1. Lecture 2
Community urbanization and personal networks

2. Definitions of community
• Tönnies 1887
Gemeinshaft: pre-industrial countryside and small scale villages, where “the proximity of
dwellings, the communal fields, and even the mere contiguity of holdings necessitate many
contacts of human beings and cause inurement and intimate knowledge of one other”
Gesellshaft: the development of urbanism implies the consequent modification of human
forms of associations, with the separation of institutional spheres (political, religious, social)
and the division of labour, regulated by the economic sphere. The domination of economic
exchange modifies the nature of personal interactions that become instrumental as they are
evaluated according to the profit people derive from exchanges.

3. • Durkheim 1893
Community: mechanic solidarity
Society: organic solidarity
• Weber 1922
Modern times favour the diffusion of instrumentally rational and value rational type of
actions, to the expenses of traditional and affective relationships
• Simmel 1921
Survival of affective relationships within modern society in emotional expressions like
love, friendship, flirtation
But urban life favours the diffusion of a blasé personality, of an individual who relates to
others in intellectual rather than emotional terms, because the multiplied social circles in
which he is embedded would require too many emotional resources to equally engage with
everyone at a deep, personal and affective level

4. Simmel provides a structural explanation to the modification of human relations in urban
society, by advancing the hypothesis that the increase in population density implies the
differentiation of social circles: the formal structure of human association shift from
communities as small and highly dense groups where everyone is reciprocally connected to
everyone else, to a structure with multiple, sparse and partially overlapping clusters.
Community Question: how large-scale social systemic divisions of
labour affect the organization and content of primary ties?
All community studies bounded by geographical location

5. Community Lost
Primary relationships in the city now are "impersonal, transitory and segmental" (Wirth
1938, p. 12). Instead of being fully incorporated into a single solidary community, urbanites
are seen as being limited members of multiple social networks, sparsely knit and loosely
bounded.
Putnam (2000): decline of social capital in US after the 1950s. He looks at a large number of
indicators, like voting, belonging to sororities, church outings, playing bridge, having family
dinners, do-good volunteering, and league bowling.
Etzioni (2001): the loss of community ties also implies the weakening of moral foundations
that derive from the commitment to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings. Those
moral foundations are under threat by the diffusion of individualism.

6. The individualization theory
The nostalgia that emerges from the supposed weakening of communitarian bonds have
influenced the affirmation of the individualistic thesis: atomization of individual lives and loss
of traditional values.
Emergence of pure relationships (Giddens 1988), where the specific circumstances that
define the content of a relationship are not institutionally superimposed, but they
negotiated within the privacy of the relationship itself, and are always passible of
modification.
Bauman (2003) describes contemporary affective relationships as liquid, as they need to
dilute the life-long commitment of institutionalised and traditional forms of families in favour
of temporary bonds where “it is always possible to press the delete button” 2003: xii

7. Community Saved
Neighborhood and kinship solidarities have continued to flourish in industrial bureaucratic
social systems.
Solidarities have persisted because of their continued efficacy in providing support and
sociability, communal desires for informal social control, and ecological sorting into
homogeneous residential and work areas.
Evidence of solidary networks among poorer, traditional, or ethnic minorities seeking to
maintain their resources against the claims of a centralizing state: the urban village (Gans
1962)

8. Community liberated
Abandon the local area as the starting point for analyzing the Community Question and
inquired directly into the structure of primary ties
• The separation of residence, workplace, and kinship groups involves urbanites in multiple
social networks with weak solidary attachments
• High rates of residential mobility weaken existing ties and retard the creation of strong
new ones
• Cheap, effective transportation and communication reduce the social costs of spatial
distances, enabling the easy maintenance of dispersed primary ties
• The scale, density, and diversity of the city and the nation-state, in combination with
widespread facilities for interaction, increase possibilities for access to loosely bounded,
multiple social networks
• The spatial dispersion of primary ties and the heterogeneity of the city make it less likely
that those with whom an urbanite is linked will themselves be densely knit into solidary
communities.

9. Testing the community question
Social network analysts have developed a series of large studies to explore the nature of
changes in personal relationships in contemporary times
Fischer (1982a; 1982b) and Wellman (1979; 1990) collected data respectively from
representative samples of the population of California and East York, and were able to map
the cohesion and composition of personal networks:.tTey discovered that
• Individuals maintain important affective relationships even in urban environments, but
that different people interact with different alters depending on the type of support
they need (Wellman 1990)
• Urbanization implies a higher proportion of friends and families in personal networks
over institutional affiliations (Fischer 1982b)
• Communities are not insomuch shaped by territorial boundaries, but are constituted by
multiplex, interconnected and spatially dispersed social networks (Wellman 1979; Mok
et al. 2007).

10. East York study
The prevalence of strong intimate ties in East York calls into question the basic contention of
the Lost argument. For East Yorkers, intimate ties occur only as much more differentiated
networks. But in these networks, many intimate ties contain support, and help from
intimates is available to almost all East Yorkers
The data support some aspects of the Saved argument. Parent-child ties play a special role in
the overall intimate networks. They tend to be socially closer than other intimate ties, even
at greater physical distances. Parents and children are more apt to provide help in mundane
matters as well as in crises. Other intimate kin, however, can be counted on no more than
can intimate friends. The local area is now metropolitan and not the neighborhood.
Data most fully support the Liberated argument that East Yorkers tend to organize their
intimate relationships as differentiated networks and not as solidarities. There are links to a
variety of people, and maintaining contact both by telephone and in person, at a wide range
of time intervals. Rather than an unambiguous membership in a single, almost
concrete, solidary community, East Yorkers' lives are now divided among multiple networks.

