9. CONCEPT OF SOCIAL GROUP Classification of small groups

The concept of a group occupies one of the central places in a sociological study, the concept of a social group summarizes the essential characteristics of collective subjects of social relations, interactions and relations, the basic structural units of society. Russian sociologist G.S. Antipova defines a social group as a set of people who have a common social attribute and perform a socially necessary function of the structure of the social division of labor and activity. Under the social group is commonly understood any aggregate of people allocated according to socially significant criteria. These are gender, age, nationality, race, profession, place of residence, income, power, education, and some others. The group has its own system of life orientations, norms of behavior, morality, culture and psychology.

Society in its concrete life reality acts as a collection of many different groups.

It turns out that the total number of human groups on Earth exceeds the population by 1.5–2 times. And all this is possible due to the fact that one individual can be in 5-6 groups. Every person is social to the extent that he is a member of various social groups and performs various functions in them. His whole life from birth to death flows in various social groups: family, school team, student group, production team, etc. The leisure, and in many ways personal, non-productive life of a modern person is realized in interpersonal communication within various groups: family, friendship companies, sports teams, tourist groups, etc. Membership in various groups determines the status and authority of a person in society. Socio-political activities are also group-based: different political parties and organizations are a kind of social groups. Unlike past historical epochs, when human activity proceeded within 2-3 groups, such as the family, which is also a production unit, a neighbor community, a circle of friends, a modern person is forced to “split up” as a person in numerous fields of activity, each of which is a certain association of people, a group. The American sociologist R. Merton defines a social group as a set of individuals who interact in a certain way with each other, who are aware of their belonging to this group and are recognized as members of this group from the point of view of others. Thus, R. Merton identifies three main features in a social group: interaction, membership and unity. Social groups, in contrast to mass communities, are characterized by:

- sustainable interaction , which contributes to the strength and stability of their existence in space and time;

- relatively high degree of cohesion ;

- clearly expressed homogeneity of the composition, that is, the presence of signs inherent in all individuals belonging to the group;

- joining wider communities as structural entities .

The structure and organization of the group . Groups can differ in the degree of organization, which corresponds to a different type of structure. According to this criterion, it is customary to divide groups into formal, having a clear structure, an ordered hierarchy of positions and strictly prescribed role functions, and informal ones, the structure of which does not have a strict regulatory framework. Formal groups usually have their own name (school, factory, company, etc.), staff, rules of admission and dismissal of employees. They are created for the accomplishment of specific goals - solving a certain range of tasks in which society is interested. The school, for example, aims to train and socialize the younger generation, the army is created for the defense of the country, the company produces a type of products and goods. Therefore, in formal organizations there is a strict division of labor, the activities of its members are governed by special rules and regulations. Formal groups can be small in their composition.

Informal groups, which are one of the varieties of small groups, often arise spontaneously, especially within large formal organizations. As can be understood from the very name, friendly, intimate, trusting relationships are peculiar to informal groups. The decisive role in their formation belongs to the sympathies and antipathies of people, their common interests, views on life, attitude.

Classification of small groups

The abundance of small groups in society suggests their enormous diversity, and therefore, for the purpose of research, their classification is necessary. The ambiguity of the concept of a small group gave rise to the ambiguity of the proposed classifications. In principle, the most diverse grounds for classifying small groups are acceptable: groups differ in their time of existence (long-term and short-term), in terms of the degree of contact between members, in the way an individual enters, etc. Currently, about fifty different classification bases are known. It is advisable to choose the most common of them, which are three classifications: 1) division of small groups into “primary” and “secondary”, 2) division of them into “formal” “informal”, 3) division into “membership groups” and “reference groups ". As seen,each of these three classifications defines a dichotomy.

The division of small groups into primary and secondary was first proposed by C. Cooley, who at the beginning simply gave a descriptive definition of the primary group, naming such groups as family, group of friends, group of nearest neighbors. Later, Cooley proposed a certain feature that would allow to determine the essential characteristic of the primary groups - the immediacy of contacts. But when such a feature was singled out, the primary groups began to be identified with small groups, and then the classification lost its meaning. If the sign of small groups is their contact, then it is impractical to single out some other special groups within them, where this very contact will be a specific sign. Therefore, according to tradition, the division into primary and secondary groups (secondary in this case, those where there are no direct contacts,and for communication between members various “intermediaries” are used in the form of means of communication, for example), but essentially it is the primary groups that are investigated in the future, since only they satisfy the criteria of a small group. This classification currently has no practical significance.

