There has been a lot of discussion by social scientists about what community is, but we can ask: who defines community? Should the people who belong (or might belong) to a community decide what it is and whether they are in or out? Or is it social scientists and professional people who really decide who is part of a community?

When we think about communities most people think about a particular place, a geographical location for the community, such as the Dubbo Community or the Redfern Community. The geographical community can be a town, a suburb, or even a small section of a suburb. There might be a few communities in the same town. There are other times when a town might be only part of a community, such as when he community involves the rural areas outside town, or two towns are closely linked.

Are all communities linked to specific geographical areas? Don't we think also about ethnic communities? The newspapers constantly reports people speaking for the Aboriginal Community or representatives of the Vietnamese community in Australia. We also talk about communities of interest. We talk about the Christian community, the legal community, the gay community, and so on.

Do you think community is a thing? a system? a process? By system I mean an interconnected set of parts which are capable of acting as a whole. A process is an observable operation or action. We can ask: is community a thing which exists apart from us? Or is it something that we are part of? Or is it something that we do together?

Community can be many things. It's parts are separate human beings when viewed in one way but they are also interconnected and interdependent and they often have similar values and aims. A crowd or established group has a life of its own, apart from the life of each member. That is, a community is not just the sum of the individuals who make it up, but something more than that.

Is community good or bad? Since the 18th century many writers pointed to the breakdown of community with the increase in division of labour, individualism, competition and so on. Still today many people mourn the loss of a form of community - the form which they had known in earlier times. Many think the old Aboriginal communities or rural villages were better than modern mass society in many ways. Some people think that members of older communities regarded each other as whole persons of intrinsic significance, while members of mass society treat each other as means to ends with no intrinsic value. In the mourning for the ideal, older form of community a number of features are viewed as lost. We no longer have the wholeness or oneness of community life. We no longer have the trust in relationships. We use people and are used by people for skills we or they possess. We don't value people as whole persons. We often don't even know the values (let alone share them) of many of the people we deal with.

Anthony Cohen has a different idea of what community is. According to Cohen, when we use the word ‘community’, what we are doing is establishing s symbolic boundary around a class of people. That is, we are using language to mark a difference between people inside and those outside the ‘community’. He suggests the word is loosely used to imply that community is:

a) a group or category of people,
who have something in common with each other
which distinguishes them in a significant way from other groups.

Community implies those inside are similar to each other and different from others. It creates a bond between some people and excludes others. Thus community implies and creates a boundary between us and them, inside group and outside group.

This boundary is marked in symbolic ways. There are many types of symbol which mark the boundaries of community - flags, badges, dances, languages and so on. One type of symbol which mark the boundaries are words - words like freedom, democracy, brotherhood. These are always "Hurrah" words, as opposed to "Boo" words - tyranny, barbarian, savage.

Symbols (including symbolic words) always carry a range of meanings whose differences can be glossed over. So, it is possible to share the symbols without sharing the meanings.

‘Community’ is one such boundary marking symbol. As a symbol it is held in common by all the members, but its meaning might vary with each member’s unique understanding of it. According to Cohen, people construct community symbolically, making community a resource and a repository of meaning, and a point of reference for their social identity.

So there can be many kinds of community, as illustrated in the following list:

Local community
Redfern community
Therapeutic community
Community of scholars
Community values
Australian community
Legal community; medical community
International community
Religious community
Community of ideas
Aboriginal community
Italian community
Community politics
Community psychology
Community studies
The intelligence community
Community services
Service to the community
Community rehabilitation
Community development