Q.What is the difference between a community and a society (or association), as sociologists use these terms?

Community and society (also called 'association') are a pair of contrasting concepts that classical sociologists developed to describe the shift from traditional, agrarian life to modern, urban life. 'Community' names relationships that are personal, intimate and enduring, in which a person's involvement with others is considerable, sometimes nearly total — the closeness found within a family, among genuine friends, or inside a tightly-bound local group are all examples of community in this sense.

'Society' or 'association' stands for nearly the opposite: relationships that are comparatively impersonal, superficial and short-lived, of the kind that dominate much of modern urban and commercial life. Commerce and industry, in particular, push people toward calculating, self-interested, rational dealings with one another — we sign contracts and make agreements with people we barely know, rather than building the deep personal familiarity typical of community. A shopkeeper dealing with a customer, or two businesses entering a contract, are relating to each other through association, not community.

This distinction runs parallel to, and helps explain, the primary/secondary group distinction discussed elsewhere in the chapter: community corresponds closely to the intimate world of the primary group, while society/association corresponds to the formal, impersonal world of the secondary group. Both pairs of concepts emerged from the same underlying sociological concern — understanding how social relationships changed as societies moved from small-scale, face-to-face arrangements to large-scale, impersonal ones — and both remain useful for describing how different kinds of relationship coexist within the same modern life: a person today typically moves, in the course of a single day, between community-like relationships (family, close friends) and association-like ones (workplace, marketplace, government office), each governed by a different logic of belonging and obligation.