Social Interactions & Social

Groups
Basics of Social Sciences
Goals Of Sociology

 Max Weber postulated the term Social Action;

 “Anything people are conscious of doing because of other people”
 “Sympathetic Understanding”
 Social Interaction; “two or more people taking one another into account”
 Social interaction is a central concept to understanding the nature of social life.
Elements of Social Interaction

 Contexts:
 Edward T. Hall (1974) identified three elements that, taken together, define the context of a
social interaction;
 the physical setting or place,
 the social environment
 the activities surrounding the interaction—preceding it, happening simultaneously with it,
and coming after it.
Contd.

 Norms:
 “Specific rules of behavior, agreed upon and shared, that prescribe limits of acceptable
behavior”
 Norms Conditioning
 Identifying norms for different social elements
Contd.

 Statuses:
 Statuses are socially defined positions that people occupy. Common statuses can pertain to
religion, education, ethnicity, and occupation.
 Ascribed statuses, are conferred upon us by virtue of birth or other significant factors not
controlled by our own actions or decisions; people occupy them regardless of their
intentions.
 Achieved statuses, are acquired as a result of the individual’s actions—student, professor,
garage mechanic, race car driver, artist, prisoner, bus driver, husband, wife, mother, or
father
Contd.

 Roles:
 Statuses alone are static—social categories into which people are put. Roles bring statuses
to life, making them dynamic.
 Robert Linton (1936), “you occupy a status, but you play a role”.
 Roles are the culturally defined rules for proper behavior that are associated with every
status. Roles may be thought of as collections of rights and obligations.
 Role Strain: When a single role has conflicting demands attached to it, individuals who
play that role experience role strain (Goode, 1960).
 Role Conflict: An individual who is occupying more than one status at a time and who is
unable to enact the role of one status without violating that of another status is
encountering role conflict.
Types of Social Interactions

 Non-Verbal Behavior:

 The study of body movements, known as kinesics, attempts to examine how such things as
“slight head nods, yawns, postural shifts, and other nonverbal cues, whether spontaneous
or deliberate, affect communication”
 Social appropriateness of behavior and the comfort and safety associated with it.
 Examples of appropriate non-verbal behavior
Exchange:

 “When people do something for each other with the express purpose of receiving a reward
or return, they are involved in an exchange interaction”
 Sociologist Peter Blau (1964) pointed out that exchange is the most basic form of social
interaction.
 Examples
Cooperation

A cooperative interaction occurs when people act together to promote common interests or
achieve shared goal.
Examples
Conflict

 People in conflict struggle with one another for some commonly prized object or value. In
most conflict relationships, only one person can gain at someone else’s expense.
 Conflicts arise when people or groups have incompatible values or when the rewards or
resources available to a society or its members are limited. Thus, Conflict usually involves
an attempt to gain or use power.
 Lewis Coser (1956, 1967) pointed out that conflict can be a positive force in society.
Competition

 Competition, is a form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict

within agreed-upon rules. Competition is a common form of interaction in the modern
world—not only on the sports fi eld but in the marketplace, the education system, and the
political system.
Social Groups
 A good deal of social interaction occurs in the context of a group. In common speech, the word group is
often used for almost any occasion when two or more people come together.
 “A social group consists of a number of people who have a common identity, some feeling of unity, and
certain common goals and shared norms.”
 Group expectations and group identities
 Members of social groups carry the fact of their membership with them and see the group as a distinct
entity with specific requirements for membership.
 A social group has a purpose and is therefore important to its members, who know how to tell an insider
from an outsider.
 It is a social entity that exists for its members apart from any other social relationships that some of them
might share.
 Members of a group interact according to established norms and traditional statuses and roles.
 As new members are recruited to the group, they move into these traditional statuses and adopt the
expected role behavior—if not gladly, then as a result of group pressure.
Characteristics of a Social Group

 Permanence beyond the meetings of members, that is, even when members are dispersed;
 means for identifying members;
 mechanisms for recruiting new members;
 goals or purposes;
 social statuses and roles, that is, norms for behavior
 Means for controlling members’ behavior
Primary Groups

 Primary groups involve interaction among members who have an emotional investment in
one another and in a situation, who know one another intimately, and who interact as total
individuals rather than through specialized roles.
 For example, members of a family are emotionally involved with one another and know
one another well. In addition, they interact with one another in terms of their total
personalities, not just in terms of their social identities or statuses as breadwinner, student,
athlete, or community leader
Secondary Groups

