Trends in Community Organization and LifeAuthor(s): T. Lynn SmithReviewed work(s):Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Jun., 1940), pp. 325-334Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2084034 .Accessed: 11/05/2012 12:05

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TRENDS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND LIFE*

T. LYNN SMITH Louisiana State University

HIS DISCUSSION is limited almost entirely to the rural community. I am not sure that the term has much meaning when applied to urban situations, and in any case I know very little about cities. Further-

more, so much of social life is carried on at the community level that it is impossible to discuss all the phases, so I have selected those aspects of the subject which appear most significant to me.

The Concept"Community." Anydiscussion of communitytrends necessarily will be greatly influenced by the specific connotations that are given to the term community, which is not an easy one to define; all in all, community is one of the most ambiguous words in sociological literature. For this reason, it is highly important to set forth precisely the sense in which the term is used in the following discussion.

An examination of the literature reveals two principal senses in which community is used, both of them having very good authority in the Latin derivation. One of these usages merely refers to qualities of solidarity or togetherness; the second definitely denotes a body of people in a given locality. MacIver combines the two to designate any social group with a definite locality base. Said he in an early study: By community I mean any area of common life, village, or town, or district, or county, or even wider area. To deserve the name community, the area must be somehow distinguished from further areas, the common life may have some charac- teristics of its own such that the frontiers of the area have some meaning.'

And more recently he has written as follows: Any circle of people who live together, who belong together, so that they share, not this or that particular interest, but a whole set of interests wide enough and com- plete enough to include their lives, is a community.2

From the strictly logical standpoint, probably there is little to quarrel with in these definitions, but the most logical definition is not always the most useful. On the basis of these criteria, who can determine the territorial limits of any community? Who is to say if the locality, the incorporated city, the county, the state, the section, the region, or even the nation can qualify as a community? If sociology is to contribute useful frames of refer- ence, something more specific must be attempted. For example, is such a definition of community one that sociologists can offer to the officials of

* Presented to the American Sociological Society, Philadelphia, December 27, I939. 1 R. M. MacIver, Community, 22, London, I917. 2 R. M. MacIver, Society: Its Structure and Changes, 9-IO, New York, I93I.

325

326 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

the United States Department of Agriculture for use in putting the agri- cultural planning work of the nation on a community basis? For many purposes, another definition must be attempted.

One of the most significant definitions of community comes out of the work of Charles J. Galpin. For the reason that farmers in horse-and-buggy days hauled their products to the most convenient railway station, there were some early attempts to set the limits of the rural community in terms of the "team haul," but for the most part Galpin was influenced by the thinking of an age that regarded the farmer as a "man without a com- munity." Out of his experiences as a rural school teacher in New York state, as a resident in the "skims" of the Lake States' cutover area, and as an organizer of farmers for a milk condensery in Walworth county, Wis- consin, Galpin came to a realization that the farmer was not a man without a community. At the University of Wisconsin, he formulated an objective definition of community and developed a relatively accurate method of determining its limits.

Walworth county was the laboratory for Galpin's classic study. From the standpoint of the village or town center, his problem was to determine all the land area under its influence; from the point of view of the farmer, he sought to know what farms were connected with the same village or other center. By means of ingenious mapping devices, Galpin determined the re- lationships of each farm home in the county with the centers of the county, and he also discovered the areas of influence of each of these centers. The results of his studies revealed for the first time the real community structure of the nation. Surrounding the twelve villages were twelve trade zones or trade basins running in irregular lines, paying no regard to political bound- aries, and overlapping each other to some extent. In the county tributary to the trade and commercial centers were eleven banking zones, seven local newspaper areas, twelve milk sheds, nine high school areas, and four library areas. Galpin concluded: It is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the conclusion that the trade zone about one of these rather complete agricultural civic centers forms the boundary of an actual, if not legal, community, within which the apparent entanglement of human life is resolved into a fairly unitary system of interrelatedness. The fundamental community is a composite of many expanding and contracting feature communities possessing the characteristic pulsating instability of all real life.3

Galpin's concept, as well as MacIver's, involves both of the senses which the term community derives from the Latin. It includes social interaction between people who belong together, social institutions, and a local ter- ritorial unit. Such a community is the matrix of the forces of localism in much the same way that the state is the matrix of national forces. Galpin's

3 Charles J. Galpin, The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community, i8-i9, Wisconsin AES Bulletin 34, Madison, I9I5.

