In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness. In sociology, the concept of community has caused infinite debate, and sociologists are yet to reach agreement on a definition of the term. In deed, one can find 94 discrete definitions of the term even as early as mid-1950s. Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to mean a group that is organised around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. However, the definition has evolved and been enlarged to mean individuals who share characteristics, regardless of their location or type of interaction. In this sense, "community" can mean a community of interest or an ethnic group. Finally, wider meanings of the word can refer to the national community or global community. What these various meanings have in common is that they refer to the strength of the ties between the group, of whatever naturecultural, ethnic, or moralthey may be. Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix com- (which means "together") and the word munis (which has to do with the exchange of services), probably originally derived from the Etruscan word munis- (meaning "to endow", or "to have the charge of").

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). In his 1887 work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft is perceived to be a tighter and more cohesive social entity, due to the presence of a "unity of will." He added that family and kinship were the perfect expressions of Gemeinschaft, but that other shared characteristics, such as place or belief, could also result in Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, is a group in which the individuals who make up that group are motivated to take part in the group purely by self-interest. He also proposed that in the real world, no group was either pure Gemeinschaft or pure Gesellschaft, but, rather, a mixture of the two.

Individual and community

Main: Structure and agency