Groups, Organizations, Deviance, and Social Control

This is Unit Five of Sociology, Part One: groups, the organizations they harden into, and the beginning of what happens when norms get broken. The unit starts by narrowing the word group, and the narrowing is sharper than it sounds. A crowd at a bus stop is not a group. Shared presence is not membership — what makes a group is that its members recognise they belong together. Then two experiments that are among the most cited in the discipline, and the first thing to get right about them is that they measured different things. Asch measured what a room full of agreeing peers can get from a person. Milgram measured what one authority figure can. Peers and authority are separate mechanisms, and the pair is often collapsed into one lesson. The middle of the unit follows groups as they grow into formal organizations and then into bureaucracies, and it treats bureaucracy's frustrations as designed rather than accidental. And the last stretch opens the second half of the unit by defining deviance. By the end you will be able to do five things. One: say what makes a gathering a group. Two: tell primary from secondary groups. Three: tell conformity from obedience. Four: name the features of bureaucracy and its costs. Five: say why deviance is not a measure of harm.

Three entries. The first sets a boundary that removes most of what people casually call groups, and the next two show that group size is not a smooth dial — going from two members to three changes what kind of thing you are looking at.

The definition.

Soc 0621 The Social Group

Two or more people who interact, share expectations, and recognise themselves as belonging together. A book club is a group; the people at one bus stop are not, though both are gatherings.

The smallest.

Soc 0622 The Dyad

A two-person group, the smallest possible and the least stable, because either member's departure ends it entirely. Smallest does not mean weakest-tie — dyads are the most intimate groups, not the least significant.

Add one.

Soc 0623 The Triad

A three-person group, more stable because it survives one departure, and capable of coalitions against a member. Two of three can agree, outvote or exclude, which no dyad can do. The third member changes the kind of group, not merely its size.

Four entries and four different sortings. Two of them cut by what the group is for; the third is a group a person may never have met; and the fourth is about a line drawn rather than anything on either side of it.

The close kind.

Soc 0625 Primary Groups

Small, long-lasting and emotionally close, valued for the relationships themselves rather than for anything they accomplish. Primary here means foundational to the self, not merely first in time.

The other kind.

Soc 0626 Secondary Groups

Larger, more impersonal, and organised around a shared goal rather than around the relationships. A committee, a class and a work team dissolve when the task ends — though primary ties do form inside them, and often do.

The standard.

Soc 0628 Reference Groups

Any group a person uses as a standard for evaluating their own behavior, appearance or success, whether or not they belong to it. The group need not accept, or even know about, the person referring to it.

The boundary.

Soc 0630 In-Groups and Out-Groups

An in-group is one a person identifies with; an out-group is one they define themselves against. Rival supporters describe identical behavior as passion in themselves and bad conduct in the others. The boundary does the work, and the trait marking it may be trivial.

Three entries, and the second and third are the two most cited experiments in the discipline. Keep them apart. One measured peers, the other measured authority, and they are not two demonstrations of the same thing.

The mechanism.

Soc 0632 Conformity

Adjusting one's behavior or judgment to match a group's, whether or not the group is right. It operates without threats, without orders, and without anyone noticing it happen.

The demonstration.

Soc 0633 The Asch Experiments

Asch showed that many people will give a plainly wrong answer about line lengths after everyone else in the room has given it. The task was unambiguous, which is what makes the finding hard to explain away.

The other one.

Soc 0634 The Milgram Experiments

Milgram found most participants would continue delivering what they believed were harmful shocks when an authority figure told them to proceed. They protested, showed distress, and continued. This is obedience to authority — a different mechanism from conformity to peers.

Four entries. Two orientations a leader can take, a failure mode that comes from a group liking itself too much, and the styles leadership runs in. Note that the failure mode is caused by cohesion, which is otherwise the thing groups are praised for.

Toward the task.

Soc 0635 Instrumental Leadership

Oriented to the task: organising work, setting goals, keeping the group moving toward completion. Task focus can advance the goal while quietly damaging the group's cohesion and morale.

Toward the group.

Soc 0636 Expressive Leadership

Oriented to the group's wellbeing: morale, conflict, and members' sense of belonging. This is not the absence of leadership — a group with only a task-driver is missing a leader rather than spared one.

What cohesion costs.

Soc 0637 Groupthink

Janis's term for a cohesive group suppressing dissent and converging on a poor decision to preserve agreement. Members privately doubting a plan say nothing, each reading the silence of the others as consent. It comes from cohesion, not from incompetence.

