Authors: Duhamel & Mény
Summary: The concept of community has many different meanings. It can have, for instance, a geographic sense (local communities), a functional sense (a village community, a Protestant community), or a legal sense (the European community). In each case, studies of community have identified certain common characteristics: among these, the existence of a common space (T. Parsons) or the means of creating a communal identity (for example, A. Etizioni's "integrative mechanisms"). The idea underlying these characteristics is that certain social attributes give a community the capacity to constitute a unity autonomous from government. Useful in distinguishing community from government is F. Tânnies's famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (relations of interdependence and familiarity between individuals) and Gesellschaft (a more impersonal, formal collectivity maintained by institutional rules).
Many studies, mainly American, have studied the correlation between the characteristics of a given community and its forms of political participation.
The traditional understanding of community as centered on a stable, local space has come under increasing challenge in the modern world due to technological change, urbanization, and the ongoing transfer of people's lives and loyalties from traditional locales to more transient and uncertain environments.