Social Collectives: Groups, Networks, and Organizations

Posted on Jan 7, 2025 in Sociology

Four Kinds of Social Collectives That Shape Our Actions

Primary Group: Shapes attitudes, behaviors, and social identity. A small social group whose members share personal and lasting relationships (Cooley). Conformity is an integral part that ensures group cohesion. Primary groups exert more pressure to conform than secondary groups. Emotional intimacy ensures similar beliefs.
Secondary Groups: Large and impersonal, whose members pursue a specific goal or activity. Weak emotional ties, typically impersonal (coworkers). Many people working together in the same organization, goal-oriented.

Instrumental: Group leadership that focuses on the completion of tasks. Gives orders, gets things done, respected by members, concentrates on performance.
Expressive: Group leadership that focuses on the group’s well-being. Raises morale, offers sympathy, and lightens moods, personal affection from members.

Authoritarian: Instrumental concerns, fast-acting, takes charge of decision-making, demands members obey, members show little to no affection.
Democratic: Expressive, includes everyone in the decision process, draws ideas and solutions from members, less successful in a crisis.
Laissez-faire: Group functions on its own, less effective for promoting group goals.

Actions that wouldn’t have been contemplated individually by the people involved become possible in the group context.
Power of conformity: Primary group cohesion is the main factor motivating soldiers to engage in combat.
Groupthink: A tendency for group members to conform, resulting in a narrow view of some issue.

How we assess our own attitudes and behavior. Serves as a point of reference for people making evaluations and decisions (can be primary or secondary).
Example: A man who imagines his family’s response to a woman he is dating is using his family as a reference group.
We also use groups we don’t belong to for reference, a strategy to win acceptance: illustrates anticipatory socialization.

In-group: A social group where a member feels respect and loyalty.
Out-group: A social group where a person feels a sense of competition or opposition.
In-groups and out-groups foster internal loyalty while generating conflict.

Large groups turn inwards: The larger the group, the more likely members will have relationships exclusively among themselves.
Heterogeneous groups turn outward: Diverse membership promotes interaction with outsiders.
Social Parity (Equality) within a setting encourages people from diverse backgrounds to mingle and form ties.
Physical boundaries create social boundaries; segregation of groups makes contact limited.

Triad: Three members (restricts individuality, encourages rivalry and domination).
Dyad: Relationship between two nodes (people).
As the number of people in a group increases, the relationships that link them increase faster.
When six or seven people share a conversation, the group divides into two.

A “fuzzy” group containing people who occasionally come into contact.
Lacks a sense of boundaries and belonging. “Social web” – a group of friends.
Granovetter: Acquaintances are more likely to provide useful information about employment than friends or family.

Efficiency: Customers do part of the work.
Predictability/Calculability: Do it according to plan.
Uniformity: Same product everywhere.
Control through automation: Humans are the most unreliable factor, but people could be controlled and dehumanized by the system.