Toward a Reformulation of Community Theory

Few students of the community are satisfied with current theoretical approaches to this perplexing social group. Little advance has been made in the decades since MacIver gave theoretical formulation to the concept of the community; since Park, Burgess, and others of the Chicago school made their rich strike of valuable ore in the veins of the ecological approach; or since Wilson, Galpin, and Sanderson devised ways for operationally defining, delineating, and describing the rural community in a way which lent itself to useful research.