TRENDS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND LIFE 327

concept and methodology have been widely accepted and used by those sociologists who have been directly faced with the problem of delimiting specific community boundaries. The concept and methodology can be of- fered for practical application in program planning activities. In this dis- cussion, Galpin's definition of community is the one followed.

Changes in the Role of the Community Unit. Since the community and its social structure are molds in which human personalities are set, it is impor- tant to devote some of our attention to the changes in the size and nature of the community itself as a social fact or unit. In this connection five observations can be made: (i) the community is expanding in size; (2) com- munities are gradually supplanting neighborhoods as the basic locality groupings; (3) there is a tendency for the internal structure of the commu- nity to become more differentiated; (4) the boundaries between communities are becoming less distinct, or more blurred; and (5) local functions, es- pecially of a governmental nature, are gradually being taken over by other governmental units, notably the county and the state and more recently the federal governments.

All of the soundings on the questions of size indicate that the limits of the community are expanding. Studies by Sanderson and his students in New York state are among the most painstaking. Their results reveal that the larger villages are receiving increased patronage in business but not in other social activities.4 Brunner and his associates have made some of the most comprehensive studies. Between I924 and I930, there was a tendency for the areas of influence of villages of all sizes to increase, although a large part of the individual villages were static.5 Six years later, in I936, a second re-survey revealed once more a gradual trend in the direction of expanded community boundaries. This time, there was a significant increase in the size of the trade basin in one third of the I40 communities studied.6

The contest between community and neighborhood is one of the great dramas of American history. In a very real sense, these locality or territorial groups are the units of which the "great society" is composed, and a priori they would seem to merit the most painstaking study on the part of the sociologist. Just as the biologist has observed, segregated, grouped, classi- fied, and arranged the various species of plant and animal life into a series of orderly categories, the sociologist should collect and systematize essen- tial facts concerning locality groupings. There is still much to be accom- plished in this direction.

It would seem that colonial society was very largely cut to the neighbor- hood pattern. With minor exceptions, the principal locality groupings were

I Dwight Sanderson, Rural Social and Economic Areas in Central New York, 93-94, Cornell AES Bulletin 64, Ithaca, I934.

6 Edmund deS. Brunner and John H. Kolb, Rural Social Trends, 94, New York, I933. 6 Edmund deS. Brunner and Irving Lorge, Rural Trends in Depression Years, 85, New

York, I937.

328 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

small in size, were comprised of persons closely knit together by the most intimate of social bonds, were areas within which the social interaction was almost exclusively on a face-to-face basis, and included groupings so limited in scope that, despite a high degree of family self-sufficiency, it was neces- sary to go outside the limits of the group for the satisfaction of many of the elemental needs of life. As the frontier edged forward from the Appalachians to the Pacific, neighborhoods were the principal locality groups utilized in the process of establishing orderly social relationships among the pioneers and their descendants.

Locality groups have tended to enlarge their boundaries, and this has had the effect of making the community supplant the neighborhood as the basic locality group in American life. This trend has been under way for many years. It has been fostered most of all by the development and dif- fusion of rapid means of travel and communication, especially the automo- bile and good roads. During the last two decades, these forces have done much to change the map of rural America. In the areas surveyed by Brunner and his associates, over one-third of all the locality groupings classed as neighborhoods disappeared between I924 and I936, and nearly one fourth of them had fallen by the way between I930 and I936.7 Especially in the South, according to observations of the writer, does it seem that there is occurring before our eyes a very rapid transformation of society from a neighborhood to a community basis. Consolidation of schools and the elimi- nation of the circuit system in church organization are among the important factors responsible for the changes.

