Community at the Workplace Beate VOlker und Henk Flap 1 Introduction Understanding communities and the conditions of their emergence is one of the main research goals of sociology. In sociology as well as in everyday life 'community' is usually considered to be a local entity, a neighborhood community. According to popular opinion and most of sociology, local communities are presently on their way out in western societies due to an ongoing modernization process and the urbanization that goes along with it. Community and local solidarity that supposedly existed in the 'traditional small villages' will not be found anymore (see Coleman 1992, De Vos 2004). In this paper we inquire whether community might be found in other places than the neighborhood, i.e. in the place where one works. How much occupational community can be found among co-workers in Dutch workplaces? Further, how can differences among workplaces regarding the experienced community be explained? There is urgency to these questions - not only because of the alleged decline of traditional communities and their supposed qualities of life. Recent developments within economy at large like the growing speed of changes in production technology and consumer taste, as well as developments within work- organizations, like a flattening of work organizations and a growth of teamwork, increase the need for solidarity. Yet, paradoxically other developments seems to undermine the conditions that make for occupational community and solidarity at work, like a growth of general welfare, the growth of dual-earner families, an increase in short-term labor contracts, and a growing heterogeneity of the workforce according to gender and ethnicity. 2 Understanding occupational community There are many understandings and definitions of community, but we do not want to be caught up in fruitless debates on definitions and classifications of community. Instead we will explicate our theoretical assumptions which we aim to test with our data. We start from a general idea about what people's needs or