ABSTRACT
Introduction: Defining Community ‘Community’ is notoriously difficult to define, a word open to misapplication and over-use, both within academic discussion and outside it. There have been many different conceptions of what community is, with ideas ranging from formal, visible institutions through to social networks and social capital – the reciprocal exchanges made between individual community members. While deciding exactly what constitutes a community has diverted social theorists for decades, it is now the decline of community in contemporary society that is lamented.1 For the study of immigrant groups in particular, community has become a powerful label, a way of talking about groups with similar backgrounds that is rarely scrutinized or deconstructed. Instead of simply accepting the notion of community at face value, this chapter probes the conundrum of community itself, focusing on the narration of community among the Polish, Italian and Greek-Cypriot groups in Leicester. It seeks to analyse the experience of community among the respondents, asking what form community has taken within the groups, and indeed whether it exists at all; how community is perceived and portrayed; and to what extent involvement in a community has affected individual freedoms.