As the community becomes larger, as neighborhood lines become in- distinct, as a community declines in importance to the extent that it be- comes a mere satellite or neighborhood within the influence of another, and as the internal structure of the community becomes differentiated, it be- comes harder to distinguish precisely where the limits of one community end and those of another begin. As re-survey has succeeded re-survey, Brunner and his associates report increasing difficulty in determining the limits of the communities in their sample.8

The tendency towards greater differentiation in the internal structure of the community can best be portrayed against a background of theoretical projections and factual studies. Attempts to project trends in community size and structure and to forecast the nature of social organization in the future have been few. One of the most significant of these and one that has had the greatest influence upon contemporary thinking is the concept of rurbanization formulated by Charles J. Galpin. In addition to developing a most useful definition of the community and demonstrating a simple and objective means for determining its boundaries, Galpin tried to foresee

7 Ibid., 93. 8 Ibid., 85.

TRENDS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND LIFE 329

the nature of the social organization in the future. He looked forward to the time when the confused pattern of social relationships existing in the period, around i9iS to i920 would become simplified; when, out of the maze of some I 5,o0o competing and conflicting trade centers of all kinds and sizes, would come about 5ooo fairly large, complete, farm trade centers; when the business and commercial groups residing in these centers of trade would clearly see their true relationships with the farmers in the surrounding areas; and when each farm family would attach itself definitely and com- pletely to one of these self-sufficient centers. To this hypothetical combina- tion of the future in which the fairly large business center offering all es- sential services would completely dominate a trade and social basin some fifteen or twenty miles in diameter, Galpin gave the name urbann com- munity." To use his own words:

Then the Federal Government took out of the countryside the crossroads post-office, and substituted the rural free-delivery for mail, changing the farmer's mail address to the larger town. A decline at once began in the crossroads post-office hamlet. The farmer began to relate himself a little more fully to the larger town. The hamlets and villages maintaining a few restricted lines of trade thereupon began running an endurance test for life. The automobile has not made it any easier for these ineffi- cient centers to survive, and at present (i920) we can watch the phenomenon of the passing of the hoe-farmer's hamlet and the rise of the machine-farmer's business center.... It may be a long time before the present partial hamlet centers will be positively abandoned by the farmer; possibly many, surviving one type of disaster, will find new life in another type of adjustment; but sooner or later the slow process of the greater business economy will, if the present tendency continues, relate each farmstead quite definitely to a single, complete, retail business center, and the ma- chine-farmer will tend to become a business man in his own natural business center.9

That a combination of the rural and urban modes of living, i.e., rurbani- zation, is taking place few will be inclined to doubt, but there seems to be little evidence that it is following the lines projected by Dr. Galpin. Such a development would represent a considerable simplification of the locality- group structure of the nation. The facts seem to be that such social rela- tionships actually are becoming more complex.

On the basis of intensive studies of i2 communities in the states of Indiana, Minnesota, and North Dakota, and of all locality groupings in the state of Louisiana over a thirty-year period, the writer has tried to describe the observed trends in locality group relationships. These are as follows:

There has been a tendency for centers of various sizes to distribute themselves more uniformly with regard to the area, population and resources of the State. Or, the changes seem to be in the direction of a more efficient pattern of rural organization. This redistribution of centers in conjunction with improved methods of communi- cation and transportation has placed each family in frequent contact with several trade centers, which means that the loyalty of the farm family is divided among sev-

9 Charles Josiah Galpin, RuralLife, 9i, New York, 1920; cf. Galpin, Rural Social Problems, 22I-227, New York, I924.

330 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

eral centers instead of being confined to one. This, too, makes for heterogeneity in the locality group and decreases the differences between various locality groups.

