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How explain the emergence and diffusion of new ideas? One perspective is that ideas are assessed for their cognitive content; new ideas succeed essentially because they arc “better” than older ideas. A second perspective holds that the process of innovation helps define what is “better” and what is adopted. Debate over these two competing interpretations continues in many fields of science (and “non-science”!).

To a greater extent than before, decisions affecting social workers and their clients will be made at the community level. It is therefore important for practitioners to be familiar with the results of current research on community power and decision making. Newer studies have built on the work of Floyd Hunter, Edward Banfield, Robert Dahl, and others. This paper presents alternative approaches for studying community power and decision making and summarizes recent findings on leadership, centralization, and policy outputs. These findings suggest guidelines for practice at the community level.

In 1983 we organized a conference on “Questioning the Welfare State and the Rise of the City” at the University of Paris, Nanterre. About a hundred persons attended, including many French social scientists and political activists. Significant support came from the new French Socialist government. Yet with Socialism in power since 1981, it was clear that the old Socialist ideas were being questioned inside and outside the Party and government—especially in the important decentralization reforms. There was eager interest in better ways to deliver welfare state services at the local level.

Between 1870 and 1914, a great deal of creative sociological research was completed in France. But this activity did not follow any sort of regular, coherent process of development; there were several quite separate lines of investigation which generally corresponded to distinct social groupings. And while the term “school” may imply too rigid a demarcation, there were at this time a number of what we may term “clusters” of researchers.

Research institutes are nearly as varied as the results they produce. The term itself generally implies the continuing cooperation of two or more persons in order to conduct research of one kind or another. Beyond these minimal conditions, however, innumerable variations are possible. The research institute as such is a recent phenomenon, one that did not arise, or at any rate did not become widespread, until the nineteenth century. Research institutes grew with the idea of research and while, of course, research has been conducted for centuries, the idea that academic scholarship should be combined with creative research became widespread only in the nineteenth century.

The great majority of writings in the field of community power tend to use an undifferentiated concept of the community, classifying together social units performing widely differing functions. This paper argues that in order for the field of community power to advance toward developing comparative pro positions, it is necessary to formulate a more differentiated classification for communities. Approaches to this problem utilized in other areas besides community power are reviewed, and an abstract typology for classifying communities according to their functions is presented. Indicators for measuring the various functions are suggested. The utility of the typology is demonstrated in several comparative propositions concerning community power. Twenty-six items on which it is suggested that future community power studies collect data are listed.