RC03

Researching community issues from a comparative perspective

The origin of RC03, in 1964, was a Committee for Comparability in Community Research with Terry N. Clark (The University of Chicago) as chairman. Then, a Working Group on Community Research was established under the ISA Committee on Political Sociology, which in early 1969 became the ISA Research Committee on Community Research. Conferences and publications have been the committee’s main activities as primary instruments to promote and support comparative studies on community issues. To know more about the history of RC03, go to Bulletin 32 (1983), pp. 9-11.

From the outset, a goal of the committee was to assist in the confrontation of findings in different regional, national and local settings to help move towards more general theories and comparative empirical research. To this aim, the RC03 has promoted research networks to provide a common framework for comparative analysis, as Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation or Urban Scenes networks. In these efforts, it was assisted by the International Sociological Association.

This site tries to provide information about RC03 aims, organizational structure, and activities to members and non-members, including links to other sites of interest.