The second of the historically proposed divisions of small groups is their division into formal and informal. This division was first proposed by E. Mayo when he conducted the famous Hawthorne experiments. According to Mayo, a formal group is different in that it clearly defines all the positions of its members, they are prescribed by group norms. Accordingly, the roles of all members of the group in the subordination system of the so-called power structure are also strictly distributed in the formal group: the idea of ​​vertical relations as relations determined by a system of roles and statuses. An example of a formal group is any group created in the context of a specific activity: a work team, a school class, a sports team, etc. Inside the formal groups, E. Mayo also discovered “informal” groups that form and arise spontaneously,where neither statuses nor roles are prescribed, where there is no given vertical relationship system. An informal group can be created inside the formal one, when, for example, in the school class there are groups consisting of close friends united by some common interest, thus, two structures of relations are intertwined within the formal group. But an informal group can arise on its own, not inside a formal group, but outside it: people who accidentally came together to play volleyball somewhere on the beach, or a closer group of friends belonging to completely different formal groups are examples of such informal groups. Sometimes, within the framework of such a group (say, in a group of tourists who went camping for one day), despite its informal nature, joint activity arises,and then the group acquires some features of the formal group: certain, albeit short-term, positions and roles are highlighted in it. In practice, it was found that in reality it is very difficult to isolate strictly formal and strictly informal groups, especially in cases where informal groups arose within the framework of formal ones.

Therefore, in social psychology, proposals were born that removed this dichotomy. On the one hand, the concepts of the formal and informal structure of a group (or the structure of formal and informal relations) were introduced, and it was not the groups that began to differ, but the type, nature of the relationships within them. Mayo’s proposals contained just such a meaning, and the transfer of the definitions of “formal” and “informal” to the characterization of groups was done quite arbitrarily. On the other hand, a more radical difference between the concepts of “group” and “organization” was introduced, which is characteristic of the development of social psychology over the past twenty years. Despite the abundance of research on the social psychology of organizations, a sufficiently clear separation of the concepts of “organization” and “formal group” still does not exist. In some cases, it’s aboutthat every formal group, unlike an informal group, has the features of an organization.

Despite some fuzzy terminology, the discovery of the very presence of two structures in small groups was very important. It was already emphasized in Mayo's research, and from them later conclusions were made that had a certain social meaning, namely: the ability to use the informal structure of relations in the interests of the organization. Currently, there are a large number of experimental studies devoted to identifying the influence of a certain ratio of formal and informal group structures on its cohesion, productivity, etc. Of particular importance is the problem in the study of the management and leadership of the group.

Thus, the second of the traditionally established classifications of small groups cannot be considered strict, although the classification of structures built on its basis is useful for developing ideas about the nature of groups.

The third classification divides the so-called membership groups and reference groups. It was introduced by G. Hymen, who owns the discovery of the phenomenon of the “reference group” itself. In Hyman's experiments, it was shown that part of the members of certain small groups (in this case, these were student groups) share the norms of behavior that are accepted not at all in this group, but in some other one, on which they are oriented. Such groups in which individuals are not really included, but whose norms they accept, Hymen called reference groups. Even more clearly, the difference between these groups from real membership groups was noted in the works of M. Sheriff, where the concept of the reference group was associated with the “reference system” that the individual uses to compare his status with the status of other persons. In the future, G. Kelly, developing the concepts of reference groups,He identified two of their functions: comparative and normative, showing that the individual group needs the reference group either as a standard for comparing their behavior with it, or for normative evaluation of it.

At present, there is a twofold use of the term “reference group” in the literature: sometimes as a group opposing a membership group, sometimes as a group arising within a membership group. In this second case, the reference group is defined as a “significant circle of communication”, i.e. as a circle of persons selected from the composition of a real group as especially significant for an individual. In this case, a situation may arise when the norms adopted by the group become personally acceptable to the individual only when they are accepted by the “significant circle of communication”, i.e. an intermediate reference point appears, on which the individual intends to be equal. And such an interpretation has a certain meaning, but, apparently, in this case we should not talk about “reference groups”, but about “reference ™” as a special property of relations in a group,when one of its members selects a certain circle of persons as a starting point for their behavior and activities (Shchedrina, 1979).

The division into membership groups and reference groups opens up an interesting prospect for applied research, in particular in the field of studying the unlawful behavior of adolescents: to find out the question why a person included in such membership groups as a school class, a sports team, suddenly starts to focus on the wrong norms, which are accepted in them, but on the norms of completely different groups, into which he was not initially included at all (some dubious elements “from the street”). The mechanism of influence of the reference group allows us to give an initial interpretation of this fact: the membership group has lost its attractiveness to the individual, he compares his behavior with another group. Of course, this is not the answer to the question: why did this group become so important for him, and that group lost it? Apparentlyall the problems of the reference groups are still waiting for their further development, because so far everything remains at the level of ascertaining which group is the reference for the individual, but there is no explanation why exactly it is.