From i9oi to I93I important alterations took place in the internal structures of the trade centers. A fundamental tendency towards specialization and division of labor between trade centers was found to be underway. Analysis of the existing situ- ation in I93I showed that, despite much over-lapping, the small centers were spe- cializing in certain types of services, medium-sized centers in others, and the largest centers in still others. Analysis of changes since i9oi showed that this division of labor had become much more evident during the thirty-year period. In general small centers nearest the farms are ceasing the attempt to provide all services and concen- trating their efforts upon certain types of enterprises for which their location gives them a comparative advantage. The types of enterprises offered by the smallest cen- ters are: those which are most undifferentiated, those satisfying the most immediate needs, those most closely connected with agricultural production and those which process farm products. As centers became larger, these types became relatively less important, and more highly specialized types made their appearance. This has an immediate influence upon the behavior of the farm family. Small centers near the farm are resorted to for securing services which meet many of the most pressing needs; larger centers at a greater distance, for services satisfying other less immedi- ate needs; and even the largest centers at considerable distance, for supplying some of the least pressing needs of the farm family.

The manner in which centers are now distributed, and the internal changes they have been undergoing lead to the belief that small centers are not doomed to extinc- tion. Probably part of the small centers, those which are poorly situated with re- spect to modern arteries of communication and transportation, will continue to de- cline and disappear, but others more favorably located will continue to serve many of the pressing and basic needs of the population immediately surrounding them.10

The results of all the New York studies as digested by Sanderson seem to be in agreement. According to him, the typical open country family in New York state now resorts to the local village or hamlet at a distance not exceeding three miles for one half of all services. Groceries, auto repairs, hardware, feed, church, grange, and school make up the bulk of these. Four out of ten families go not over four miles to a slightly larger village for similar services. From a still larger village distant four to six miles, three fourths of all families receive services such as banking, groceries, drugs, furniture, work clothes, movies, physician, high school, lodge, hardware, shoes, and weekly newspaper. Nine out of ten families patronize a city distant i s miles or more for dress clothes, furniture, shopping goods, and luxuries. Finally, the mail order firm is resorted to by one tenth of the families for clothing, hardware, and automobile equipment, and sundries." John H. Kolb, writing in Wisconsin some i 5 years after Galpin, has arrived at essentially the same conclusion.'2

10 T. Lynn Smith, Farm Trade Centers in Louisiana 1901 to 1931, 54-55, Louisiana AES Bulletin 234, Baton Rouge, I933.

1 Sanderson, op. cit., 95. 12 Trends in Town-Country Relations, 28, Wisconsin AES Research Bulletin II7, Madison,

I933.

TRENDS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND LIFE 331

The growing tendency for county, state, and federal governments to as- sume responsibility for functions once thought to be strictly of local concern is well known. County, state, and even federal support for schools has brought with it more centralized control and direction. The state operating very largely through the county has assumed a considerable measure of re- sponsibility for local health and sanitation. The building and maintenance of roads and highways, once a community and county function, has been taken over very largely by the state and federal governments. Gradually, the police power and the administration of justice generally are being trans- ferred to levels of government not centering in the community. These are merely examples of the widely ramifying changes that are underway.

Thus the facts seem to be: (i) both the neighborhood and the community are losing exclusive claim to the loyalty and patronage of the individual family; (2) neighborhoods are not doomed to extinction, but will find their principal role as a complementary part of the enlarged community; (3) com- munities are developing complementary and supplementary relationships among themselves, are allowing the neighborhood to play a definite role, and are seeing the individual families participate in the activities of the great society in an extracommunity capacity; (4) the family is gradually dividing its attachments and loyalty among the surrounding neighborhood, the encompassing community, and the centers of industry and trade whose influences envelop the community; and (5) many necessary functions of social living, once directed by the forces of localism operating through the community, are now carried on at the county, state, and national levels of government.

Changes in the Structure of the Community Unit. The increased social dif- ferentiation within the community has already been treated in another connection. Two other important structural changes next receive attention. These are the changes in social solidarity and in social stratification.

