Sociologist Amitai Etzioni posited that formal organizations fall into three categories. Normative organizations , also called voluntary organizations , are based on shared interests. As the name suggests, joining them is voluntary and typically done because people find membership rewarding in an intangible way. Compliance to the group is maintained through moral control. The Audubon Society or a ski club are examples of normative organizations. Coercive organizations are groups that one must be coerced, or pushed, to join.
These may include prison, the military, or a rehabilitation centre. Compliance is maintained through force and coercion. Goffman states that most coercive organizations are total institutions. A total institution is one in which inmates live a controlled life apart from the rest of society and in which total resocialization takes place. The third type are utilitarian organizations , which, as the name suggests, are joined because of the need for a specific material reward.
High school or a workplace would fall into this category—one joined in pursuit of a diploma, the other in order to make money. Compliance is maintained through remuneration and rewards. Table 6. Bureaucracies are an ideal type of formal organization. Pioneer sociologist Max Weber popularly characterized a bureaucracy as having a hierarchy of authority, a clear division of labour, explicit rules, and impersonality.
Bureaucracies were the basic structure of rational efficient organization, yet people often complain about bureaucracies, declaring them slow, rule-bound, difficult to navigate, and unfriendly.
Let us take a look at terms that define bureaucracy as an ideal type of formal organization to understand what they mean. Hierarchy of authority refers to the aspect of bureaucracy that places one individual or office in charge of another, who in turn must answer to her own superiors. For example, if you are an employee at Walmart, your shift manager assigns you tasks. Your shift manager answers to the store manager, who must answer to the regional manager, and so on in a chain of command up to the CEO who must answer to the board members, who in turn answer to the stockholders.
There is a clear chain of authority that enables the organization to make and comply with decisions. A clear division of labour refers to the fact that within a bureaucracy, each individual has a specialized task to perform. For example, psychology professors teach psychology, but they do not attempt to provide students with financial aid forms.
In this case, it is a clear and commonsensical division. But what about in a restaurant where food is backed up in the kitchen and a hostess is standing nearby texting on her phone? Her job is to seat customers, not to deliver food.
Is this a smart division of labour? The existence of explicit rules refers to the way in which rules are outlined, written down, and standardized. There is a continuous organization of official functions bound by rules. For example, at your college or university, student guidelines are contained within the student handbook.
As technology changes and campuses encounter new concerns like cyberbullying, identity theft, and other issues, organizations are scrambling to ensure their explicit rules cover these emerging topics.
Bureaucracies are also characterized by impersonality , which takes personal feelings out of professional situations. Each office or position exists independently of its incumbent, and clients and workers receive equal treatment.
Impersonality is an attempt by large formal organizations to protect their members. However, the result is often that personal experience is disregarded. Finally, bureaucracies are, in theory at least, meritocracies , meaning that hiring and promotion are based on proven and documented skills, rather than on nepotism or random choice. In order to get into graduate school, you need to have an impressive transcript. In order to become a lawyer and represent clients, you must graduate from law school and pass the provincial bar exam.
Of course, there is a popular image of bureaucracies that they reward conformity and sycophancy rather than skill or merit. How well do you think established meritocracies identify talent? Wealthy families hire tutors, interview coaches, test-prep services, and consultants to help their children get into the best schools.
This starts as early as kindergarten in New York City, where competition for the most highly regarded schools is especially fierce. Are these schools, many of which have copious scholarship funds that are intended to make the school more democratic, really offering all applicants a fair shake?
There are several positive aspects of bureaucracies. They are intended to improve efficiency, ensure equal opportunities, and increase efficiency. And there are times when rigid hierarchies are needed.
However, there is a clear component of irrationality within the rational organization of bureaucracies. Firstly, bureaucracies create conditions of bureaucratic alienation in which workers cannot find meaning in the repetitive, standardized nature of the tasks they are obliged to perform.
Secondly, bureaucracies can lead to bureaucratic inefficiency and ritualism red tape. Thirdly, bureaucracies have a tendency toward inertia. Inertia means bureaucracies focus on perpetuating themselves rather than effectively accomplishing or re-evaluating the tasks they were designed to achieve.
Finally, as Robert Michels suggested, bureaucracies are characterized by the iron law of oligarchy in which the organization is ruled by a few elites. The organization serves to promote the self-interest of oligarchs and insulate them from the needs of the public or clients. Remember that many of our bureaucracies grew large at the same time that our school model was developed—during the Industrial Revolution. Young workers were trained and organizations were built for mass production, assembly-line work, and factory jobs.
In these scenarios, a clear chain of command was critical. Now, in the information age, this kind of rigid training and adherence to protocol can actually decrease both productivity and efficiency. Too much adherence to explicit rules and a division of labour can leave an organization behind.
