section_path: Types of community
section_name: Types of community
paragraph_text: Types of community
  
  A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:
  
  The usual categorizations of community relations have a number of problems: (1) they tend to give the impression that a particular community can be defined as just this kind or another; (2) they tend to conflate modern and customary community relations; (3) they tend to take sociological categories such as ethnicity or race as given, forgetting that different ethnically defined persons live in different kinds of communities—grounded, interest-based, diasporic, etc.
  
  In response to these problems, Paul James and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy that maps community relations, and recognizes that actual communities can be characterized by different kinds of relations at the same time:
  
  In these terms, communities can be nested and/or intersecting; one community can contain another—for example a location-based community may contain a number of ethnic communities. Both lists above can be used in a cross-cutting matrix in relation to each other.