 A secondary group, in contrast, is characterized by much less intimacy among its members.
It usually has specific goals, is formally organized, and is impersonal.
 Secondary groups tend to be larger than primary groups, and their members do not
necessarily interact with all other members. In fact, many members often do not know one
another at all; to the extent that they do, they rarely know more about one another than
about their respective social identities.
 Members’ feelings about, and behavior toward, one another are patterned mostly by their
statuses and roles rather than by personality characteristics.
Functions of a Group

 Define Boundaries
 Choose leaders
 Make decisions
 Set goals
 assign tasks
 Control members’ behavior
Reference Groups

 A reference group is a group or social category that an individual uses to help define
beliefs, attitudes, and values and to guide behavior. It provides a comparison point against
which people measure themselves and others. A reference group is often a category we
identify with rather than a specific group we belong to.
 Positive reference groups are composed of people we want to emulate. Negative reference
groups provide a model we do not wish to follow. Therefore, a writer might identify
positively with those writers who produce serious fiction but might think of journalists
who write for tabloids as a negative reference group.
Small Groups

 Th e term small group refers to many kinds of social groups, such as families, peer groups,
and work groups, that actually meet together and contain few enough members so that all
members know one another.
 The smallest group possible is a dyad, which contains only two members. An engaged
couple is a dyad as are the pilot and copilot of an aircraft.
 George Simmel (1950) was the first sociologist to emphasize the importance of the size of
a group on the interaction process. He suggested that small groups have distinctive
qualities and patterns of interaction that disappear when the group grows larger. For
example, dyads resist change in their group size.
Large Groups; Associations

“Purposefully created special-interest groups that have clearly defined goals and official ways of
doing things. Associations include such organizations as government departments and agencies,
businesses and factories, labor unions”
Formal Structure:
Associations are run according to a formal organizational structure that consists of planned, highly
institutionalized, and clearly defined statuses and role relationship
Example: Bureaucracy
Informal Structure:
Formal associations never operate entirely according to their stated rules and procedures. Every
association has an informal structure consisting of networks of people who help one another by
bending rules and taking procedural shortcuts.
Activity
Community & Society
 Sociology by Tischler: Groups & Organizations
 Page 157-158
Social Institutions

 The ordered social relationships that grow out of the values, norms, statuses, and roles that
organize the activities that fulfill society’s fundamental needs.
 Economic institutions organize the ways in which society produces and distributes the
goods and services it needs; educational institutions determine what should be learned and
how it should be taught; and so forth.
 Of all social institutions, the family is perhaps the most basic. A stable family unit is the
main ingredient necessary for the smooth functioning of society.
Social Organizations

 The relatively stable pattern of social relationships among individuals and groups in
society. These relationships are based on systems of social roles, norms, and shared
meanings that provide regularity and predictability in social interaction.
 Social organization differs from one society to the next.
 Just as statuses and roles exist in ordered relationships to one another, social institutions
also exist in patterned relationships with one another in the context of society. All societies
have their own patterning for these relationships.
 A society’s social organization tends to be its most stable aspect
STRATIFICATION
Social Class

 A social class consists of a category of people who share similar opportunities, similar
economic and vocational positions, similar lifestyles, and similar attitudes and behaviors.
 A society that has several social classes and permits social mobility is based on a class
system of stratification.
 Class boundaries are maintained by limiting social interaction, intermarriage, and mobility
into that class.
Class Education Occupation College and post college

Upper Liberal arts education at elite Corporate ownership; upper- College and post college
schools echelon politics; honorific
positions in government and
the arts

Upper Middle College and graduate training Professional and technical fi College and graduate training
elds; managers; officials;
proprietors

Middle-Middle High school; some college Clerical and sales positions; Option of college
small business
semiprofessionals; farmers

Lower-Middle Grade school; some or all of Skilled and semiskilled High school; vocational
high school manual labor; craftspeople; school
foremen; nonfarm workers
Unskilled labor and service
work; private household work
Grade school and farm labor
Lower Class Little interest in education;
high school dropouts
Poverty

 Poverty refers to a condition in which people do not have enough money to maintain a
standard of living that includes the basic necessities of life.
 Poverty seems to be present among certain groups much more than among others.
 In 2007, 12.5% of all Americans lived below the poverty level. Although 8.2% of all
whites were living in poverty, 24.5% of all blacks and 21.5% of Hispanic origin fell into
this group.
 People living in certain regions of the United States are much more likely to live in poverty
than those living in other U.S. regions. For example, the poverty rates in Louisiana and
New Mexico are more than twice those of Maryland (Proctor and Dalaker, 2002).
 It is also a fact that the level of poverty in rural areas actually is higher than that in our
cities. Thirty percent of the nation’s poor live in rural America
The Feminization of Poverty