How it is exercised.

Soc 0638 Leadership Styles

From authoritarian, issuing decisions, through democratic, deciding by participation, to laissez-faire, leaving members to organise themselves. Under time pressure a group may accept direction it would resent otherwise. No style is best in general.

Two entries covering what a secondary group becomes when it gets large enough to need written rules — and the defining feature is that it survives the replacement of everybody in it.

The form.

Soc 0640 Formal Organizations

A large secondary group deliberately structured to achieve its goals, with explicit rules and assigned positions. A hospital, a university and a manufacturer run on written roles rather than acquaintance — and each persists as its members are replaced.

Three of them.

Soc 0641 Types of Formal Organization

Normative, joined voluntarily for a shared purpose; coercive, entered under compulsion; utilitarian, joined for material reward. One organization can be experienced as more than one type by different members.

Four entries. Weber's description, the costs built into the description, a claim about who ends up running large organizations, and the spread of the whole model into places that never called themselves bureaucracies.

The form.

Soc 0643 Bureaucracy

Organization by hierarchy, written rules, specialised division of labor, impersonality, and appointment on qualification. A licensing office treats every applicant by the same published criteria. Impersonality is the design goal, and it makes bureaucracies fair and frustrating at once.

The costs.

Soc 0644 The Costs of Bureaucracy

Rules followed past their purpose, slow response, diffused responsibility, and inequality reproduced through formally neutral procedure. An expense claim is bounced between departments until the window closes. These are consequences of the design, not failures of the people inside it.

Who ends up in charge.

Soc 0645 The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Michels held that any large organization, however democratic its aims, tends over time to concentrate power in a small leadership. A member-run association ends up governed by the few who understand its procedures. It is a strong tendency, and calling it a law overstates the evidence.

Where it spread.

Soc 0647 McDonaldization

Ritzer's term for the spread of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control from fast food into education, medicine and work generally. A clinic booking fixed-length appointments has adopted the model, whatever the presenting problem.

Three entries opening the second half of the unit, and the first two exist to separate a pair of ideas that ordinary usage welds together. Deviance names a relationship to a norm. It says nothing at all about harm.

The definition.

Soc 0650 Deviance

Any violation of a society's norms, from mild breaches of etiquette to serious crimes. Standing too close, dressing against convention, and theft are all deviant, at very different scales. The norm violated defines it, and it carries no judgment about harm.

The standing error.

Soc 0651 "Deviance Means Harmful"

Harmless acts are deviant where norms forbid them, and harmful acts are conventional where norms permit them. Dyed hair breaks a norm and injures nobody; historically, legal practices caused enormous harm. Confusing the two makes it impossible to study how norms change.

And it moves.

Soc 0653 Deviance Is Relative

Whether an act is deviant depends on the society, the setting and the moment, because the norm supplying the judgment varies across all three. The same act is unremarkable at home, deviant at work, and criminal in a third country. Relativity of definition is not relativity of consequence.

Two entries closing Part One. Norms are held in place by something, and the something is far more often a look across a table than a courtroom.

The mechanism.

Soc 0655 Social Control

The mechanisms by which a society encourages conformity to its norms, running from a raised eyebrow to imprisonment. Most of it is informal, immediate, and delivered by whoever happens to be present.

Two kinds.

Soc 0656 Formal and Informal Social Control

Formal control is exercised by authorised agents through official sanctions; informal control by ordinary people through everyday reaction. A court imposes a fine; a colleague's silence after a remark does comparable work more cheaply — and reaches conduct no formal system could observe.

Five things to carry out of Part One. A group requires that its members recognise they belong together. Presence is not membership, and most gatherings are not groups. Going from two members to three changes the kind of group, because three can form a coalition and two cannot. Primary groups are valued for themselves and secondary groups for what they accomplish, and a reference group is neither — it is a standard a person measures against, and it need not know they exist. Asch and Milgram measured different mechanisms. Asch measured conformity to agreeing peers on a task with an obvious right answer. Milgram measured obedience to one authority figure. Collapsing them into a single lesson about people being sheep loses both findings. Bureaucracy's impersonality is the design rather than a defect, which is why it produces fairness and frustration from the same feature. Its costs — rules outliving their purpose, diffused responsibility, slow response — follow from the structure and not from the people inside it. And deviance is a relationship to a norm, carrying no claim about harm. Harmless acts are deviant where norms forbid them, and the norm supplying the judgment varies by society, setting and moment. Part Two takes up the theories that explain deviance, then crime, punishment, and who gets labelled.