EXAMPLE B COMMUNITY STUDIES Extracts from Payne (1993: 1-6)

Before we can 'revisit' the community study, we have first to locate it, but unlike physical places, the com-munity study is a social construction which is highly adaptable, transportable and indeed, transient. It is one thing to know what and where it used to be:

Frankenberg (1966) or Bell and Newby (1971) are useful as original Baedeckers in helping to map and access the early locations. It is another thing to position more recent studies and to understand the research imagina-tions that create them, and are created by them.

Once a sketch map has been drawn, the revisiting can begin. In this brief re-exploration, we shall be less interested in the perennial questions of the definition of community, or the sociological purpose of studying 'communities', as with four questions of research methodology and imagination. Why is it that, from most sociological accounts, communities seem so full of such nice people? Why are small settlements appar-ently so receptive of middle-class sociologists, and yet remain so hostile to other 'incomers'? How can sociologists know if their fieldwork is representative and comprehensive? And how can the sociologist evaluate whether a given finding is characteristic of 'communities', rather than of wider British society?

Rediscovering the community study

After becoming a mainstream strength of British sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, community research rapidly became no more than a backwater interest by the 1970s. The familiar successes of Rees (1950), Williams (1956), Dennis et al. (1956), Young and Willmott (1957), Frankenberg (1957 and 1966), Stacey (1960), Littlejohn (1964), Rex and Moore (1969), etc.

found little echo in the following decade. To some extent victims of their own success (what more was there to discover about the social life of small settle-ments?), criticized for spatial determinism and inade-quate theorization by Dennis (1958), Gans (1964), Pahl (1968) and Stacey (1969), they were swept aside by the tide of expansion and specialization of the discipline that began in this country in the mid-1960s (Payne et

al., 1981: 95-9).

The author sets out the pur-pose for his review by mention-ing some of the problems of defining community. He

A tourist map is the analogy for the review, showing different locations and interest points along the way.

A number of questions are asked in order to orient the reader to the terrain. given as part of the reason.

68 Doing a literature review It is important to recognize that community research did not completely cease during this shift in socio-logical fashion. It also evolved so that we had fewer studies of 'social places', and more accounts of

problems studied in a location.

A decade after Newby's observation, Day and Murdock saw little sign of this gap having been filled:

Bell and Newby's textbook account of this tradition (1971) turned out to be in effect its death knell. Rather than inspiring a new wave of case studies in community research, it seemed to provide ample justification for ignoring past work of the kind. (1993: 83–4)

They quote a voice from social geography in support:

relatively little of social scientific value could be said to have been bequeathed to later generations of researchers either by the concept of community or the methodology of community studies (Cooke, 1988).

An alternative interpretation can be found at the anthropological end of the discipline. By the mid-1980s, Cohen could reflect that whereas in the 1970s there had been a paucity of studies, things had since

i mproved:

the problem we faced on the occasion of this present book was, therefore, quite different: we were con-fronted by an embarrassment of riches. Research seemed to be going on apace throughout the British Isles, in cities and countryside, on the remote periphery and in commuter villages. (Cohen, 1986: viii)

Bulmer had also been cautiously optimistic the year before, perceiving some sign that the study of localities is being revived (1985: 433). While another study could see 'a lively upsurge of locality and community studies in Britain (Warwick and Littlejohn, 1992: xv).

Are these assessments . . . to be believed? On the whole, the answer should be yes. In the first place, several successful and very recognizable community studies had taken place, such as Brody's work on Inishkillane (1973), Stacey's revisit to Banbury (1975), Strathern's anthropology of Elmdon (1981), Giarchi's description of Troon (1984), or the fifteen of so studies reported by Cohen (1982, 1986). Other, less well-known work includes Stephenson (1984), Holme (1985), Fraser (1987), Morris (1987), Macleod (1990), Dean (1990), Goudy (1990) and Borland et al. (1992). These range over communal patterns of kinship, housing, migra-tion, politics, drinking, religion, social control, localism, identity and cultural survival – for the most part the familiar themes of the earlier tradition of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, there were several studies that were arguably not quite community studies, but which examined issues by looking at their manifestations in particular localities and which took these localities very

Seeming decline attributed to a change in focus of community studies.

