Community organization and planning

Community organization is found wherever people have learned to live together. In simple societies it rests upon customs or traditional ways of regulating social relationships. These customs have come to be called folkways and mores, after the classic exposition of William Graham Sumner.¹ Mores change slowly, perhaps imper ceptibly. The preoccupation with this facet of life in stationary societies has sometimes led to the assumption that mores display such resistance to change that they must be accepted, without thought of their alteration.

The inertia of habit and custom is a conservative force in mod ern society, which must be taken into account in any analysis of social changes. However, in industrial, urban society, which is characteristic of contemporary life, many evidences of conscious social reconstruction are found. Such methods of effecting change are deviations from the traditional organization of community life. The methods by which communities deliberately change their structure and way of life is the theme of this book.

Community organization is a necessary condition of conscious cooperation for local planning and for other forms of common action. This concept of community organization is used inclusively to indicate not only social structures within which cooperative activities take place but also the various processes of social inter action which indicate that the forms have functional meaning for the people involved. This aspect of life in contemporary communi ties can be better understood if placed in relation to other changes that have taken place, and by contrast with the organization of simple local societies, as the first two chapters will indicate.