Unfortunately, once established, bureaucracies can take on a life of their own. The McDonaldization of society Ritzer refers to the increasing presence of the fast-food business model in common social institutions. This business model includes efficiency the division of labour , predictability, calculability, and control monitoring.
For example, in your average chain grocery store, people at the cash register check out customers while stockers keep the shelves full of goods, and deli workers slice meats and cheese to order efficiency. Whenever you enter a store within that grocery chain, you receive the same type of goods, see the same store organization, and find the same brands at the same prices predictability.
You will find that goods are sold by the kilogram, so that you can weigh your fruit and vegetable purchases rather than simply guessing at the price for that bag of onions, while the employees use a time card to calculate their hours and receive overtime pay calculability. Finally, you will notice that all store employees are wearing a uniform and usually a name tag so that they can be easily identified.
There are security cameras to monitor the store, and some parts of the store, such as the stockroom, are generally considered off-limits to customers control. While McDonaldization has resulted in improved profits and an increased availability of various goods and services to more people worldwide, it has also reduced the variety of goods available in the marketplace while rendering available products uniform, generic, and bland.
Think of the difference between a mass-produced shoe and one made by a local cobbler, between a chicken from a family-owned farm versus a corporate grower, or a cup of coffee from the local roaster instead of one from a coffee-shop chain.
Ritzer also notes that the rational systems, as efficient as they are, are irrational in that they become more important than the people working within them, or the clients being served by them.
By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them. We often talk about bureaucracies disparagingly, and no organizations have taken more heat than fast-food restaurants. From their environmental impact to their role in the U. Furthermore, working at a fast-food restaurant is often disparaged, and even referred to dismissively, as a McJob rather than a real job.
But business school professor Jerry Newman went undercover and worked behind the counter at seven fast-food restaurants to discover what really goes on there. Newman found, unlike Schossler, that these restaurants have much good alongside the bad. Specifically, he asserted that the employees were honest and hard-working, the management was often impressive, and the jobs required a lot more skill and effort than most people imagined.
So what do you think? Or are they dead-end jobs that typify all that is negative about large bureaucracies? Have you ever worked in one? Would you? McDonaldization the increasing presence of the fast-food business model in common social institutions. Types of Groups Groups largely define how we think of ourselves. There are two main types of groups: primary and secondary.
As the names suggest, the primary group is the long-term, complex one. People use groups as standards of comparison to define themselves—as both who they are and who they are not. Sometimes groups can be used to exclude people or as a tool that strengthens prejudice.
Groups and Networks The size and dynamic of a group greatly affects how members act. Primary groups rarely have formal leaders, although there can be informal leadership. Groups generally are considered large when there are too many members for a simultaneous discussion.
Social networks are collections of people tied together by a specific configuration of connections. The structure and function of the connections determine what the network is capable of and how it influences its members.
In secondary groups, there are two types of leadership functions, with expressive leaders focused on emotional health and wellness, and instrumental leaders more focused on results. Further, there are different leadership styles: democratic leaders, authoritarian leaders, and laissez-faire leaders.
Within a group, conformity is the extent to which people want to go along with the norm. A number of experiments have illustrated how strong the drive to conform can be. It is worth considering real-life examples of how conformity and obedience can lead people to ethically and morally suspect acts. We live in a time of contradiction: while the pace of change and technology are requiring people to be more nimble and less bureaucratic in their thinking, large bureaucracies like hospitals, schools, and governments are more hampered than ever by their organizational format.
At the same time, the past few decades have seen the development of a trend to bureaucratize and conventionalize local institutions. This trend has been referred to as the McDonaldization of society. Types of Groups 1. What does a functionalist consider when studying a phenomenon like the Occupy Wall Street movement? What is the largest difference between the functionalist, conflict, and, interactionist perspectives? Group Size and Structure 8. Formal Organizations Which is NOT an example of a normative organization?
Group Size and Structure What is your leadership style? Formal Organizations As mentioned above, the concept of McDonaldization is a growing one. Introduction to Groups and Organizations Boler, Megan. May Cabrel, Javier. Types of Groups Christakis, N. Cooley, Charles Horton. New York: Shocken. Cyberbullying Research Center. Hinduja, Sameer and Justin W.
Marsden, Peter. New York Times. Occupy Wall Street. Retrieved November 27, Perreault, Samuel. Self-reported Internet victimization in Canada, September Statistics Canada catalogue no.
Simmel, Georg. Levine Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Groups and Networks Allemang, John. April F. Asch, Solomon. Boatwright, K. Carroll, William. London: Zed Books. Christakis, Nicholas and James Fowler. NY: Little, Brown and Company. Department of the Army. The sample was restricted to respondents from the United States. All participants were presented with six activities.
