterns for resolving community conflicts continue. Despite this lack of comparability, James Coleman has made a notable attempt to pull together what was known about Community Conflict. The ‘stratification approach’ to community power has been subject to a sustained critique by Nelson Polsby in his book Community Power and Political Theory. Polsby is arguing that there are common empirical presuppositions among many researchers into community power. There can be noted that, as in community studies in general, there is a marked tendency for individual investigators of individual community power structures to generalize their findings to all communities willy-nilly.