Social Solidarity. The nature and basis of the social solidarity or cohesion within the community is undergoing a rather fundamental change. Gradual though this is, it is nevertheless of basic importance. Definitely on the wane is the cohesion which results from likenesses and similarities, called by Giddings "consciousness of kind," by T6nnies "gemeinschaft," and by Durkheim "mechanistic solidarity." In other words, what Sorokin, Zim- merman, and Galpin have called the cumulative group is being replaced by what Kolb has designated as special interest groups. With the increasing heterogeneity of the social relationships in a given area, the community must depend more and more for its unity and cohesion upon that type of social solidarity which develops out of division of labor, specialization, and the consequent lack of self-sufficiency on the part of the individual. The resulting interdependence-buttressed by give-and-take, live-and-let-live attitudes and a contractual type of cooperation-provides much of the

332 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

unity to be found in the present-day communities. In the past, this type of solidarity, which Durkheim called organic, has been much less important; in the future, its role promises to be much greater in the community.

Today, the nature of this change can best be observed in certain areas where geographic and cultural factors have held off the forces of change until recently. I quote a conclusion from a recent study of a Mormon village in the Utah Valley:

... Salem in its early history represented a type of social relationship in which ... "gemeinschaftliche" elements largely predominated. It was based on common bonds like interests, and similarity of experience. These "community" elements became strong and were developed after the settlement of Salem. Though some members of the village were related by blood and marriage these connections were not the prin- cipal basis for the formation of the community. Rather it was the common accep- tance of and belief in Mormonism. Since that time certain "associational" elements have tended to weaken these common bonds. Relationships of a more contractual nature have arisen and expressed themselves. The church, in order to meet these new and challenging forces, has adopted various measures, some of which have been partially successful. In other respects it is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain its authority and influence. This trend toward an increase of the "associational" elements in the village can only be explained in the light of the great and rapid changes which have occurred in our present-day society. Urbanization and all its in- fluences have made themselves felt in the most remote rural districts and as a result certain traits of an "associational" nature have tended to arise. Salem at present is still in a period of transition. What the eventual adjustment will be will have to be left to the future.13

Earlier it was observed and described in less isolated areas as follows: ... Neighborhood groups are no longer the important organization unit. Grouping arrangements are along new lines. These groups are more largely determined by the interests, the deliberate intent, the purposive action of the people. Locality groups have lateral or geographic dimension. Interest groups have psycho-cultural or perpendicular dimension. Locality groups depend upon proximity, common life, and residence in a recognized physical area. Interest groups depend upon polarity, promotion, special concerns, leadership, and deliberate effort. The polarity implies the fields of magnetic influence, when thus released from locality restrictions people are attracted to certain places of interest.14

The essential fact is that the nature of community solidarity is shifting very rapidly from the type based upon likenesses and consciousness of kind to one based upon a conscious recognition of basic differences, lack of self- sufficiency, and mutual interdependence of parts.

Social Stratification. There seems little doubt that increased social strati- fication is one of the fundamental trends now remolding the community.

13 Reed H. Bradford, a Mormon Village: a Study in Rural Social Organization, 64, a thesis submitted to the faculty of the Louisiana State University in partial fulfillment of the require- ment for the master's degree, I939.

14 J. H. Kolb and A. F. Wileden, Special Interest Groups in Rural Society, 2, University of Wisconsin AES Bulletin 84, I929.

TRENDS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND LIFE 333

Zimmerman sees this as a result of the centralization of governmental func- tions and authority and the decline of local self-government.'5 Nelson in- dicates how increased differences between the classes have come about by people becoming identified as "relief" and "nonrelief," "signers and non- signers," "eligible" and "ineligible," "employed" and "unemployed."'6 0. E. Baker and others stress the fact that farmers are gradually losing control of the land, with a result that farm society is becoming more and more constituted of landless tenants and laborers. Paul S. Taylor reveals startling facts concerning the large rural proletariat at the bottom of the social pyramid who follow migratory labor as a mode of life, who never succeed in gaining acceptance as part of any established community, who can never attach themselves to established institutions, who live for the most part in poverty, and who have a large share in the seemingly efficient production in some areas of large-scale agriculture.17 Furthermore, it seems likely that not only is social stratification developing in extent, but that a sort of hardening of the social arteries is bringing about a greater degree of caste in the vertical social structure of the community.