In contrast, participants in Study 3 reported on imagined future activities and were presented with the same six prompts as above except that the question wording was slightly different e. Next, participants were asked, with how many persons, including themselves, did they prefer to be in the respective activity. Underneath each question a textbox was presented that allowed the participants to fill in the number of persons. The welcome screen presented the consent form and explained the study was about decision making in daily life.
After providing consent, the various six questions were presented to the respondents and they filled out the number of persons that were present Study 2 or preferred Study 3 for each activity.
Next, the participants reported their demographical information and were given a code that would allow respondents to obtain their reimbursement. Finally, participants were debriefed about the study. In the previous studies we did not identify strong sex differences between men and women in the group sizes that were reported. It can be argued that no sex differences are expected in these situations as many or all participants may have reported on mixed-sex situations. Therefore, in Study 4 we aimed to focus on sex differences between men and women in the group sizes they report in various activities by asking explicitly about same-sex daily activities and by including two additional activities in which sex differences may be more likely: sports activity and visiting bars and clubs.
The sample consisted of respondents from the United States. All participants were presented with eight same-sex daily activities that had happened in the past. The questions explicitly mentioned same-sex others in boldfaced text and clarified the sex of the others in parentheses. The following two example prompts were used for women see SI for a complete overview of all questions. The demographical questions were identical to Studies 2 and 3.
Participants accessed the study through Amazon Mechanical Turk. After reading the consent form the respondents proceeded with indicating their sex male or female.
Women were assigned to the female question format condition and men were assigned to the male format condition. Next, the participants indicated the group size that characterized the eight activities in which they had taken part in the past with same sex others.
Finally, respondents provided demographical information, were provided the code to obtain payment and were debriefed about the study. In Studies 1—4, we asked people to report on a wide variety of common situations. However, these categories may not have been exhaustive, and may not fully represent daily life.
We therefore used experience sampling to obtain reports on random social situations. Moreover, in Studies 1, 2, and 4 we used retrospective reports to investigate group size.
Although we asked for the last time someone engaged in a particular behaviour e. Finally, participants may remember a dinner that they especially enjoyed rather than the last dinner per se. To address these memory-related concerns we decided to use a real-time data capture approach in which the typical reference period is brief i. We used data from the Interdependence in Daily Life Study [ 67 ].
The majority of the participants were born in the Netherlands Participants were asked whether they experienced a situation with another person since the last text message received. After an intake session during which demographics were recorded, as well as surveys and experimental tasks unrelated to this study, participants completed a seven-day-long experience sampling phase 10, responses; Each day between and , participants received seven messages at semi-random times one message per two-hour time block, with at least 45 minutes in between.
Browse Subject Areas? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. Abstract A salient objective feature of the social environment in which people find themselves is group size. Introduction Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours are influenced by those around us—in conversations at home, in shared activities such as going out for dinner with friends, and while working on projects with colleagues.
The current research This study addresses the question of whether we indeed observe the dyad emerging as the typical group size across a wide variety of social situations more than would be expected by chance. Results The dyad is frequently the most common group size Full information on data screening can be found in the Supporting Information SI. Download: PPT. Fig 1. Frequency distributions of group size in eight daily activities sampled in Study 4. The over-representation of dyads compared to other group sizes The most commonly used count models are Poisson and negative binomial.
Age and group size Pearson correlations were performed to assess whether group size was associated with age. Relationship status and group size In order to assess the association between group size and relationship status single versus in a relationship , Pearson correlations were performed and reported in S4 Table.
Discussion The results of the present studies provide strong evidence for the prevalence of the dyad in daily life. The core configurations model Caporael [ 5 , 6 ] proposes that face-to-face groups are hierarchically structured in four core configurations. Four reasons for the prevalence of the dyad More than larger sizes, dyadic interactions enable benefits from direct reciprocity [ 26 ].
Sex differences For our mixed-sex diary data Study 5 we did not find significant sex differences. Limitations Studies 1—4 have three limitations in common that should be taken into account. Future research One issue remaining for future research is to provide empirical evidence that the dyads that are so prevalent in various domains are also stable over time. Study 2 Participants. Study 3 Participants. Study 4 In the previous studies we did not identify strong sex differences between men and women in the group sizes that were reported.
Study 5 In Studies 1—4, we asked people to report on a wide variety of common situations. Supporting information. S1 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in five daily activities sampled in Study 1. S2 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in six daily activities sampled in Study 2.
S3 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in six imagined future daily activities sampled in Study 3. S4 Fig. Mosaic plot indicating sex differences. S5 Fig.
Frequency distribution of group size in five daily activities indicating sex differences in Study 1. S6 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in six daily activities indicating sex differences in Study 2. S7 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in six imagined future daily activities indicating sex differences in Study 3. S8 Fig. Frequency distribution of group size in eight daily same-sex activities indicating sex differences in Study 4.
