Core Community Commonalities
While there are many definitions of community, a review of the sociology literature reveals at least three core components or markers of community, as well as the critical notion of imagined community (Anderson 1983). The first and most important element of community is what Gusfield (1978) refers to as consciousness of kind. Consciousness of kind is the intrinsic connection that members feel toward one another, and the collective sense of difference from others not in the community. Consciousness of kind is shared consciousness, a way of thinking about things that is more than shared attitudes or perceived similarity. It is a shared knowing of belonging (Weber [1922] 1978). The second indicator of community is the presence of shared rituals and traditions. Rituals and traditions perpetuate the community’s shared history, culture, and consciousness. Rituals “serve to contain the drift of meanings; . . . [they] are conventions that set up visible public definitions” (Douglas and Ishwerwood 1979, p. 65) and social solidarity (Durkheim [1915] 1965). Traditions are sets of “social practices which seek to celebrate and inculcate certain behavioral norms and values” (Marshall 1994, p. 537). The third marker of community is a sense of moral responsibility, which is a felt sense of duty or obligation to the community as a whole, and to its individual members. This sense of moral responsibility is what produces, in times of threat to the community, collective action.