Blackwell Reference Online

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Community integration is a compound concept derived from sociology that addresses the two central questions of (1) how communities are formed, reproduce, grow, and change; and (2) what continually integrates or binds them together. The field of communications adds a third dimension, asking (3) what role communication plays in forming, sustaining, and integrating communities. Through much of the twentieth century, scholarship on community integration was primarily concerned with communities in geographic space. But, as virtual communities began to grow at the turn of the millennium, a fourth dimension of scholarship began to inquire about (4) the relationship between place-based and virtual communities. The original questions on community integration draw directly from sociology's classical scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Tönnies, Durkheim, and Simmel. These questions were directly taken up and developed by the research program of the Chicago School of sociology in the first third of the twentieth century, especially by Robert Park, through the elaboration of the concept of the urban community as an ecology. Communication scholarship has more often focused on specific processes that contribute to or predict local community integration, usually understood as the relationship between community integration and interest in local issues and civic participation. ... log in or subscribe to read full text