Social community: its definition, structure, significance

Society is an integral socio-cultural system, consisting of a huge number of subsystems. One of them is a social community. Any commonality implies the accumulation of people who have something of the same (for example, interests, tasks or goals). People who join in a community usually have similar ideas about life, perform similar social roles in society.

So, we can say that the social community is a set of human individuals united by similar conditions of life, having the same interests, values and conscious of their social identity. The grounds for uniting people can be: their close interaction among themselves, common activities, awareness of the similarity of interests, their own culture, formed on the basis of similar ideas about the goals of this community, moral concepts, etc., the existence of a system of self-government.

A number of sociologists believe that social communities and groups in most cases do not arise spontaneously. One concept of their emergence was suggested by the American D. Homans, who believed that people, interacting with each other, are trying to achieve a certain good. The more significant the given good, the more efforts the person assumes for rapprochement with other people for whom this benefit is also significant. In simple terms, according to the American sociologist, people unite in groups, form communities and communities only to achieve a specific goal.

One social community can differ from another goal of its education, form and form. Types of such associations of people differ according to the following features:

- by the time of existence: from a few minutes (the audience of the concert hall, meeting) to whole centuries (a single nation);

- In terms of the composition of their members: from two people to several thousand (members of a certain party);

- the density of connections between the main representatives: from a closely- knit team (office staff) to very amorphous, almost non-interacting entities (football fans).

Sociologists distinguish such a concept as a mass social community, the distinctive features of which are:

- instability of existence;

- the heterogeneity of the composition of the people entering into it, the impossibility of establishing their exact number;

- functioning on the basis of one or another activity and the impossibility of existence outside of it.

As an example of a mass social community, you can bring fans of a certain pop star, fans of the sports club, members of various associations. The tribe of indigenous people of New Guinea, a separate nation, race, a crowd of protesters near the administration of the enterprise are also mass social communities.

A separate place among other associations is occupied by an ethnos - a set of people who live for a long period of time in a certain territory, have a stable own culture, differing in self-awareness, that is, aware of the difference of their association from other similar ones. Ethnic community is formed, as a rule, on the basis of a common territory for living, creating all the necessary conditions for people to interact with each other. Further, when such a social community as an ethnos is already formed, this sign becomes secondary or generally loses its significance. People who identify themselves with a particular ethnicity can live in different parts of the Earth and, at the same time, remember and honor the traditions of their ethnos, celebrate the holidays that they have established and adhere to the rules of conduct that they have defined.

Socialization of man is impossible without his interaction with other representatives of the human race. Each of us in one or another degree does not belong to one, but several social communities. A person outside of society ceases to feel like a person, becomes an outcast.