 Disproportionate concentration of poverty among female-headed families

 The difference within women?
 Single mothers
 Divorced mothers
 Role of Capitalism and Class segregation in poverty?
Consequences of Class Stratification

 Health Burden
 Reproductive rights and reproductive/fetal health
 Mortality rates
 Arrests and legal issues
 Criminal justice system treatment
 Difference between types of crimes according to classes
 Mental health burden
Theories of Class Stratification

 Functionalist Theory:
 Functionalism is based on the assumption that the major social structures contribute to the
maintenance of the social system
 Th e existence of a specific pattern in society is explained in terms of the benefits that
society receives because of that situation. In this sense, the function of the family is to
socialize the young, and the function of marriage is to provide a stable family structure.
 Every society must select individual members to fill a wide variety of social positions (or
statuses) and then motivate those people to do what is expected of them in these positions
—that is, to fulfill their role expectations.
Davis & Moore

 Different positions in society make different levels of contributions to the well-being and
preservation of society
 Filling the more complex and important positions in society often requires talent that is
scarce and has a long period of training
 Providing unequal rewards ensures that the most-talented and best-trained individuals will
fill the roles of greatest importance.
 Criticism:
 Morality and theory’s usefulness
Conflict Theory

 Stratification as the outcome of a struggle for dominance. Current views of the conflict
theory of stratification are based on the writings of Karl Marx. Later, Max Weber
developed many of his ideas in response to Marx’s writings.
 The groups who own or control the means of production within a society obtain the power
to shape or maintain aspects of society that favor their interests.
 They are determined to maintain their advantage. They do this by setting up political
structures and value systems that support their position. In this way, the legal system, the
schools, and the churches are shaped in ways that benefit the ruling class.
 As Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels put it, “The ruling ideas of each age have
always been the ideas of its ruling class”
 Marx believed that in a capitalist society, there are two great classes: the bourgeoisie, or
the owners of the means of production or capital, and the proletariat, or the working class.
Those in the working class have no resources other than their labor, which they sell to the
capitalists. In all class societies, one class exploits another.
 Marx believed that people’s lives are influenced by how wealth is distributed among the people.
Wealth can be distributed in at least four ways:
 1. To each according to need. In this kind of system, the basic economic needs of all the people
are satisfied. Th ese needs include food, housing, medical care, and education. Extravagant
material possessions are not basic needs and have no place in this system.
 2. To each according to want. Here, wealth will be distributed according to what people desire
and request. Material possessions beyond the basic needs are included.
 3. To each according to what is earned. People who live according to this system become the
source of their own wealth. If they earn a great deal of money, they can lavish extravagant
possessions upon themselves. If they earn little, they must do without.
 4. To each according to what can be obtained—by whatever means. Under this system, everyone
ruthlessly attempts to acquire as much wealth as possible without regard for the hardships that
might be brought on others because of these actions. Those who are best at exploiting others
become wealthy and powerful, and the others become the exploited and poor (Cuzzort and King,
1980).
 In Marxist terms, the first of these four possibilities is what would happen in a socialist society.
Although many readers will believe that the third possibility describes U.S. society (according to
what is earned), Marxists would say that a capitalist society is characterized by the last choice—
the capitalists obtain whatever they can get in any possible way
Modern Conflict Theory

 Social inequality emerges through the domination of one or more groups by other groups.
Stratification is the outgrowth of a struggle for dominance in which people compete for
scarce goods and services. Those who control these items gain power and prestige.
 Those who are dominated have the potential to express resistance and hostility toward
those in power. Although the potential for resistance exists, it sometimes lies dormant.
Opposition might not be organized because the oppressed groups might not be aware of
their mutual interests. They might also be divided because of racial, religious, or ethnic
differences.
 Those in power will be extremely resistant to any attempts to share their advantages.
Economic and political power are important advantages in maintaining a position of
dominance.
Contd.

 What are thought to be the common values of society are really the values of the dominant
groups. The dominant groups establish a value system that justifies their position. In this
way, the subordinate groups come to accept a negative evaluation of themselves and to
believe that those in power have a right to that position.
 Because those in power are engaged in exploitative relationships, they must find
mechanisms of social control to keep the masses in line. By holding out the possibility of a
small amount of social mobility for those who are deprived, the power elite will try to
induce them to accept the system’s basic assumptions. Thus, the oppressed masses will
come to believe that by behaving according to the rules, they will gain a better life
(Vanfossen, 1979)
Questions and Reflections