Community is one of the key words in the sociological vocabulary. It is also one of the most frequently used in debates about the use of welfare resources and the care of the socially vulnerable. Words such as 'family', 'heritage', 'community', 'welfare' used so freely in political debate have diffuse meanings because they relate to a set of central values in society which, if scrutinized, would lose much of their precision and would look more like myths: i.e. they often express more the way we would like things to be than the way they are. They are therefore imbued with contradictory and emotionally charged beliefs, which might seem to render them valueless as explanatory concepts.