Any society always has a certain social structure. People interact, uniting in different communities and social groups. Historically, the first social community was family, clan, and tribe. Over time, such communities began to form on other grounds - the similarity of interests, goals, functions and cultural needs.
Each person participates in a variety of forms of social life. He can simultaneously be a member of a family, sports section, enterprise or religious organization. Watching a television program, he becomes part of its viewer audience, and by reading a particular magazine, it becomes part of the readership of this magazine. A person lives in a locality, which means that he belongs to this territorial community. He is a citizen of a certain state and a representative of a certain nation. This is far from a complete listing of the forms of social life in which each of us has to participate.
Social communities are a necessary way of human existence. It is in them that all the conditions and means are created that contribute to the development of the personality and satisfy its needs and interests. Their activities affect the sustainability of society, its functioning. The laws of the formation and existence of such associations are studied by sociology.
Social community has the following features:
- the proximity of the living conditions of people;
- common needs;
- their awareness of the similarity of interests;
- the presence of interaction and joint activities;
- the formation of their own culture;
- social identification of community members;
- Creation of a management system or self-government by a community.
Among social communities, an important place is given to territorial ones, such as a city, village, region, etc. They are one of the main components of the social structure. This is a collection of people who live in the same territory. They are distinguished by sustainable economic, social, spiritual and environmental ties and relationships.
There are communities identified artificially, and there are real social groups fixed in the social structure. For example, status groups (elite, unemployed), functional (teachers, miners, doctors, military), national-ethnic (tribe, nation, nationality) and others. There are also unfixed communities — crowds, nascent collective movements, and marginals.
