The hypothesis that communities may be characterized by their degree of sociocultural complexity has taken many forms, from earlier polar typologies to recent detailed analyses of the social division of labor. Without reviewing such well-known material, it may be said that the significance of such a dimension - here called differentiation - is widely recognized. It is a concept that organizes a wide variety of institutional patterning previously thought to be disparate. It also allows one to rank communities from simple to complex, even when the communities are from different cultural contexts. A third asset involves the assessment of degree of differentiation at an earlier time period. When this is done, it is possible to compute increase or decrease in differentiation, in short, to measure "community growth."
