social group

social group, any set of human beings who either are, recently have been, or anticipate being in some kind of interrelation. The term group, or social group, has been used to designate many kinds of aggregations of humans. Aggregations of two members and aggregations that include the total population of a large nation-state have been called groups.

One of the earliest and best-known classifications of groups was the American sociologist C.H. Cooley’s distinction between primary and secondary groups, set forth in his Human Nature and the Social Order (1902). “Primary group” refers to those personal relations that are direct, face-to-face, relatively permanent, and intimate, such as the relations in a family, a group of close friends, and the like. “Secondary group” (an expression that Cooley himself did not actually use but that emerged later) refers to all other person-to-person relations but especially to those groups or associations, such as work groups, in which the individual is related to others through formal, often legalistic or contractual ties. Cooley felt that primary groups were the fundamental agencies through which the individual’s character or personality was formed. American sociologist Talcott Parsons distinguished five factors that differentiate primary groups from secondary groups: relations between members of primary groups, as contrasted with secondary groups, tend to be (1) diffuse, rather than specific or delimited, (2) particularistic, rather than universalistic, (3) ascription-based (i.e., based on who or what you are), rather than achievement-based (i.e., based on what you do or have done), (4) other-oriented or group-oriented, rather than self-oriented, (5) affective or emotion-laden, rather than emotionally neutral. Secondary groups are those in which relations between members tend to fit the opposite poles of the five factors.

Historically, many other pairs of terms have been used to classify groups. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies coined the now-famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (“community”) and Gesellschaft(“society,” or “association”), which for all practical purposes reflect the same distinction as that between primary and secondary. The American anthropologist Robert Redfield distinguished between folk society and urban society. The English jurist Sir Henry Maine talked of societies of status and societies of contract. All of these categories are virtually coterminous with the primary-group–secondary-group distinction. There is also a close correspondence between these pairs of terms and the distinction between mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity, which was emphasized by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim.

Still other sets of terms are used, not as bases for distinguishing types of groups but as bases for describing the individual’s relationship to different groups. Thus, the terms we-group and they-group, as well as the terms in-group and out-group, are used in order to contrast a group of which the referent, or focal person, is a member (often, a primary-type group) and some other group—not necessarily different in kind—of which the focal person (and other members of his in-group, or we-group) is not a member and toward which he feels some degree of animosity or negative affect.

Another set of distinctions based on the individual’s relationship to the group is expressed by the terms membership group and reference group. The former has the obvious meaning of a group of which the individual is a member, here and now, by reason of one characteristic or another (such as being a member of a particular family or a member of the sixth-grade class in Jefferson School). The term reference group has been used in two ways, to mean either a group for which the individual aspires to membership or a group whose values, norms, and attitudes serve as points of reference for the individual. In either case, the crucial feature is that the individual adapts his attitudes and behaviour to model those of the members of the reference group. Obviously, membership groups and reference groups are not mutually exclusive.

The term group, or social group, has been used to refer to very divergent kinds of aggregations of people. Indeed, the term has been used so broadly as to threaten its fruitfulness as a focal concept. For one thing, the word group has sometimes been used to designate the members of a social category based on possession of a common attribute, even when the members have no meaningful degree of interrelation. Thus, it has been used to refer to such collections as persons of a particular age, all persons having similar incomes or occupations, and all persons with similar reading habits. These are what might be called statistical groups, as distinct from actual groups, the latter being characterized by interrelatedness of the members.

Virtually all efforts to classify social groups result in a certain degree of artificiality. Because of these and other problems of definition and classification, sociologists have attempted to distinguish between various kinds of social aggregates, some to be considered groups and others to be identified by other terms—audiences, publics, and the like; there is, however, no generally accepted classification at this time.