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The paper presents comparison between the associations of British and American voluntary associations. The development of postwar research on the structure and functioning of voluntary associations has been uneven, and there have been marked differences between British and American research in this field. This paper offers a narrow definition of voluntary associations. It defines voluntary associations as groups in which membership is in no sense obligatory, which have a formal constitution, but which do not have paid officials at the local level. The next section of this paper places the subsequent analysis in context by pointing briefly to the very substantial similarities between research in Great Britain and the U.S. The third section discusses differences in the research environments of the two countries, and suggests their relevance to the main problem. The fourth section assesses the differences in research orientations between the two countries, as it has influenced the study of voluntary associations. The final section considers the effect of these differences upon the functional analyses that have been made.

The paper presents an integrative analysis of voluntary associational leadership and reputational influence. It is noted that the degree to which leadership in voluntary organizations contributes to reputational influence patterns in the general community is not an easily predictable phenomenon. It becomes clear that no "a priori" assumptions can be made about the role of voluntary groups in the general leadership of any given community. There is a need, however, to distinguish the "organizational community" from the community in which formal voluntary groups are of considerably less significance. The study results of the overlap of reputational influentials and formal leaders in four towns are given in tabular form. The factors are number of reputational individuals, number of formal leaders, maximum possible overlap, actual overlap and percentage overlap. From the point of view of influence structures, it was discovered that the larger the town the greater the number of persons who receive a given proportion of nominations as an influential. The results of the study presented in this paper justify the trend toward the use of a combination of the positional and reputational methods of identifying leaders.

Expanding traditional sociological conceptions of community to include environmental considerations in community research, this paper stresses the importance of documenting both subjective and objective environmental concerns, as well as reconciling such differences as are presented and details precedence. Some recent data on the nature of social contact in high-rise ‘communities’ illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years numerous discussion of urban communities have given great weight to themes of disorganization and disorder. This paper critically examines several important conceptual, procedural, and substantive issues inherent in most treatments of community disorganization. To illustrate such fundamental problems as ‘overgeneralization’ and dominant group bias five specific topics—migration, disasters, slums, ghettos, and collective violence—were selected for intensive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]