Community as social ties

In the previous chapter we examined theories of community and explored its various dimensions, including sentiment (the way community exists symbolically), space (the way community is defined by a physical or temporal space) and social structure (the way community is defined by social features of a group – such as its membership rules). In this chapter, we explore in more detail the social structural dimension to community by examining the nature of the social ties between people that define the concept of community and then consider how the concept is employed to prescribe rather than describe the behaviours of its members.