Shows that little was done in over a decade to fill the knowl-edge gap.

Beginning to see the use of testimony to shape the map.

Use of sources from other disciplines.

The 'however' movement is used to show that there was an alternative view of what had been happening in the area of community studies.

More testimony using a posi-tive attitude in contrast to the negative attitude of the pre-vious ones.

A question-and-answer is used to take the side of the positive view of community studies.

More citations are given to provide evidence.

Links shown to previous stu-dies; themes are said to be the same.

Classifying and reading research 69 seriously. Examples of this trend are Moore's 'The social

impact of oil' (1982), Davies's description of 'The Evangelistic bureaucrat' (1972), Dennis's concern over 'People and planning' (1970), Pryce's report on the 'Endless pressure' of ghetto life (1979), MacKinnon's study of 'Language, education and social processes in a Gaelic community' (1977) or Wengler's account (1984) in rural Wales: 'The supportive network'.

Next door to the community study

On this brief and by no means exhaustive review, it seems reasonable to claim that the community study is tolerably alive and well, and living in British sociology (albeit in a less fashionable or visible part of town). One reason for this survival has been that wider sociological concerns could be examined in specific sites (Moore, Davies, Dennis, Pryce, MacKinnon, Wengler). Another reason is that processes external to sociology put community back on the research agenda, as in the work of Martin Bulmer. On the one hand, his contributions can be seen as a development of his early career experience in the sociology department at Durham (Bulmer, 1978), a department which produced a series of local studies such as Moore (1974), Taylor (1979), Williamson (1982), and also Bulmer (1975). On the other hand, his work in the mid-1980s (e.g. Bulmer, 1986, 1987) was also related to the fresh stimulus of Peter Wilmott (1983, 1986) and Clare Wengler (1984) which marked the rediscovery of local systems as a potential basis for 'community care'. The setting of a new political agenda for social policy, in which a government that did not believe in the existence of society, set about decanting the mentally ill and others into the care of 'the community' sharpened interest in kinship, networks and neighbouring.

A parallel political stimulus led to the rediscovery of the mining community, namely the miners' strike in 1984-85. Drawing on the experiences of strikers and their wives, a number of sociological and polemical accounts appeared in the following years: Gibbon and Steyne, 1986; Parker, 1986; Samuel et al., 1986; Seddon, 1986; Allen, 1989; Winterton and Winterton, 1989;

Gilbert, 1992 and Warwick and Littlejohn, 1992 (who also record the growth of something of a 'Featherstone history industry'; see Evans, 1984; Berry and Williams, 1986; Clayton et al., 1990). These are neither all 'conventional' community studies nor produced within normal canons of social scientific work, but draw on the idea of the community, communal sentiment, and in some cases specifically on contrasts and continuities with the classic study, 'Coal is our life'.

A third area of development was the shift away from the community per se towards the idea of 'locality'. This has taken two forms. One is in the field of social geography, :.there there has been less antagonism towards space as

The point of the previous section is emphasized: commu-nity studies is still a major form of research. Note how studies classified on the fringe of the category are cited as a reason for the continuation of com-munity studies research.

We see an adaptation of the definition of community stu-dies to include stustu-dies of local-ity. In the next paragraph note how the notion of locality study is consolidated as an i mportant development of community studies.

The miners' strike of the early 1980s is used to chronologically locate studies of locality. The gender dimension is men-tioned. However, strong links are made with a classic com-munity study, 'Coal is our life'.

These studies are said to have revived awareness of the con-cept, community.

We are taken further into the notion of locality with a sub-division.