Groups Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The term ”group” can refer to small, face-to-face groups or large, formal organizations. Collectivities, a third type of group, are defined by observable attributes (such as race or age), or by common interests (such as hunting or farming). Crowds are a special type of collectivity that brings individuals together in the same location at the same time. Some crowds can share a focus of attention that can produce a temporary feeling of cohesion. Workers, shoppers, and tourists who overflow city street at closing time are a crowd whose members display a rudimentary form of social organization in which individuals will generally keep both bodily and eye contact to a respectful minimum as they maneuver along crowded sidewalks.

Georg Simmel called attention to the significance between a group of two persons, and a group of three persons. If one person leaves a two-person group, the group ceases to exist. In three-person groups, one person may leave, and the remaining two may still constitute a group. In principle, a small group can last indefinitely if old members are replaced by new ones. The potential for a group to persist has been used to investigate the way group practices turn to norms as groups change over time.

In the 1930s and 1940s there were several innovations in the study of groups. Lewin, Lippitt, and White invigorated the field of social psychology in an experimental study with obvious references to the threat posed by Hitler to democratic regimes. At the same time, W. W. Whyte published his path breaking study of a small, street-corner gang exposing the gang’s internal structure as it was related to the larger community. J. L. Moreno asked members of small groups simple questions, such as ”Who are the persons in this group who are your three best friends and who are your three favored co-workers?” He plotted the results in a sociogram where each individual is represented by a dot on a piece of paper, and lines connecting the dots display a visual pattern of friendship and work relations within the group. The graphing of subjective preferences has now been transformed into mathematical theories that capture unsuspected regularities in contacts across the world wide web.

In the 1950s R. F. Bales, particularly in his collaboration with the dominant sociological theorist of the time, Talcott Parsons, created a shortlived synthesis of self, society and small groups. George Homans provided a major alternative to Parson-Bales’ structural-functional orientation when he explained the interpersonal dynamics of a professional work group in terms of ”social behavior as exchange.” Homans observed that less competent workers in the group continually asked for help from a more accomplished co-worker, and in return the co-worker received deferential treatment. This study enlarged the theoretical boundaries of economic exchanges to encompass accounts of social exchanges.

George Herbert Mead shifted the emphasis from groups as foundational social units by proposing that human relations form when individuals learn to ”take the role of the other.” Later theorists would embrace the perspective of interaction-as-communication without paying particular attention to the structure of concrete groups in which interactions take place. Erving Goffman began a series of publications on what he was later to call the ”interaction order.” Inspired by anthropological accounts of ritual behavior, he saw repair work in everyday life as having a ritual quality that restored social order when everyday disputes threatened a group’s functional cohesion. At the same time, Howard Garfinkel rejected the concept of social norms claiming that ordinary practices create and recreate social order as a living, ongoing achievement of everyday life. Dorothy Smith found Garfunkel’s studies congenial to the problems faced by women who lived in a world of concepts developed by men who had conceptually marginalized women in everyday life.

Bibliography:

Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-To-Face Doubleday-Anchor, Garden City, NY.
Whyte, W. W. (1943) Street Corner Society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.