I Don't Really Know What the Hell Is This
A COMMUNITY MODEL—Roland L. Warren
Warren, R (1975). In K. Kramer and H. Specht (eds.), Readings in community organization practice. 2nd. Ed. Englwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall
It is the inescapable fact that people’s clustering together in space has important influences on their daily activities which give us perhaps our best clue to a definition of the community as a social entity. We shall consider a community to be that combination of social units and systems which perform the major social functions having locality relevance. This is another way of saying that by “community” we mean the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to those broad areas of activity which are necessary in day to day living. We shall organize our description and analysis of such activities around five major functions which have such locality relevance. These functions are:
1. Production-distribution-consumption 2. Socialization 3. Social Control 4. Social Participation 5. Mutual Support
While all have locality relevance, this does not mean that they necessarily are functions over which the community exercises exclusive responsibility or over which it has complete control. On the contrary, the organization of society to perform these functions at the community level involves a strong tie between locally based units such as business, schools, governments, and voluntary associations and social systems extending far beyond the confines of the community. Rather than being extraneous to the present consideration of the community, these relationships to extra-community systems (are) an important focus of attention. Nor does it mean that these functions are not performed by other types of social systems such as informal groups, formal associations, and whole societies. The community, however, is especially characterized by the organization of these functions on a locality basis. The function of
Warren, R (1975). In K. Kramer and H. Specht (eds.), Readings in community organization practice. 2nd. Ed. Englwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall
It is the inescapable fact that people’s clustering together in space has important influences on their daily activities which give us perhaps our best clue to a definition of the community as a social entity. We shall consider a community to be that combination of social units and systems which perform the major social functions having locality relevance. This is another way of saying that by “community” we mean the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to those broad areas of activity which are necessary in day to day living. We shall organize our description and analysis of such activities around five major functions which have such locality relevance. These functions are:
1. Production-distribution-consumption 2. Socialization 3. Social Control 4. Social Participation 5. Mutual Support
While all have locality relevance, this does not mean that they necessarily are functions over which the community exercises exclusive responsibility or over which it has complete control. On the contrary, the organization of society to perform these functions at the community level involves a strong tie between locally based units such as business, schools, governments, and voluntary associations and social systems extending far beyond the confines of the community. Rather than being extraneous to the present consideration of the community, these relationships to extra-community systems (are) an important focus of attention. Nor does it mean that these functions are not performed by other types of social systems such as informal groups, formal associations, and whole societies. The community, however, is especially characterized by the organization of these functions on a locality basis. The function of