S1 Table. Frequencies of group size in eight daily activities sampled across Studies 1—4. S2 Table. Zero-inflated test results of poisson model and negative binomial model testing dyad inflation in Studies 1—4. S3 Table. Summary of correlations between group size and age by activity for Studies 1—4. S4 Table. Summary of correlations between group size and relationship status by activity Studies 1—4.
S1 File. Supplementary materials and methods. References 1. Dunbar RIM. Theory of mind and the evolution of language. Approaches to the evolution of language. Social loafing: a meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. J Pers Soc Psychol. View Article Google Scholar 3. In small we trust: lay theories about small and large groups.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. The bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychol Bull. Caporael LR. Sociality: Coordinating bodies, minds and groups. View Article Google Scholar 6. The evolution of truly social cognition: the core configurations model. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. The social brain hypothesis.
Evol Anthropol. View Article Google Scholar 8. Falk A, Fischbacher U. A theory of reciprocity. Games Econ Behav. View Article Google Scholar 9. Cropanzano R, Mitchell MS. J Manag. View Article Google Scholar Learning Objectives Review the four types of social interactions: accidental, repeated, regular, and regulated.
Key Takeaways Key Points A social interaction is an exchange between two or more individuals and is a building block of society. Symbols are used to communicate the expectations of a given society to those new to it. The empirical study of social interaction is one of the subjects of microsociology. Methods includes symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology as well as later academic sub-divisions and studies such as psychosocial studies, conversational analysis and human-computer interaction.
Key Terms dyad : A pair of things standing in particular relation; dyadic relation. Social Interaction : A social exchange between two or more individuals. Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology studies procedures people carry out in order to create a sense of orderliness within a particular institution or community.
Ethnomethodology is different from traditional sociology because it is not as concerned by the analysis of society, but rather by the procedures through which social order is produced. Key Terms ethnomethodology : An academic discipline that attempts to understand the social orders people use to make sense of the world through analyzing their accounts and descriptions of their day-to-day experiences. Harold Garfinkel : He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.
Dramaturgy Dramaturgy is a sociological concept developed by Erving Goffman that uses the metaphor of theater to explain human behavior. Key Takeaways Key Points All identities and behaviors are dependent upon the audience to whom one performs. This is called impression management. Dramaturgy emphasizes the dual evaluative work that is undertaken by both the performer and the audience, thus demonstrating the inseparable link between performer and audience, individual and society.
Front stage behaviors are those that are visible to the audience, while back stage behaviors are those to which the audience does not have access. Key Terms Impression Management : In sociology and social psychology, impression management is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event; they do so by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.
Size the number of people involved is an important characteristic of groups, organizations and communities in which social behavior occurs. Dyads and triads are the smallest social groups. A triad is more stable than a dyad because one member can act as a mediator should the relationship between the other two become strained. As an organization or community grows in size it is apt to experience tipping points where the way it operates needs to change. The complexity of large groupings is partly because they are made up of interrelated subgroups.
As the size of a group increases, the need for more organization or leadership also often becomes more obvious. Crowds and Large Groups : This large group may share some traits such as enjoyment of the concert that the crowd just witnessed , but likely vary in many other traits. Large groups introduce diversity of attitudes and behaviors. German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that as the group becomes greater, the individual becomes separated and grows more alone, isolated and segmented.
On one hand, he believed that the bigger the group the better for the individual. In a larger group it would be harder to exert control on an individual, but there is a possibility of the individual becoming distant and impersonal. Studying Group Attitudes and Behaviors : Sociologists study interactions within groups, and between both groups and individuals.
The Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies conducted in the s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. Conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College, the Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies published in the s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups.
They are also known as the Asch paradigm. The original experiment was conducted with male participants. Each participant was put into a group with five to seven confederates. The participants were shown a card with a line on it the reference line , followed by another card with three lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say out loud which of the three lines matched in length the reference line, as well as other responses such as the length of the reference line to an everyday object, which lines were the same length, and so on.
On the third trial, all the confederates would start giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them.
The aim was to see whether the real participants would conform to the wrong answers of the confederates and change their answer to respond in the same way, despite it being the wrong answer. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous answer, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer.
Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many cohorts were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just one cohort and as many as fifteen. Results indicated that one cohort has virtually no influence and two cohorts have only a small influence.
When three or more cohorts are present, the tendency to conform increases only modestly. The maximum effect occurs with four cohorts. Adding additional cohorts does not produce a stronger effect. In terms of gender, males show around half the effect of females tested in same-sex groups. Conformity is also higher among members of an in-group. The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied.
This result holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer.
This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have upon a larger group.
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