Varieties of Group

October 23rd, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Group, Converge-Disperse, Sociology of Group

A togetherness, a sharing of a space (either physically or conceptually or both). A group.

The key is identification so we can distinguish those who are in from those who are not. That is the start. This has to register in a consciousness. Someone is aware, defines, sees the identified togetherness. Point of view is sometimes critical.

For example people in a city who are sleeping at a time certain. They form a group (because I have just identified them) whose members do not self-identify. One can be in a group of whose existence he is unaware.

Precursor group–all the qualities and situations that could flower into group with the addition of awareness.

Then there is the physical group–the sharing of a place. The most obvious manifestation of group. Several friends walking down the street in animated conversation. Passengers on an airplane. Factory workers in a loft. Assembled members of a congress. Neighbors. The situations and variations are endless.

Then the dispersed groups. People who are not usually physically together. Ethnics, politicals , professionals, trade unionists, religionists, associates based on shared interests. They are spread out, some in units, some isolated. They can come together periodically like mountain men who met yearly to trade furs for supplies. A convergence-dispersal measure.

I do not intend to pursue a sociology of the group—an abstract model that would sweep together the large class of groups we have been considering—but I will suggest a few dimensions (some already mentioned) that will begin the comparison of the several different kinds of experience.

(One) Number (can be expanded to a simple demographic scheme of number, gender, age.) Group varies by number, from the pair all the way up to the numberless universal. At the lower end each number is significant. At the upper range the members tend to be treated as an anonymous mass—the average member a statistical construct.

(Two) Pattern of convergence/dispersal–including occasions of coming together, media of communication. All the ways of associating and being or not being together. It varies by the degree of actual contact and interaction among members—the group can be the physically separated audience to a television program. The extremes: the small face-to-face group with considerable interaction against the large dispersed group with minimal contact among members. And various combinations between. Even those who come together, interact, associate exit to their separate ways. Even close-knit units like family-domicile groups or soldiers in barracks have occasion to separate and turn to other than group concerns.

(Three) Time and tempo. There is a pattern of sequencing. The annual cycle of holidays, the daily routine—together at home then out to school and work and friends and shopping and free time. Pattern of concentrating and separating. The group may come together and then stop quickly. Some continue on indefinitely like life-long friendships or kin or members of a church. There is also a turn-over in membership in some groupings, some dying or dropping out others joining.

Both physical and conceptual groups can end , disband. The jury called for trial duty forms a closely bound group until they finish their work and are dismissed by their judge. Sometimes members remain in contact but otherwise they become a simple precursor group, available for mobilization.

(Four) Cultural. This includes the question of shared interests—which can be related to the quality that defines the group and its members. Each active group tends to either have or develop its own consensus—shared culture. This also varies in extent of sharing– with the possibility of cultural segmentation. Each group tends to impose its own cultural mark, some more obviously than others.

(Five) Type of organization. Variable: Informal, not established, institutional, bureaucratic, hierarchal-egalitarian, cooperative-competitive. It could be a small town hall meeting where all members can see and hear all the others and directly interact. Or it could be a small face-to-face decision making situation like a jury or a board of directors or friends gathered on the street corner or denizens in a bar-room or a family and its dinner guests. The group can also develop an internal order based on standardized relationships and tasks. For example: the ordering of newsrooms for the processing of reporters’ stories. The assembly line for manufacturing an item. The order of a lecture hall at college.

(Six) Another form of grouping is in the ordering imposed by production and exchange. The assembly-line is only a formal recognition of how materials and services are brought together It is a queue in its informal state where the producer at each step binds the up-stream supplies into his value added item which he in turn makes available, unless he is the ultimate consumer, for the voluntary and contingent actions of those producers who follow him. It is a linkage of supplier-producer-consumer. The coordination is made by the persons at each step. If I want to build a house unless I make all the materials from scratch myself I have to secure them from suppliers. My act of collecting and putting together establishes my group-like relationship with the suppliers and coordinates in an ex post facto sense the acts leading up to mine. Until I act everything done before by others is in a contingent limbo. So there is the possibility of the social organization (ie. the market) preceding the group–the group can emerge from the social organization. It requires an awareness and an appreciation of the whole.

(Seven) Type of contact with other groups as well as the other specifics of environment. This is a measure of groups in interaction and the kind of order this places on the relating groups. Issues of war and peace, trade, imperialism, diplomacy. Most clearly seen at the level of nation-states but similar kinds of external relationships can be found wherever groups meet. There is a transaction culture that develops that is both a consequence of the prior internal order of each group as well as the rebounding consequences for the internal ordering of each. .

We can think of the several distinctive measures of group as fitting into a definition-of-group-space. This space will be n-dimensional, that is it will have as measures all of the conceptual qualities needed by the various definitions. So a certain inexact relationship of each usage to all the others may become visible. I do not intend to set up such a space here, just call attention to its possible construction. This space can be used to define different types of groups (the different combinations of measures) but it might also be viewed as continuous. Like a color chart. I strongly suspect that the development of these issues among others could lead to a unified model of the group and this is one of the objectives of sociological work.

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So in sociology (1) group is an interest in its own right, (2) groups in their overall togetherness are the building blocks of the social organization of a larger unified society, (3) against this larger ordering is the question of the independence of the group itself.

We have some relevant notes to offer on these issues in future posts.

Onward.