ABSTRACT

Sociological literature is full of descriptions and classifications of social groups. Anthropologists, on the other hand, preoccupied rather with the field of culture and its typical isolate, the social institution, have used the group concept somewhat erratically. The usual sociological classification of groups is mostly based on the nature of the human contacts and relationships involved in the formation of groups; here such distinctions as that between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contact groups (Cooley) are too familiar to need explanation. The classification suggested by Park and Burgess, into family, language or racial group, territorial communities, conflict groups and accommodation groups, operates with mixed criteria and is, in the author’s own words, neither ‘adequate nor wholly logical’. 170 The manner in which groups emerge and develop offers another criterion; it led to Toennies’ familiar dichotomy which, somewhat shorn of its metaphysical fringes, reappears in Maclver’s distinction of Communities and Associations. while the former are said to emerge spontaneously among people living in proximity and sharing a wide range of common interests, the latter evolve where an aggregate of individuals act in voluntary coordination for a specific common purpose. 171 L. v. Wiese distinguishes aggregates (Massen), A-groups (the pair, or group of three), and B-groups (plural groups), and subdivides the last in accordance with the interests and ‘wishes’ by which they are dominated. 172 These various definitions seem to me deficient at least in one respect; they all fail to account for the precise relationship between the group formation as such and the purposive action patterns, that is, the institutions, through which groups operate and are alone visible. These definitions all imply institutions, for example, as ‘the determinate forms in accordance with which men enter into social relations’, and so produce groups. 173 But the mutual determination of the two ‘dimensions’ of social existence is left unexplored.