Groups and Organisations

Chapter 4 ended by saying that groups and organisations are the settings in which much socialisation takes place. This chapter looks at those settings themselves. It starts with what counts as a social group and the difference between close, personal groups and large, goal-driven ones. It then moves to the big organisations of modern life, with Max Weber's account of bureaucracy and a famous warning about who ends up running them, and finishes with the idea that people are linked not only in groups but in networks of ties, where acquaintances can matter more than friends.

What Is a Social Group?

Wikipedia's Social group article defines a social group as "two or more people who interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and collectively have a sense of unity." It sets out two ways of explaining what holds a group together. Under the social cohesion approach, it says Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif (1956) described a social unit through five features: shared goals, a division of labour, status relationships, accepted norms and sanctions. Under the social identification approach, membership rests on awareness of a shared category rather than on personal bonds between members, and the page credits Tajfel and Turner, and Turner (1982), with that view. Chapter 3's norms and sanctions and Chapter 4's roles both turn up in the Sherifs' list.

Primary and Secondary Groups

Wikipedia's Types of social groups article says the American sociologist Charles Cooley, a member of the Chicago school, introduced the primary and secondary distinction in 1909, in Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. This is the same Cooley as Chapter 4's looking-glass self, who published his earlier book in 1902; 1909 minus 1902 is 7 years (computed in Python). The Social group article, by contrast, never mentions Cooley or secondary groups; it covers primary groups through Donelson Forsyth's typology, and cites Litwak and Szelenyi (1969) for three subtypes: kin, close friends and neighbours.

Two Kinds of Social Order: Community and Society

Wikipedia's Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft article credits the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, in a book whose first edition came out in 1887. Gemeinschaft, "commonly translated as 'community'", covers "personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions". Gesellschaft, commonly translated as society, covers "indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions", and the page lists associations, corporations, companies, the modern state and academia as examples. It links Gesellschaft to modern society and a "rational self-interest" that weakens the traditional bonds of family and local community.

The page does not describe the pair as group types, and it ties them to kinds of social relationship, so using them as a rough large-scale version of Cooley's pair is my own gloss (check). It also reports Durkheim's reading, which maps Gemeinschaft to mechanical solidarity and Gesellschaft to organic solidarity, a link to the founders in Chapter 2. 1909 minus 1887 is 22 years, so Tönnies came before Cooley (computed in Python).

Bureaucracy: Weber's Ideal Type

Wikipedia's Bureaucracy article defines it as "a system of organization where laws or regulatory authority are implemented by civil servants (non-elected officials)", and says that today it is "the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned." The word joins the French bureau ("desk" or "office") with the Greek kratos ("rule"), and the page says it was coined by the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay in the mid-18th century; its first known English use was in 1818, when Lady Morgan wrote of "the Bureaucratie, or office tyranny". It says Max Weber broadened the definition in the 1920s to any administration run by trained professionals under fixed rules.

The page lists the characteristics of Weber's ideal-typical bureaucracy, from Economy and Society (1921):

• hierarchical organisation and formal lines of authority (a chain of command);
• a fixed area of activity, with a rigid division of labour;
• regular and continuous execution of assigned tasks;
• decisions and powers specified and restricted by regulations;
• officials with expert training, advancing according to technical qualifications;
• qualifications evaluated by organisational rules, not by individuals.

Set these against Cooley's secondary group: impersonal, goal-oriented, with interchangeable members. A bureaucracy is that idea pushed as far as it will go. The page says Weber lived from 1864 to 1920 and warned of an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control. The gap from his 1921 book to Lady Morgan's English use in 1818 is 103 years (computed in Python), so the word was in circulation long before Weber's account.

What critics say

The page's criticisms, as far as I read them, include these:

• Red tape. The See also section defines it as an "Idiom for excessively bureaucratic procedures or regulations."
• Merton (1957). He described a "trained incapacity" resulting from "over conformity": following the rules so closely that the organisation's real purpose is lost.
• John Stuart Mill (early 1860s). He wrote that "a bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy."
• Others. The page also names Ludwig von Mises (1944), David Graeber and Leon Trotsky (1936), each with a different complaint, so the critics do not agree among themselves on what is wrong.

The page's mention of Parkinson and Michels did not appear in the part I read, because the fetch was cut off, so nothing is claimed here from the Bureaucracy page about either man.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Michels did get his own page. Wikipedia's Iron law of oligarchy article credits Robert Michels, a German-born Italian sociologist, in Political Parties (1911). The claim is that any democratic organisation, however egalitarian it begins, tends to be run by a leadership minority, because growing size and complexity require bureaucracy, centralisation and delegation, which concentrate power in a few hands. The page gives Michels's summary: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." 1911 minus 1887 is 24 years after Tönnies, and 1973 minus 1911 is 62 years before the weak-ties paper below (both computed in Python).

Networks and Weak Ties

A group has a boundary; a network does not need one. Wikipedia's Social network article defines it as "a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations)" connected through "networks of dyadic ties". It places the roots of the idea in the late 1890s with Durkheim and Tönnies, early systematic work on small groups in the 1930s with Jacob L. Moreno, and a major growth in the 1970s with Harrison White and his Harvard students, who include Charles Tilly, Stanley Milgram, Mark Granovetter and Barry Wellman. It adds that methods were mathematically formalised in the 1950s and widespread across the social and behavioural sciences by the 1980s.

Wikipedia's The Strength of Weak Ties article is about Mark Granovetter's 1973 paper in the American Journal of Sociology. It says he had submitted it to the American Sociological Review in 1969 and was rejected, so four years passed between the first submission and publication (1973 minus 1969, computed in Python). The page says weak ties are "pivotal in the flow of information" and can reach populations and audiences that strong ties cannot. The Social network page says a broad range of contacts is most effective for getting a job. The reason is nearly a matter of geometry, though that explanation is my own reasoning (check): your close friends mostly know the same people you do and so hold the same information, while an acquaintance moves in a different circle and may know of a vacancy you have never heard about.

Where to Read More

• Pages used. This chapter uses seven Wikipedia pages: Social group, Types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Bureaucracy, Iron law of oligarchy, Social network and The Strength of Weak Ties. The Types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Iron law of oligarchy and Strength of Weak Ties articles appeared complete in the fetch. For Social group the fetch tool did not report a length and I cannot tell how much of it was read. Bureaucracy (187,369 characters) and Social network (201,551) were cut off after the first 100,000, so about 53.4 percent and 49.6 percent were read (my arithmetic, done in Python), and later sections are not reflected here.
• Summaries. The fetch tool returns a summary made by a small model, not the raw page, so a quotation is only as exact as that summary. In particular, the dates in one summary can differ from the same people's dates elsewhere in the course, and I have not resolved such differences with a third source.
• Primary texts. I have not read Cooley, Tönnies, Weber, Michels or Granovetter directly; every claim above comes from the Wikipedia pages.

Exercises