Changes in the Social Processes. Within the limits of this paper it is im- possible to treat adequately all of the significant changes in the functioning of society on the community level. The discussion is therefore limited to two of the more significant social processes: conflict and cooperation.

Social Conflict. The nature of social conflict has greatly altered in response to changes in the structure and solidarity of the community. Formerly, lines of cleavage between various social groupings were abrupt, sharply defined, and unbridged by class differences. In a community possessing a high degree of mechanistic social solidarity, the limits of the most important social groupings tended to coincide; political, religious, kinship, and oc- cupational lines followed one another closely. Today, much of this has changed. As increased social differentiation has added new social groupings, the lines of demarcation have followed new channels. Old lines of cleavage have become blurred. The limits of a group's influence have become more vague and ill-defined. Much overlapping has occurred, and there is much less tendency for the boundaries of one social grouping to parallel those of another; political groupings within the community no longer follow family lines so closely; religious cleavages cut across occupational lines; and a new class consciousness has cut across all these groupings. It should not be fore- gotten that a method of sampling which made possible accurate forecasts of i928 and I932 elections, by I936 was no longer valid.

15 Care C. Zimmerman, The Changing Community, 648-653, New York, I938. 16 Lowry Nelson, "National Policies and Rural Social Organization," Rural Sociology, I

(1936), 87. 17 "Migratory Farm Labor in the United States," Monthly Labor Review, XLIV (March,

I937), 9-II.

334 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

All of these changes mean much from the standpoint of social conflict. Misunderstandings between groups of one variety over differences in one sphere are much less likely to be aggravated by differences of another kind. Political struggle within the community is not so strongly drawn up along town-country lines; family feuds are not so strongly reinforced by occupa- tional, political, and religious differences; and religious struggle is not so likely to be at the same time a conflict between different economic strata, kinship groups, political entities, and occupational alliances. Except for the intensification of class struggle, all of this confusion tends to weaken the intensity and shorten the duration of inter- and intracommunity conflict. Blood feuds extending generation after generation are unthinkable in a community whose soldarity is of the organic type. At the present time, it is possible for a large part of the population of the community to play the role of mere spectator in connection with local conflict situations.

Cooperation. The nature of cooperation and of cooperative activities also is rapidly undergoing a fundamental transformation in the communities of the nation. Cooperative activities range all the way from the unconscious, spontaneous, neighboring and mutual-aid practices of the pioneer group, to the calculated, contractual forms of united effort embodied in cooperative marketing associations, credit unions, and consumer-owned retail outlets. Of primary importance in colonial days and on the frontier, noncontractual mutual-aid practices have long held a fundamental place in the social ac- tivities of most rural communities, but with the coming of the automobile, good roads, and the increased mobility of population, such practices lose much of their efficiency. As social differentiation and division of labor have replaced mechanistic soldarity with that of an organic type, cooperative activities within the community have been changing from a mutual-aid basis to a more deliberate and contractual type. This kind of cooperation operates through a formally constituted organization, possessed of specific rules, and is set up on a strict give-and-take basis. Unlike the former, it is not spontaneous; it must be promoted. It need not be personal, and in fact is frequently highly impersonal. Adjustment to this contractual variety of cooperation is one of the basic problems confronting the communities of the nation.

Conclusion. In conclusion, I would say that the locality-group structure of society is undergoing a rapid transformation. The future promises a social structure in which the horizon of the individual family is greatly extended and its relations with locality groupings are much wider and more complex than in the past. Group cohesion seems likely to be based even more on conscious recognition of mutual interdependence; social conflict promises to be more prevalent but more intermittent and less deep-seated; and mutual aid is likely to give away still more to cooperation of the con- tractual type.