ABSTRACT
This chapter covers perspectives on community offered by sociological writers and from the critical literature in community development. Collective actions can be examples of communities opposing or resisting the dominant practices or values of an institution and there have been many examples of this recently across the countries of the European Union in opposition to monetary and austerity policies. Communities are spaces where humans have their identities and talents positively affirmed, and can be spaces of care and love. One of the key lessons in a substantial literature is that community can be used in ways that mystify complex and interrelated economic, gender, social, racial and political relations. Ideas and a practice to support social relationships has been a constant in social work and these ideas reflect the full continuum of ideological perspectives. From empirical work on social relationships between people in regions in Italy, Putnam distinguished between types of social capital: bridging and bonding capital.