11. The impact of internet over communities ties
The Internet Decreases Community
The Internet through its entertainment and information capabilities draws people
away from family and friends. Further, by facilitating global communication and
involvement, it reduces interest in the local community and its politics
The Internet Transforms Community
The Internet provides the means for inexpensive and convenient communication
with communities of shared interest. Through its low costs and asynchronous
nature it increases communication among friends and family, especially contact
with those who are
far away. Widely dispersed communities of shared interest become dominant;
neighborhood communities become quaint residuals.
The Internet Supplements Community
A third perspective sees the Internet as another means of communication to
facilitate existing social relationships and follow patterns of civic engagement and
socialization. The Internet blends into people’s life. People will use the Internet to
maintain existing social contacts by adding electronic contact to telephone and
face-to-face contact. Their offline hobbies and political interests continue online.

12. Netlab studies (Wellman)
• An ethnographic and survey study of a wired suburb, Netville.
• A very large Web-survey (Survey 2000) hosted at the Website of National Geographic
Society.
• International data from the same survey with respondents from 178 countries.
• A study of Catalans and their uses of the Internet.
• Results from a study of Japanese users and uses of the Internet.
Netville
Netville residents with high-speed Internet connections have much more informal contact
with neighbors than did the non-wired residents who had not yet received their high-speed
access.
Wired residents know the names of 25 neighbors, while non-wired residents knew only
eight.
They talk to twice as many neighbors as do the non-wired neighbors.
Wired residents make 50% more visits to each other’s homes, and their contacts with
neighbors were more widely dispersed in the development.
Wired Netville residents also maintained more long-distance contact with friends and
relatives than non-wired residents did
They are more involved in local policies

13. National Geographic Survey 2000
• Rather than weakening community, the Internet supplements existing face-to-face and
telephone contact.
• Heavy Internet users have a greater overall volume of contact with community members
because Internet use supplements telephone and face-to-face contact. It does not
displace it.
• Although the Internet increases the number and intensity of friendship and kinship ties
that can be sustained at long distances, relatively local ties remain important.
Survey 2000
• The Internet is used in similar ways in many parts of the world.
• North Americans usually have been online longer, use the Internet more frequently, and
do more kinds of activities online.
• Rather than operating at the expense of the real face-to-face world, it is a part of it, with
people using all means of communication to connect with friends and relatives.
Catalans
• Catalan networks are larger and more local than their North American counterparts.
• Personal encounters are the predominant mode of communication. Telephoning is of
secondary importance. The Internet is hardly ever used except to communicate with
those few friends who live in other countries.
• Internet is used to surf the web

14. Personal networks
Studies in numerous countries to empirically measure size, composition, density and
functions of personal networks
EG: Teheran, France, Germany
Qualitative studies on the change in the composition of personal networks
(no network structure)
Family studies, and the transformation of families and of institutional forms of belonging.
Smart 2007: the heterosexual and institutionalised conceptualization of family semantically
prioritizes biological connectedness and physical space: conversely, a more general sociology
of personal life should embrace various forms of families, kinship, friendship, same sex
relationships, acquaintances, and people living apart together (Levin 2004).
Friendship studies.
Friendship is becoming more important in personal lives (Rosenail and Budgeon 2004), but
also that different kind of affective relationships are blurring the boundaries and shuffling
the roles (Spencer and Pahl 2006).

15. Recap
 Community concept at the core of sociological studies
 In classic sociology, opposition between community/society, preindustrial/industrial, rural/urban
 Simmel. Blasé’ and social circles
 Individualization theory
 This tradition has informed the subsequent community question:
• Community lost
• Community saved
• Community liberated
 Social network analysts empirically test the community question
 Reharsal of individualization theory: the impact of internet
• Internet decreases community
• Internet transforms community
• Internet supplements community
 Further network analysts test proves that internet embeds in people’s everyday life, as a
further meaning of communication, and increase social participation

16. References
Bauman, Z., 2003. Liquid Love: on the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Durkheim E., 1964 [1893], The division of labour in society, New York, Free Press.
Etzioni A., 2001, The Monochrome Society, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Fischer C., 1982b, “What Do We Mean by `Friend’?” Social Networks 3: 287-306.
Fischer, C.S., 1982a. To Dwell Among Friends. Personal Networks in Town and City. The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Gans, Herbert. 1962. The Urban Villagers. New York: Free Press.
Giddens, A., 1994. The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern
Societies. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Levin, I., 2004. Living apart together: a new family form. Current Sociology 52 (2), 223–240.
Mok, D., B. Wellman, and R. Basu (2007), "Did distance matter before the Internet?
Interpersonal contact and support in the 1970s," Social Networks, 29, 430-61.
Putnam R. D., 2000, Bowling Alone, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York
Roseneil, S., Budgeon, S., 2004. Cultures of intimacy and care beyond ‘the family’: personal
life and social change in the early 21st century. Current Sociology 52 (2), 135–159

17. References
Simmel G., 1921, Fragment über die Liebe dem Nachlass Georg Simmels’, Logos, 9: 1-54
(English translation: “A Fragment on Love” in G. Simmel, 1984, On Women, Sexuality and Love.
Yale University Press, New Haven).
Spencer, L., Pahl, R., 2006. Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today. Princeton
University Press, New Jersey.
Tönnies Ferdinand, 1957 [1887], Community and society, Courier Dover Publications
Weber M., 1978 [1922], Economy and society. An outline of interpretative
sociology, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles
Wellman B. (1990), «Different strokes from different folks: community ties and so-cial
support», in American Journal of Sociology, 96, 3, pp. 558 – 588.
Wellman B., 1979, The community question, American Journal of Sociology, 84: 1201 – 1231.
Wirth, Louis. 1938. "Urbanism as a Way of Life." American Journal of Sociology 44 (July): 3-24.